“Now, Mr. Verdi,” Michaela chided.
“I can. I can so.”
“Tsk.”
“Well . . . I can remember when my father told me about it.”
“Mmmm.”
“And when I was a tyke myself, all we had to do was the mass-ed computer lessons, at home, Now, the kids have all that to do AND the damnfool school for two hours! HOMEroom, they call it! Did you ever hear such damnfool stuff: HOMEroom!”
“Socialization, Mr. Verdi,” Michaela said.
“Socialization! Damnfool!”
“Mmmmm.”
“I remember what socialization did for me, young lady! Even when they tried to put it in the mass-ed curriculum! It made me detest the Pledge Allegiance and the State Song and the damnfool Civic Anthem and the whole shebang, that’s what it did! Oh, I know, they say that when the kids got nothing but the mass-eds they started to act strange and their folks didn’t feel like they were normal kids . . . I’ve heard that. I don’t believe a word of it.”
“Mmmmmm.”
“Poor little things. You ever heard Mr. Hampton Carlyle stand up and recite all the verses of Hiawatha at you, little lady?”
“All the verses?”
“Well, it took him a week, you know. Including the gestures . . . You’re blessed if you never had to go through that, let me tell you. And they’re still doin’ it to the kids, to this day! Oh, and then there’s Artsandcrafts! Whoopee, let’s make a little basket out of paper for the Spring Pageant and stick it full of paper flowers! And there are Special Activites. . . . Oh, I declare, Mrs. Landry, it’d gag a maggot. It’s out of the Middle Ages, that’s what it is.”
“Mmhmmm.”
“When I was a child, I had my work to do. I’d interfaced with an AIRY, and I had to know that. And I had Basque, and one of the Reformed Cherokee dialects, and I had Swedish, and I had Ameslan.”
“Ameslan?”
“American Sign Language, girl, don’t they teach you anything? I had all that, and I had my mass-ed lessons to get, and I had to help out around the place. But I had time to play, and I had time to lie up in a black walnut tree and just dream once in a while, and go wading in the creek . . . these children now, Mrs. Landry, they don’t have a minute to call their own. Freetime, they’re supposed to get. After they’ve worked all day for the government, and after they’ve gone to Homeroom—if they can fit that in—and done the mass-ed lessons no matter what. And after they’ve put in the extra tutorials with their grammar books and dictionaries, and filled their backup requirements, and after they’ve done such stuff as run hell for leather through a shower and cut their toenails and the like, and after they’ve gone to every family briefing scheduled for them for the evening . . . if there’s any time left, girl, that’s theirs. That’s their freetime, and precious little of it do they get. Fifteen minutes, if they’re lucky.”
“Mr Verdi?”
“What? What?”
“You say they have to fill their backup requirements. What’s that?”
“Shoot.”
The old man looked cross, and Michaela patted his hand and told him he didn’t have to tell her if he didn’t want to bother with it.
“Oh, no, I’ll tell you!” he said. “Backup . . . that’s basic.”
“Mmmm.”
“You know how it works, this Interfacing?”
“No, sir. Only what I see on the news.”
“Huh. Bunch of damnfool.”
“I expect it is.”
“Well, now, the Interface is a special environment we build in the Households. There’s two parts to it, each one with all the temperature and humidity regulated down to the dot, and special stuff piped in and whatnot, with the environment on one side exactly right for whichever Patoots or Pateets we’ve got in residence at the time, and the environment on the other side just right for humans. And between the two there’s this barrier . . . you can’t have cyanide gas coming on through to the kiddies just because the Patoots need it, and vice versa for oxygen and whatall, you see . . . but it’s a specially made barrier that you can see through and hear through just like it wasn’t hardly there at all. And we put the baby in the human side, and the AIRY’s live in the other, and the AIRY’s and the baby interact for a year or so and pretty soon you’ve got an Earth baby that’s a native speaker of whatever the AIRY speaks, you see.”
“Oh,” said Michaela. “My!”
“But that’s for just the first time!” said the old man emphatically. “That’s just for the very first time an Alien language is acquired as a native language by a human being. And after that, why, the human child is the native speaker and you don’t have to go through all that. You just put that child, the one you Interfaced the first time, together in the ordinary way with another human infant, and that’s backup, don’t you know. The second child will acquire the Alien language from the one that was Interfaced, now there’s a human native speaker available. That’s necessary, let me tell you.”
“Mmmmm.”
“You’re not paying attention to me, are you? You asked me what backup was, you know, and now you’re not paying attention!”
Michaela sat up very straight and insisted that indeed she was.
“You think I’m boring, do you? Everybody thinks I’m boring! Lot of damnfool phooey, if you ask me! What do they know?”
Michaela didn’t think he was boring at all, as it happened, because the more she could learn about the habits and lifestyles of the Lingoes, the more efficiently and safely she could murder them. She considered every word that Stephan Verdi said potentially of the greatest value to her—you never knew when some scrap of information would be precisely the scrap that you most needed—and she was able to assure him with complete honesty that she was listening to every word he said and enjoying it.
“I’d know if you were lying, don’t you forget,” he said.
“Would you?”
“You can’t lie to a linguist, young woman—don’t you try it.” Michaela smiled.
“Already tried it, haven’t you! I can tell by that smirk you’ve got on your face! Pretty doesn’t cover up body-parl, girl, never has and never will!”
“Mr. Verdi . . . all that excitement’s not good for you.”
“Excitement? You don’t excite me, you hussy, it’d take a good deal more than you to excite me! I’ve seen everything there is, in my time, and taken most of it to bed if I fancied it! Why, I’ve—”
“Mr. Verdi,” Michaela broke in, “you wanted to explain to me why I can’t lie to a linguist.”
“I did?”
“Mmmhmm.”
“Well . . . let me tell you this: if you lie to a linguist, girl, and you get away with it, if you lie to a linguist and he doesn’t catch you out, it’s only because he let you lie, for his own very good reasons. You keep that in mind.”
“I will.” And she would.
“Backup,” she reminded him then. She’d almost lost track herself this time.
“Oh, yes. Well. You see, after Interfacing, that human child is the one and the only living human being that can speak the Alien language—and it’s taken years to produce just the one. And you never know what could happen. You’d have important treaties set up, don’t you know, or something else important—and the kiddy gets wiped out in a flyer accident. Struck by lightning. Whatever. You can’t have that, you see. There’s got to be another child coming along behind that knows the language, too, and another one behind that. Providing backup, in case anything happens. And of course grownups can’t ever acquire languages like babies do, but they make a point of picking up a language as best they can every year or two, from tapes and whatall, and trying to talk to the kids that learned it Interfacing, you see. And that way, if the little one that had the AIRY’s language first should go to his Maker before the backup child was old enough to work alone, well, in an emergency you could send along the grownup that had the language sort of half-assed . . . that’s the only way that grownups can learn langu
ages, most of ’em . . . and the child that was too young, and they could get by as a team after a fashion. In an emergency, don’t you know! You wouldn’t want that as a general thing, ’cause it doesn’t work for warm spit. But in an emergency . . . well!”
“It sounds like a hard life for the children,” Michaela said.
“It is. It’s purely awful. Like being born in the damnfool army.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, and he pulled fretfully at his covers until she’d rearranged them to his satisfaction.
“It doesn’t sound easy for the adults, either,” she added, when she had him settled.
“Oh, phooey. They’re used to it. Time they’ve done nothing but work all the time for twenty years, they wouldn’t know what to do with themselves if they got the chance to live any other way. Phooey.”
* * *
Most of the time he got a little agitated over a sentence or two in every paragraph, but he was really enjoying himself tremendously. She watched, and she’d take his pulse if he began to look flushed, while he roared at the top of his lungs about interfering damnfool women and their interfering damnfool nonsense, but she decided very quickly that Sharon Verdi was quite right. The old man’s body was worn out, to such an extent that he couldn’t get around anymore or do much for himself; but inside the frail assortment of muscles and bones and wrinkled flesh he was, as she’d said, fit as a racehorse. She did not need to worry about Stephan Verdi.
Only once had she seen him become so excited that she’d had to interfere and insist on a sedative. That was the day he got started talking about the Anti-Linguist Riots of 2130, with people throwing rocks at the children and setting fire to the linguists’ houses . . . That was when the families had made the shift from living in individual homes like everyone else and had set up the communal Households, where there would be security in numbers. And had earth-sheltered every one of them, not only for economy’s sake but also as a defense measure. So that each could be a kind of fortress on very short notice.
Talking of that, shouting that the linguists sacrificed their whole lives so the rest of the universe could live fat and lazy and at their ease, and shouting about ingratitude that would make the devil puke . . . the old man began to cry, and Michaela knew how that shamed him. A man, crying. Once Head of this Household, and crying. She’d stopped him gently, and soothed him into taking a glass of wine and a sedative, and she’d sat there beside him till he fell asleep. And since then, at the first sign that he was about to take up the subject of the riots, she headed him off expertly into a safer topic.
“You’re a good child,” he’d say to her from time to time.
“I’m glad you’re pleased with me, sir.”
“You’re the best listener that I ever knew!”
“My husband always used to say that,” she said demurely.
“Well, he was right, by damn. Does a man good to have somebody like you that can pay attention when he talks!”
“Mmhmmm.”
In many ways Michaela was sorry she had to kill him. He was a nice old man. For a linguist.
Chapter Seven
Let us consider James X, a typical 14-month-old infant of the Lines. Here is his daily schedule, for your examination . . . this is an infant, remember. A baby . . .
5:00 – 6:00 AM
Wakeup, followed by calisthenics or swimming, and then breakfast.
6:00 – 9:00 AM
Interface session, with one or two Aliens-in-Residence.
9:00 – 10:00 AM
Outdoor play with other children. During this play hour the adults supervising use only American Sign Language for communication.
11:30 – 12:00
Lunch.
12:00 – 2:30 PM
Nap.
2:30 – 3:00 PM
Calisthenics or swimming.
3:00 – 5:00 PM
“Play” time; spent with an older child who speaks yet another Alien language to James.
5:00 – 6:00 PM
Supper, followed by bath.
6:00 – 7:00 PM
“Family” time; spent with parents if available, or with an older relative.
7:00 PM
To sleep.
Note that this extraordinary schedule guarantees that the infant will have extensive exposure each day to two Alien languages, to the primary native language of the Household (which will be English, French or Swahili) and to sign language. But this is by no means all. Great care is taken to see that the adults directing the exercise sessions speak some different Earth language to the children—in James’ particular case that morning session involves Japanese and the afternoon Hopi. That is, James X must deal with daily language input in at least six distinct languages—and the answer to your inevitable question is no . . . this does not cause James X any difficulty. Initially there may be a brief period of confusion and minimal delay in language development; however, by the age of five or six he will have native speaker fluency in all those various tongues.
Weekends will differ from the schedule above very little; there may be some sort of family outing, or a visit to a pediatrician, and on Sunday there will be an amazingly lengthy time spent in Family Chapel. These are very busy babies indeed.
(from a briefing for junior staff,
Department of Analysis & Translation)
Andrew St. Syrus had the languid good looks characteristic of his family. Skin so fair that ten minutes in the sun meant a burn, and hair the color of good English wheat. And he had a beautiful mouth. Like all the St. Syrus men, he grew a full mustache above it to serve as a counterweight of masculinity. And he had learned, painstakingly, in daily sessions supervised by other St. Syrus men, the repertoire of male body language that no St. Syrus man could afford to dispense with. Thomas Chornyak, now, if he lounged a bit in his chair you saw only a sturdy male bulk lounging in a chair; if Andrew took the same posture he appeared to be draped over the chair for the elegance of the effect, and it was fatal. Andrew sat up straight, and he kept his shoulders square, and he made damn sure every unit of his body-parl had an unambiguous message like a drone string on a dulcimer . . . I AM VERY MALE. It was a nuisance, and the Household was searching for at least two husbands from outside the Lines who could offer a substantial contribution of genes best described as hulking.
He arrived at Chornyak Household before breakfast, refused anything but a cup of strong black coffee, and went straight to Thomas’ office to tell him about the kidnapping.
“My God, Andrew,” Thomas said at once, both hands gripping his desk. “Jesus . . . that’s awful.”
“It’s not pleasant.”
“You’re sure it’s a kidnapping? Not just a mixup . . . one of those cases you read about once in a while where some woman takes home the wrong baby?”
“They’d have one extra at the hospital, if it were that.”
Thomas made a face, and apologized.
“It was a stupid question,” he said. “I’m shocked stupid, I’m afraid. Forgive me.”
“It’s understandable.”
“Not really, Andrew—but go on.”
“They think it must have happened sometime between midnight and the four o’clock feeding . . . that’s when they noticed that the baby was gone. Somebody just waltzed up to the night nurse with a fake note saying they wanted the child for Evoked Potentials, and she handed it over like a sack of groceries.”
“How could that happen? A baby is not a sack of groceries!”
“Well,” sighed Andrew, “the nurse on duty had no reason to be suspicious. Someone’s always coming after babies from the Lines for neurological testing—you know that. The man was dressed like a doctor, he acted like a doctor, the note was scrawled like a doctor’s usual bad excuse for handwriting. she had no way of knowing. Hell . . . nobody argues with a doctor, Thomas—you can’t blame the woman.”
“She should have checked.”
“Thomas. She’s a nurse. A woman. What do you expect?”
“I
expect competence. We expect competence in the women of the Lines, Andrew.”
St. Syrus shrugged, carefully.
“Well,” he said, “it’s done. Never mind blaming the nurse at this point—it changes nothing. It’s done.”
“I’m sorry, Andrew,” said Thomas.
“I know you are, and I appreciate it.”
Andrew got up and walked back and forth as he talked, his hands clasped behind him. “We felt that the worst possible thing would be publicity . . . Considering the way people feel about us, they’d probably give the kidnapper board and room instead of turning him in. So we exerted a little pressure in the necessary places, and we’ve been promised that those media buzzards won’t be allowed one word, not even an announcement.”
“I see.”
Andrew looked at him, narrowing his eyes, and said, “You know, Thomas, that’s odd. They must be short-staffed, or confused, missing an opportunity to sic the pack on us and keep the public mind off their own shenanigans. This one is tailor-made for the bastards—I can’t figure out why they’re passing it up.”
“Andrew, when have the actions of our illustrious government ever made sense?”
“Not lately.”
“I rather expect they’re concerned that people might get nervous about hospital security measures . . . copycat crimes, that sort of thing.”
“I suppose. Whatever it is, thank God for it.”
“Right you are, my friend. And I will tighten the screws a bit from this end, just to make sure that their motivation doesn’t slip somebody’s mind on its way up through the chain of command.”
Native Tongue Page 10
