Native Tongue

by Suzette Haden Elgin, Susan Squier

  “There you are, sir,” he said. “Black. And now to business.”

  “Please.”

  “Sir, we have some difficult news.”

  “And?”

  “Sir, we want you to know that this action was taken very reluctantly—VERY reluctantly.”

  “For the love of the gospels, man,” said Thomas wearily, “will you spit it out or let me go back to my work?”

  It came out in a rush, because the government man was worried. They’d promised him there’d be no trouble about this, but he found that hard to believe. If it had been him there would have been trouble. A lot of trouble. And he wasn’t even somebody important.

  “Sir, a baby of the Lines has been kidnapped from the maternity ward at Santa Cruz Memorial Hospital.”

  Chornyak did not so much as blink. He might as well have said that the sun had come up that morning in the east.

  “Federal kidnapping, I assume,” he said. And they nodded.

  “Female or male?”

  “Female, sir.”

  “Mmhmm.”

  The junior man looked at his companion out of the corner of his eye, signaling confusion and now-what and a bunch of other stuff; the senior official, who’d been at this a long time, paid no attention to him. They’d wait; and when the Lingoe godfather chose to speak, he’d choose to speak. And if he was going to raise hell, well, he’d raise hell. And there was not one thing anybody could do about it, except if he used the needle he had in his pocket, and he wasn’t sure he could do that.

  “Explain,” said Thomas at last. “Please.”

  He was being excruciatingly polite. If he were pulling out your toenails one at a time, he would be excruciatingly polite.

  “My name is John Smith, Mr. Chornyak,” said the senior official.

  “Yes. I’ve worked with you before.”

  “I was instructed to explain to you that in the interests of our efforts to acquire the Beta-2 language of the primary Jovian lifeforms it became necessary for us to take temporary custody of one of the infants of St. Syrus Household . . . somewhat abruptly.”

  “Became necessary.”

  “Yes, Mr. Chornyak.”

  “I don’t follow you, Smith.”

  He told him. He told him about the dead infants, about the meeting with the technicians, about the final decision that it had to be a linguist baby the next time.

  “You were supposed to be advised of this in advance,” Smith lied. “But when news came in of the baby’s birth in California there wasn’t time to talk to you first—we didn’t know when we’d get another chance like that, you see.”

  “And where is the baby now?”

  “In one of our safe houses, sir.”

  “Your friend here—does he have a name?”

  The junior man cleared his throat uneasily and said, “Yes, sir. I’m Bill Jones, sir.”

  Thomas carefully entered that information on his wrist computer, and smiled at them. John Smith and Bill Jones. Sure. And they all lived happily ever after.

  “And when does the baby go into the Interface?”

  “In three weeks, Mr. Chornyak. We can’t wait any longer than that, in view of the current crisis.”

  “Ah, yes. The current crisis. Which is?”

  “We don’t know, sir. We aren’t told. You know how that is, Mr. Chornyak. Need to know.”

  “All right, I’ll assume the existence of the current crisis for the moment—it’s that or stay here all night, obviously. Given that assumption, Smith, do you suppose you could just explain to me, without a lot of fluff and quaver, why this extraordinary crime has been authorized—no, that’s not strong enough—has been committed by the government of the United States? Against a Household of the Lines, to which this government owes much and from which it has suffered no injury? Kidnapping—” A corner of Thomas’ upper lip twitched, once. “—is a crime. It is not a trivial crime. It carries the death penalty. I suggest that you explain to me why an official of my government has felt justified in kidnapping one of my relatives.”

  Smith hesitated, and then said, “Sir, we explained to you.”

  “You explained to me that you have failed in your experiments using human infants in the Interface with the lifeforms. Yes. I understand that. That does not surprise me—you were told that you would fail. What I do not understand, however, is why that set of entirely predictable events lead in some inexorable manner to this crime.”

  Feeling that if he was ever to seem more than a cardboard character in this exchange this was his moment, Jones spoke up.

  “Perhaps you’d let me handle that, John,” he said carefully.

  “By all means, Bill. Have at it.” Smith shrugged. It wasn’t going well, and it probably wasn’t going to get any better, but he didn’t intend to let that bother him. He’d met with Chornyak before, on different but almost equally uncomfortable occasions. He’d met with linguists hundreds of times. And he knew that there was absolutely nothing an ordinary citizen could do if a linguist decided to structure an encounter in such a way that that citizen would look like a perfect ass. That was one of the skills the Lingoes learned, it was one of the things they trained their brats in from birth, and it was one of the reasons they were hated.

  Jones appreciated it greatly when the Lingoe putting him down was a male, at least . . . when it was one of the bitches, he got physically sick. Oh, they observed all the forms, those women; they said all the right words. But they had a way of somehow leading the conversation around so that words came out of your mouth that you’d never heard yourself say before and would have taken an oath you couldn’t be made to say . . . He knew all about linguists. You couldn’t win, not face to face with one, and he knew better than to try. Let Jones beat himself to death on that rock if it appealed to him; he’d learn.

  “Sir,” Jones began, “it’s like this.”

  “Is it,” said Thomas.

  “We of the federal government have of course heard and read the official statements of the Lines to the effect that there is no genetic difference between linguist infants and the infants of the general population. And we are capable of appreciating the reasons for that position, in view of the regrettable friction between the Lines and the public.” He stopped, and Thomas tilted his head a fraction, and Jones felt deeply inferior for no reason that he could understand; but he was into it now and had no choice but to go on. They’d been told to be very careful with this man.

  “You know what he can do, don’t you?” the chief had said to them, holding on to his desk with both big fists and leaning at them like a tree. “That man, all by himself, can just give an order. And every single linguist in government contract service would just stop what they were doing. That means every last interplanetary negotiation we have in progress—business, diplomatic, military, scientific, you name it—every last one would simply STOP. We can’t do a damn thing without the Lingoes, god curse their effing souls and may they fry one and all in hell. But that man, may he fry especially slowly, holds this government hostage. Do you understand that, Smith? You, Jones, do you remember that?”

  And why, thought Jones, bewildered, had the government then sent him? Smith, maybe . . . he understood that Smith had experience in dealing with linguists. But why him? Why not some real superstar?

  Smith, who was watching him in mild amusement, knew the answer to that question. The government, which was composed of bureaucrats, felt that sending anyone obviously important to deal with Thomas would give Thomas an indication of the way he owned us all, and that that would be a tactical eror. As though Thomas himself were unaware of the facts of the matter . . . So they sent a team. One experienced ordinary-looking agent, with no spaghetti and no flash, just your average government token. And one very junior bumbler to set him off. Poor Jones.

  “So, Mr. Chornyak,” Jones labored, “we of course understand the motivation for that stance on the part of the Lines—but we also know that it isn’t really in accordance with the facts. That is
, we know that in actuality the genetic difference does exist.”

  “All that inbreeding,” Thomas murmured courteously; and Smith chuckled inside as Jones swallowed the bait.

  “Exactly,” said Jones happily.

  “Unnatural practices.”

  Jones looked startled and declared that he hadn’t said that.

  “There is some other sort of inbreeding, Mr. Jones?”

  “Well, there must be.”

  “Oh? Why must there be? We could establish the sort of systematic genetic difference you suggest—claiming, by the way, that the linguist Households deliberately lie—we could only establish that sort of systematic genetic difference by systematically fucking our first cousins, generation after generation. Switching to sisters would do it even faster, though it might give us some other kinds of genetic differences. Two-headed babies. Armless babies. Headless babies. That sort of thing.”

  “Mr. Chornyak, I assure you—”

  “Mr. Jones, I assure you that I did not leave my home, where I have important duties to see to on behalf of the government you claim to represent, and fly here through vile weather and a traffic pattern managed by lunatics, to listen to you attack the sexual habits of my family.”

  It was too much for Jones, entirely too much. He had no idea how he’d gotten to the point where he now found himself, and he sat there opening and shutting his mouth like a toad.

  “Mr. Chornyak,” said Smith, moved by pity, “do come off it.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Stop torturing my associate, Chornyak. It’s not nice. You are behaving like the Ugly Linguist. And the fact that he makes it so easy doesn’t make it any more sporting.”

  Thomas chuckled, and Jones looked infinitely confused.

  “We don’t believe you,” Smith went on. “This is no news to you at all. We’ve been telling you we didn’t believe you ever since we found out what linguists were for. And it’s got diddly to do with your sexual practices, in which the government hasn’t the slightest interest.”

  “It is scientifically . . . drivel,” said Thomas.

  “So you tell us. And we don’t believe that either.”

  “And?”

  “And we have put up with it, because you have us by the short hairs as always. Forty-three human infants have now died in our valiant attempts to go along with the arrangement it pleases you linguists to impose upon us. And how many computer scientists are now barely capable of cutting out paper dolls from trying to deal with all this I can’t imagine.”

  “Eleven, as of yesterday,” said Thomas.

  “How do you know that?” demanded poor pitiful Jones.

  “They know everything,” Smith told him. “It gets boring after a while.”

  “So,” said Thomas, “you decided that you had to have a linguist infant, because only a linguist infant could acquire the language you call Beta-2. Despite the fact that there is no evidence whatsoever that there is any such language. And even if you had to steal the infant. Rather a primitive act, stealing a human being, don’t you think?”

  Smith was not going to be led down a path at the end of which he would hear himself admitting that he didn’t consider linguists to be human beings. Not a chance. He said nothing at all, and Thomas went on.

  “Mr. Smith,” he said, “Mr. Jones, I swear to you—” and to Jones’ astonishment he suddenly looked just like the pictures of Abraham Lincoln at his most tender and trustworthy . . . “—that we of the Lines are now and always have been telling you the simple truth. Never mind the dubious genetic theory involved; we’ll ignore that. But the reason that you cannot put a human infant into an Interface with a non-humanoid Alien without destroying that infant utterly has nothing whatsoever to do with whether you use an infant of the Lines or not. It has to do with the fact that no human mind can view the universe as it is perceived by a non-humanoid extraterrestrial and not self-destruct. It is as simple as that.”

  “So you say,” said Smith stubbornly.

  “So we say, yes. And so we have always said. We tried, very early in the days of the Interfaces, because it did not happen that in early exploration of this galaxy we encountered only humanoid Aliens. Sometimes we did, yes; but just as often, we ran into sentient beings who were crystalline, or gaseous. You will recall the infamous encounter with the population of Saturn, which was a liquid—the Lines lost three infants to that one. And when we saw we had reached a limit that could not be breached by technology, we halted there. The United States government would be well advised to do the same.”

  “It cannot be true of every non-humanoid Alien species,” declared Smith. “That’s ridiculous.”

  And Thomas thought that no, it wasn’t ridiculous at all. It was distressing, but it was not ridiculous. No human being could hold his breath for thirty minutes; that was a natural barrier, and one learned not to fling oneself at it. No human being, so far as he knew, could share the worldview of a non-humanoid. It was not ridiculous.

  “If you people are willing to keep trying,” said Thomas reasonably, “and if you don’t mind risking the sanity and the lives of your infants in this quixotic series of gambles, that’s your business. But we linguists are genuinely tired of having you blame the results of your stupidity on us.”

  “Mr. Chornyak—”

  “No. You listen to me. What you sit here saying to me is very easily summed up, Smith. It goes like this. One: we linguists do know how to Interface with non-humanoid Aliens, but we won’t—for some mysterious reason. Our inherent wickedness. Our monstrous greed. Just for the hell of it. Who knows? We just won’t. Two: you non-linguists have made a real try at using your own babies, and they’ve all died horribly, or worse than died. Three: since that comes directly from our refusal to help, we are to blame for those tragedies—we, the linguists, not you who actually put the babies in the Interface time after time after bloody time and watch them suffer unspeakably. Four: since we are to blame for all that, and since humanity really and truly needs to grab off these non-humanoid tongues, you the government are thereby by god ENTITLED to one of our babies. It’s not kidnapping, it’s our just desserts after your patient forbearance long past the point of sweet reason. We owe you one of our babies!”

  Jones had always prided himself on being a sophisticated and reasonable man, and on being free of the primitive emotion of prejudice. Watching the threedies of the anti-linguist riots, he had marveled that man could so turn against his own kind and could excuse such brutality for a reason that was no reason. Once, for the color of a man’s skin. Now, for whether a man came out of the households of thirteen families of this world—out of the Lines. He had watched and felt contempt, thankful that he could not be like that, pleased that no such baseness tainted him.

  His stomach twisted, now; sick, he realized that the hate he felt for the elegant man who sat there mocking them—hate that rolled through him as he had once seen pus roll from a wound—was prejudice! He hated this man with an entirely irrational blood lust. He would have taken pleasure in thumbing out his eyes. For a few words, and no doubt a few gestures. He’d been warned that a linguist could control you with gestures and you’d never suspect, when he was in training. “With the tip of their little finger, men!” the instructors used to snap at them. “With nothing more than the way they breathe, they can control you!” He’d learned that for the exams, he’d learned all kinds of crap for exams, but he hadn’t believed it. He believed it now. Because it couldn’t have been the words that Chornyak was using. Shit, he’d read those words in a hundred right-wing magazines, heard them in a hundred bars when tempers were running high, it was what anybody at all would have said in an off-guard moment, it could not be the words . . . No, the man had done something to his mind, he’d gotten at him somehow . . . with the tip of his little finger. With the way he breathed.

  It did not occur to Jones that one way to avoid some of this, although it wouldn’t save you from what linguists could do with the modulations of their voices,
was not to look at the linguist while he talked. He stared at him, as fascinated as a snake in a basket. Smith, on the other hand, looked at the ceiling when he wasn’t speaking directly to Chornyak and looked a little past him when he was, and he knew that Jones had been told to do the same. Jones hadn’t learned it, because he hadn’t believed it mattered.

  “Mr. Chornyak,” said Smith, “we know how you feel, and you know how we feel, and it’s all very cosy. The question is not how we feel about this—nobody likes it, whatever you may think—but what the linguists will do.”

  Thomas sighed and shook his head slowly.

  “What can we do?” he asked. “I can imagine the reaction I’d get if I called the FBI and reported that a government agent had kidnapped one of our babies. We are as helpless in the face of government barbarism as any other citizen, Mr. Smith, and we will do what any other citizen does. We will go through the motions. Call the police, report the baby missing, pretend for the sake of its parents that a search is being made . . . And then we will comfort the mother in her grief as best we can.”

  “You don’t know—”

  “I do know. The baby will die, as all the other babies die. Or it will be mutilated so horribly that it will have to be put to death in the name of decency, as has also happened. And we will comfort the mother in her grief, as best we can.”

  Thomas knew precisely what Smith was thinking. Why, Chornyak, he was thinking, don’t you threaten us with what you really can do, and with what every one of us knows you really can do? Why don’t you threaten to pull out the linguists, every last one of them, and plunge the world into chaos? Why do you pretend that you are just a citizen like any other citizen?

  Well . . . let him wonder. Thomas had no intention of telling. Nobody knew, or would ever know, except when time came to pass on the leadership of the Lines. Then he would have to explain to the next Head that that trump card was being held for one situation—for the time when the government, after murdering who knew how many hundreds or thousands of innocents in their Interfaces, finally stumbled upon that unique non-humanoid species whose perceptions could be tolerated by humans. On that day, which might be ten thousand years away, or ten days, the government would suddenly decide that it was in the Interfacing business and could do the job of acquiring Alien languages on its own. And it was then that the government would hear the linguists’ terms: either the Lines kept that part of the Interface industry as they had all the rest, or every linguist involved in negotiation, no matter how crucial, would walk out and participate no more. It was not the intention of the linguists to see their own offspring wasted in this random search for the chance species that would break the perceptual barrier between humanoid and non-humanoid; on the other hand, it was not the intention of the linguists to see their power lost to the government or the public.