“Let me take a look at you,” she said, holding Nazareth firmly with a hand on each shoulder. “No, Nazareth, don’t go tugging away from me! I’m not at all sure you’re well . . . perhaps I should suggest to your father that you spend another few days at the hospital, since it’s so pleasant there? Hold still, woman, so that I can see you! They’ll still feed us, if we don’t get to Barren House till noon—hold still.”
Nazareth smiled at her, declaring that she gave up, and Michaela looked her over thoroughly in the morning light; it was more reliable than indoor light. Still much too thin, she thought. Much too thin. Tall as she was, a good four inches taller than Michaela, the gauntness was still obvious. Especially in the plain tunics she wore. Her hipbones stuck out, still.
“I won’t eat more,” announced Nazareth with determination, reading her mind. “Don’t bother instructing me, Nurse. I eat enough already. I have always been a gawk—just ask my erstwhile husband—and I am not going to change to one of those motherly types at my advanced age.”
“Hush,” said Michaela, and laid a gentle finger to Nazareth’s lips, getting a kiss for her trouble; she moved her hands to trace the stark cheekbones, and narrowed her eyes to study the face of this self-proclaimed gawk. Yes, she was too thin; but the look of intolerable strain was gone. There was a touch of color in her cheeks, her eyes glowed with the beginnings of health, and she had let her hair down from that vicious knot she’d always worn it in and put it in a single braid down her back.
“Really, Nazareth,” Thomas had commented the first time he’d seen the change of hairstyle. “At your age.” Michaela was delighted that Nazareth had ignored him.
“You look better, Nazareth,” she said, finally satisfied. “So much better.”
“I am better, that’s why. Nothing like chopping away all the dead wood and decay at one whack to improve the basic structure.”
“When I remember how you looked in the hospital that day. . . .”
“Don’t remember,” advised Nazareth sensibly. “Don’t think of it. You think of the past too much . . . it’s not good for you.”
And how did she know that? Michaela stared at her, thinking how dear she was, and Nazareth clucked her tongue at her.
“Could we go on now, do you suppose?” she demanded, pretending to be cross. “If you’re through with inspection? I’m willing to eat, if you’d give me half a chance. And I happen to know that Susannah made spice bread this morning, Michaela.”
“It’ll all be gone.”
“If you keep us standing here like this, it certainly will.”
Michaela took her hand, and they hurried, cutting across the greenspace and leaving disapproving glances behind them from the pedestrians standing sedately on the slidewalks. They would think she was a Lingoe, too—it crossed Michaela’s mind as she stretched her legs to keep up with Nazareth’s brisk stride, and she marveled that it did not bother her. What bothered her was the prospect of missing out on Susannah’s pulitzer among spice cakes.
* * *
She had a long and busy day, and she gave no more mental space to her dreams; she was occupied with the living. And when she got back to Chornyak Household in midafternoon, ready to make her daily report to Thomas—a farce, but their most discreet opportunity to make arrangements for the nights, and therefore observed punctiliously—she found the house hushed and a message from Thomas that she should not go to his office that day.
“Is something wrong, Clara?” she asked, surprised; Thomas never omitted her “report” if he was in the house, because he was determined that it should be looked upon as an unchangeable item in his daily schedule. “It’s awfully quiet. . . . has something happened?”
“It’s Father, child,” Clara said.
Paul John? Michaela would have run, then, answering the call like an old fire horse answering an alarm, but Clara caught her wrist and held her fast.
“It’s no use, child, and there’s no need for you to go,” said the other woman. “He’s gone—and everything’s been seen to.”
“But why wasn’t I called? He’s my patient! Why didn’t someone send for me, Clara? I was only at Barren House!”
“Michaela, dear child, my father had come down to make a pest of himself in the computer room—” Clara began.
“Oh heaven, your father . . . and I am standing here complaining at you! Oh, Clara. . . .”
Clara patted her hand and went right on. “He’d taken it into his head that there was something he wanted changed in one of the tax programs, and he was standing there talking, telling them how they were doing it all wrong and he wouldn’t tolerate it—and he just went, child. In the middle of a phrase. It couldn’t have been easier.”
“But—”
“And,” Clara continued, “we women were seeing to our dead many and many a long year before ever we had a nurse in this house. There was no need to disturb you.”
“I’m sorry, Clara,” Michaela said softly. “Of course there wasn’t. When did this happen?”
“Oh, perhaps an hour ago, dear. I’m sure someone’s gone over to Barren House with the news by this time . . . it’s not the sort of thing we announce on the intercoms . . . but you must have just missed them.”
Michaela drew a long breath, and realized that she was shivering. She was ashamed of herself.
“Clara, I’m so sorry,” she said again.
“Don’t be, my dear; Father was ninety-five, you know. It was to be expected, and I’m not grieving. If he’d been sick, now; if he’d suffered—that would have been another thing entirely. But this was just as he would have wanted it. He died right in the middle of telling someone what to do. It’s all right. Really.”
Michaela tried to smile, and then Clara was gone, saying something about arrangements to be made, and she could, blessedly, sit down at last. She was as weak as if she’d been tapped like a tree, and all her blood drained away. And she knew why. It wasn’t grief, though Paul John had mattered greatly to her; Clara was right that he had died as he would have preferred to die. It was because of what she had thought the instant Clara told her, what had come into her mind the instant she heard the news.
OH THANK GOD, NOW I WILL NOT HAVE TO KILL HIM.
That is what she had thought. She was sick with relief, and sick at her relief. She stayed there a long time, in the unusual stillness of the house, wondering what sort of wickedness wound on itself she nurtured.
After a while a message came through on her wrist computer, from Thomas. Unfortunate incident, but not unexpected, etc. Michaela’s services would, however, still be needed, etc. She was expected to continue in her position . . . he would meet with her the following day to discuss the necessary changes in her duties, etc.
Michaela acknowledged the message. And then, when she was sure she could walk without trembling, she went to her room.
Chapter Twenty-two
Now, the only song a woman knows is the song she learns at birth, a sorrowin’ song, with the words all wrong, in the many tongues of Earth. The things a woman wants to say, the tales she longs to tell . . . they take all day in the tongues of Earth, and half of the night as well. So nobody listens to what a woman says, except the men of power who sit and listen right willingly, at a hundred dollars an hour . . . sayin’ “Who on Earth would want to talk about such foolish things?” Oh, the tongues of Earth don’t lend themselves to the songs a woman sings! There’s a whole lot more to a womansong, a whole lot more to learn; but the words aren’t there in the tongues of Earth, and there’s noplace else to turn. . . . So the woman they talk, and the men they laugh, and there’s little a woman can say, but a sorrowin’ song with the words all wrong, and a hurt that won’t go away. The women go workin’ the manly tongues, in the craft of makin’ do, but the women that stammer, they’re everywhere, and the wellspoken ones are few. . . . ’Cause the only song a woman knows is the song she learns at birth; a sorrowin’ song with the words all wrong, in the manly tongues of Earth.
(a 20
th century ballad,
set to an even older tune called “House of the Rising Sun”;
this later form was known simply as
“Sorrowin’ Song, With the Words All Wrong”)
SUMMER 2212 . . .
Time passed, in the ordinary way of time passing, in the cycle of the seasons and the less predictable but equally endless cycle of the government negotiations for conquest and expansion of territory. Languages were acquired, and infants born and Interfaced, and yet more languages acquired. Sophie Ann died, peacefully, in her sleep; and Deborah was gone now, too, with the little girls tending her to the last. Susannah’s arthritis kept her in a wheelchair now, but did not keep her from baking her spice bread. Nazareth remained thin, Caroline abrupt, Aquina excessive. They tried not to think of what Belle-Anne had become, because there was nothing they could do about that; and when Aquina could not keep from thinking about it they soothed her through the horrors and kept careful watch on the herb cupboards until the spasm of memory had eased. Time went by, no different from any other time.
And Nazareth had been right. Every tiny girl in Chornyak Household knew Láadan now, and used it easily. It wasn’t going as rapidly at the other Barren Houses, but the reports coming in from them were not displeasing. A few of the older girlchildren, already out of infancy when the teaching of Láadan began but still too young to be much involved in government contracts, had begun to pick up the language on their own . . . haltingly, of course. But then, the women were even more halting, and they managed. “Latining by,” they called it, remembering Nazareth’s comment about what the “international” Latin must have been like. They managed. And the men had noticed nothing.
One of the first things that Nazareth had done as the Project was put into effect was to prepare a manual alphabet for Láadan. Like the fingerspelling alphabet of Ameslan in concept, but very different in form, because it had to be something that only the trained and seeking eye could see. The tiniest movements, and made by fingers lying still and unseen in laps—that was all it could be. It was splendid training for the little ones, and for all of them; if you could learn to follow those miniature motions and understand them, all the while behaving as if you weren’t doing so, following ordinary body-parl was absurdly simple by comparison.
The children loved it . . . there’s never been a child who didn’t love a “secret language” and this one was wondrously secret. It let them sit in Homeroom, for example, demure and seemingly attentive while the teachers droned away in their twentieth century rituals; the eyes of the little girls gave away nothing, but their fingers were busy. “STUPID poem! Will he never stop? How long is it till the bell? He’s an old fool!” And much worse, of course. It was exciting, it was just dangerous enough, and it was theirs alone. There was no need to worry about them forgetting that they must keep it a secret. You couldn’t have gotten them to betray Láadan short of using thumbscrews and the rack, because it was theirs, and it was theirs together—nothing else met that description.
It was happening just as Nazareth had told them it would happen, and they willingly granted her that. But there were some things that were surprising, nevertheless. For instance, there was the speed of it.
“It’s happening so fast!” Thyrsis said, and yelped; she had stabbed her finger with her embroidery needle. She put the finger to her mouth, to catch the drop of blood before it spotted her work, and said, “How can it be so fast?”
“Nazareth, you said it would take a long time,” agreed one of the others. “Generations, you said. . . . I remember very well.”
“And it will be generations,” Nazareth said, “before it is anything more than an auxiliary language. That’s unavoidable. I don’t see any change in that constraint.”
“But they use it constantly, and they love it so. And they do strange things.”
“For example?”
Susannah chuckled. “For example . . . when I thought I’d introduce a new word yesterday, for that new way of dancing that we saw on the threedies. You remember, Grace? The one that looks as if the youngsters are all trying to dislocate their shoulders?”
“I remember,” Grace said. “I would swear it had to be painful.”
“Well! I thought I had a decent proposal for a word, and I suggested it. And one of the littlebits corrected me, I’ll have you know!”
“Corrected you? How could that be—did you make an error in the morphology? At your age?”
“Of course not, it was a perfectly good Láadan word, formed in accordance with every rule. But she did. She said, ‘Aunt Susannah, it could not be that way. I’m very sorry, but it would have to be this way.’”
“And she was right?”
“Goodness, how would I know that? I don’t have native intuitions about Láadan, you know!”
“Nor do the children.”
“Ah, but they seem to think they do. Already.”
“It’s not possible.”
“No . . . but she said ‘This way, my mouth knows that it’s right.’”
They all shook their heads, admitting bewilderment. And Nazareth said, “I admit it’s happening far more quickly than linguistic theory would allow. But I think I know why, really. I think we just hadn’t realized how much fun it would be for the children. They have so little fun, we ought to have realized . . . but I never thought of it.”
“Do you notice,” Caroline asked, “do you notice how close they are, to one another?”
“The little girls?”
“Of course, the little girls! Even the older ones, who are just able to use Láadan enough to make the tiny ones laugh at them . . . they are . . .”
She stopped, because there was no word for it in any language she knew, and she wanted to use the right word.
“Oh,” she said. “I know . . . They are héenahal.” And she sighed. “Such a relief, to have a language with the right words in it!”
“Well, no wonder they are so knit together, then,” Nazareth observed. “Remember that some of them have had that blissful resource from the day they were born.”
“I cannot imagine it,” Grace said emphatically. “I try, but I can’t. What that must be like. Not to be always groping, because there aren’t any words—while the person you want so desperately to talk to gets tired of waiting and begins talking of something else. To have a language that works, that says what you want to say easily and efficiently, and to have always had that? No, loves, I cannot imagine it. I am too old.”
“It’s working, then,” Thyrsis said. “We can truly say that it’s working.”
“Oh my, yes,” Nazareth answered. “You surely could not, for even one instant, believe that this reality is the one that you and I were born to deal with? Yes, it is working, and very very quickly.”
“And,” Aquina pointed out, “we are no more ready to deal with the new one than we were the day Nazareth told us to get off our butts!”
“Aquina, don’t start!”
“Well, we aren’t.”
“There’s no hurry, Aquina.”
“No hurry? God almighty, the men are slow, but they are not deaf and blind! How long do you think this can go on, before they notice?”
“A very long time,” Caroline said confidently. “They think we are all fools. They believe that our entire attention is devoted to setting up descriptive matrices for the eighty-four separate phonemes of Langlish at the moment, for instance.”
“Eighty-five.”
“Eighty-five now? Dear heaven . . . you perceive? Nothing is so outrageous that it doesn’t just reinforce them in their conviction that we have vanilla pudding for brains. And when they are that secure in their perceptions, we are quite safe.”
“Still,” Aquina fretted, “still! They aren’t ordinary men, they are linguists. Trained to observe. They’re sure to notice, and we aren’t ready.”
“Aquina,” Thyrsis protested, “must you? When we are so happy?”
“Yes. I must. Somebody has to.”
Nobody answered her, and their fingers flew at their work in a determined WE-ARE-IGNORING-YOU unanimity, but that didn’t stop her.
“What we really need,” she said solemnly, “what would really solve the problem once and for all, is a colony of our own. A colony just for women. Somewhere so far away, and so lacking in anything worth money, that men would never be interested in taking it away from us.”
Nazareth threw up her hands, embroidery and all.
“Aquina,” she cried, “you are outrageous! A colony! We cannot even buy a piece of fruit without a man’s written permission, and you want us to buy tickets on the spaceliners . . . We can’t travel beyond the city limits without a male escort and a man’s written permission, but you want us to take off for the stars and set up a colony. . . .” She broke down, helpless with laughter, but managed to use both hands to smooth Aquina’s white hair, to show there was no malice in the laughter.
“Oh, I know,” grumbled Aquina, “I know. But it would be so wonderful.”
“We’d take vacuum bottles of frozen sperm along,” chuckled one of the others. “For the little girls we’d be kidnapping. Wouldn’t we, Aquina? And we’d sneak them through customs as . . . what . . . shampoo?”
“I know,” said Aquina again, “I’m an old fool.”
“Well then. . . don’t be a tiresome old fool, Aquina.”
“But the men will notice,” she insisted. “Never mind my fantasies, you know they will notice. And we aren’t certain what to do.”
“My dear,” chided Nazareth, “that’s not so. You have a list. Eleven possible male reactions. Eleven logical moves in response, one for each hypothesis. We did that five years ago.”
“Oh, we made lists! But we haven’t done anything to get ready to carry them out! We have other lists for that! The pre-lists, to get started preparing for the real lists. . . . It’s stupid. It’s bizarre. It’s inexcusable! We should already have begun, long ago.”
“Oh, dear. . . .”
Native Tongue Page 32
