It dragged on, interminably, all the pleasure gone from it for him. Adam passed out and had to be carried to a cubbyhole in the dorms reserved for just such undignified accidents. Adam could not control his women, and he could not handle his liquor, and no doubt it was unpleasant for him to have to always compare himself with Thomas, and so he drank until he could compare no longer. It seemed to Thomas that this celebration, that had become a mockery, would never end.
When at last it was over, as had to happen despite his distorted time perceptions, Thomas was weak with a mixture of relief and dread. And glad that he could get away now to his office, where no one would dare go at night without his express invitation, and where Michaela Landry would be waiting for him as he had instructed her to be. He had expected to be in an unusually good mood at the end of this evening, and he had wanted her to be there, to talk to.
He still wanted her to be there, frantic as he felt. Not for her body—he had no interest in her body tonight. But for her blessed skill at listening with her whole heart and her whole mind. And for the fact that he could trust her absolutely.
He felt that if he could not have talked to someone about this he would have gone mad. He could talk to Michaela, bless her.
“Michaela, do you understand what I’m telling you? Do you follow what I’m saying?”
“I’m not sure,” she said carefully. “I’m not a linguist, my darling . . . I know nothing about these things. Perhaps if you would not mind explaining it to me again, I might understand.”
He badly needed to say it all again, that was clear to her. And for once she badly needed to hear it again. To be sure that he was saying what she thought he was saying, and to learn what he had learned. Because the women had not told her, of course, any more than they would have told any other woman who had to live among the men. Not even Nazareth. And Michaela had not guessed.
“Michaela,” said Thomas sternly, “if you would pay attention, you wouldn’t have any problem—it’s not beyond you to understand this.”
“Of course, Thomas. Forgive me—I will listen very very carefully this time.”
“Now you know about the Encoding Project, Michaela; you’re in and out of Barren House constantly, you couldn’t possibly not know. For generations our women have been playing at that game . . . constructing a ‘woman’s language’ called Langlish. You must have at least heard them speak of it.”
“I think I do remember something about it, Thomas.”
“Well, it’s nonsense, and it’s always been nonsense. In the first place, it is impossible to ‘construct’ a human language. We don’t know how any human language began, but we damn well know that it wasn’t because somebody sat down and created one from scratch.”
“Yes, my dear.”
“And in the second place, if it were possible to do such a thing, it certainly could not be done by women . . . as is made painfully clear by the travesty they’ve produced. Eighty-plus phonemes. Switching the obligatory word order—by committee, mind you—every two or three years. Sets of hundreds of particles. Five different orthographies, for different situations. Eleven different separate rules for the formation of simple yes/no questions. Thirteen—” He caught himself then, remembering, and apologized. “None of that means anything at all to you, Michaela. I’m sorry.”
“It’s very interesting, Thomas,” she said. “And I’m sure it must be important, when a person understands it.”
“It is important. It bears out everything that I’ve said about the folly of both the Project itself and the women involved in it. It is exactly what you would expect to see happen when a group of women took on an entirely absurd task and worried at it in their spare time for interminable years. With committees and caucuses thrown in. It is what I would have predicted, and I do understand the result—and that is the problem.”
“I’m so sorry, my dear; now I really don’t follow you.”
“Michaela, I’ve made a point of checking up on the progress—or regress—of Langlish every six months or so. It’s puerile, mechanical, a kind of overelaborated Interlingua beside which Interlingua looks as authentic as Classical Greek. It has always been like that. It has been a source of amazement to the men of the Lines that our women could produce such a monstrosity . . . and has been proof enough, if we had needed further proof, that language acquisition skills are not directly correlated with intelligence. But—and this is the point—out of that travesty, that ‘Langlish,’ there could not possibly have developed any coherent system that could be learned and spoken by little girls throughout the linguist Households. It is impossible that that could have happened.”
Michaela noted the signs of strain in the muscles of his neck and shoulders, and moved to a different position where the turn of his head to look at her would ease them.
“But you seem to think that it has happened,” she said. “Or do I still misunderstand?”
“No. . . . I think it has happened. I don’t understand it, it makes not the remotest sense, but I think that it has happened. And I will not have it, Michaela!”
“Certainly not,” she said promptly. “Of course you won’t.”
“I won’t have it,” he continued, as if she’d said nothing. “I have never believed in being overly strict with our women, but this I will not permit. Whatever it is, unless I have somehow got it entirely wrong, it’s dangerous—it has to be stopped, and stopped now, while it involves only a handful of little girls and a gaggle of foolish old women. Damn their conniving souls!”
“Will they tell you the truth about it, Thomas, do you think? If they’re frightened, I mean. I suppose this Langlish must mean a good deal to them.”
“I don’t expect to have to have them tell me,” he said, his face grim and his eyes blazing in a way she’d never seen him look before. “I will put everything else on my schedule for tomorrow aside. I will go to Barren House immediately after breakfast—I may damn well go before breakfast. And I will stay in that warren of iniquity until I get to the bottom of this if it takes me a week. I’ll turn out every cupboard in the place, I’ll look at every program in the computer . . . and while I’m there, to demonstrate to them that I am not quite as stupid as they may have thought, I will search every container and contraption they allegedly use for ‘needlework,’ with shears in hand if that’s what it takes. I’ll get to the bottom of it, Michaela. Whether they are ‘fond’ of it or not. Whether they dare try to lie to me or not.”
“I see, Thomas. My, what a lot of trouble for you.”
“And if it is what I think it is. . . .”
“Yes, my dear? Then what?”
“Then,” and he struck his desk with his fist so hard that she nearly jumped—not quite, but nearly—“then I will stamp it out. Every last vestige of it. I will destroy it as I’d destroy vermin, and I’ll see to it that it’s done in every one of the Households. And there will be no more Encoding Project, Michaela, I give you my word on that. Not ever. Not ever again.”
Thinking that she must be more careful than she had ever been before, Michaela told him how wonderful it was that he could do all that, and so swiftly and surely. And then she asked him, “But my dear, I don’t think I see why you must trouble yourself in that way. It’s only a language, and they know so many languages already! Is it because they’ve done this without your permission . . . taught it to the children without asking you first?”
He stared at her fiercely, as if he would bite her, and she sat absolutely still and deliberately tranquil under his gaze until he was satisfied with glaring and clenching his teeth and knotting his brows.
“This Langlish, if they’ve actually pulled it together sufficiently for children to use it, would be as dangerous as any plague,” he told her flatly. “Never mind why, Michaela. It’s complicated. It’s way beyond you, and I’m glad it is. But it represents danger, and it represents corruption—and it shall not happen.”
“Oh, my dear,” Michaela breathed, “if it is so very dreadful as all that . . . perhaps you s
hould not wait until tomorrow. Perhaps you should go tonight—yes, I am certain that you should go tonight!”
She knew no surer way to keep him from going straight to Barren House than to offer it as her emphatic suggestion, and he responded as she had anticipated.
“If I could be sure that I am right, I would go at once,” he said. “But I’m not quite that sure. There’s no need for hysteria.”
She shivered carefully, and made her eyes wide to tell him that she was frightened, and he laughed.
“Michaela, for heaven’s sake. Nothing could possibly happen before morning, even if I am right—and I’d look like a madman charging over there in the middle of the night if I’ve made an error. Don’t be absurd.”
He went on about it for quite a while; for him, he did a considerable amount of repeating himself. It was the whiskey, she supposed, or the shock of having to entertain the suspicion that the women had put something over on him. Or both.
She let him talk, feeling as if she were not really there in the cramped room but looking at it and at him through a tiny hole in a distant fabric, far from here, high in space and time. Whatever his problems might have been, they were about to be solved; as for her, she had no problems now because he had solved them. For good and for all. Peace filled her like dark slow water . . . the light in the room was gold melting and flowing.
Here was a murder that she could carry out as she had Ned’s, in good conscience. Here was a service that she could do, for the women of the Lines. She was no linguist and never could be, she couldn’t help them with their language and would only be a burden to them if she tried—but she was as skilled at killing as they were at their conjugations and declensions. She, Michaela Landry, could do something that not one of them, not even silly Aquina with her notions of militancy, could have done. She could save the woman’s language, at least for a time—perhaps long enough, certainly for a good while—and she could pay in some measure for her sins. If there had been deaths before at her hand that were not justified, if she had done harm, this would be a kind of recompense.
And no need to wait for opportunity, no need to be clever, because she had no intention of trying to escape. Not this time. She was tired, so tired, of playing the role of Ministering Angel while something in her writhed over questions she couldn’t answer, and the men she’d killed tormented her nights with their pleading. Now there would be an end to that, and the Almighty had mercifully granted her the privilege of a worthy end!
When he had fallen asleep, worn out with drink and with talk, she took a syringe from the nurse’s case that she kept always with her at night in case of an emergency, and she gave Thomas a single dose of a drug that was swift and sure. He made no sound, and he did not wake; in ten minutes he was quite dead, and past all hope of heroic measures. She moved him to the floor, long enough to close the couch that served them for a bed, and then she bent and maneuvered him onto it again—she had not spent all these years lifting and turning patients for nothing. She was strong enough, even for a man of his bulk, gone limp in death. She dressed him as he’d been dressed for the banquet, loosening the necktie, making it look as if he’d just stretched out there to take a nap. He often slept in his office, and no one would be surprised that he’d done so after the celebration.
And then! Ah, the wicked nurse, her sexual advances spurned by the upright moral Head of Household even in his slightly tipsy state, fell upon him and repaid his years of kindness with murder most foul! Out of nothing more than her wounded pride. . . . She could easily imagine the newslines and the threedy features. . . . CRIME OF PASSION! VINDICTIVE NURSE CRAZED WITH LUST AND MADDENED BY REJECTION, SLAYS TOP DOG LINGOE! It would be a seven days wonder. Maybe eight days. Maybe, since it was Thomas Blair Chornyak, much longer. It should buy the women many months, even if some other of the men had begun to notice what was happening, because the transfer of power for such an empire as the Lines constituted could not be a simple matter.
She had never been so calm, or so content. She was sorry that she would have to leave Nazareth Chornyak . . . dear Nazareth. But if Nazareth had known of this, she would have been grateful to have Michaela do for her what she could not do herself. It was a fitting gift to leave for her.
Michaela took her nurse’s case and went to her own room and her own bed; she fell asleep at once and slept without a single dream to disturb her rest. And she didn’t bother to undress. When they came for her in the morning, as they would the moment they saw the empty syringe beside the corpse, she would already be dressed to welcome them.
Chapter Twenty-four
It was a time when there was no splendor . . . do you understand? It was a time when the seamless fabric of reality had been subjected to an artificial process: dividing it up into dull little parts, each one drearier than the one before. And uniformly dreary, getting drearier and drearier by a man-made rule. As if you drew lines in the air, you perceive, and then devoted your life to behaving as if those air-territories bounded by your lines were real. It was a reality from which all joy, all glory, all radiance, had been systematically excluded. And it was from that reality, from that linguistic construct, that the women of Chornyak Barren House were attempting to extrapolate. It couldn’t be done, of course. You cannot weave truth on a loom of lies.
Aquina kept saying that we had to decide what to DO . . . well, imagine a person standing on a block of ice, planning and planning and planning. Planning ways to get about on the ice, ways to decorate it, ways to divide it up, ways to cope with all the possible knowns and givens of a block of ice. That would be a busy person, provident and industrious and independent and admirable, isn’t that so? Except that when the ice melts, none of that is any use at all.
We women had set a flame upon the ice, and it was inevitable that the ice would melt. In such a time, having never known anything but life upon the ice, you cannot do; in such a time, you can only be.
I would have explained, if I had known how; it wasn’t that I was trying to keep anything secret. It hurt me that I didn’t know how to explain. I would wake up in the morning and think, perhaps this will be the day when the words that would explain are given to me; but it never happened. I grew to be very very old, and it never did happen.
(a fragment from what is alleged
to be a diary of Nazareth Chornyak Adiness;
it bears no date)
The meeting was an unusual one, in every way. Every place at the table was filled, and it had been necessary to bring in extra chairs to seat the overflow that couldn’t be fit at the table proper. Not only were the full complement of men from Chornyak Household there, but a delegation of three senior men and two junior from each of the other twelve Lines, attending in person. Ordinarily this outside representation would have been handled by computer conference to avoid the inconvenience and overcrowding . . . And looking at it now, seeing everyone jammed in elbow to elbow at the table, those in the chairs lining the walls already uncomfortable before the meeting even began, James Nathan wondered if he had made a mistake when he chose this alternative.
At his elbow, David Chornyak was wondering the same thing, and he and James Nathan stared at each other in quick consternation, and then looked quickly away. It was too late now, whether it had been an error or not; they were all here, and the best thing to do was get on with the business of the day as swiftly as possible.
“Go on, Jim,” said David under his breath. “Let’s get this over with.”
James Nathan nodded, and pressed the small stud beneath the table. He disliked the sound of the thing . . . his grandfather Paul John’s choice of a falling minor third would not have been his choice. But the tones did stop the muttering and get everyone turned to face him, which was their function.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” James Nathan began, “and my thanks to all of you for coming here in person. I know you’re not particularly comfortable, and I regret that. I’m afraid we’ve never had any need for conference facilities here at Chornyak Househol
d.”
Nigel Shawnessey, whose Household in Switzerland did have conference facilities, cleared his throat elaborately and gave the ceiling a significant glance. He considered this a ridiculous imposition, carried out only as a vehicle for a display of dominance. And wholly unnecessary. Nobody had ever challenged Chornyak House for the position of Head of the Lines, and so long as the Chornyaks continued to produce men of the traditional caliber nobody ever would.
James Nathan had not missed the bit of body-parl, and he knew what it meant, but he didn’t agree. Filling the shoes of Thomas Blair Chornyak had not been easy; stepping into them at forty-six had come perilously close to being beyond his abilities. Nobody had ever anticipated such a thing, with his father in robust health and only just turned seventy . . . the Chornyak men filled their posts well into their eighties ordinarily, and sometimes longer than that.
There had been nothing ordinary about having a Head murdered by a madwoman. And the effort of assuming Thomas Blair’s role, so suddenly and without any of the usual mechanisms of transition, had brought painfully home to James Nathan the need to keep a tight rein on the Lines. Which was, even as he thought it, so awkward and unfelicitous a phrase that it made him smile. A tight rein on the Lines, indeed . . . thank God he hadn’t said that aloud! And he had been adamant about this meeting—under no circumstances would he have called it at Shawnessey Household, and found himself obliged to run the meeting while Nigel Shawnessey played host, with all the intricate burdens that would have laid upon the Chornyak men as guests. Thomas would have done it that way, and never given it a thought, but he was not Thomas, and he knew it. Oh no . . . he might be young, and he might have tumbled into the Headship a bit abruptly, but he was not stupid.
“Our agenda today,” he said smoothly, “is a single topic, and a most unusual one. The last meeting of this particular kind was held in 2088, when the decision was made to build Chornyak Barren House, and we were fewer in number in those days. I’ve called the meeting only because the time I was having to spend listening to complaints from all of you about this matter had begun to take up an absurd proportion of my days—and my nights. And I insisted on having all of you here in person because leaks to the media would have been more than usually unacceptable in this case. Security on the comset network isn’t adequate, as all of you know to your sorrow—and it would be very distasteful to have this affair become a topic for the popnews commentators.”
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