Native Tongue

by Suzette Haden Elgin, Susan Squier

  It was an argument that went round and round like a canon, and it would go on as long as there was privacy and leisure enough to sustain it, because it had no answer. If Aquina was right, then they were indeed seriously behind. But they were so busy! The only ones who had the free hours that might have gone into actually setting one of the plans in motion were those too ill or too old or otherwise unable to do any of the tasks involved. And there was no way out.

  The governments of Earth had no limit in their greed; every new Alien people contacted meant new Alien treasures to be sought after, and a new market for the products of Earth, and that meant a new Alien language to be acquired. There were never enough infants, never enough Interfaces . . . again this year a resolution had come up in the United Nations, proposing that the linguists should be compelled by law to establish one of the Households in the Central American Federation, one in Australia, one somewhere else—it was not fair, the delegates thundered, that all the Households should be located in the United States and in United Europe and in Africa, when everyone needed them equally! And then of course the delegations from the African confederations and from United Europe had leaped up to protest that they could hardly be included in the accusations of linguistic imperialism, since it was the United States that hoarded ten of the thirteen Lines.

  It kept happening. As though they were a public utility, or a military unit, and not private citizens and human beings at all. It made no difference, because there was no way that the Lines could be compelled to spread themselves “equitably” around the world at the pleasure of its populations. But the constant pressure to do more, to be more, never let up. Why, the governments wanted to know, couldn’t each linguist child be required to master at minimum two Alien languages instead of one, thus doubling their usefulness? Why couldn’t the women of the Lines be required to use the fertility drugs that would guarantee multiple births? Why couldn’t the time each infant spent Interfacing be increased to six hours a day instead of three? Why . . . there was no end to their whys, and nothing but the stern grip of the Judaeo-Christian paradigm kept them from adding a question about why the men of the Lines couldn’t take a dozen wives apiece rather than one.

  As there was no end to their demands, there was no end to their prying. The linguists had spotted the men from the various intelligence services within days of their being planted in the Households, and had been much amused. They might have been fine secret agents, but they were rotten plumbers and carpenters and gardeners. And the ones assigned to so enflame the passions of the women that they would manage to marry into the Lines had been hilariously obvious.

  The women of the Barren Houses had no time, in such an atmosphere, to set contingency plans in operation. Every day there was less time. Even these brief gatherings in the parlor, armed with the needlework for excuse, just to discuss what there was not time to do and to fret about it, were becoming more and more rare. And more brief, with everyone but the very oldest obliged to meet multiple deadlines.

  As they were obliged now, all of them leaving in a rush except Susannah, who no longer went out to work on negotiations, though she still put in long hours as a translator and at the computers storing data. Aquina had to leave, for all her determination to do something; and Susannah was left alone with Nazareth and the usual flurry of everything being up in the air.

  “I can’t believe it,” she said. “Surely you aren’t on holiday, Natha? Aren’t there at least six places you’re supposed to be, at the same time, fifteen minutes ago?”

  “Yes,” laughed Nazareth. “And I’m late for all of them.”

  “And still sitting here?”

  “I’m trying to make up my mind which of the six to be late to first, dear Susannah.”

  “Mmmm. . . I perceive. And I perceive something else, Nazareth Joanna Chornyak Adiness.”

  “What else do you perceive, with those wise old eyes?”

  “That you are not worried,” Susannah pronounced.

  “Ah! What very sharp eyes you have, grandmother!”

  “But you aren’t. Are you?”

  “No. I’m not worried.”

  “Everyone else is, my dear. Not just Aquina. If it were only Aquina it wouldn’t matter. But everyone else.”

  “I know.”

  “They try to keep from thinking about it, but they are upset.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then—why are you so serene. Nazareth? What aren’t you saying? Why are you unconcerned?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Truly?”

  “Truly.”

  “Nazareth?”

  “Yes, Susannah?”

  “Do you know something we don’t know? Again? As you knew that it was time to begin teaching Láadan, and we didn’t know? As you knew that it would work, that teaching, and we didn’t know?”

  Nazareth gave the question serious consideration, while Susannah sat looking at her steadily.

  Finally, she answered, “Susannah,” she said slowly, “I am so sorry. But there’s no way to explain. I’m not able to explain.”

  “Perhaps you ought to try, nevertheless.”

  “If I could, Susannah, I would. And when I can, I will.”

  “And how long will that be? Before you feel that you might be able to begin to attempt to try?”

  “Nazareth began folding her work away, smiling.

  “My crystal ball is broken. Susannahlove,” she teased. “And I must go, or it won’t be just six places I need to be at once, it will be a dozen. I have to clear some of them away.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  On this view, sentences are held together by a kind of “nuclear glue” consisting of mesons, alpha-particles, and meaning postulates, all swirling in more-or-less quantitized orbits around an undifferentiated plasma of feature bundles. Thus, the earlier notion of a grammar as an abstract yet concretely manifested generative-recognition algorithm is abandoned, and is replaced by a device (to return to a more traditional sense of that word) in which features specify and are specified by other features in various combinations, subject, of course, to obvious constraints which need not concern us here. Whatever else may be said in favor of this position, it is at least unassailable, and this in itself represents a significant advance in the Theory of Universal Grammar as this field had traditionally been conceived. Opposed to this at the present time stands only the Theory of Universal Derivational Constraints, which, although it is likewise unassailable, suffers from a lack of plausibility. . . .

  Coughlake makes what is perhaps the best possible argument in favor of the Unsupportable Position when he says that derivational constraints should be left unrestrained, since, he argues, they have been exploited for too long already by non-derivational chauvinists attempting to exert a kind of interpretivist imperialism, a pax lexicalis, as it were, over the realm of syntax.

  INSTRUCTIONS: You have thirty minutes. Identify the distinguished linguist who is quoted above, and specify the theoretical model with which he is to be associated. Then explain, clearly and concisely, the meaning of the quotation. DO NOT TURN THE PAGE UNTIL YOU ARE TOLD TO DO SO. BEGIN.

  (question taken from the final examination

  administered by

  the Division of Linguistics,

  U.S. Department of Analysis & Translation)

  This was a splendid, and a rare, occasion. Looking down the tables spread with the heavy white linen (real linen, taken from chests in the storage rooms where is had been folded away along with other Household valuables rarely used), looking at the gleaming silver and crystal, Thomas wondered just when they had last done this. It had to have been years ago, unless you counted the Christmas dinners . . . and even for those, they didn’t bring the linens from the chests, or invite guests from the other Households. This opulent display was in honor of his seventieth birthday . . . and the last one, come to think of it, could only have been for some other Head-of-Household’s seventieth birthday. Long ago, in this house, it would have
been the celebration for Paul John. As if the number seventy had some significance.

  But it was of course only an excuse. To stop the round of work and study and breeding and training and recording. To spend time in eating and drinking and good fellowship. To spend time renewing acquaintances, seeing old friends you might not have seen except in passing for years and years. Such excuses were few and far between, with only thirteen Heads of Lines to turn seventy.

  They’d been enjoying themselves, no question about it. First there had been the magnificent food, such food as the public was led to believe the linguists gobbled every night, and the fine champagne, and the exotic wines from the colonies. All of that with the women still at the tables, and the conversation restrained by their presence to politics and shop talk . . . but delightful nevertheless.

  And now the women had gone off to whatever it is that women do when they are alone together—gossip, Thomas thought, always gossip—and the time for real conversation had come. The solid useful talk of men, who know and enjoy one another and can speak freely together. Not gossip, certainly. The bourbon had come out, and the best tobaccos; the room had a warmth that it never had at Christmas. Thomas smiled, realizing that he was genuinely contented, for that moment at least. So contented that even the thought of the latest D.A.T. catastrophe could not distract him. Not tonight.

  “You look smug, Thomas,” his brother Adam observed, pouring him some more bourbon. “Downright smug.”

  “I feel smug.”

  “Just because you survived to seventy?” Adam needled him. “That’s not so remarkable. Two more years, and I’ll have done the same.”

  Thomas just grinned at him and raised his glass to touch the other man’s in a satisfactory clink of mutual congratulation. Let Adam pester; nothing was going to spoil his mood tonight.

  He pointed down the table with his cigarette, at the huddle of men in splendid formal wear complete with neckties. “What are they talking about down there, Adam? If it’s as good as it looks, I may move down where I can get in on it. Which is it, sex or the stock market?”

  “Neither one. Surprise.”

  “Oh? Not women, not money?”

  “Oh, it’s women, Thomas. But not their arms and their bosoms and their bottoms, my dear brother. Nothing erotic.”

  “Good lord. What else is there to talk about, when one talks of women?”

  He paid attention then, trying to hear, and scraps of it floated up to him over the general hum.

  “—damned angel, all the time. Can’t believe—”

  “—one single ache or pain, can you believe it? It’s unheard of, but God what a relief! I was—”

  “—how it used to be, whine and nag and whine and nag from morning till night—”

  “—how to account for it, but—”

  “—damn, but it’s good, you know, having—”

  Thomas shook his head; he couldn’t hear enough. Just a word here and a phrase there, drowned in satisfied discourse.

  “All right, Adam,” he said, “I give up. What are they talking about?”

  “Well . . . I don’t know anything about it myself, living as I do in single blessedness. But if they are to be believed, something has come over all the women.”

  “Come over them? They all looked just as usual to me—what do you mean, come over them?”

  “According to them—” Adam made a large gesture, to include all the men at the tables “—the socialization process has finally begun to take hold, and the women are recovering at last from the effects of the effing feminist corruption. High time, wouldn’t you say?”

  “That’s what they’re saying?”

  “That’s it. Women, they tell me, do not nag any more. Do not whine. Do not complain. Do not demand things. Do not make idiot objections to everything a man proposes. Do not argue. Do not get sick—can you believe that, Thomas? No more headaches, no more monthlies, no more hysterics . . . or if there still are such things, at least they are never mentioned. So they say.”

  Thomas frowned, and he thought about it. Was it true? When had he last had to put up with insolence from Rachel? To his astonishment, he found that he could not remember.

  He raised his glass high and shouted down the table, to get their attention; and because it was, after all, his celebration they turned courteously to see what he wanted of them.

  “Adam here tells me all our women have gone to open sainthood,” he said, smiling, “and I’m ashamed to say that I not only haven’t noticed, I don’t find it easy to believe—it’s a good deal more likely that Adam’s confused. But if he’s not, it sounds like a damn drastic change . . . is it all of them? Or just a few?”

  They answered without any hesitation. It was all of the women in the Households. Oh, perhaps the very oldest were still a bit cross now and then, but that was age—even old men could be annoying. Except for that, it was all of them, all of the time. As Adam had said, the distortions of the twentieth century had apparently finally been laid to rest, and the new Eden was come on Earth.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Thomas declared.

  “No doubt, brother, no doubt,” Adam said, with a foolish smirk on his face. Adam had had too much bourbon.

  At the next table Andrew St. Syrus raised a hand and said, “Let me just take a poll, Thomas . . . all right? Tell me, all of you—how long has it been since you sat and listened to a woman nag? Or watched one sit and blather endlessly about something that no one in his right mind could possible have any interest in? Or blubber for hours over nothing at all? How long?”

  There was a murmur, and some consultation, and then they agreed. It had to be at least six months. Perhaps longer. They had only begun to notice it recently, but it must have been going on quite a long time.

  “But that’s amazing!” said Thomas.

  “Isn’t it? And wonderful. And all in time for your seventieth!” And up came the bourbon glasses in a toast.

  “Oh, and those tiny ones,” said someone across the room. “Oh, to be fifty years younger!”

  A roar of laughter went around the room, with the usual jeers about dirty old men, but there was support from the other tables.

  “They are so incredibly sweet, those tiny tiny girls,” mused the fellow who’d brought it up. A Hashihawa, he was; Thomas could not remember his first name. “And they have the most charming concepts. Chornyak, perceive this, would you? I have a granddaughter—hell, I have two or three dozen granddaughters—but this one in particular, she’s an adorable little thing, name of Shawna, I think. At any rate, I heard her just the other day, talking to one of the other little girls, and she was explaining so gravely how it was, that what she felt for her little brother was not ‘love’ qua ‘love’, you know, it was. . . . I don’t remember the word exactly, but it meant ‘love for the sibling of one’s body but not of one’s heart.’ Charming! Just the kind of silly distinction a female would make, of course, but charming. Ah, it’ll be a lucky man of a lucky Line that beds my little Shawna, Thomas!”

  “What language was she speaking?”

  The man shrugged. “I don’t know . . . who can keep track? Whatever she Interfaced for, I suppose.”

  And then the examples began coming from others. The charming examples. The so endearing examples. Just to add to the conversation and explain to Thomas, who clearly had not noticed what was going on around him lately. Not a lot of examples, because the subject went rather quickly to the more interesting question of the next Republican candidate for president of the United States. But at least a dozen.

  Thomas sat there, forgetting his bourbon, something tugging at him. Adam was staring blearily at him, accusing him of thinking of business instead of celebrating like he was supposed to do. But he wasn’t thinking of business. Not at all. He was thinking about a dozen examples, a dozen “charming” and “endearing” concepts, from nearly as many different Households. That should have meant roughly a dozen different Alien languages for the examples to have come from. But it didn
’t sound that way. Few of the men had remembered the actual surface shapes of the words, but Thomas had been a linguist all his life; he didn’t need all the words to be able to perceive the patterns. They were all, every one of them, from the same language. He would have staked his life on it.

  And that could mean only one thing.

  “Sweet jesus christ on a donkey in the shade of a lilac tree,” said Thomas out loud, stunned.

  “Drink up,” Adam directed. “Do you good. You’re not half drunk enough.”

  He was not drunk at all, he was stone cold sober. And a whole bottle of bourbon would not have made him drunk at that moment.

  It could only mean one thing.

  Because there was no way that the little girls of all those different Households could all be acquiring a single Alien language, all at the same time. No way.

  And it began to fall together for him. Things he had half noticed, without being aware that he noticed them. Things he had seen from the corner of his eye, heard from the corner of his ear—things he had sensed.

  He looked at the men of his blood, the men of the Lines, laughing and hearty and slightly tipsy and contented, surfeited with the rare pleasure of the evening and one another’s good company. And all he could think was: FOOLS. ALL OF YOU, FOOLS. AND I AM THE BIGGEST FOOL AMONG YOU. Because he was Head not of just Chornyak Household, but of all the Households, and that was supposed to mean something. That was supposed to mean that he always knew what was going on in the Lines, before it could go farther than it ought to go.

  How could it have happened? Where could his mind have been?

  He said nothing to the others, because of course he could be wrong. There could be some other explanation. There could be some cluster of related Alien languages spread out among the Lines by coincidence, something of that sort. Or he could be imagining the patterns, distracted by the liquor he so rarely drank. He put it aside and concentrated on fulfilling his role as host for the rest of the evening, because it was his duty to do so and because he would not spoil this for everyone else when he might be mistaken.