Earthsong

by Suzette Haden Elgin

  Dellwilder looked utterly stunned; he sagged, and then he shook himself, a wet dog of a man, and went around the desk to sit down in his chair.

  “You are prepared to tell me,” he said to Jay, “to swear to me, that this audiosynthesis business is a valid concept. That our top people agree that it is.”

  “Yes, I am. Mad as it seems, I am.” And he added, “The women say, and our people agree, that it isn’t even anything new. It’s been lying around since the first writing system, but the only people who ever used it were religious fanatics. Nobody ever paid any attention.”

  “It’s like photosynthesis, for plants. It’s free.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Zlerigau …”

  “Yes, sir.” He knew what was coming next.

  “It’s got to be stopped!” the President shouted at him. “It can’t have gotten very far. Not really very far. God knows everybody I know still eats food, three times a day! We’ve got to stamp this out. Advertising campaigns solar system wide, on all the comsets, to make people crazy about food … the look of it, the smell and the taste of it. Scientific reports about what audiosynthesis really does to the human body!” He was sitting up straight now, beginning to look once again like the symbol that he embodied. Taking charge. The leader of the free universe, in action again. “I want spectacular fakes, Jay! Studies proving that audiosynthesis dissolves bone. Fries blood. Turns you into a fungus. I don’t care how ridiculous the conclusions are, just as long as they’re scary enough. And I want—”

  He stopped, suddenly, with an exclamation of pain, and covered his face with his hands.

  “Gets to you, doesn’t it?” Jay said, no longer caring whether he sounded sufficiently respectful. The stimulants were wearing off, and he could feel himself sliding. Sliding down into the darkness of truly not giving a damn. About anything.

  “You know, Dellwilder,” he went on, dreamily, “I would have sworn that I was not somebody who wanted to see babies starving and women weeping over their skeletal little bodies. I thought I was a decent man. Suppose you’d said to me, ‘Hey, we just found out that we can end hunger forever, for all human beings, everywhere in the inhabited universe!’ I would have sworn I was a man you could have counted on to rejoice about that. And it turns out that that’s not true. It turns out that if fixing it so babies don’t starve means my life has to be changed into something I don’t recognize, I’m willing to let them starve. I’m eager.”

  The look on the President’s face told him that the President felt the same way about it. That it was no longer possible for the President to know, either, what was good and what was evil, because it all ran together for him now the way it did for Jay.

  “It has to be stopped,” the President said again. “Now. Right now. It cannot, must not, be allowed to go on for even one more day. No matter what has to be done. No matter who has to be removed. It has to be stopped!” Dellwilder was shaking all over; if Jay hadn’t been in even worse shape, he would have hit the alarm that brought the White House doctor in here at a run.

  “They’re working on it, Mr. President,” he said softly, just before the drugs ran out at last and he slipped into unconsciousness. “Round the clock. They’re working on it.”

  We were greatly worried at that time about the men—about how to give them a sense of Being that wasn’t tied to how strong (or how rich, or how cruel) they were. We talked endlessly of finding them a new metaphor—not Warrior, not King, not Giant, not Wild Man, not Iron Man, not Owner of Most Toys—and of finding a way to insert that metaphor into the culture for them. We did this; and we listened courteously to the arguments of those among us who said we were wasting our time, that the only appropriate thing to do with regard to men was to step back and let them destroy themselves.

  This was before the Icehouse Effect gripped Earth in its teeth and shook us like a big dog shakes a kitten. This was before we saw how human men … most human men … were so helpless before the cold that the only metaphor we could find for them was Lost Child. When that happened, we set all such matters aside and concerned ourselves only with seeing to it that as many human males as possible survived. In that terrible time we no longer listened to the Abandoners. We said to them only, “Don’t start.” And they held their peace, because anything else would have been indecent.

  (Archive entry; Belle-Charlotte Adiness St. Syrus)

  FROM THE ARCHIVES OF:

  Chornyak Barren House

  ENTRY OF:

  Ruth Aquina Chornyak Adiness

  We knew many years before the murder of Marthajean Brown that the Audiosynthesis Project had spread far enough to guarantee that it could not be stopped. Even if the governments banned all musical performances and made it a federal offense to own any device that provides music. Even if they found a way to monitor “consumption” of music and levy taxes on every citizen, based on personal totals. Even if they jailed parents who refused to feed mouthfood to their children. Even if they set up programs to constantly torment those learning audiosynthesis with multisensory holograms of mouthfood. Even if they managed to create epidemics of deafness by deviant medicine and outlawed the surgery that allows the deaf to hear when hearing is their preference. Even if they did worse things.

  The Holy One knows, governments are skilled at finding things so profoundly evil that they startle the rational mind; nevertheless, we were sure they could not win this round. We were certain that even though they might be able to stamp out audiosynthesis in limited areas, for limited periods of time, they could not do so on any general basis. It isn’t possible to observe every person, at every moment. Sounds are easy to hide, and they don’t have to be loud to be nourishing. Nor is it possible to stop evolution by force. We had learned by then that no one who had had the opportunity to live by sound alone for a year or two would ever willingly go back to mouthfood again. Not once the habit was broken.

  Not even those who, like most people who grew up eating food, still felt the lust of the mouth. In spite of that lust, they came to have so strong a distaste for mouthfood that they almost could not bring themselves to eat it; so much of it was, they realized, dead flesh. The dead flesh of animals. Usually, something that had been alive had to be dead, to provide them with mouthfood, and they knew it. Except for foods that did not require killing … fruit, for example, that could be picked and still leave the plant thriving … the feeling was much like the distaste people have always felt for eating human flesh. (Think only of how much intense training it takes for our MGTs to be able to manage, since they must take sometimes music, sometimes mouthfood, as the situation requires! It’s not easy.)

  At that point, after we were quite certain that it was safe to stop hiding the Project, we added an arbitrary fifty years to the secrecy—just in case. Just to hedge all bets. Experience has taught us to allow that kind of margin. Because even when you think you have set down every conceivable circumstance that might occur to hamper you in what you’re doing, even when you’re certain you’ve analyzed every item and found ways to deal with it, outsiders will surprise you by adding a dozen items to your list that you failed to think of. It comes of living in among the trees where you cannot see the forest.

  During those extra fifty years, we tackled the question that we had always dreaded (and that was the logical extrapolation of Delina Chornyak Bluecrane’s original question, “Who do we tell?”):

  How do we turn this loose?

  How were we to make it public? What was the best way to tell the populations of every human world that no one ever needs to go hungry again? That it was no longer necessary to earn money in order to eat? How were we to make audiosynthesis training universal? How could we get people—people who had abundant food supplies available to tempt them—past the difficult early stages? How were we to soften the shock and betrayal that our past and present students would feel when they understood why they so rarely felt any need to do more than toy politely with their food? We had lied to them, day after day, for a
s long as they had known us; they would be justified in feeling outraged, and they might never be able to forgive us.

  And then there was the hardest question of all: what would happen once the information was out? What would happen when the rich and the powerful realized that much of their advantage over the rest of humanity had been to a substantial degree canceled? There was no way, no way at all, to answer that one. No matter how many times we ran our computer models, hoping for resolution, they only confirmed our human fears, agreeing with us that almost anything was possible.

  We knew there was the very real possibility that the women of the Lines would be slaughtered in the first waves of rage, those waves that would be the birth pangs of the first race of human beings to take its sustenance from sound rather than from flesh. Birth pangs are good in the long run; women who are weary to death of hauling babies about in the womb long for them. But they are brutal and messy and painful and, once begun, unstoppable. We were too many to hide, and no match for the forces that could be brought against us. There was no way to make sure it wouldn’t happen, as there is no way to be sure you won’t die at the tip of a lightning bolt. We had accepted that; but we thought we ought to be able to find ways to make it very unlikely. The strategy we chose was the one that has so often been our mainstay:

  Don’t tell them; let them “discover” it for themselves. So they feel that it is their knowledge, gained by their efforts, and won by their skill at overcoming your puny attempts to prevent them.

  We were satisfied with that plan; we decided upon it by consensus and we were agreed that it was best. We didn’t stop there. We constructed more than thirty substrategies for implementing it, to be distributed among the women of the Lines. In the linguist Households; in the churches and chapels of Our Lady of the StarTangle; and among the linguist women of the Meandering Water tribe, most of whom were living with PICOTA husbands and families. We worked it all out in detail.

  And that was where we got stuck.

  I have no idea how long we might have stayed like that, smack against the cliff face and unwilling to budge. We were so afraid! So full of what-ifs. What if we had miscalculated and should have added ten more years of secrecy, or twenty, or a hundred and twenty?

  What if we didn’t do the “allow discovery” process with sufficient skill, and people learned that that was what we were up to, before enough time had gone by so that they could forgive us for it?

  What if?

  We were just plain scared. We had always been scared, because it had always been possible that we’d be caught. But that was a chronic sort of fear. Background noise. This fear was not chronic but acute. This was not “I might die one of these days if things go wrong” but “I might very well die tomorrow before nine-thirty.” This was different.

  We are ordinary human women, with the same fondness for our own skins that other human beings have. We dithered and dawdled and procrastinated and waited “just one more week” over and over and over again. I admit, and we would all admit, that we were scared useless. Perhaps we would never have told, if left to our own devices? It’s a terrible thought, and I won’t try to imagine the results of such a course of action—or inaction—but I won’t try to deny that it might have been our choice.

  However, as often happens, we were saved by a fanatic. Cleo St. Andrews saw the news story about the murder of the President’s secretary. She recognized it as the perfect opportunity to raise the suspicion of a conspiracy of women and bring an investigation down upon us. And she marched straight into the Washington, DC, police station and—as flamboyantly as possible—confessed to the murder. Just like that! Without any consultation. Without any discussion. She knew … of course she knew … what would happen if she called a needlework circle meeting and proposed the idea: she’d be overruled. She didn’t chance it. Just thought, At last! The perfect opportunity! and off she went to seize it. Only fanatics behave like that. We must always be grateful that they exist, infuriating though they surely are, as catalysts to overcome our understandable human hesitations.

  Cleo’s failure to let any of us in on her plan did have one compelling advantage to set against its abruptness and lack of careful consideration. It made our confusion and our fear when the police came knocking at our door (with the men of the Lines right behind them demanding an explanation, of course!) convincing. It was absolutely genuine. Nobody had to put on an act. Nothing that had happened to us since the terrible day when the Aliens first abandoned humankind had come upon us with such suddenness and such crushing force. That may have saved us much suffering in the initial turmoil; for sure it saved us the agony of having to make a decision for or against her plan. We owe her more than we can say—for getting us past the hook we were dangling on; for leaving all of us innocent of responsibility; for taking all the potential guilt upon herself.

  To the women yet to be born …

  Ruth Aquina Chornyak Adiness

  The women of the Lines might have been willing to go in person to the UNE satellite; nobody asked them. It might have been possible to ensure their safety; the issue was not raised.

  The United Asian Alliance had been particularly strident on the subject. “These so-called women have destroyed our worlds!” the head of the delegation had hissed in his meticulous Panglish, with his hands curled like claws, palms up, before his face. “Human beings, gentlemen, could not do what they have done. We were right to call the linguists evil; we were right to treat them as pariahs. Our error was in backing down and accepting them into the human community as we did. You see how they have repaid us! They have made rubble of our lives! They have bitten out our living hearts and spat them onto the bare ground! I will not stay in a room where such devils are permitted to roam free!”

  “It was only the female linguists,” said the member from New Ireland. “It’s unfair to blame the Households of the Lines in their entirety for a wickedness that is confined to their women.”

  Ahmling Medde Sang made a rude noise, and the curled fingers tightened into fists. “You believe that?” he shouted. “You believe that women, all on their own, could have devised a plan like this and carried it out, over centuries? More fool you, if you believe that!” He shook both fists frantically; it was clear that his anger overwhelmed him.

  As it overwhelmed them all. If there had been a way to make ending hunger a criminal act under the law of any nation, the women of the Lines would have been locked away by now; if it had been up to Medde Sang, they would have all been hanged, every last one of them, and there were many who agreed with him. He went on, speaking more softly now, the anguish building in his voice, saying, “I tell you there was a man—some one man of a vileness impossible to imagine, driven only by an all-consuming lust for power—running that pack of females!”

  “He lived hundreds of years, Medde Sang?”

  “This is no matter for jokes—do not insult us with your attempts at humor!! There was a man, and he passed the task on to someone in the next generation, and so on down through all the years until this day; that is as obvious to you as it is to me. We may never know who he is … who he was … it fills me with awe that he has been able to remain hidden … but he has to exist. I agree that with the situation as it is, hunting him down would be a stupid waste of resources; I agree, let him go anonymous into history. It’s the only rational course to follow. However …” He held up one finger to mark the importance of his words, “However, the women of the Lines were his puppets, and they did their foul work at his bidding! If they come into this hall, gentlemen, I leave—and all my delegation with me!”

  The shouts of “And so do I!” “And that goes for us, too!” made the consensus amply clear. On the dais at the front of the crescent-shaped room the UNE’s chairman had raised both his hands in a gesture of surrender. “All right,” he said. “Very well. I understand. And I will advise the Lines that their delegation is ordered to appear … a small delegation, carefully chosen … tomorrow morning, by comset only.”


  He didn’t try to gavel them into silence, or to control the hubbub in any way. Like the rest of them, the outrage he felt burned in his heart and mind like a live coal. The dilemma was impossible either to bear or to escape. The end of hunger for all mankind has arrived; I should rejoice. Celebrations are in order. The end of my life has arrived; my heart is broken; I can only mourn.

  In a random silence, he heard the voice of a delegate from the United States fiercely declaring that this is what happens when you make it illegal for men to beat their wives, and he made a note. No adult male finds it necessary to use physical force to control women; it was time the man was replaced and sent for medical observation. He would advise the head of the US delegation to see to it, and this time he would not agree to diplomatic postponements.

  In response to the UNE’s order, the women of the Lines put together a delegation of five, one for each of the traditional colors of humankind.

  For the whites they chose Amalie Noumarque Chornyak, because she was tall and imposing and gifted with a presence that could hush whole roomfuls of the unruly. In case something went wrong, they chose Noukhane Lin Verdi, with her month-old daughter, Mary Leaf, to represent the yellow peoples. Noukhane was their most brilliant and skilled spontaneous strategist, and the baby was a superb prop. Sharowa Ndal Adiness, whose voice was so compelling that you could not keep from hanging on her every word no matter what she might be saying, was there to represent and honor the blacks. The browns had Judith Lopez St. Syrus, chosen for her grace of bearing and her beauty. And Cheris Shannontry Bluecrane, a woman of the Meandering Water Tribe, stood for the red peoples.