Native Tongue

by Suzette Haden Elgin, Susan Squier

  Only when she could step back and see nothing out of the ordinary in any way except the body on the floor did she scream for help and faint appropriately across the threshold in the clear view of the security monitor. Carefully, being very sure she did herself no harm. She had to take excellent care of herself now, did Michaela, because she was now the one who had all the big plans.

  Chapter Four

  I suppose every single one of us that comes here, knowing that his work will mean contact with extraterrestrials, thinks that he will be an exception, that he’ll find a way to make friends with at least some of them. You figure you’ll get the Lingoe to teach you a few words . . . “Hello! How are you? Nice whatsit you’ve got there!” That kind of thing. You think, we can’t just go on forevermore being strangers, right? But when the time comes, and you get close to an Alien, you understand what the scientists are talking about when they say it isn’t possible. There’s a feeling that comes over you. It’s not just fear, and it’s not just prejudice. It’s something you never felt before, and something you’ll never forget when you’ve felt it once.

  You know how you can find things under rocks that will just about go crazy digging in and curling up, trying to get away from the light? That’s how you feel, when you’re close to an Alien, or even when you’re in contact with one by comset for more than a minute or two. You wish you had something to burrow into. Everything goes on red alert, and everything you’ve got to feel with is screaming ALIEN! ALIEN! You’re glad then, let me tell you, you’re very glad then, that you’re not expected to be friendly. Just polite, that’s all, even after all the training they give you here. Just polite.

  (U.S. Department liaison staffer,

  in an interview with Elderwild Barnes

  of Spacetime)

  The fervent emphasis that the government placed on traditional Christian values and on getting-back-to-one’s-Vacation-Bible-School-roots (never mind that it put a steady drag on American culture, like hanging lead weights on one side of a wheel, pulling all of life at a crazy angle back toward the twentieth century) was a big help to Brooks Showard in his cursing. He didn’t have to be inventive about it and use the resources of his Ph.D. to dredge, up exotic oaths. The sturdy fundamental godams and hells that had served his forefathers, glazed now with time like candied fruits studding an otherwise plain loaf of bread, served him perfectly well.

  “God damn it to hell and back,” he said, therefore. “Oh god damn it all the way to hell and back, with side trips for the eager! Oh, shit!”

  The other technicians had pulled back from the Interface, the oh so perfect and according to specs Interface, where Brooks stood holding the infant. They had formed themselves into a little group, that could behave as if it had nothing to do with whatever this regrettable latest development turned out to be. Who, them? They were just passing by. Just happened to be in the neighborhood, don’t you know . . .

  “You get on over here!” he bellowed at them, shoving the baby under one armpit and shaking his free fist at them like the maniac, raving ranting maniac gone clear outaspace, that he considered himself to be at this moment. “You get on over here and look at this mess, you shits, you’re as guilty as I am in this! Get your asses on over here and see this!”

  They moved an inch, maybe. And Showard began a steady dull cursing, bringing Job’s beard into it along with the private parts of the Twelve Disciples and a variety of forbidden practices and principles. They weren’t going to come over there to him. They weren’t going to participate in this, share the guilt, spread the horror around, not willingly. He was going to have to take it to them, the cowards! And it might be that next time he wouldn’t have the guts to go inside the Interface after what was squirming there either, and then they could all be cowards together in Christian fellowship, couldn’t they?

  Behind him, safe in its special environment, the Alien-In-Residence existed, so far as anyone could tell. If it had died, presumably the various indicators on the walls would have told him that—that was the theory, anyhow. You couldn’t say that the AIRY sat, precisely, or that it stood, or that it did anything, or was in any particular state. It was, and that was all it was. If what had happened to the human infant was of any concern to it, there was no way to know that, and might never be any way to know that. Sometimes Showard wasn’t sure he saw the AIRY, really; the way it flickered (??), and never any pattern to the flickering (??), it drove the Terran eye to a constant search for order until there were great flat spots of color floating in the air between you and the source of the sensory stimulation. And then there were the other times, when you profoundly wished that you couldn’t see it.

  The linguists called theirs Aliens-in-Residence, too, called them AIRY’s for short like the technicians did; but theirs were different. It was possible to look at one of theirs and at least assign labels roughly to its parts. That thing was a limb, say. That little lump there might well be a nose. There was its rosy butt, you see. Like that. It was possible to imagine that the creature had obligingly taken up “residence” in the simulated and sealed-off environment you had built for it within your house, and that it was delighted to visit for a while and share its language with your offspring. God knew the Lines had offspring to spare; the Lingoes bred like rats. But Brooks couldn’t imagine the thing inside this Interface being allowed to take up “residence” in a human dwelling. Did it even have “parts”? Who could tell?

  And now, there was this baby.

  “Gentlemen,” said Government Work Technician Brooks Everest Showard, holder of a secret rank of Colonel in the United States Air Force Space Command, Division of Extraterrestrial Intelligence: “I am sick unto death of killing innocent babies.”

  They all were. This would be, they thought queasily, the forty-third human infant to be “volunteered” by its parents for Government Work. The ones that had lived had been far worse off than those that had died; it had not been possible to allow them to go on living. The thing that the Colonel carried under his arm like a package of meat must already be dead . . . it was something to be grateful for.

  There were plenty of bleeding-hearts who called them, the G.W. staff, “mercenaries.” And so they were. You might do what they did for money; you surely would not do it for love. They liked to think they did it for honor and glory, sometimes, but that was wearing a little thin. And the parents? You couldn’t help wondering sometimes whether the parents, if they’d been allowed to see what went on here, would have considered the generous fee they had been paid to be an adequate compensation. You wondered if those who had volunteered baby boys would be interested in keeping the posthumous Infant Hero Medal in its black velvet box with the solid silver lock . . . if they’d had a little more information. The obligatory top secret classification on the procedure, the signed-for-in-advance permission to cremate—can’t chance Alien bacteria or viruses getting into the environment, you understand that, of course, Mr. and Mrs. X—they helped. But you wondered.

  “Well, Brooks,” one of them said finally. “Happened again, I guess.”

  “Oh! You can talk, can you?”

  “Now, Brooks—”

  “Well this kid can’t talk! It can’t talk English, it can’t talk Beta-2, it can’t talk anything and it never is going to talk anything!” An obscene jingle ran crazily through his head, turning him sick . . . ALPHA-ONE, BETA-TWO, SEE ME MAKE A BABY STEW . . . sweet god in heaven, make it stop . . . “You know what it has done, thanks to our expert intervention in its exceedingly brief life?”

  “Brooks, we don’t want to know.”

  “Yeah! I expect you don’t!”

  He advanced on them, inexorably, shaking the dead baby the way he had shaken his fist, shaking it in front of him like a limp folded stuff, and they saw the impossible condition that it had somehow come to be in. He made certain they saw it. He turned it all around for them so that they could get a clear view from all sides.

  None of them threw up this time, although an infant that had l
iterally turned itself inside out by the violence of its convulsions, so that its skin was mostly inside and its organs and its. . . . what? . . . mostly outside, was something new. They didn’t throw up, because they had seen things just as bad before, if you were interested in trying to rank abominations on a scale of awfulness, and they weren’t.

  “Get rid of it, Showard,” said one of the men. Lanky Pugh was his unfortunate name. Doubly unfortunate because he was shaped like a beer keg and not much taller. Doubly unfortunate because when he told you his name you might be inclined to grin a little, and to forget the respect that was due a man who could play a computer the way Liszt might have played a metasynthesizer. “Vaporizer time, Showard,” said Lanky Pugh. “Right now!”

  “Yeah, Brooks,” said Beau St. Clair. He hadn’t been there as long as the rest of them, and he was looking green. “For the love of Christ,” said Beau.

  “Christ,” Brooks ranted at them through gritted teeth, “would have had nothing to do with this! Even Christ would have been too merciful to raise this thing from the dead!”

  The man allegedly in charge of the group, who had not had the guts to go into the Interface after the baby when it had seemed to them all to suddenly explode in there, felt as if he had to make some kind of leadership gesture. He cleared his throat a couple of times, to make sure that what came out wouldn’t be just a noise, and said, “Brooks, we do the best we can. For the greater good of all mankind, Brooks. I think Christ would understand.”

  Christ would understand? Brooks stared at Arnold Dolbe, who watched him warily and backed off a step or two more. Arnold was not going to take a chance on being handed that baby, that was very clear.

  “God allowed His beloved Son to be sacrificed, for a greater good,” explained Arnold solemnly. “You see the parallel, I’m sure.”

  “Yeah,” spat Showard. “But God only allowed crucifixion and a whipping or two, you pitiful pious shit. He would not have allowed this.”

  “We do what we have to do,” said Dolbe. “Somebody has to do it, and we do the best we can, like I said already.”

  “Well, I won’t do it again.”

  “Oh, you’ll do it again, Showard! You’ll do it again, because if you don’t we’ll see to it that you take the whole rap for this all to yourself. Won’t we, men?”

  “Oh, shut up, Dolbe,” Showard said wearily. “You know what bemdung that is . . . one word about this, one word, and we will all—every one of us, right down to the lowliest servomechanism that cleans the toilets in this establishment—be dumped. Just like the babies, Dolbe. Mercilessly. Permanently. We’ll disappear like none of us had ever existed. And you know it, and I know it, and everybody knows it. So shut up already. Be your effing age, Dolbe.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Lanky Pugh. “There’d be an ‘unfortunate incident’ that just conveniently happened to vaporize everything out to about two feet past the G.W. property lines. With no danger whatsoever to the population, of course, no cause for alarm, folks, it’s just one of our little routine explosions. Shitshingles, Dolbe . . . we’re all in this together.”

  Brooks Showard laid the horrible pile of distorted tissues that had only recently been a healthy human infant down on the floor at his feet, and he sat down beside it very gently. He laid his head on his knees, wrapped his arms around them, and began to cry. It was only by the quick intervention of Arnold Dolbe that the servomechanism speeding across the floor to pick up what it interpreted as garbage was intercepted. Dolbe snatched the baby from under the edge of the cylinder and almost ran to the vaporizer slot . . . and when he had shoved the body through it he rubbed his hands violently against the sides of his lab coat, scrubbing them. There goes your boy, Mr. and Mrs. Ned Landry, he thought crazily, and have we got a medal for you!

  “Thank you, Dolbe,” sighed Lanky. “I didn’t want to look at that thing any longer, either. It wasn’t really . . . decent.”

  Lanky was thinking of Mr. and Mrs. Ned Landry too. Because he was the one who had to dump all the data out of the computers after each failure, and he remembered stuff like the names of the parents. He wasn’t supposed to. He was supposed to dump it out of his head at the same time. But he was the one who had to write the names down on a piece of paper before he dumped them, and he was the one that had to transfer the names to the data card in his lockbox, so there wouldn’t be any chance of losing what had been dumped. Lanky knew all forty-three sets of names by heart, in numerical order.

  In the small conference room, with Showard in reasonable control of himself once again, if you ignored the shaking hands, the four G.W. techs sat and listened while the representative from the Pentagon laid it out for them. Neat and sweet, wasting nothing. He wasn’t overpoweringly pleased with them.

  “We have got to crack that language,” he told them bluntly. “And I mean that one hundred percent. Whatever that thing in the Interface has for a language, we’ve got to get at it—it sure as hell can’t use PanSig to communicate. We absolutely must find a way to do that—communicate with it, I mean. With it, and all its flickering friends. This is a matter of the utmost urgency.”

  “Oh, sure,” said Brooks Showard. “Sure it is.”

  “Colonel,” snapped the Pentagon man, “it’s not a question of just wanting to chat with the things, you know. We need what they’ve got, and we can’t do without it. And there’s no way of getting it without negotiating with them.”

  “We need what they’ve got . . . we always ‘need’ what something’s got, General. You mean we want what they’ve got, don’t you?”

  “Not this time. Not this time! This time we really do have to have it.”

  “At any cost.”

  “At any cost. That’s correct.”

  “What is it, the secret of eternal life?”

  “You know I can’t tell you that,” the general said patiently, as he would have spoken to a fretful woman he was indulgent with.

  “We’re supposed to take it on faith, as usual.”

  “You can take it on anything you like, Showard! It makes no difference to me what you take it on. But I sit here, empowered by the federal government of this great nation to support you and a rather sizable staff in the carrying out of acts that are so far past illegal and criminal, and so far into unspeakable and unthinkable, that we can’t even keep records on them. And I’m here to give you my sacred oath that I’m not going to participate in that kind of thing for trinkets and gewgaws and a new variety of beads; and neither are the officials who—with tremendous reluctance, I assure you—authorize me to serve in this capacity.”

  Arnold Dolbe flashed his teeth at the general, trying not to think that the uniform was quaint. There were good and excellent reasons for keeping the ancient uniforms, and he was familiar with them. Tradition. Respect for historical values. Antidote to Future Shock Syndrome. Etc. And he wanted to be certain that the general remembered him as a cooperative fellow, a real Team Player in the finest reaganic tradition. He meant to see to it that the general was fully aware of that. He felt that a brief speech was in order, something tasteful but still memorable, and he thought he was not overstating the case when he considered himself to be topnotch at the impromptu brief speech.

  “We understand that, General,” he began, all sugar and snakeoil, “and we appreciate it. We are grateful for it. Beelieve you me, there’s not one member of this team, not one man on this team, that doesn’t support this effort all the way—those without a need to know always excepted, of course. Not that they don’t support the effort, that is—they just don’t know . . . in detail . . . what it is that they’re supporting. We do—those of us in the room—we do know. And we feel a certain humility at being chosen for this noble task. Colonel Showard is a little overstressed at the moment, understandably so, but he’s behind you all the way. It’s just been an unpleasant morning here at Government Work, don’t you see. And yet—”

  “I’m sure it has,” said the Pentagon man, cutting him off in a way that hurt Dolbe deeply.
“I’m sure it has been bloody hell. We know what you men go through here, and we honor you for it. But it’s something that’s got to be done, for the sake of preserving civilization on this planet. I mean that, gentlemen! Literally for the sake of preventing the end of humankind on this green and golden Earth of ours—the permanent end, I might add. I’m not talking a few decades in the colonies while things cool off and then we can move back planetside. I’m talking the end. Period. Final. Total.”

  He said it as if he believed it. It was in fact possible that he did believe it, if only because he was a good soldier and you cannot be a good soldier if you think that those up the chain of command from you are telling you lies. And of course they were good soldiers too, and they wouldn’t think that those who had fed them the same line were lying to them. Nobody knew precisely where the buck stopped in this business. The general had a feeling that the buck went around and around on a möbius strip. Sometimes he wondered who was in charge. Not the President, certainly. It was one of his primary duties to make certain that the President never knew much about this little twig on the executive branch. The general had no illusions about the Pentagon not being part of the executive branch.

  He steepled his fingers, and he looked at them long and hard, noting automatically that only Dolbe began to squirm under his gaze.

  “Well, gentlemen?” he asked. “What are you going to do now? I’ve got to take some kind of reasonable answer back to my superiors—no details, mind, just a rough idea—and they aren’t feeling all that patient these days. We’ve run out of fooling around time, gentlemen. We’re right up against the wire on this one.”

  There was a thick silence, with the general’s fingers drumming lightly on the table, and the air exchange whirring high and thin, and the American flag jerking limply every now and then in the mechanical breeze.