Native Tongue

by Suzette Haden Elgin, Susan Squier

  “I realize it’s late,” he told the young man with the fretful face who answered his call to the ILO section chief’s residence. “And I am aware that calling your chief at home is not usual procedure.” And he smiled. “Would you get him for me, please, young man?”

  The screen flickered; there was a brief pause; and then the face of the ILO chief appeared, a bit fuzzier than Thomas approved of when he had to use it as a data source. Rachel must have the Emergency Room computers locked in; that always meant transmission interference.

  “Donald,” he said, fuzzy image or not, since it wasn’t going to get any better, “sorry to bother you at home.”

  “Quite all right, Thomas,” said the other man, his face twisted diagonally across the screen. “What’s the problem?”

  “You’ve got the delegation at eight tomorrow for those seldron labor dispute meetings, I understand, and one of my offspring’s handling the interpreting.”

  “Fortunately,” said the image. “Last time they were here we had to make do with PanSig and somebody who couldn’t do much more than say howdeedo . . . some smartass from D.A.T. It wasn’t very successful. It was in fact damn near a disaster. I don’t want to hear, Thomas, that we’re up against that again tomorrow. Those Jeelods aren’t going to give us many more chances on this, they’re really furious. I don’t know exactly what kind of idiot misunderstanding is responsible this time, but I know we need somebody who really knows the language.”

  “Well,” said Thomas, “we’ll do the best we can, of course. But the youngster we’re sending you has come down with something suddenly—she’s not at all well.”

  “Oh, God. That’s all we need. Thomas . . .”

  “Now, I didn’t say she wouldn’t be there,” said Thomas. Remember, federal man, he was thinking, and remember good—without us you don’t do anything much. “I felt you should be warned that there is that possibility, just as a matter of professional courtesy. The doctor’s with her now.” A minor, but useful, modification of the facts.

  “The doctor?” Donald Cregg was of course aware of what a medical house call, especially at night, meant. Even through the blur and the sputter, Thomas could see the worry on his face. “It’s serious, then.”

  “Maybe not. You know how young girls are. Every twinge, they think they’re dying. It may be nothing at all. Nevertheless—just on the off-chance—I called to let you know you may be without an intrepreter tomorrow morning.”

  “Damn it!”

  “You could call D.A.T.,” Thomas needled him. “They’ve really been putting their backs into the federal language courses, I understand.”

  “Sure . . . sure, Thomas. Come on, man—who else have you got for REM34 if the kid can’t make it?”

  “Nobody. That’s one hell of a language.”

  “Aren’t you linguists always spouting off about no language being harder than any other language?” the image demanded.

  “No human language is harder than any other human language,” said Thomas. “Quite right. But Alien languages are something else again. All of them are hard, and some of them are harder than others. REM34 happens to be one of the hardest. We’ve got some people here good enough to translate written materials, but nobody who can interpret.”

  “See here, Chornyak, you’ve got a contract!” said the other man indignantly. “And that contract specifies that when you take on a language you put enough of your people on it to cover things like this. That’s what we pay you for, for God’s sake.”

  Thomas let a full thirty seconds go by, to give the section chief time to think over the alternatives he had to doing business with the Lines. And then he answered with politeness to spare.

  “There are only just so many of us available, my friend,” he said, borrowing from Rachel because it was handy, “and even if we learned fifty languages apiece we still couldn’t be in more than one place at a time. We have two youngsters right now acquiring REM34 from my daughter, but neither one is exactly suited for sophisticated negotiations—one of them is four and the other is about eighteen months. In time, they’ll be available, but they won’t help matters tomorrow.”

  “Ah, shit,” said Donald Cregg. “This is damn tiresome.”

  “’It is. I agree with you. Maybe some of you people ought to reconsider and send some of your infants over to Interface along with ours.”

  And live with dirty stinking Lingoes? And live packed into a hole in the ground like animals, with no decent privacy and no comfort and a lifestyle just above the poverty level? Thomas watched the man, not able to make out any body-parl with the comset image the only data available, but perfectly able to imagine it. Cregg would be pretending he hadn’t heard that last sentence.

  “Look, do what you can to get your kid there as scheduled, will you? This isn’t visiting vippies here for keys to the city, Thomas, this is a matter of real urgency.”

  “I’ll do everything possible,” said Thomas.

  “And thanks for the warning.”

  “Any time. Any time at all.”

  The screen cleared, and he sat smiling at it. It was most important to keep the government conscious at all times of their dependency on the linguists. Thomas was careful not to overlook even the smallest opportunity to drive that point home and refresh the federal memory, that sieve of convenience and expediency.

  He jabbed the intercom for his room, and got no answer; tried again, and heard the soft beep of the transfer mechanism before Rachel came on line from wherever she’d gotten to. The girldorms, probably.

  “Well,” he said abruptly, “are they sending a med-Sammy for this major crisis?”

  “No, Thomas,” said Rachel. “Take a half grain of codeine and a muscle relaxant and call them in the morning.”

  “I thought so,” said Thomas with satisfaction. “You’ve made a great deal of fuss—and an embarrassing scene—over nothing.”

  “Thomas, I’m sorry you feel that way. But Natha is never sick. And she does not ever complain. You will remember . . . the time she fell picking apples and broke three ribs, we didn’t hear a word from her. We wouldn’t have known she was hurt if she hadn’t fainted in the orchards.”

  “I don’t remember that, Rachel, but it sounds as if she sets an example you might do well to emulate. Spunky, from the sound of it.”

  “Is that all, Thomas?”

  “See that she’s at the ILO at five minutes till eight, Rachel—and see that she’s in top form. And that is all.”

  He reached out and cut off any remarks his wife might have had in mind. Later, he’d have to try to work his way through the gruel in her head long enough to make her remember a few things about decent courtesy, and about her function as role model for younger females under his roof. It would be a nuisance, but it could be done—given sufficient patience, and sufficient skill. But not now. Right now he had contracts to see to.

  At Barren House, Aquina was facing the music, and it wasn’t pleasant. They had her pinned at a table in a back room, and it was Susannah and Nile and Caroline—no goodies from Belle-Anne or oil in the waters from Grace this time—who were lambasting her. And they were good at it.

  “You fool, Aquina!” Susannah had said for starters. “You contemptible, wicked fool of a woman!”

  “And bungling . . . don’t forget bungling,” Caroline added. It was Caroline who had caught her. Caroline who’d been alerted by Faye, their most medically skilled woman, that Aquina had been at the herbs in the basement cupboards. And Caroline who’d caught her coming out of the kitchens at the main house and had forced her to hand over the empty bottle in her pocket and give it to Faye for analysis. . . . not that anything sophisticated had been required. Faye knew what Aquina had taken because she knew the inventory down to the last leaf and fleck; and she’d only had to uncap the bottle and smell it to know what it had contained.

  How could she have been so bungling? Aquina thought that was a very good question . . . except that she never, never had imagined that the other
women could spy on her and follow her around. Or that Caroline could twist her arm so cruelly that she was helpless to keep her from searching her pockets . . . Who would have thought they’d be so suspicious, them with their damned ethics always on such prominent display?

  “I’d do it again,” she’d said, defying them. And Caroline had turned on her like a snare set free on a rabbit, and in spite of herself Aquina had gasped between her teeth, sucking air, and jerked away from the other woman. Caroline was much smaller, much thinner, much less powerful of frame than Aquina; she was also stronger than Aquina could ever hope to be, with a grip like a man’s.

  “You try that again, you silly bitch,” Caroline hissed at her, “and so help me God I’ll put you in permanent traction where you can’t do anybody any more harm with your stupidity and your viciousness!”

  Susannah clucked her tongue, and objected mildly. “She’s not vicious, Caroline. Stupid, yes. But not vicious.”

  “She did her damnedest to poison a fourteen-year-old girl, and she’s not vicious? What is that, tenderness and love?”

  “Caroline . . . you know very well that Aquina had no intention of harming Nazareth Chornyak. She bellows a right good line, but she wouldn’t really hurt a living creature. Come off it.”

  Caroline was so angry that she turned around and smacked the wall with her fist; Aquina was glad that it was the wall and not her.

  “Aquina,” Nile said, “whatever did you think you were doing?”

  “I’ve told you.”

  “You tell us again.”

  She told them. The thought of having to wait forty years before Nazareth could work on the women’s language at Barren House, really work on it—especially since Aquina had found her notebook, and it had turned out to be a treasure horde of Encodings, even more valuable than she had hoped—that thought had been intolerable to her. And there was only one way to shorten that forty years. . . . Nazareth had to be made barren. If Aquina could have managed that, the girl would have been kept at Chornyak Household a few more years, to finish her education and her training; but then she would have come to Barren House.

  “But Aquina, you know nothing about medicine!”

  “I can read. I know where Faye’s herbals are. I’m literate.”

  “You could have killed her.”

  “No, she couldn’t,” chided Susannah. “Good lord. First she followed the formula with substitutions for anything that alarmed her, and then she cut its strength by half. And then she only gave Nazareth half a dose of that. I’m sure the child has been miserable, but she’s not in any real danger, nor was she ever.”

  “Aquina had no way of being sure of that,” Caroline insisted, and Nile nodded solemn agreement. “It’s luck—just pure blind luck, not skill, not knowledge—that all she did with her nasty potion was make Nazareth sick!” And she leaned over the table and fairly hissed at Aquina. “Do you realize, you idiot, that you could have cost us not just the forty years you’re whining about, but lost us Nazareth forever? You had no idea what you were doing!”

  Aquina knew that they were right. She could see it now, see it clearly. She must have been half out of her mind, with frustration and with the constant worrying at the problem in her head. And she was sorry, sorry to the depths of her. But she’d be damned and fried in oil and pickled before she’d admit it.

  “It was worth a try,” she said defiantly. And she stared at them, breathing hard and fast and deep, until they threw up their hands and walked out on her.

  Chapter Ten

  They are encumbered with secret

  pregnancies that never come to term.

  There are no terms, you don’t see.

  They drag their swollen brains about with them everywhere;

  hidden in pleats and drapes and cunning pouches;

  and the unbearable

  keep kicking, kicking

  under the dura mater.

  It is no bloody wonder they have headaches.

  Hold them to your ear, lumpy as they are,

  and pale;

  that roar you hear is the surge of the damned unspeakable

  being kept back.

  Stone will not dilate

  will not stretch

  will not tear—

  it shivers.

  Cleaves.

  Moves uneasily.

  At its core the burgundy lava simmers,

  making room.

  There are volcanoes at the bottom of the sea.

  Those pretty green things swaying are their false hair.

  Deliver us?

  Ram inward the forceps of the patriarchal paradigm

  and your infernal medicine

  and bring forth the ancient offspring

  with their missing mouths?

  I think not.

  Not bloody likely.

  (20th century “feminist” poem)

  Thomas was nobody’s fool. He listened to what the doctors had to tell him, and he looked at the computer printouts, and he gave it about fifteen minutes of his time. You looked at sets of data, each one representing a possible hypothesis, until you had only one left. The one he had was the one he would have considered least plausible; but it was the only one the computers had not eliminated—therefore, it must be taken seriously. And he sent for a chief of detectives to come to his office at Chornyak Household.

  The man was called Morse, Bard Morse; he was tall and bulky and ordinary-looking, but he proved to have a quick mind that belied the ponderousness of his movements. He listened while Thomas explained that someone had tried to poison a daughter of the house, and he ran his eyes over the computer printouts swiftly, and he came to an immediate conclusion.

  “Oh, you’re quite right, Chornyak,” he said. “No question about it. Did you think there was?”

  “Only because it was so unlikely,” said Thomas. “There’s no reason on or off this green globe for anyone to single out this one child—she’s only fourteen years old. And if the motive had only been to score some points off the linguists, it wouldn’t have been just Nazareth who was affected by the stuff. It makes no sense to me, frankly.”

  “Furthermore,” mused the detective, “whoever did it isn’t worth a damn, if you know what I mean.”

  “I’m not sure I do.”

  “Well, there’s various kinds of poisonings, Mr. Chornyak. There’s the kind that’s meant to kill, with a great whopping fatal dose all at one time—this sure as hell wasn’t that. And then there’s the kind that’s meant to kill slowly, small doses given over a year or so, and the victim growing sicker and sicker—but with that plan, they never would have used a dose that would make your kid so sick so fast . . . and they would have used something that was harder to trace and analyze. That’s not it, either.”

  “What else is there?”

  “There’s the kind where the poisoner doesn’t really want to kill anybody. He does it for malice, because he enjoys seeing the victim suffer, for instance. Or he does it out of ignorance—say it was another child, that fancies himself a poisoner because he’s seen it on a threedy and thinks it’s exciting, but he doesn’t really understand that what he’s doing is dangerous.”

  “Well? Do you see this business as either of those?”

  Morse chewed on his mustache and screwed up his forehead, and then he shook his head.

  “Naw,” he said. “Hell . . . it’s possible it was a kid. Maybe. But how a kid would have known to put those particular herbs together, or even which ones would be poisonous, I don’t see. And I don’t see where a kid would have gotten them, Chornyak. Those weren’t dandelion greens and daisy petals, you know, that was some pretty exotic stuff. But the malice bit . . . would that come in here? Would anybody pick out just that one child, for malice?”

  “I don’t know, Morse. I don’t know at all.”

  “Is there any reason, Chornyak, why somebody would be jealous of your daughter Nazareth? Is she . . . oh, spectacularly beautiful, maybe? Spectacularly brilliant? Anything like that?�
��

  Thomas shook his head, and laughed. “She’s not unpleasant to look at, but that’s as far as it goes—just a plain ordinary gawk of a girl. And as for brilliance . . . her linguistics skills tests are clear off the scales, the highest we’ve ever recorded in the Lines . . . but only a few of the adults know that, close family members. And none of them would be such fools as to let the information get out for general knowledge where it might cause jealousy. So far as I know, people view Nazareth as an ordinary, reasonably well-liked, very busy linguist child, with nothing to set her off. You realize that there is a sense in which any linguist child is unusual—but not to other linguists.”

  “I see,” said Morse. “Well, have you got anyone on the place that’s mentally just plain defective, sir? A retarded adult, for example?”

  No . . . nothing like that. We never have had, to my knowledge.”

  “Well, you see, the malicious kind, they’re always a certain kind of person. Retarded sometimes—that’s why I asked—cunning, but not intelligent, you know? And whatever the situation, they love to cause a commotion. They love attention, and everything in an uproar, and the feeling of power that they’re causing it all. They enjoy seeing pain, or they’re indifferent to it—they’re very sick people, as a rule. And always, always and without exception, they are fiendishly clever, Mr. Chornyak. They’re terribly hard to catch, and they enjoy the bloody hell out of running rings around the authorities and proving how easy it is to trick everyone. This isn’t like that, you see. This isn’t like that at all. It’s inefficient and disorganized and—well, it’s just bumbling about, as if the poisoner was either completely confused or maybe didn’t really have his heart in it. If you’ll pardon a joke at a serious time, sir, if a committee was supposed to poison somebody, this is how I’d expect it to look. An amateur committee at that.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Thomas with satisfaction. “I see.” There was nothing like getting someone to look at a problem who actually knew what he was supposed to know and could get right to the heart of it.

  “It makes perfectly good sense, Chief Morse.” He went on. “I understand exactly what you mean. But doesn’t it leave us in a bit of a mess? That is, if this particular poisoning isn’t any of the usual kinds, doesn’t that mean it will be very hard to solve?”