Native Tongue

by Suzette Haden Elgin, Susan Squier

  “Let them fight, then,” said James Nathan. “What can they do? They have no legal rights in this matter, so long as they cannot claim that they’re being deprived of anything—and I have explained to you that we would make absolutely certain they couldn’t make that claim. Nothing but the best for our women, I promise you! So they fight it, so they have hysterics, so what, Dano? Men have been able to control women without difficulty since the beginning of time—surely we are not such poor examples of the male homo sapiens that we cannot continue in the ancient tradition? Are you suggesting, Dano Mbal, that we men of the Lines are not capable of controlling our women?”

  “Of course not, Chornyak. You know I am suggesting no such thing.”

  “Very well, then. The women have only themselves to blame for this, my friends. They have decided, in some incomprehensible female way, to turn themselves into multilingual robots—it was not we men who set them on that course. They’ve made their beds, as the saying goes; let them lie in them. They have no money, they are legally not even of age . . . what can they do to stop us?”

  “They can bitch. They can raise hell.”

  “Then the more quickly we get this done, the more quickly we’ll be rid of their bitching and their hell-raising. I move we vote. At once. Time’s a-wasting, gentlemen.”

  * * *

  There was a certain amount of discussion, a few objections, some grudging compromises had to be made . . . that was to be anticipated. It was how the game was played. But in the end they agreed unanimously, as James Nathan had known from the start they would. And when that point was reached, and the vote properly recorded, he punched the keys that would display the holos he’d had prepared especially for this meeting. He intended to spend plenty of credits; they had the money, they could afford to spend it, and he’d been serious about that. But there was no reason to waste money, and he’d spent many careful hours with David, the two of them working out every detail of the basic plan. There was no reason at all why the residences couldn’t be sufficiently uniform to allow for purchasing all the materials in huge quantities, at correspondingly huge savings.

  In the Barren Houses, when the announcement was made, the women first sat shocked into total silence, staring at one another. And then their eyes began dancing, and they smiled, and then they laughed until they had no strength left to laugh any more.

  “We were going to flee into the woods. . . .”

  “With babies on our backs . . .”

  “Dig ourselves forts in the desert . . .”

  “Oh, dear heaven. . . .”

  “We were going to be shut up in the attics . . . oh, lord. . . .”

  Even Aquina had to admit that it was funny, although she felt obligated to warn them that this was probably all just a trick to lull them into a sense of false security. Before the men began the real action against them.

  First they said, “Oh, Aquina, don’t start!”

  And then they all thought of it together, and they backed Nazareth to the wall.

  “Nazareth, you knew.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “You did. That’s why you always stalled . . . always said that it would be all right, always did your best not to be here when we had planning sessions. You knew. Nazareth Joanna, how did you know?”

  Nazareth stared at the floor, and at the ceiling, and everywhere except at them, and begged them to let it pass.

  “Can’t you just be satisfied?” she asked them. “We don’t have to flee anywhere, we don’t have to erect battlements and woman ramparts and move into caves with lasers at the ready . . . we just have to go on about our business, with a great deal less inconvenience than we’ve ever had to put up with in all our lives.”

  “Nazareth,” said Caroline, “if we have to tie you to a tree, you are going to explain.”

  “I was never able to explain anything,” Nazareth wailed.

  “Try. At least try.”

  “Well.”

  “Try!”

  “Perceive this . . . there was only one reason for the Encoding Project, really, other than just the joy of it. The hypothesis was that if we put the project into effect it would change reality.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well . . . you weren’t taking that hypothesis seriously. I was.”

  “We were.”

  “No. No, you weren’t. Because all your plans were based on the old reality. The one before the change.”

  “But Nazareth, how can you plan for a new reality when you don’t have the remotest idea what it would be like?” Aquina demanded indignantly. “That’s not possible!”

  “Precisely,” said Nazareth. “We have no science for that. We have pseudo-sciences, in which we extrapolate for a reality that would be nothing more than a minor variation on the one we have . . . but the science of actual reality change has not yet been even proposed, much less formalized.”

  She didn’t like the way they were looking at her, or the way they were moving back. She hadn’t liked it before, when they were crowding her, but this was worse. And inevitable; she had known it couldn’t be avoided.

  “What did you do, then, Nazareth,” Grace asked her in a strange voice, “while we made fools of ourselves?”

  Nazareth leaned against the wall, and looked at them bleakly. It was hopeless. Probably the little girls who spoke Láadan well could have said what she needed to say, but she couldn’t even begin. I had faith? Could she say that?

  Faith. That dreadful word, with its centuries of contamination hiding all the light of it.

  “Please,” Nazareth said, giving up. “Please. I love you. And everything is going to be all right. Let that be enough.”

  It was Aquina that saved her, however.

  “Good lord,” Aquina cried, struck with still another call to arms. “We don’t have time for this! We have to decide how we go about offering Láadan to women outside the Lines. . . .”

  Dear Aquina.

  “Now that,” said Nazareth solemnly, “is something that I do believe I can be helpful with. If you’ll let me make a pot of tea and if we could all sit down and talk about it. . . .”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  1Ø REM HERE WE GO AGAIN

  2Ø GOTO 10

  It was Lanky Pugh’s personal opinion that this latest hooha from Government Work should have been located offplanet. Way offplanet. Preferably somewhere out behind the Extreme Moons.

  But the Pentagon didn’t feel that way about it. In the first place, they assured him it was perfectly safe for G.W. to be right where it was. El Centro, California, wasn’t just a ghost town—it was a ghost location. Nobody, but nobody was ever going to drop by the godforsaken broiling spit in the middle of a giant rockpile that had once been a town called El Centro . . . in a time when you couldn’t be too particular about what square foot or two of this earth you stood on. That time was long gone, now.

  The real reason, however, was that the scientists who were required for this project couldn’t be allowed to go offplanet. Some of them might have been willing to do without their labs and their creature comforts, but the government wanted them right there at hand. Right on tap, where you could pick up your comunit and give a call and say, “My God, Professor Blah, will you come take a look at this?” And Professor Blah could be right there, in about half an hour maximum. The Pentagon was almost violently against the idea of having any of their Professor Blahs more than a half hour out of range.

  And so they were set up in an underground installation, all nicely cooled and decorated so you could hardly tell you weren’t at a motel, in the middle of effing nowhere. Lanky Pugh, and a whole platoon of servomechanisms, and the Professors. And what they had going this time surprised even Lanky, who had really believed—when they closed down Arnold Dolbe’s unit—that the U.S. Government had come to the end of its string regarding the Interfacing of human babies and nonhumanoid Aliens. The shutdown had been very convincing, and Lanky had approved of it with all his heart. He’d been glad the baby pr
oject was over, glad to see the discreet removal of the media notices calling for volunteer infants, and damn surprised when he found out that it was just one more song-and-dance to a federal tune.

  Here they are, opened up with a brand new project, this one going on just below the surface of the ground for all the world to see, if the world cared to trek out to El Centro, California. This project’s Interface had cost the taxpayers a cool billion if it had cost them a nickel—you didn’t provide a shared environment for humans and whales in the middle of an effing desert for any kind of discount rate.

  There was a turnstile, and a chipper little servomechanism sitting beside it to chirp at people. “Hello, folks! Welcome to the Cetacean Intersection! Please insert your credit card in the slot that you see outlined in red on the top of the turnstile, and step right through! Please follow the yellow line that you see straight ahead of you on the floor of the building! It will take you right to the Interface! Thank you, folks, and please come back and see us again.”

  Nobody, to Lanky’s knowledge, had ever bothered to go through the turnstile and follow the yellow stripe and watch the solemn pair of small whales swimming in their half of a regulation Interface . . . a little oversized, but otherwise regulation . . . with an equally solemn tubie watching them through the barrier. There was nothing to see, nothing to hear, and nothing at all to experience that was worth the 135° hell of rocks and cracked earth and Nothing that stretched as far as you could see in every direction above the ground.

  It was fancy, all right, and if anyone ever did come look at it it would probably impress the hell out of them. Lanky had to give the government credit; they’d spared no expense. There was even a very small automated souvenir shop, where you could buy a toy Interface to take home to the kids.

  The real project, though, was two levels lower, encased in the same earthquake-proof concrete shell, but sunk deep into the bowels of the blasted earth. And what went on down there, far underneath the whales swimming round and round and round and the tubie watching, was something else altogether.

  “Let’s just assume,” the Pentagon briefer had said, “that what the linguists tell us is true. Just for the sake of getting on with this. Let’s assume that the problem is simply that the human brain cannot tolerate sharing perceptions with a non-humanoid brain. We’ve had plenty of evidence that that’s true.”

  “Yeah, we sure have,” Lanky had agreed. “Damn sure we have.”

  “And then let’s just set aside the other matter. Let’s just ignore, for now, the fact that the linguists know a solution to the problem that they’re unwilling to let us in on. The hell with them, gentlemen! The government of the United States has for chrissakes got savvy enough, and technology enough, and everything else enough, to either figure out what it is that the linguists know or to find some other way around the problem.”

  “Damn right,” said Lanky. “Way to tell ’em.”

  “Now what it boils down to is this . . . what we need, men, is a brain that’s just a little bit less humanoid and just a little bit more Alien. A kind of bridge between the two, don’t you see?”

  Lanky didn’t know whether he saw or not, but the professors had all seemed to follow what was going on without any difficulty. They trusted him with the computers; he trusted them with their tools. And it sounded just about as crazy, no more and no less so, than any of the rest of the G.W. projects.

  The idea was to use genetic engineering, and the government’s overflowing tanks full of tubies, and gradually, one step at a time, alter the brains and the perception systems of the tubies to make them alien. Or Alien, as the case might be.

  The Pentagon man had felt obliged to caution them.

  “We can’t move fast,” he’d said. “We don’t dare move fast, because we don’t know exactly what it is that we’re after. But we have thousands of tubies for you gentlemen to work with, to modify in whatever way you care to—and if you run out, well, there’s plenty more where those came from. You just let us know what you need.”

  The professors sat with microscopes and nearly invisible messes on slides and in Petri dishes, and they made their slow changes. Lanky didn’t know how they did that. Whether they poked the little embryos with the scientific equivalent of pins, or blasted them with lasers, or ran currents through them, or what. He most emphatically did not want to know. He knew enough about G.W. projects to last him all the rest of his life. He stayed carefully away from the profs, he ran the data they gave him without allowing any of it to register in his memory—that’s what you have computers for, so you don’t have to put stuff in your own memory—and that was all he did. Just doing his job, thank you very much.

  He had asked one question. He had asked, “What are you going to call it?”

  “Call what?”

  “Well . . . you’re down here to fool around with the embryos till you get something we can Interface. Something that’s not quite human and not quite humanoid and not quite Alien either. I believe you’ll get it . . . don’t see why not. But what are you going to call it?”

  “Mr. Pugh,” the eggdome had said, looking at him just exactly the way he looked at the stuff under his microscope, “please go away and let me work.”

  All right. Lanky had gone away as requested. It didn’t hurt his feelings, being talked to like that. After what Lanky Pugh had been through, he didn’t have any feelings left to hurt. He gave the professor one wave to acknowledge the message and went on up to watch the whales swim around.

  One of the things he planned to do, before he left this fancy hell, was figure out how to get into the Interface and go for a swim with those whales in that beautiful blue water. Round and round and round, in a lovely endless loop.

  Appendix

  From: A First Dictionary and Grammar of Láadan

  As is true in the translation from any language into another, many words of Láadan cannot be translated into English except by lengthy definitions. A miscellaneous sampling is given here to illustrate the situation; it consists mainly of samples from the “ra-” prefixing forms of the language.

  doóledosh: pain or loss which comes as a relief by virtue of ending the anticipation of its coming

  doroledim: This word has no English equivalent whatsoever. Say you have an average woman. She has no control over her life. She has little or nothing in the way of a resource for being good to herself, even when it is necessary. She has family and animals and friends and associates that depend on her for sustenance of all kinds. She rarely has adequate sleep or rest; she has no time for herself, no space of her own, little or no money to buy things for herself, no opportunity to consider her own emotional needs. She is at the beck and call of others, because she has these responsibilities and obligations and does not choose to (or cannot) abandon them. For such a woman, the one and only thing she is likely to have a little control over for indulging her own self is FOOD. When such a woman overeats, the verb for that is “doroledim”. (And then she feels guilty, because there are women whose children are starving and who do not have even THAT option for self-indulgence . . .)

  lowitheláad: to feel, as if directly, another’s pain/grief/surprise/joy/anger

  núháam: to feel oneself cherished, cared for, nurtured by someone; to feel loving-kindness

  óothanúthul: spiritual orphanhood; being utterly without a spiritual community or family

  ráahedethi: to be unable to feel lowitheláad, above; to be empathically impaired

  ráahedethilh: 1) to be unwilling to feel lowitheláad, above; to be empathically impaired 2) to be musically or euphonically deprived

  radama: to non-touch, to actively refrain from touching

  radamalh: to non-touch with evil intent

  radéela: non-garden, a place that has much flash and glitter and ornament, but no beauty

  radíidin: non-holiday, a time allegedly a holiday but actually so much a burden because of work and preparations that it is a dreaded occasion; especially when there are too many guest
s and none of them help

  radodelh: non-interface, a situation which has not one single point in common on which to base interaction, often used of personal relationships

  raduth: to non-use, to deliberately deprive someone of any useful function in the world, as in enforced retirement or when a human being is kept as a plaything or pet

  rahéena: non-heart-sibling, one so entirely incompatible with another that there is no hope of ever achieving any kind of understanding or anything more than a truce, and no hope of ever making such a one understand why . . . does not mean “enemy”

  rahobeth: non-neighbor, one who lives nearby but does not fulfill a neighbor’s role; not necessarily pejorative

  rahom: to non-teach, to deliberately fill students’ minds with empty data or false information; can be used only of persons in a teacher/student relationship

  ralaheb: something utterly spiceless, “like warm spit,” repulsively bland and blah

  ralée-: non-meta (a prefix), something absurdly or dangerously narrow in scope or range

  ralith: to deliberately refrain from thinking about something, to wall it off in one’s mind by deliberate act

  ralorolo: non-thunder, much talk and commotion from one (or more) with no real knowledge of what they’re talking about or trying to do, something like “hot air” but more so

  ramime: to refrain from asking, out of courtesy or kindness

  ramimelh: to refrain from asking, with evil intent; especially when it is clear that someone badly wants the other to ask

  ranem: non-pearl, an ugly thing one builds layer by layer as an oyster does a pearl, such as a festering hatred to which one pays attention

  rani: non-cup, a hollow accomplishment, something one acquires or receives or accomplishes but empty of all satisfaction

  rarilh: to deliberately refrain from recording; for example, the failure throughout history to record the accomplishments of women.