Native Tongue

by Suzette Haden Elgin, Susan Squier

  “That’s because Aquina’s so excited. She never can talk straight when she’s excited . . . fortunately, she’s always bored at negotiations, or lord knows what kind of things she’d have brought upon us by now.”

  “How can you be excited, Aquina, at this hour of the night?”

  “Because it is exciting,” Aquina insisted.

  “Tell us again.”

  Aquina told them, trying not to get ahead of herself, and they listened, nodding, and Susannah got up and made three pots of tea and poured it all round.

  When she was satisified that everyone was settled with the steaming cups, she called Aquina to a halt, saying, “Now let me just find out if I have this straight, without all the exotic touches. What you’re telling us is that that child, all on her own, has been writing down Encodings and making up words to fit them in Langlish. Without any help or instruction from anyone. And nothing in the way of information about Langlish, really, except the scraps the little girls pick up running back and forth between here and the main house . . . the bits and pieces they see us fooling with at the computers, and such. Have I got it right, Aquina?”

  “Well, it was pissy Langlish, Susannah—you’d expect that.”

  “I surely would.”

  “But you have it right. Considering what she has to work with, she’d done very well. You could tell the forms were supposed to be Langlish, at least. And that’s not what matters anyway; it’s the semantics that matters, damn it. And I had a chance to ask her a thing or two while we were waiting for the men to wind up their dominance displays and let us come home—she’s been doing it a long time, she says.”

  “That would mean a month or two, at her age.”

  “Maybe so; maybe not. She says she has lots more pages at home. She’s keeping a notebook, like I kept a diary. What wouldn’t I give to get a look at that notebook!”

  “You really think this is important, don’t you, Aquina? Not just a little girl playing, but really important.”

  “Well, don’t you?”

  “Aquina, we weren’t there—we didn’t see what she had written. And you can’t remember very well. How can we judge, with so little data?”

  “I copied one of them.”

  “Without asking her.”

  “Yes. Without asking her.” Aquina was used to being in trouble with her housemates, and used to being on the wrong side of their ethical lines; she didn’t bother being defiant. “I thought it mattered, and I still think so. Here . . . please, look at this.” And she showed them a sample of what had been on Nazareth’s tablet.

  To refrain from asking, with evil intentions; especially when it’s clear that someone badly wants you to ask—for example, when someone wants to be asked about their state of mind or health and clearly wants to talk about it.

  “Well?” she demanded after they’d looked at it long enough to understand it. “Say something!”

  “And she gave this a lexicalization as a Langlish word?”

  “Well, hellfire and heavengates, woman, Nazareth doesn’t know that there’s any other woman-language but Langlish! Naturally that’s what she tried to do. But can’t you see? If she can formulate semantic concepts like these, we know what to do with them!”

  “Oh, but Aquina,” Susannah objected, “then the child would expect to see them turn up on the computers in the Langlish program. And that would mean the men would have access to them. We can’t have that, and you know it.”

  There was a chorus of agreement, and Aquina shook her head fiercely and shouted, “I NEVER SAID—” and then abruptly lowered her voice and started over. She was too tired to yell, even if it had been appropriate.

  “I never said that we would tell Nazareth we were using them; lord, I’m not completely stupid!”

  “But then how would we get them?”

  “I’ll get them,” said Aquina. “I’m Nazareth’s informal backup for all the Jeelod negotiations, and they’re back with some fool complaint about every two weeks. I’ll have plenty of boredom time with her to find out where she keeps that notebook. Not in the girldorm, that’s for sure . . . I never would have. But she never has any opportunity to take it far from either this house or the big house—it’s in a tree, or down a hole, or something. And she’ll tell me.”

  “And then?”

  “And then I will—very carefully, so she’ll never know—go every week or so and copy off whatever she’s added.”

  There. Now they were shocked. They knew all about breaking eggs to make omelettes, but it didn’t help them any; they had about as much political sense as Nazareth, even when you put the whole bunch of them together.

  “You can’t do that,” said Nile flatly, pulling her shawl tighter around her as a sudden lash of sleet rattled the window beside them.

  “Why can’t I?”

  “How would you have felt if somebody had done that with your diary, when you were little?”

  “There’s a difference.”

  “Such as?”

  “My diary was only important to me. Nazareth’s secret notebook is important to every woman on this planet, and every woman beyond, and all women to come. The two things are not the same at all.”

  Susannah reached over then and laid her hand, gnarled with arthritis and swollen with blue veins, but sure and strong and kind, over Aquina’s hand.

  “My dear,” she said gently, “we understand you. But please do think! Living as we do, all of us in communal households from the day we’re brought home from the hospital—and on the public wards before that, lord knows!—and no instant away from the Household except the time we spend shut up with one another in interpreting booths . . . Aquina, we have so little privacy! It’s so precious. You can’t violate Nazareth’s privacy by sneaking her notebook from where she’s hidden it away, just because she’s a child and won’t suspect you—that’s despicable. I don’t believe you mean it.”

  “Oh, she means it!” said Caroline, joining them with a mug of black coffee. Caroline didn’t care for tea, and wouldn’t drink it to be polite. “You can be sure she means it!”

  “Indeed I do,” said Aquina.

  Susannah clucked her tongue, and took her hand away; and Aquina wished for her own shawl, but against the chill inside this house, not the chill of the weather. She could not understand why it never stopped hurting, having all the other women set against her. She’d be fifty-five years old tomorrow, more than half a century, and she’d lived here in Barren House so many years . . . and still it hurt. She was ashamed, to be so soft. And sorry she’d told them, but it was too late for that.

  “I will find out where she keeps the notebook,” she said between her teeth, “and I will check it every week or two to copy what’s been added there, and I will bring that data back here for us to work on.”

  “You’ll work on it all by yourself if you do.”

  “I’m used to that,” said Aquina bitterly.

  “I suppose you must be.”

  “And because Nazareth will never know about it, she won’t be looking for those words in the Langlish computer displays—and they’ll be safe. But we will have the good of them.”

  “Shame on you.”

  “I’m not ashamed,” she said.

  “Takes eggs to make an omelette?”

  Aquina firmed her mouth and said nothing; she hadn’t learned not to be hurt, but she’d learned not to let them bait her.

  And then, because she was so tired and she felt so alone, she started to tell them what she thought of their damnfool ethics, but Susannah cut her off instantly. And Belle-Anne, drawn from her bed by the subdued racket of their arguing, rosy as an angel, and her yellow hair loose down her back, came in to help. She rubbed Aquina’s taut shoulders, and poured her a fresh cup of tea, and there-thered her generally until she was soothed and Susannah had the subject well changed and onto neutral ground.

  What was a real shame, they were saying, was that it would be so long before they could have Nazareth with them. With them an
d working on the woman-language in all her spare moments, with full knowledge of what she was doing.

  “Do you know,” asked Nile, “that Nazareth’s mother told me the child’s language-facility scores are the highest ever seen since we’ve been keeping records? Clear off the scale! They’re expecting tremendous things of her . . . and such luck that it was her they gave that awful Jeelod language to; she has no trouble with it, apparently.”

  “She won’t be any use to us for . . . oh, what, forty years?” Aquina hazarded, her voice thick with resentment even under Belle-Anne’s stroking and soothing. “She’s eleven now . . . she’ll marry, perhaps marry into another Household, and she’ll have the obligatory dozen children to give birth to—”

  “Aquina! Don’t make it worse than it is! Thomas Blair Chornyak will never let her get out of his sight—you can count on that. And it’s not a dozen children she’ll have to produce, that’s absurd!”

  “All right, half a dozen, then. Six children, seven children, whatever you like—lots of children. And every instant given over to working on the government contracts, hardly time to get up out of childbed before she’s back in the interpreting booths again . . . until she’s worn out at last, and the menopause comes to bless her.”

  “Even then,” Caroline put in, “she may not come to us. Not if her husband wants her to stay with him—not if she wears well. Or if she’s lucky and the man’s fond of her beyond just her body.”

  “Or if she’s useful to him somehow,” said Thyrsis, with a sharp note to her voice that caught their attention. So that was it . . . she’d come to Chornyak Barren House against her husband’s wishes, because she was useful to him in some way, clever at something he liked having her do. And if she’d tried to go to Shawnessey Barren House he’d have been close by to be forever pressuring her to come back to the main house. They would be interested in knowing how she’d managed to get around his authority, come the time she felt free to tell them more.

  “Damn and damn and damn,” mourned Aquina. “That’s forty years or more wasted. Don’t you understand that? Don’t any of you understand that?”

  “Aquina, it’s not as though the whole Encoding Project was dependent on Nazareth—we are all working on it. And women at the other Barren Houses are working on it, Be reasonable.”

  They soothed her, all of them. Soothed and coaxed, anxious to restore her perspective on this in spite of her distress. She was overtired, she would feel better about it in the morning, she would see that it was just that she’d been under such a strain. On and on. . . .

  Aquina let them talk, and she kept her own counsel. Tomorrow, first thing, what she would do was go looking for Nazareth and begin trying to find out where that notebook was hidden. Her own priorities, thank god, were properly ordered.

  Chapter Three

  The only way there is to acquire a language, which means that you know it so well that you never have to be conscious of your knowledge, is to be exposed to that language while you are still very young—the younger the better. The infant human being has the most perfect language-learning mechanism on Earth, and no one has ever been able to duplicate that mechanism or even to analyze it very well. We know that it involves scanning for patterns and storing those that are found, and that’s something we can build a computer to do. But we’ve never been able to build a computer that can acquire a language. In fact, we’ve never even been able to build a computer than can learn a language in the imperfect way that a human adult can learn one.

  We can take a language that’s already known, and program a computer to use it by putting the language into the computer piece by piece. And we can build a computer that’s programmed to scan for patterns and store them very efficiently. But we can’t put those two computers side by side and expect the one that doesn’t know the language to acquire it from the other one. Until we find out how to do that (as well as a number of other things), we are dependent on human infants for the acquisition of all languages, whether Terran or extraterrestrial; it’s not the most efficient system we can imagine, but it’s the most efficient system that we have.

  (from Training Lecture #3,

  for junior staff—U.S. Department of Analysis & Translation)

  SPRING 2180. . . .

  Ned Landry had been pleased with his wife Michaela, as well he might have been, since she had fit his bill of specifications almost to the last and most trivial detail. (There was that slight tendency to poor muscle tone in the hips—but he wasn’t a fanatic. He knew that he couldn’t expect total perfection.) It had cost his parents a tidy sum to pay the agency fee for her, but it had been well worth it, and he had long since paid them back with interest. Just picking a wife from among whatever gaggle of females happened to be available in his circle of acquaintances had never appealed to Ned; he had wanted something with quality guaranteed, and he had never regretted waiting. It had been a little annoying, having his own marriage nothing but a list of specs in a file when his friends were well on their way to being heads of families already—but they envied him now. They all envied him, and that pleased him.

  Michaela did all the things he wanted a wife to do. She saw to his house and his meals and his comfort and his sexual needs. She kept so smoothly running a setup that he never had time to think, I wonder why Michaela hasn’t . . . done something or other, because she always had done it; often it wasn’t until after she had seen to some detail, some change, that he realized it had been a thing that he wanted. The flowers in the vases were always fresh; clean garments appeared as if by magic in his gardrobes; a tunic that had seemed to him about to show signs of wear either appeared so expertly renovated that it looked new, or was replaced between one day and the next . . . never once did he have to miss something or do without anything.

  Ned had only to mention in passing that a particular food sounded interesting, and in the next day or two it would appear on his table—and if he didn’t care for it after all, it would never appear again. Household repairs, maintenance, cleaning, the small garden of which he was justifiably proud, any sort of household business matter, upkeep on his assets and his collections—all these things were attended to in his absence. His only contribution to the perfect serenity of his home was to look over the printouts his accountant provided for him at the end of every month and sign or refuse the authorization for spending whatever sums Michaela had requested.

  It was a blissful existence; he treasured it. Except at his work, where no woman’s influence could intrude and there was therefore no way Michaela could smooth the waters, Ned Landry was spared even the memory of irritation. And she was always there, her butter-blond hair in the elegant chignon he liked so much for the contrast if offered when, in his bed, she let it down to fan over the pillows like a net of pale silk.

  He valued Michaela for all the things that she did, he knew her worth, and he saw to it that she was rewarded not only by the customary birthday and holiday gifts expected of any courteous husband but with small extra ones that he had no obligation to make. He was careful not to establish any pattern that might lead her to take that kind of indulgence for granted—when you had something as fine as Michaela in your pocket, you didn’t act like an ass and take chances with her. He had no intention of spoiling her. But once in a while, seemingly for no reason, he would bring her some pretty trinket, the sort of foolishness that women always liked. Ned prided himself on understanding what women liked and on his ability to provide it, and Michaela was worth every credit and penny she cost him. Michaela was a thoroughbred, and superbly trained, just as the agency had guaranteed that she would be.

  But the thing that mattered most to him about his wife, the thing that was the heart and core of the marriage for him, was none of those usual things. He could have hired almost anyone to do what she did around the house, including the sexual services—although he would have had to be exceedingly careful about that last. He would have been obliged to give orders rather than having his order anticipated, but he could
have managed that. He could have bought servomechanisms to carry out many of those orders. And anything he had no permanent arrangement for, he could have dialed up by comset in a matter of minutes.

  What really mattered to him, the one service that he could not have simply purchased, was Michaela’s role as listener. Listener! That was beyond price, and had come as a surprise to him.

  When he got home from work in the afternoon, Ned liked to unwind for a while. He liked to stand there, maybe pace a bit, with a cigarette in one hand and a glass of straight whiskey in the other, and tell her about his day. What he’d said, and what so-and-so had said back, the sonofabitch, and what he’d said then, and how it had showed the sonofabitch, bygod. The good ideas he’d had and how they’d worked out when he tried them. The ideas that should have worked, and would have if it hadn’t been for so-and-so, the stupid jackass. And what he just happened to know about the stupid jackass that might come in handy one of these days.

  He liked to pace a while, and then stand there a while, and then pace some more, until he’d gotten rid of the energy from the morning, talking all of it out of his system. And then when he’d finally loosened up he liked sitting down in his chair and relaxing with the second glass of Scotch and the fifth cigarette—and talking some more.

  That listening function of Michaela’s meant a tremendous amount to Ned Landry, because he loved to talk and he loved to tell stories. He loved to take stories and draw them out to a great length and polish them until he found them flawless. Adding a new detail here, inventing a bit of embroidery there, cutting a line that didn’t quite meet his standards. To Ned, that kind of talking was one of the major pleasures of a man’s life.

  Unfortunately, he was not good at it, for all his excruciating effort, and nobody would listen to him long if they could help it. Talking to people other than Michaela meant that second of attention that tantalized his need; and then the sudden withdrawal, the blank eyes, the glassed-over face, the restless body, the furtive looks at the timespot on the wrist computer. He knew what they were thinking . . . how long, oh lord, how long? That was what they were thinking, no matter how much some of them tried not to show it, for the sake of politeness.