Earthsong

by Suzette Haden Elgin

  Delina was far past both hunger and thirst now. As clean both inside and out as a synthodiamond, riding on a high keen wind only she could feel or hear, she scoffed at her greatgrandmother and declared that she was no more melodramatic than Nazareth was.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Can you really shock the dead? Can you startle them into begging your pardon? Delina smothered the laugh that threatened to break loose, and explained.

  “Dropping dead in a rose garden,” she said, “at the very moment the AIRYs are leaving us forevermore—the very moment they cease to be Aliens-in-Residence and become Aliens-in-Absentia? Seeing them off by expiring among the flowers at the mere sight of their backs? You call that dignified, Greatgrandmother? I call it tacky. And I call it outrageous, too! And irresponsible. Especially. I call it irresponsible. How dare you do that to us!”

  “Delina, dear love,” Nazareth answered calmly, drawing her shawl more tightly around her shoulders, as if she felt the chill, “is that any way to talk to a dead person?”

  Delina’s eyes narrowed and her lips thinned, and she almost backed up a step before she remembered: Stand your ground. Nazareth wasn’t asking a serious question, she was teasing an outrageous child; but she was going to get a serious answer all the same. She paused a minute to think, to shape the words that she would say, and then she answered with great care.

  “I don’t know, Greatgrandmother,” she said, “I truly don’t. How do people talk to a dead person? I’ve never talked to one before. Books about manners don’t mention it. You’re the only person I ever knew who claimed it was possible, and you gave me no instructions. I’ve had to just do the best I could, all on my own, and for you to stand there being flippant at me isn’t helpful. Or called for, in my opinion.”

  Nazareth raised her eyebrows. “When?” she asked. “When did I ever tell you that it was possible to carry on a conversation with the dead?”

  “You didn’t say it in so many words, Greatgrandmother.”

  “I thought not.”

  “But you gave me the impression that you believed it could be done. Lots of times. And, you said it was narrow-minded to assume that it couldn’t be done just because it hadn’t been.”

  Nazareth’s lips twitched, and she stood tapping them with her two forefingers, studying Delina for a moment, before she spoke again. “It appears to me that you are genuinely angry with me,” she said slowly, “and that’s astonishing. I had every right to die, like any other human being. But you’re angry.”

  “I’m furious with you!” Delina declared, raising her chin and looking the old woman right in the eye, so far as it was possible to do that at this distance; she was sure her intention was clear. “And I am here to tell you that you’re not going to get away with it!”

  “That’s why we’re here.”

  “Exactly.”

  “You couldn’t have just … oh, done a séance, for instance? Or brought in a Ouija board, or a crystal ball, or some goat entrails? You had to go bother all the Indian Nations?”

  Ah! There it was—the explanation for her greatgrandmother’s uncooperative behavior. The reason there’d been no greeting, no friendly preamble, let alone any sign that she was happy to see Delina again, as Delina rejoiced to see her. Delina was supposed to have managed this alone, without “bothering” anybody. Without washing the Chornyak linen in public. Without making a spectacle of herself, or of the Households.

  Delina firmed her lips to a thin line, and opened her mouth for a cool and dignified reply, but there wasn’t strength enough left in her to bring it off. Shuddering all over, she wrapped her arms tightly round herself and rocked from side to side, whimpering, her face screwed into a tight knot of misery.

  “Delina Meloren,” Nazareth said quickly, “my question must have been badly put!” She stepped out of the sumac thicket, narrowing the distance between them a little, saying, “You realize that once I was past ninety I no longer concerned myself a great deal with people’s ‘feelings’ … perhaps I’ve lost the knack. I didn’t intend to cause you pain, but that’s no excuse. Delina, can you tell me what hurts you so?”

  “Greatgrandmother,” Delina managed finally, through teeth clenched against the shaking, “I’m not stupid; I’m not ignorant. I tried everything. I did try. Everything! Respectfully. With an open mind. No matter how the others looked at me, or how they talked. And none of it worked. Maybe because I did it wrong; I don’t know. But it failed. All of it. The Ouija board sassed me … have you ever heard of such a thing as that?” She swallowed hard, and went on, “And I had to put up with the entire family … everybody but Willow, bless her … treating me as if I’d gone mad, instead of helping me. Telling me I was out of my mind with grief … lecturing me solemnly about how much you would have disapproved of my behavior … telling me I was letting you down! Dosing me with potions that would gag a maggot, choke a snake—”

  “But child,” Nazareth broke in, “what on earth did you tell them you were doing?”

  “I told them I was trying to get in touch with you, Greatgrandmother, because we needed your advice! What else would I have told them?”

  Nazareth blinked. Frowning, lips parted, shaking her head slowly, she started to speak. “You should never have said that you—” And then she stopped, and started over in a different tone of voice. A crisp one; all business. “Please go on,” she said. “The Chornyak males did not shut you up and declare you mad, as I would have expected them to do. The women of Chornyak Household have all grown so puny and so peaked that they are no match for you. The people of the PICOTA did not send you packing. You stand here before me apparently at liberty to do whatever you damn well please. That being the unlikely lay of this land, child—go on!”

  “I could scarcely have said that now I had no work to do I’d decided to take up parlor games,” Delina said flatly. “There was no plausible explanation, except the plain and honest truth. I told them—and it was accurate—that no proof exists either for or against the possibility of communicating with the dead. I told them I needed to talk to you. And I told them I didn’t intend to give up until I was convinced it was impossible. Nobody encouraged me; on the other hand, nobody stopped me. I framed it as a scientific hypothesis, you perceive.” She took a long deep breath and let it go, shuddering. Remembering. “Meanwhile, while you have been lollygagging around heaven, or wherever you are, the whole world has gone mad, and for all I know, all its colonies as well! Shame on you, Natha!”

  Nazareth considered that for a while in a silence of a sort that Delina had seen many hundreds of times before and had often seen followed by spectacular fireworks. She faced her greatgrandmother with her head flung back, as defiant as she could manage to be under the circumstances. Remembering what the Indian medsammys had told her about the necessity for utter faith, utter confidence, utter trust. “We have no reason,” they’d told her, “to believe that those who live in the spirit world look at things the way we do. Why should they? But we know one thing: hypocrisy and false manners are no use with them at all.” She stood quiet and alert, waiting, listening to the wind telling her she was doing fine, until Nazareth spoke again.

  “And so, Delina Meloren, for sweet sanity’s sake you decided on a vision quest in the ancient Indian fashion? This follows?”

  Delina could have explained that it was the dreams that had made her decide to do it. Dreaming night after night of blue corn and red corn, black corn and purple corn, fields of short stubby corn growing implausibly in hills of plain dry sand, and never the tall lush green and yellow Anglo corn of Kansas planted in dark rich ground in long logical rows, her mind had finally gotten through to her. Had gotten past all her … terrible irresistible pun … all her reservations. But she was not going to explain. Her greatgrandmother was dead; she had the advantage. Presumably she knew all the answers before she asked the questions.

  Delina stood there as silent as granite, glaring at Nazareth. Noticing that the Indian medsammy was right … Nazare
th looked nothing like an apparition. She looked perfectly ordinary, and a bit tired. She trailed no clouds of glory. She wore a nondescript and ordinary-looking gray dress—not the garment she’d been cremated in, Delina was certain of that—and an equally ordinary shawl was around her shoulders. You couldn’t even see through her.

  “Greatgrandmother,” Delina said, aware that she was wringing her hands and not able to stop, wishing desperately that at least one of the other women of her household stood beside her, “I am so angry with you!”

  “Yes, dearlove. I notice that you are.”

  There was a gust of wind, and leaves tore away from the sumac and whirled up into the cedar trees like a necklace of brilliant fetish birds; the cedar moaned as the wind went surfing through its broad green arms. It was getting colder, and darker.

  “All my life,” Delina said bitterly, “I heard just one line … ‘Nazareth will not leave us till we can spare her.’ And then, on the very day when we need you more than any other day, on the very day when the whole world turns upside down, you die on us!”

  “Well, Delina, I am sorry,” Nazareth told her, “and I am sorry you’ve had so hard a time. Still … I never said that line, you know. Not once. Other people said it. And the way I died … that wasn’t deliberate.”

  Delina’s laugh rang out harsh and sudden, startling the grasshoppers into leaping, all at the same time, all around her.

  “I don’t believe you for one minute, Greatgrandmother!” she cried. “Don’t try that with me! You were out there in the roses. You looked up and saw the AIRYs waltzing across the lawn and whoopsing away with no explanation. And you said to yourself. ‘Well, I certainly don’t want to have to deal with this mess!’ And you dropped dead on the spot with a sheaf of roses tastefully draped over your thighs! That is what really happened!”

  There was another long silence, punctuated only by the chill wind in the cedars and the occasional thunk of a landing or a taking off.

  “Delina.”

  “Yes, Greatgrandmother Nazareth.”

  “The dead do not argue. Tell me why you’ve … what is this you’ve done? Summoned me, I suppose. Tell me why you’ve summoned me.”

  “Don’t you already know? Isn’t that part of it?”

  “Part of what, child?”

  “Part of being dead?”

  “If it were, would I tell you?”

  Delina thought about that, and shook her head. “I guess not,” she said. And then, from out of a lifetime of love: “Natha? Are you all right?”

  “Yes, Delina, sweet child; I’m entirely all right. Now … tell me, please, with no more carryings-on.”

  “All right,” Delina answered. “I’ll ignore the facts of all this. I’ll behave as if I were at … oh, at the State Department. I have three questions for you.”

  “Ask them.”

  “One: I want to know why all the Aliens left. Two: I want to know if they are coming back—or if they are going to do something else to us, something dreadful. And three—more than anything else—I want to know what to do. At least where to begin. How to start.” She moaned, then, and put both her hands over her face, and stumbled three steps backward, trying not to fall down, thinking: Oh, damn, now I’ve done it! And that was four questions, not three! If it hadn’t been so long since she’d taken any liquid into her body she would have been weeping, but there was nothing left to serve her for tears. “Don’t you dare disappear on me again!” she said desperately. “I am doing the very best I can!”

  It didn’t happen; when she looked toward the cedars again, Nazareth was still there. She looked as if her patience were wearing thin, but she was still there.

  “Oh, Natha,” Delina said mournfully when she had caught her breath, gripping the earth beneath her with her bare feet, curling her toes into the dirt to keep her where she was, “we are so bewildered! The men are no help; they have all the authority to do things, but they just mill around bleating and blustering, and when we make suggestions they wave their arms at us like we were cattle they were trying to shoo into a field … I think they’re in shock, Natha. As many weeks as have gone by since it happened, I think they’re still in shock.”

  “That’s possible,” Nazareth answered, nodding. “It’s a hard and shocking time for humankind, Delina; there’s been no preparation for this. No warning. Plenty of ancient stories about the arrivals of alien beings, but none where they settle in for generations and then leave without a word. Shock is appropriate. Not useful for getting on with it, I realize—but appropriate. Understandable.”

  Delina let her hands fall to her sides, and she settled herself to speak with more composure. She wondered if she dared go closer to Nazareth; she longed to. But she was afraid; better to stay where she was. “You know, Natha,” she said, “better than I do, that the men always believed the time would come when the Aliens would tell them all the secrets. Would explain all the science, all the technology, they’d kept from us. When they would stop treating us like cute little children playing grownup. I think all the men, not just the men of the Lines, were convinced of that. And now here we are, knowing no more than we ever knew, and they’re gone!”

  “What are they doing … the men, I mean?”

  “They go off in corners in little bunches, and talk to each other … they get drunk, and talk to each other. They have meetings, and talk to each other. They’re stuck, somehow! And supposing we women could do any better, there are no mechanisms in place to let us try. It’s the same way in every one of the houses of the Lines … chaos … and I suspect it’s even worse everywhere else. Somebody has to do something, Natha, we have to find a way to go on. We linguists are the only ones who know everybody in power … I think it has to be us, I really do. Please, Greatgrandmother, can’t you—isn’t there some way you can come back again?”

  Nazareth clucked her tongue. “Don’t be absurd,” she said crossly, ducking to avoid another flight of sumac leaves. “Of course not!”

  “Suppose we made you a shrine, Greatgrandmother. I am quite serious. Suppose we made you a shrine, and we really did come each day and tend the shrine and make our respectful greetings to you?”

  Everything fell silent around them while Nazareth thought that over; it was, after all, a fair question. But in the end she shook her head, and Delina nodded.

  “All right, I’ll accept that,” she said. “It makes sense. But then please answer my questions. Why, after interacting with Earth and its colonies for more than two hundred years, did every single Alien leave us? At the same exact minute, and, for all we know, forever? Throwing all the worlds into turmoil? Why? What does it mean? They knew, Natha—they knew what the consequences would be, for us, and they had no more evil among them than humans have. Why did they do it? What is going to happen? And what are we to do?”

  And Nazareth told her; it didn’t take long.

  There was thunder off in the distance; once, twice, and then in a long rumbling roll that went on and on. The leaves went dull as the sunlight was cut off by the clouds. And the rain began falling again as Delina listened, nodding now and then, holding her lower lip tightly in her teeth, trying to make sure every word was etched in her memory. She was not so naive as to count on doing this twice in a single lifetime; she knew Nazareth. Suppose the summoned dead ordinarily popped in and out like robobuses; nevertheless, Delina could well imagine her greatgrandmother refusing ever to participate in this most ultimately bicultural process again. And the medsammys had told her she must leave her wrist computer hanging in the bundle in the sycamore, along with all the rest of the mechanical trappings she’d had with her. She just had to remember. She focused her windswept mind to that, and hung on for dear life.

  Will Bluecrane would never have asked another Indian for a report on a vision quest. Never. Even the thought of doing such a thing was improper. But with Anglos you did have to ask, because otherwise you couldn’t be sure what sort of messes they’d gotten themselves into, or what needed to be done to set ma
tters right. Reluctantly, therefore, because Delina had shown herself worthy of a different sort of treatment … but still, he couldn’t risk letting her suffer harm … he asked her.

  “My greatgrandmother came,” she said.

  “And that was what you were hoping for, I believe.”

  “Yes, Grandfather.”

  He waited, and she looked at him gravely for a minute before the grin he found so delightful happened. She was no prettier than she’d been when she first showed up to torment him, but right now she had the uncanny translucent elegance that goes with a sacred procedure done properly and all the trimmings laid on. She had not only survived, he told himself with satisfaction, she had improved. And that was how it was supposed to work.

  “Chief Bluecrane,” she said, “your medsammys supervised me sixty-seven ways from breakfast and back again. I promise you … there’s nothing you need to clean up, nothing that has to be repaired. It’s all taken care of. You don’t have to ask me any more questions.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “Certain sure. Of course I’m sure, or I’d ask for help. I came here asking, remember? I didn’t decide I’d just make it all up as I went along. You can check with your people, Mr. Bluecrane; they’ll tell you that I’m all right and nothing has to be done. No repairs required; no loose ends. They were very careful, and I was very careful. And Greatgrandmother was very careful, you may be sure. And I found out what I needed to know.”

  The old man sighed, long and slow, and crossed his open palms on his broad chest, beaming at her with very genuine pleasure.

  “I’m glad,” he said. “I’m very glad. And I am proud of you, Delina Chornyak.”