Earthsong

by Suzette Haden Elgin

  “Suppose we handle it as we handled Láadan,” said Brandwynne, finally, tentatively. “Suppose Delina is right.”

  (“May the Holy One let her be right!” someone said.)

  “Suppose we teach audiosynthesis to the women and girls of the Lines, just as we taught them Láadan. And then we’ll find a mechanism for spreading it far and wide. Until it has gone so far and so wide that by the time the men find out about it, it will be too late to undo what we’ve done.”

  There were frowns on all their faces, and Delina said what they all were thinking. “But Brandwynne, the Láadan project failed. Why would we try that again, when it has already failed us once?”

  They had been so sure that women outside the Lines would welcome Láadan, would welcome a language constructed specifically to express the perceptions of women, once they knew it existed and had ways to learn it. They had been so certain that it would be the same blessing for other women that it had been for the linguist women. And they had been so wrong in those certainties.

  “It wasn’t a failure for us!” said Glenellen indignantly. “It has been a triumph, and a blessing!”

  “Yes,” said Delina, “and so might it be a triumph and a blessing if every woman of the Lines could do without her food ration and give it to others who need it—but it would be the same sort of failure Láadan was. Remember how ridiculous we felt? There we were, the foolish women of the Lines, with our language for all women, that we’d slaved over in every spare minute for a hundred years and more, offering it to women everywhere—at great danger to ourselves, I remind you … and they didn’t give a fig for it!”

  “They took it up for a while,” Sarajane chided her.

  “Uh uh,” Willow scoffed. “For a year or two. While it was the very latest thing. And then, with very few exceptions, they forgot all about it.”

  “I don’t understand why that happened,” said Delina softly. “I never have. Do any of us understand it?” But nobody answered her.

  “Perhaps it was not a failure,” Brandwynne said, if it will provide us with the model we need this time! Perceive—the two projects are very different. Láadan is a language. Constructed to express the perceptions of women and save them vast amounts of linguistic work they must otherwise do, yes, and valuable in our eyes. But it is clearly something most women are willing to do without. The problems they have with existing languages apparently don’t bother them as much as the prospect of having to learn a new language does. Humiliating for us, and a humbling experience, but there it is. But nourishment for their bodies, dearloves, and for the bodies of their children? It’s not the same thing! Hunger is a powerful motivator!”

  “Maybe,” said Delina slowly; beside her, Willow was smiling, and nodding yes. “At least it would save us from having to start all over—we know the Láadan model as well as we know our heartbeats. We could use the channels we’ve already established.”

  “Well, then,” said Brandwynne briskly, “that’s settled. And now we have work to do, work that won’t wait. How shall we divide it up?”

  “What distresses me,” Sarajane told Delina fretfully, “is that I go right on feeling hungry!”

  She sat cross-legged on the high narrow bed in the small sickroom, with her chin in her hands and her knobby spine bent in a comma; she wore nothing but the bedsheet she’d wrapped round her body underneath her arms. She looked like a plucked chicken with braids. But she didn’t look the least bit sick. Suppose some of her numerous progeny decided to visit? Delina wasn’t sure that even the blisters marring the delicate lacework of wrinkles on the old woman’s face—blisters put there deliberately, with the help of a handful of poison ivy—would convince her sons and grandsons and greatgrandsons that she needed to be kept in bed. “Dear Sarajane,” she asked, “couldn’t you try to look just a little sicker?”

  “Don’t change the subject, child!”

  “But—”

  Sarajane waved one impatient hand. “Put it out of your mind, Delina Meloren!” she said emphatically. “If any of my relatives, or anybody else’s relatives, stick their noses in here, they’ll find me gasping for breath and delirious, you have my word on it! But I don’t want to talk about that now. Trust me; I’ve been misleading men for more than eighty years!”

  “Oh, law … I’m sorry, Sarajane,” Delina said, feeling foolish. She was sorry. Talk of teaching your grandmother to suck eggs.

  “I should hope so!”

  “Yes, ma’am. And I am at your service.”

  “I want to know how it’s all going, that’s all,” Sarajane declared. “Nobody’s given me any kind of report for days. I want to know how we’re all getting along!”

  “We’re sailing through it,” Delina said. “Except for Brandwynne.”

  “Brandwynne?” Sarajane’s eyebrows went up. “But Brandwynne’s strong as oxen! What happened to her?”

  “You know Brandwynne.”

  “I do indeed; I’ve changed many of her diapers in my day. And what precisely has she done this time?”

  “How about if I just quote her?”

  “Good enough … what did she say?”

  “She said, and I quote: ‘Seventy-two hours have gone by and I’ve gained three ounces; I’m convinced. And now I have work to do.’ And out she came.”

  “You talked to her about variables?”

  “I did,” said Delina.

  “And?”

  “And she told me that given the number of design flaws in our experiment, one more would make no difference—and she talked about extrapolation. And, as I said, out she came. Prepared to claim, if anybody questioned her about it, that she’d been misdiagnosed.”

  “Drat the woman!”

  “Yes. But the others are holding on and doing just fine, and Brandwynne’s making herself useful.”

  “Doing what?”

  Delina laughed softly. “Petitioning the men to let us attend their meetings,” she said.

  “She doesn’t think they’re already befuddled enough?”

  “She started out with the idea that it would keep them from getting suspicious about what we’re up to here at Womanhouse … which is an irrelevant worry, I think, given the way they’re occupied, but Brandwynne is an i-dotter and t-crosser about that sort of thing … and then she decided that we ought to attend the meetings, and she buckled down to petition seriously. And she may be right.”

  “Hmmmph.”

  “Well, it’s possible. Things are happening so fast out in the worlds … everything’s sort of melting down, you know? Maybe we should go. As for the others, still hanging in there—they’re like you. They go on feeling hungry.”

  “It bothers me,” Sarajane said crossly, and she grabbed a pillow to clutch against her flat chest.

  “I’m sorry you’re uncomfortable,” Delina said. “I wish I knew a way to do something about it.”

  “No, no …” Sarajane made the hand-waving get-away-from-me gesture again. “That’s not what I mean, child. What I mean is: it’s going to make it hard for us to teach this process, if the hungry feeling just goes on and on.”

  “I warned you about it,” Delina reminded her.

  “So you did, but that doesn’t make it any easier. Did knowing about it make it any easier for you?”

  “No,” said Delina, and she sighed softly. “It didn’t help.”

  “I know, intellectually, that I can’t be hungry. I’m weighed every morning, and I’ve been gaining weight. Obviously I’m getting more than enough nourishment. But it’s like you told us it would be … my mouth is lonesome.” She chuckled, and hugged the pillow tighter. “Only you, Delina,” she said, “would have put it that way! But it’s accurate. My mouth is lonesome. My mouth, and my tongue, and my teeth. I lust after biting and chewing and swallowing, you perceive. I dream about the way good chocolate feels, melting on my tongue, and the taste of freshmade spicebread … and butter melting on hot bread! Oh, how I crave the taste of butter melting on hot bread! I’m downright depraved,
Delina! I admit it.”

  Delina smiled, thinking how ill the word fit her, and told her that such evil would no doubt be remarked on far and wide.

  “But think, child!” said Sarajane. “I’m old! I’m supposed to be pretty well impervious to lust! It must be a good deal worse for the young and truly passionate, don’t you suppose? Delina, if everyone who tries audiosynthesis is going to have this problem, we’ll have a lot of resistance to deal with.”

  Delina sat down beside her on the bed, wishing she dared rub the knobby back and sure she’d do it wrong if she tried. She would ask Willow to come do it instead. “Sarajane,” she said, “I don’t know if that mouth-hunger is ever going to go away for people who’ve always eaten traditional food. It’s habit, you perceive. It’s a lifetime of enjoying the way food feels in your mouth and throat, and the smell of food, and the way food looks, and the pleasure of eating with others. But I don’t think it has to be that hard. Tiny kids don’t have that lifetime of conditioning to overcome; infants suck their thumbs to soothe the mouth, but they don’t know anything about any food but milk.”

  “And people involved in famines? They’ll be all ages, you know; they won’t just be infants and tadlings.”

  “Yes. But they’ll be people who have no food, or almost none. They won’t have to make a deliberate effort not to help themselves to food, Sarajane, the way we’ve had to—because there won’t be any. They won’t have to struggle against temptation. And where, before, they suffered from hunger, they won’t suffer anymore.”

  “You hope.”

  “I hope, yes,” Delina agreed. “And so far, so good, Sarajane! Willow is doing just as well on Mozart and Calendia as I did on Gregorian chant. Jenny is enjoying herself and staying bonniful on Ozark ballads and baroque bluegrass. Glenellen is having to work hard to pay sufficient attention to the popdrivel she’s testing, and she’s lost a few ounces as a result, but the evidence seems clear enough: any music will do, if it’s music the listener is willing and able to attend to.”

  “Even wicked music? Even the latest sadistic popballads from Gehenna?”

  Delina shivered. “I don’t know … I suppose so. I’d like to believe that such stuff would be like spoiled food and make the people listening to it sick, but I’d wager that’s just sentimental pap. We couldn’t be that lucky, could we? I don’t plan to test for it, however. I’m just happy that any and all music seems to serve.”

  She grinned at Sarajane. “Beauty,” she said, “is apparently in the ear of the beholder. Behearer?”

  “Beholder, Delina. Beauty held with the eye; beauty held with the ear; beauty held with the hand. It’s all beheld. And it’s wonderful that it works out this way—that it’s not just some very narrow range of music that will do!”

  “Yes, it is,” Delina said. “It’s what you would expect—the most economical solution, you perceive—but it could have gone the other way, and it would have made things so much harder.” And she added, “It would take training … lots of it … to get by as many religious do, on a drone note or two. None of us needs to try that. But the principle would be exactly the same as for any other musical sound.”

  Sarajane sat up straight, wiggling her shoulders to ease them, and beamed at Delina, who was grateful that there were no observation windows for this sickroom; she had rarely seen anyone look so superbly healthy as Sarajane did now. All the signs of strain she’d been showing were gone. “To think that I have lived to see this day!” the old woman said gleefully. “To think that a Chornyak woman should have done this!”

  Delina immediately looked hard at the floor, and Sarajane could not keep from laughing.

  “You did do this, you know, Delina Meloren!” she said. “You can try to slough it off on Nazareth, but it was you who got this project off the ground, not your greatgrandmother. We’ve not seen hide nor hair nor ghostly trace of her!”

  “You don’t believe I talked to her, do you, Sarajane?”

  “Not for one minute! I don’t pretend to know what happens to the dead, my dear, but I don’t believe they’re available to the living. But—” She stopped, and reached over to pat Delina’s hand. “But, I agree with Willow. It makes no difference. If it makes you happy to think you and Nazareth had a chat, don’t let me lessen that happiness. The information is all that matters, and it appears to be valid, praise be!”

  Delina said nothing; you do not argue with old people. And she blamed Nazareth, who had let her down abominably. Not one thump on a window. Not one noise in the night. As Sarajane said, not one ghostly trace.

  “Delina?”

  “Yes, Sarajane?”

  “Will you get me a different chiplet, please? I am so tired of the one that’s been playing all these days, I cannot tell you how tired!”

  Delina hesitated, and Sarajane’s face changed; she narrowed her eyes and stuck out her chin. She had the chin the St. Syrus Line was famous for—sharp and sturdy under a generous mouth and a nose that came to a point.

  “If Brandwynne can say that seventy-two hours convinces her, and she quits,” she announced emphatically, “I can say that seventy-two hours of one music chiplet convinces me. Even though I won’t quit.”

  “Sarajane,” Delina began, “I would have liked to know—”

  “You would have liked to know whether the same music, over and over for thirty days, would serve. Of course you would! But you said yourself: any music serves if the listener is willing and able to attend to it. Delina, I am not willing, or able, to listen to that same stuff any longer!”

  Delina drew a breath, intending to plead, but Sarajane put her hand firmly over the younger woman’s mouth.

  “Hush!” she said. “We have told you over and over again—you cannot expect other people … normal people … to behave as you do. I’m quite sure that in my place you would actually have listened to those same three hours of music for thirty days, just to settle the question. I freely admit that you would have. I won’t. And I want to point out to you, Delina Meloren Stubborn-As-Any-Mule Chornyak, that we have at least fifty years, and more likely two hundred and fifty, in which to settle all these fine points. Now get me a different chiplet—the same kind of music will be fine, but a different set of pieces—without any more fuss. Please. I’m miserable enough, me and my lusting mouth, without having to be bored on top of it!”

  It was frustrating to have to admit it, but Delina knew Sarajane was right. If they could have just handed the audiosynthesis information over to the government to be taught solar-system-wide on the comsets, it would have been one thing. A swift thing, perhaps. To do it secretly, on the other hand, was going to take a lot of years; they did indeed have plenty of time to work out the details. She said it aloud then: “It will take a lot of time, doing it this way.”

  “Yes, it will.”

  “During which many people are going to die of hunger.”

  “Yes. That’s true. And you are not to torment yourself about it.”

  “Suppose the next thing we do is send the information to all the women of the Lines, using the recipe codes,” Delina said slowly, half to herself. “They’ll know how to go on with it immediately, and they’ll understand why it’s urgent. We can get every linguist woman trained in audiosynthesis inside a year. And we can find a way to get the food that we free up that way distributed secretly, to people who need it, and the money we save invested for the project. I’m sure we can.”

  She stood up abruptly, managing to trip over the leg of Sarajane’s bed in the process. Her voice was stern as she grabbed at the wall to get her balance. “I don’t accept that,” she said flatly.

  “Don’t accept what? That you’re not to torment yourself?”

  “No—what I don’t accept is the idea that we have to sit by and watch people starve when we know how to prevent it.”

  “Delina!” Sarajane’s voice was sharp now, and her face was troubled; she knew what a nuisance it could be to have Delina dead set against something. “I tell you now, and I w
ant you to listen to me: secrecy is the only possible way this can be done!”

  “I know that,” Delina said. She stood against the wall, leaning her head back against it. “I should have realized it all along; I don’t know where my mind was. I suppose I just wasn’t willing to face it … I wanted this to be a fairy tale. But perceive, Sarajane … the person who’s being nourished by the sound doesn’t have to know that it’s happening … she just has to be made to listen, and the nourishing takes place. It can be a secret, and stay a secret, and we can nevertheless keep people fed.”

  “How? Tell me how we can do that!”

  “Give me a little time, dearlove. There’s an idea nibbling at me; I can’t quite perceive it clearly yet, but it’s there. Let me work on it.”

  “Muzak didn’t do it,” Sarajane said, cautioning her. “Remember that, Delina! People didn’t gain weight because music was just played at them endlessly, if that’s what you’re thinking of.”

  Delina smiled at her, and offered no argument; she could feel her mind trying to get through to her once again. Whatever it was, in a little while she’d have it. “I’ll go get you a different music chiplet, now, Sarajane,” she said.

  “Thank the saints,” said the old woman. “I’m grateful; it will be a tremendous relief. But there’s just one more thing.”

  “Anything,” Delina told her. “Anything that’s possible—you’ve got it.”

  “Like an answer to a hard question?”

  “For sure. If I know it. Try me.”

  Sarajane cleared her throat and hesitated, hugging the pillow hard, and Delina saw the worry on her face. She had been nearly carefree, but that was gone now.

  “What is it, Sarajane?” she asked, thinking how very much she loved her. “What’s bothering you?”

  “There’s something I want to know,” said Sarajane slowly. She let the pillow go and put both hands to her face. “Delina, I want to know—what will people be like, after this? People who’ve only known their mother’s milk, and then audiosynthesis? People who’ve never known mouthfood … what will they be like?”