Earthsong

by Suzette Haden Elgin

  Delina looked at the floor; like any linguist woman, and like any woman disapproved of long term, she had had too little experience of praise to know what to do with it.

  “What will you do now?” he asked her.

  “Go home.” She looked up at him, frowning. “I’ll let you know how it turns out.”

  His eyebrows went up. “Explain, please,” he said.

  “It’s important for the men at Chornyak Household to believe that I’ve had an awful time and been properly punished for my impudence. I have to go home in disgrace, you perceive … humiliated … barely able to face them … cured at last of my absurd ideas and ashamed I ever had them. That’s what I promised I would say, whatever happened, and it’s what the women who’ve been covering for me are entitled to. I have to convince the men that I’ve learned my lesson and am deeply sorry for my behavior.”

  “That’s called lying,” said Will.

  “Yes. It certainly is. And I don’t do it well. But most of it will be done for me. Some of my aunts and greataunts, chattering about my deep regret where the men can hear them, will do it.”

  “I’d have thought the men would know … they say you cannot lie to a linguist.”

  “That’s so,” said Delina. “Unless”—and she looked at the floor again—“you are also a linguist.”

  Will nodded; perhaps it was true.

  “You will tell the women the truth, though?”

  “Oh, yes!” she said. “Not the little girls, because that’s not fair—you can’t give them responsibility like that, not against the inquisitive efforts of skilled adult males. But I’ll tell the women.”

  Will wondered what the women of his own house did behind his back, hoping the gulf was not quite so wide as the one at Chornyak Household. Presumably the fact that the males and females of the linguist Lines lived in separate buildings made gulfs easier to carve out and maintain.

  “Do you think the women will believe you, Delina?” he asked.

  She shook her head, her eyes not seeing him. “Probably not. I’ll have to find a way to convince them; it won’t be easy.”

  “Good luck to you,” he began, thinking he’d throw in a few more wise sayings just to round things off for her, and then he stopped, realizing that she wasn’t hearing him, either; she was thinking of something else.

  “I have a message from Nazareth Chornyak Adiness for you,” she said, surprising him. “Brace yourself, Grandfather.”

  “I’m braced, Delina. Braced and curious. Tell me.”

  “Greatgrandmother said—and told me to tell you she had said—that the women of the Lines must begin taking husbands from among the PICOTA, if your men can be persuaded. Even if they will not come live in the Households and our women must go to them instead, it must be done. That alliance must begin, as quickly as possible, she says … because there is more trouble coming, and it will be needed.”

  Will Bluecrane nodded slowly, rubbing his chin with the back of his hand; it made sense. He could see it. It was going to be a matter for much argument, because the prejudice against linguists was far from gone … on the other hand, it was the marriage of the highest of technologies. And no doubt there was more trouble coming; in his experience, there always was. “Stars and bionic garters!” he said. “Shall we begin with me?”

  “You have a wife already, Chief Bluecrane.”

  “My misfortune, Delina.”

  “And hers,” she said, chuckling.

  “Go home, child,” he said, thinking what a shame it was that she wasn’t pretty. Life would have been so much easier for her if she’d been pretty. He wondered how her husband treated her, and how he had been persuaded—even in the bizarre context of Main Houses and Womanhouses and Barren Houses that passed for “home” with linguists—to let her hare off to the PICOTA domes on her errand with the dead.

  “Go home,” he said again, gruffly, “and eat, and drink, and rest. And then we’ll talk about this business of future alliances. And Delina …”

  “Yes?” She swayed where she stood, and he reached out and steadied her, carefully.

  “Will you be all right?” he asked. “Shall I send someone along to see you safely home?”

  “Nobody will mind if I’m a little wobbly,” she said, “and I don’t require any fussing over. I’ll be fine.”

  “I am told that you were obedient, and respectful, and brave,” he said, pleased to see her cheeks turn dull red. “That’s satisfying to me; if you had died, or been a smartass, I would never have lived it down.”

  “Thank you; I’ll remember that while I’m being humble at home.”

  “Just one more thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “I am also told by our … what is it you call them? Medsammys?”

  “Medsammys, yes. From ‘medical’ … and ‘samurai.’ Elite class with the power of life and death.”

  “Appropriate for ours, Delina?”

  She thought a minute, and then shook her head. “No; not appropriate at all. I’m sorry! It’s habit; a discourteous habit of reference that I promise to give up. What was it that your healers told you?”

  “That you could have accomplished exactly the same thing with a ten-day fast in your own tradition. Maybe some sacred music with it, for buffering.”

  “Really?” It was the first time Will had seen her falter.

  “They say so. They say that for such as you—a discourteous habit of reference I promise to give up in my turn—it’s the long fasting, not the rest of the gewgaws.”

  “I didn’t know that,” said Delina slowly. “If I’d known, I would not have troubled you.”

  But I dreamed of Indian corn, she thought. And Greatgrandmother Nazareth did not say we must begin marrying theologians and musicians. She chided me for “bothering” the Indian tribes, but she said we must marry men of the PICOTA. Perhaps, she thought, careful not to let it show on her face, perhaps you are wrong.

  “That’s all right,” he said. “But remember it, please. For next time.”

  FROM THE ARCHIVES OF: Chornyak Barren House

  ENTRY OF: Delina Meloren Chornyak

  You can’t just get up in the morning and say to yourself, “Well, time to start saving the solar system!” Never mind the logic or illogic of it, never mind “modesty”; they’re not relevant. Even if you knew beyond all question that you had the power to do it, you couldn’t tackle the task that way and still function. You wouldn’t be able to tolerate even five minutes of leisure, you perceive … you’d be saying to yourself, How can you sit there and read (or take a bath, or talk to a friend, or anything else not indisputably critical to survival) when you could be saving the worlds? It would be like knowing that you were on the right track to finding a cure for a cruel disease, only worse. You’d work night and day. You’d work while you ate. And still, still, you would feel intolerable guilt.

  That won’t do. The work will never get done, that way. You have to step outside what you’re doing and look at it from outside, even while you are most deeply occupied with it. You have to learn to perceive it as a scientific project, as a theoretical investigation, as research for the sake of research. You have to rope it off in your mind as if it had nothing to do with anything, with maybe—maybe—a slim potential for practical application, far down a long and unforeseeable road.

  I approached the problem Nazareth set for me, therefore, as I would have approached any problem in linguistic analysis. As if I had been searching for the answer to … oh, let’s say, the problem of English predicate order before nouns. Why do we say “little brick house” but not “brick little house?” Why “tall blond man” but not “blond tall man?” I set to work to find out how to save humankind from catastrophe in exactly the same way I would have searched for those word order rules:

  Record the data.

  Look for pattern(s).

  Extrapolate.

  Solve for the missing item(s).

  Plus the extra step every woman of the Lines learns early: Fi
nd the one critical end of the tangled string. The one you pull to make the entire knotted mess fall in orderly disorder at your feet.

  I’m well trained; I knew better than to hurry. Nazareth had never let up on reminding us that you have to plan far ahead: not in terms of years or tens of years, but in terms of centuries. Strange as it seems, when the human lifespan is rarely more than one hundred and fifty years, it has to be like that. We know from bitter experience that planning based on shorter chunks of time leads only to dead ends and a step back for each step forward, with success becoming a matter of blind chance. I knew all of that. On the other hand, I knew I had no time to waste.

  We linguists were going to be all right for a long time. The excellent fees we’d always earned and our skill in investing them, together with our frugal lifestyle, meant that there was money enough to maintain all thirteen Households of the Lines for generations. I could see that we might have to cut back on our charities; I could see that we were probably going to be hated again, more than ever; but we wouldn’t have to go without anything we ourselves needed. And our underground and earth-sheltered buildings would continue to protect us against riot and disaster.

  But the ferociously busy trade between Earth and her colonies and the Alien worlds hadn’t employed only linguists. From the top government officials who hired us, all the way to the people on hourly wages who built the interpreting booths where we spent most of our time, that trade had represented a good three-fourths of the solar system’s economy. You couldn’t rip it out of the fabric of daily life and expect the remaining rags and tatters to sustain all the billions who had depended on it. Most of the people who’d been thrown out of work when the Aliens abandoned us would have had meager savings, if any. The social welfare systems would take care of them after an equally meager fashion when their funds were gone … for a while. For a little while.

  The Aliens hadn’t taken away any of the gleaming gadgets they had given us to make our lives easier, but we knew the gadgets would break down (everything does, eventually) and they would wear out, and we didn’t know either how to repair them or how to make new ones. The borrowed Alien science had been left behind, too, but we had always used it by pushing buttons that read PUSH and pulling levers that read PULL. Not by knowing what we were doing! I was at the breakfast table the Sunday morning when Jorn Benjamin Chornyak told the sorry tale of our attempts to find out what we had been doing—when our scientists broke open the units that the buttons and levers were mounted on.

  “There was nothing inside!” Jorn said, leaning over the table, his voice thick and harsh. I had often heard Jorn distressed or angry; you can’t be Head of all the Lines and live placidly. But I had never heard him sound like he sounded that morning. Total silence fell in the diningroom then, you can be sure. Even at the tables near the outside walls, where you sit if your goal is to eat fast and escape, people put down their knives and sporks and they listened.

  “There wasn’t anything there,” he went on, in that curious voice that said, I can’t take much more of this, I’ve already borne more of it than I can bear. “Nothing at all. And you know what that has to mean. Either the Aliens did everything themselves, and the buttons and levers and studs on the units are like those on children’s toys—connected to nothing at all, put there so that we human beings could play ‘just pretend’—or the connections are in a form we know nothing about and don’t even know how to start looking for.”

  People said the kind of things you say in such situations: curses; lamentations. From beside him, Jorn’s youngest son asked, “What’s going to happen with all that stuff?”

  “Well,” Jorn answered, giving his scrambled eggs one vicious stab after another, “what do you suppose is going to happen? When the gadgets stop working, they’ll be useless, of course!” And he added, “They’ve sent crash teams into the planet archives … we’ll have to find out how we used to do things. We had ways of getting by, before they gave us all the pretty toys; we have to find out what they were, and learn how to make use of them again.”

  “And the colonies?” somebody asked from a far corner, hesitantly. “Will we be able to stay in contact with them?”

  Jorn shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “Nobody does. Maybe the metacomsets will go on working for the next hundred years while we figure out how they’re made and how to maintain them. We were told, when they were installed, that they were a permanent modification to our information networks; maybe it’s true. And maybe it was a lie, like telling little kids ‘sure, there’s a Santa Claus’; maybe they’ll all quit tomorrow morning and we’ll be cut off except for the kind of primitive communication across space we had in the twentieth century. I do not have the least idea. Nor, so far as I know, does anybody else.”

  I was frightened; we were all frightened. All day and all night we heard the flyers coming and going, seemingly without ever a break; all day and all night, every computer channel was up and running and sending FULL messages when you tried to access it. People were moving back and forth; information was moving back and forth; international organizations and interplanetary ones were busy. A great deal was going on. But we know it would be childish to assume that those who were running all the frantic hum of activity knew what they were doing. At least I had that small advantage—I did know what I was doing. I had my information from a source that was beyond challenge.

  “The Aliens left us,” Nazareth had said to me, standing there by the cedars looking just as alive as I did, “for just one reason: because their governments have put the Earth and all its colonies under quarantine for their intransigent violence.”

  I tried to interrupt, but she made the PanSig BE-STILL-TILL-I-AM-THROUGH gesture, using both arms to make it as emphatic as possible, almost losing her shawl in the process, and she never paused until she was through. Earth and Mars and Venus, Gehenna and Strawberry Fields and Luna, Jupiter and Xa and Horsewhispering—every single planet and every last asteroid!—we had all been classified by the consortium of Alien governments as plague worlds. They perceived us as pocked and raddled and warped, filthied by a disease that made us do one another deliberate harm, often taking pleasure in the doing. None of us were going out; none of them were coming in. Quarantined! Like the lepers of the most ancient histories. And quarantined we would stay, she told me solemnly, until we cured ourselves.

  “How?” I got in that one word. “How?” Where is the end of the string?

  And my greatgrandmother said: “Find a way to put an end to hunger, Delina Meloren.”

  Just like that! No details; no instructions. Just: Find a way to put an end to hunger.

  They asked me later whether she was unable to tell me more or just unwilling, and I said angrily, “How in Gehenna’s name would I know that? I’m a linguist, not an anthropologist of the culture of the Dead!”

  Because they were also linguists, even in that time of terrible worry they were intrigued by the lexical possibilities, and they stopped to play with the pieces a little … “Thananthropologist?” “Thanthropologist?” But I didn’t join in that discussion. I had an opinion, and I intended to express it. “It is my personal opinion that she was unwilling to say anything more,” I told them. “You know how she is. Was. Is? ‘Nobody understands or values that which just falls into their laps,’ she was forever saying. Right? And consider this: if there is a rule—a law of the Afterlife—against such telling, how could she get away with explaining to me why the Aliens have abandoned us? If she was allowed to tell me about the quarantine, why not the rest of it? I think she could have told me what to do, step by step, down to the last detail! I really do. I think she just wouldn’t.”

  “Delina,” they objected, “you can’t know that! Surely, if she could have helped us—”

  “Perhaps,” I said flatly, cutting off the romances. “When I am dead, I will know.” And I set the question aside; it had no relevance.

  I couldn’t see the crucial connection between ending hunger and ending violen
ce, myself. It wouldn’t have been my guess. There were so many far more obvious string-ends. Changing the school curriculum, for example. Creating a soap-op to play daily on the comsets, with nonviolence as its theme. Vaporizing Gehenna and all its sadistic and masochistic citizens; hunting down everyone Gehenna-like on other worlds and treating them the same way. Things like those would have come to my mind, and perhaps I would have been desperate enough to accept even that last one. But ending hunger? I didn’t understand.

  I didn’t let it bother me. We’ve all seen a seemingly trivial verb ending or postposition turn out to be the one bit of information that brings a grammar of rigor and elegance out of hopeless confusion. I was willing to take the connection on faith; it came from a reputable source. And so I put the libraries onto my wrist computer—it was slow, but at least it didn’t keep telling me it was FULL—and I set to work.

  My libraries had abundant data on both hunger and experiments in stamping it out. The pattern displayed in that data was so prominent that I didn’t have to look for it; it leapt out at me on its own during the second routine sort, preflagged.

  First: There would be a “new food.” Fish flour. Pulverized gwabaroot. Liquefied algae. Whatever. Second: The new food would be provided at little or no cost to a hungry population. Third: The people would reject it despite their hunger, because in the context of their culture it was repulsive to them, or in some other way totally unacceptable; they would go hungry rather than eat it. A few exceptional individuals might make a sensible decision and survive, but most would choose to starve. Four: Everybody back to the drawing board!

  Over and over again, those same four futile steps.

  You might think—certainly I did—that people who are in the extremes of hunger will eat anything. They won’t. I learned that people have gone hungry trying to survive on soups made of grass and bark and weeds, all the while surrounded by a wealth of nourishing food readily available to them in the form of millions of fat grubs and worms. Other populations (including some for whom the grubs and worms were an everyday part of the diet) have died surrounded by animals that would have fed them well—because they were sacred animals and killing them was forbidden. I found account after account of prisoners condemning themselves to die of severe illness or frank starvation because the food their captors provided to them was contaminated by filth or vermin. None of this is logical, but it is all a matter of record.