The cause of Michaela’s condition was something unique to Michaela, not one of these universals of womankind. When she had taken this post, she had intended to put an end to the women of Chornyak Barren House one by one, as plausibly and randomly as she could manage . . . adding forty or more notches to her bow. She had even considered killing all of them at once as a political statement; of course she would have been caught and punished, but it would have been a way of letting the linguists know they weren’t getting off scot free with their murders of innocent babies! She would have been a heroine to the public, who felt as she did about the matter; she had thought it might very well be worth it.
And she had gone so far as to select Deborah as her first victim. Deborah was ninety-seven years old; she had to be fed an enriched gruel and pureed fruit and vegetables with a soft tube. And no little girl went to talk to Deborah, although to Michaela’s consternation almost every little girl went to sit on the old lady’s bed to stroke her forehead and pat her hands for a few minutes during the day.
“She doesn’t know you’re there, sweetheart,” Michaela had told the child the first time she saw that happen. “It’s very kind of you, but it’s useless—Deborah hasn’t been aware of anything for a very long time.”
The child had turned clear eyes up to her, disturbingly adult eyes: she could not have been more than six years old. And she had said: “How do we know that, Mrs. Landry?”
Michaela had admitted that she could not be absolutely sure, of course—but there was no reason to believe anything else, and the doctors would tell her exactly the same thing.
“And that means,” said the little girl reprovingly, “that while we do not know for sure, Aunt Deborah might very well lie there every day unable to speak or move, and wish and wish and wish that someone would come sit with her and pet her a little. Isn’t that so?”
“Child, it’s so unlikely!”
“Mrs. Landry,” and it was a rebuke, no question about it, “we are not willing to take that chance.”
Michaela had not interfered again. But it had seemed to her in some way a little unwholesome that the children should be thinking about what Deborah might or might not be feeling, and it reinforced her opinion that she was the logical first victim. She had anticipated that she would take care of that rather promptly.
And now she’d been here half a year almost, and Deborah still lay there silent and unmoving under the hands of the little girls and the other women of the house. Michaela could not bring herself to do the act. Worse, with every passing day she felt herself less and less willing to kill any of them. They were not what she had expected. They were not what she had always been told they were. They did not fit the profile of the “bitch linguist” that everyone she had known believed in, that was the staple character in obscene jokes and foolish stories that children used to frighten one another. “Hey, you think the Lingoe males are shits,” people would say. “They’re angels of charity and goodness compared to the Lingoe bitches!” She had expected it to be easier than the other times—but it hadn’t turned out that way.
Here were women who had spent their lifetimes in unremitting work. The twenty-three who were her patients were not victims of illnesses, for the most part; they were simply exhausted. Like very old domestic animals who had been worked until one day they lay down and just could not get up again; that’s what they were like. They were not indifferent to the problems of the public . . . they were concerned about the affairs of the Chornyaks, certainly, but so was anyone concerned about their own families. But they cared just as much for the problems of the public at large as did any other citizens. They were just as interested in the latest events in the colonies, just as excited about the newest discoveries in the sciences, just as eager to hear of events in the world and beyond. The aristocratic disdain, the contempt for the “masses,” all that list of repulsive characteristics she’d been brought up believing marked the woman linguist—none of it was to be found in them. Not in the women she tended. And not in the other twenty who were not her patients.
They were not perfect, were not saints—if they had been, it would have been easier, because they would have been so other. Some of them were petty and silly. Some did everything to excess—for example, there were the absurdities of Aquina Chornyak, which seemed endless. But it was just the sort of distribution of imperfections that you would expect to find in any group of women of such a size. No more, and no less. And their devotion to one another, not just to the invalids who might have called to any woman’s compassion but devotion even to the most irritating among them, touched Michaela’s heart.
She had not seen anything like this outside the Lines. But then outside the Lines women never were together in this way. Every woman was alone in her own house, tending to the needs of her own husband and her own children, until she was of an age when she was sent to a hospital to die—all alone in a private room. Women, asked to consider living as did these linguist women, would have said that the prospect was horrible and declared that nothing could make them choose such a life; Michaela was sure of it. But perhaps they would have been to one another as the linguist women were, if they’d had the opportunity; how could anyone know? It didn’t matter, because other women were never going to have what these women had, they were always going to be shut up, one or two to a house, never going out except as the displayed possession of some man.
These women, living as they did, were wonderful to watch. She envied them what they had, but she could not hate them for it—she had seen in her first post, at Verdi Household, that the women of the Lines were as totally subjugated to the men as any women anywhere. They went out into the world to work, but they had no privileges. The situation was in no way their fault.
How was she to kill them?
But if she did not kill them . . . then the awful thought could not be kept out of her mind: perhaps she was wrong to have killed the others. Not Ned; she would never believe she had been wrong to kill Ned. But the other linguists? They had been male linguists, but still . . . it was a seed she could not allow to grow and yet it grew when she was sleeping. What if the male linguists were as innocent of the things she had been taught all her life long to blame them for as the women were? What if she had killed not to do her part in freeing her nation of a pestilence but out of a naïve belief in a stereotype that had no basis in reality? So many things that “everybody knew” had turned out, under her own eyes, to be lies. What if all the rest of the beliefs about linguists were lies, too? And when she remembered that the only evidence she had had for the conviction that linguists were to blame for the baby-slaughter at Government Work was the word of Ned Landry, her stomach twisted viciously. When had Ned Landry ever known anything, about anything? What if he had been entirely wrong?
Michaela lost more weight, and slept even less, and the women made her herb teas and fussed over her and threatened to call Thomas and tell him his nurse was sicker than her patients.
“You would not really do that,” she said.
“No. We would not really do that. But we would insist that you do it—and we will, if you don’t begin to improve.
She was still fretful, still not at ease in herself, as the time for the Christmas holidays drew near. And then one morning something happened that settled at least one part of the issue for her.
It was a morning when she was doing something that required her nursing skills instead of just her woman-wit. Sophie Ann Lopez, born a Chornyak but married into the Lopez family of the Lines, and then come home to Chornyak Barren House when she was left a widow at eighty, was not one of the bedfast ones. She was ninety-four, and she did not get things done speedily, but she got them done. She was up each morning with the birds, and the absolute limit of her concession to her advancing years was the cane she used for going up and down stairs. The moment she reached the level she was headed for she’d put the cane somewhere, and then in an hour or two everyone would be calling, “Has anybody seen Sophie Ann’s cane?�
� She hated the cane, and nothing but the almost inevitable prospect of months in bed with a broken hip from tumbling down stairs made her give in and accept even that minimal aid.
But in the cold of mid-December Sophie had caught some sort of infection; it had spread to her kidneys, and finally it had been necessary for a surgeon to come with his lasers and do a bit of minor surgery. It had gone uneventfully, behind the panelled screens with their riot of wild roses and blackberry vines in brilliant wools against a background of deep blue, and the surgeon was off to some other task, leaving Michaela to watch over Sophie Ann as she gradually awoke from the anesthetic.
For a while Michaela had thought her patient was only mumbling noises. And then, struggling through the sedative layers, had come recognizable words.
“It won’t be long now,” Sophie kept saying. “Not long now, I tell you!”
She kept it up until Michaela was first amused and then curious.
“What won’t be long now, dear?” she asked, finally.
“Why, Láadan! What a silly question!”
“What is it, Sophie? Is it a celebration?”
Michaela leaned over and stroked the thin white hair gently away from the damp forehead where it clung in limp strands.
“They’ll see, then,” babbled the old woman. “They’ll see! When the time comes, when we old aunts can begin to talk Láadan to the babies, it won’t be long! And then they’ll be talking pidgin Láadan, but when they speak it to their babies . . . then! Then! Oh, what a wonderful day!”
It was a language?
“Why, Sophie Ann? Why will it be wonderful?”
“Oh, my, it won’t be long now!”
It had come a scrap at a time until Michaela thought she had at least the rough outlines. These women, and the women of linguistics for generations back, had taken on the task of constructing a language that would be just for women. A language to say the things that women wanted to say, and about which men always said “Why would anybody want to talk about that?” The name of this language sounded as if Sophie were trying to sing it. And the men didn’t know.
Michaela stood thinking, tending Sophie Ann, and wondering if this was only the anesthetic talking; the old woman seemed very sure, but Michaela had known surgical patients to be very sure of dragons and giant peacocks in the operating room and similar outrageous delusions. If it was true, how could it have happened? How could they have kept it a secret, how could they work on it and not have the men know, supervised as they were? And how could anyone invent a language? Michaela was quite sure that nobody knew just how the first human language had come to be; she was equally sure that God was supposed to have played a prominent part in the becoming . . . she remembered that much from Homeroom. Hadn’t there been something called a Tower of Babble? Babbling? Something like that?
It was inevitable that Sophie Ann’s racket, and Michaela’s questions, would draw the attention of the other women; they came pretty quickly. Caroline came, wrapped in her outdoor cape, just back from an assignment, and cocked her head sharply to listen.
“Oh, goodness,” she said at once, “what nonsense she’s talking!”
“Is it?”
“It certainly sounds like it. What’s she been saying, Mrs. Landry?”
“Something about a secret language for women,” Michaela told her. “She calls it Ladin . . . lahadin . . . Latin? Almost like Latin, but with a lilt to it. And she keeps saying that it won’t be long now, whatever that might mean.”
“Oh,” Caroline laughed, “it’s just the anesthetic!”
“Are you certain of that?”
“Mrs. Landry, Sophie is almost one hundred years old!”
“So? Her mind is as clear as your own.”
“Yes, but she is talking about something from long long ago . . . you know how very old people are! They cannot remember what they did five minutes ago—her cane, for example, which she never knows the location of—but things that happened half a century ago are as fresh in their mind as their own names. That’s all this is.”
“Please explain, Mrs. Chornyak,” said Michaela firmly. “I’m afraid it’s a complete muddle to me.”
Caroline held the screen with one hand and unwound her cape with the other, talking easily. “Mrs. Landry, when Sophie was a little girl the women’s language was a secret, I expect. Women were much more frightened then, you know; at least the women of the Lines were. They were afraid that if the men found out about the women’s language they’d make them stop working on it, and so they tried to keep it a secret. But that’s all been over for many many years.”
“There is a woman’s language, then?”
“Certainly,” said Caroline cheerfully. “Why not? It’s called Langlish, Mrs. Landry, not whatever Sophie was mumbling about Latin. And it’s not a secret at all. The men think it’s a silly waste of time, but then they think that everything we do except interpreting and translating and bearing children is a silly waste of time. You can almost always find somebody working on Langlish in the computer room, my dear . . . you’re perfectly free to go watch if you like.”
“But it’s for linguist women,” said Michaela.
“Did Sophie say that?”
“No . . . but I assumed it would be.”
“That would be a warped sort of activity,” Caroline observed. “And a real waste of time . . . no, it’s not reserved for linguist women. We are constructing it, because we have the training. But when it’s finished, when it’s ready for us to begin teaching it, then we will offer it to all women—and if they want it, it will be for all women.”
“Sophie Ann called it a pigeon. A pigeon?”
Caroline frowned, and then she saw what the trouble was. “Not the sort of pigeon you’re thinking of, Mrs. Landry,” she said. “Not the bird. It’s pidgin . . . p-i-d-g-i-n.”
“What does that mean?”
“Is Sophie Ann all right, Mrs. Landry?”
“Absolutely. I wouldn’t be chatting with you if she weren’t.”
“I’m sorry; I ought to have known that. A pidgin, then. . . . when a language in use has no native speakers, it is called a pidgin.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Say that a conquering nation spoke Hungarian. And they conquered a people who spoke only English. They would have no language in common, you see. But they would need to communicate for trade, for administration, that sort of thing. In such a situation they would work up between them a language that wasn’t quite Hungarian and wasn’t quite English, for use only when the two peoples had to communicate. And a language like that, the native language of nobody, you perceive, is called a pidgin.”
“Is that a good thing? For women to learn one of these pidgins?”
“No . . . it isn’t. But say that the conquered speakers of English for some reason became isolated from the rest of the world. Say they had children who were born hearing the pidgin and grew up using it and perhaps began to prefer it to English. And by the time they had children, it was the only language the children heard, and it became a native tongue for them, for the children. Then it would be what is called a creole, Mrs. Landry. And it would be a new real language. It would develop then like any other language, change like any other language, behave like any other language.”
“So . . . women here who know this Langlish only from a book or a computer, they speak it to children. And the children would speak it, but it’s not a real language. But if they speak it to their own children. . . .”
“The situation is very different from the classic one,” said Caroline. “We women are not precisely a conquered people with an existing language . . . but the analogy is close enough. Basically, yes; it would then become a native language. Remembering, of course, that all children of the Lines are multilingual and have a number of native languages. It would become one of their native languages.”
“For all women to learn, if they chose to.”
“Of course.”
“Would they choose to,
do you think?”
Sophie Ann was wide awake now, looking at them with an anxious expression that caught Michaela’s attention at once; she turned to her patient and touched her soothingly, stroking her arm.
“It’s all right, Sophie Ann,” she said. “It’s all over.”
“I’ve just been explaining to Mrs. Landry about Langlish,” Caroline told Sophie Ann. “You were talking about it before you woke up, dearlove—a lot of nonsense, I’m afraid. About long ago, when it was kept secret.”
Michaela saw the look of consternation on Sophie Ann’s face, and spoke quickly to reassure her. “It’s all right, dear,” she said, knowing that the old woman must be embarrassed at her confusion. “Really! Caroline has explained it all to me. It’s all right.”
“Well,” said Sophie Ann weakly. “Well. I’m sure . . . I’m sure everyone talks a lot of drivel under an anesthetic.”
“Oh, they certainly do,” Michaela reassured her. “Doctors and nurses don’t pay any attention—it’s never anything but nonsense—it was just that in your case it was such interesting nonsense.”
Caroline kissed Sophie’s forehead and went away, and Michaela settled to her care, saying no more. But she knew, nevertheless, that this was the very last straw. She could not harm these women.
Native Tongue Page 26
