Native Tongue (13 page)

“Ah,” said Michaela. “I understand. Thank you, Mrs. Verdi.”

“You’re quite welcome . . . and don’t worry. Nothing he needs won’t wait five minutes, or fifteen for that matter. And if he ever should have a touch of something or other that makes you feel you really need to be closer, there’s a very comfortable couch in his room where we could put you up for a night or two.”

Michaela had nodded, satisfied. True, she would be taking the old man out of this world a bit more quickly than the Verdis anticipated; but while she was serving as his nurse, he would have the best care she could provide him, and no corners cut. She was an excellent nurse; she had no intention of lowering her standards. And she was awfully glad to be able to stay in the spacious corner room, where she could lean out like Rapunzel and watch the river.

Stephan Rue Verdi, 103 and not more than 99 pounds dripping wet, lived up to his billing. He was as formidable a talker as she’d ever encountered. But she didn’t find him all that boring. When his great-granddaughter judged the old man’s narrative skill, she didn’t have Michaela’s experience with Ned to use as a standard.

“When I was a child,” old Stephan would begin, and she’d murmur at him to let him know she was listening (but that wasn’t enough, she had to sit down right beside him where he could look at her without effort), “when
I
was a child, things were different. I can tell you, things were
very
different! I don’t say they were better, mind—when you start saying they were you’re doddering—but they were surely different.”

“When I was a child, we didn’t have to live the life these children live, poor little things. Up every morning before it’s even light yet, out in the orchards and the vegetable gardens working like poor dirt farmers by five-thirty most of the year . . . and a choice . . . ha! some choice! . . . between running around the blasted roads and doing calisthenics for hours, or chopping wood, come the time of year there’s nothing left to do in the way of agriculture. And then the poor little mites get to listen to the family
bul
letin while they eat their breakfast . . . when I was a child, we linguists lived in proper houses like
anybody else, and we had our own family tables. None of these great roomfuls of people like eating in a cafeteria and everybody all jumbled in together like hogs at a trough . . .”

“The family bulletin, Mr. Verdi,” Michaela prompted him. He tended to lose track.

“Oh, the
bul
letin, now that’s very very important, the
bul
letin! That’s a
list
the kidlings have to face every morning while they try to eat, with everything on it they have to do that day and everything they didn’t do or didn’t do right the day before. . . . Poor little mites,” he said again.

“Hmmm,” said Michaela. He would settle for “hmmmm” most of the time, since he preferred to do all the talking himself.

“Oh, yes! ‘Paul Edward, you’re to be at St. Louis Memorial at nine sharp, they’re operating on the High Muckymuck of Patoot and he won’t let them touch him unless there’s an interpreter right there to pass along his complaints.’ ‘Maryanna Elizabeth, you’re expected at the Federal Court house from nine to eleven, and then you’re wanted clear across town at the Circuit Court—don’t take time for lunch, you’ll be late.’ ‘Donald Jonathan, you have three days scheduled in the Chicago Trade Complex; take your pocket computer, they’ll expect you to convert currencies for the Pateets!”

“My word,” Michaela said. “How do these children ever get to all those places?”

“Oh, we’re very efficient. Family flyer, great big thing, revs up outside at 8:05 on the button—the five minutes to let the poor little things go to the bathroom, don’t you know—and runs them into St. Louis to the State Department of Analysis & Translation, where they’ve got a whole army of chauffeurs and pilots and whatalls waiting, pacing up and down for fear they’ll be late. They deliver everybody where they’re going all day long and then bring ’em back again to SDAT at night, and we do it in reverse.”

“Mmmmm.”

“And then, supposing a tyke’s not scheduled for the Patoots or the Pateets, well, he’s got to go to
school
for two hours . . . flyer puts him down on the slidewalks in Hannibal, you see, or they run him there in the van. School . . . phooey. I say the kids that get out of it ’cause they’re scheduled in solid, and then just make it up with the mass-ed computers, they’re the lucky ones. Would
you
want to spend two blessed hours five days a week with a bunch of other bored-sick kids, saying the Pledge Allegiance and singing the Missouri State Song and the Hannibal Civic Anthem and listening to them read you the King James—
not that I’ve got anything against the King James, but the kids can read, you know,
in
a couple dozen languages! They sure don’t need somebody to read to ’em. . . . And celebrating damnfool so-called holidays like Space Colony Day and Reagan’s Birthday? ’Course, they do Halloween and Thanksgiving and Christmas and such, too, all that stuff . . . but would you want to do that? All that truck, I mean? Phooey . . . I can remember when we still had
classes
at school!”

“Now, Mr. Verdi,” Michaela chided.

“I can. I can so.”

“Tsk.”

“Well . . . I can remember when my father
told
me about it.”

“Mmmm.”

“And when I was a tyke myself, all we had to do was the mass-ed computer lessons, at home, Now, the kids have all that to do AND the damnfool school for two hours! HOMEroom, they call it! Did you ever hear such damnfool stuff: HOMEroom!”

“Socialization, Mr. Verdi,” Michaela said.

“Socialization! Damnfool!”

“Mmmmm.”

“I remember what socialization did for
me
, young lady! Even when they tried to put it in the mass-ed curriculum! It made me
de
test the Pledge Allegiance and the State Song and the damnfool Civic Anthem and the whole shebang, that’s what it did! Oh, I know, they say that when the kids got nothing but the mass-eds they started to act strange and their folks didn’t feel like they were normal kids . . . I’ve heard that. I don’t believe a word of it.”

“Mmmmmm.”

“Poor little things. You ever heard Mr. Hampton Carlyle stand up and recite
all
the verses of Hiawatha at you, little lady?”

“All the verses?”

“Well, it took him a week, you know. Including the gestures . . . You’re blessed if you never had to go through that, let me tell you. And they’re still doin’ it to the kids, to this day! Oh, and then there’s Artsandcrafts! Whoopee, let’s make a little basket out of paper for the Spring Pageant and stick it full of paper flowers! And there are Special Activites. . . . Oh, I declare, Mrs. Landry, it’d gag a maggot. It’s out of the Middle Ages, that’s what it is.”

“Mmhmmm.”

“When I was a child, I had my work to do. I’d interfaced with an AIRY, and I had to know that. And I had Basque, and one of
the Reformed Cherokee dialects, and I had Swedish, and I had Ameslan.”

“Ameslan?”

“American Sign Language, girl, don’t they teach you anything? I had all that, and I had my mass-ed lessons to get, and I had to help out around the place. But I had time to play, and I had time to lie up in a black walnut tree and just dream once in a while, and go wading in the creek . . . these children now, Mrs. Landry, they don’t have a minute to call their own. Freetime, they’re supposed to get.
After
they’ve worked all day for the government, and
after
they’ve gone to Homeroom—if they can fit that in—and done the mass-ed lessons no matter what. And
after
they’ve put in the extra tutorials with their grammar books and dictionaries, and filled their backup requirements, and
after
they’ve done such stuff as run hell for leather through a shower and cut their toenails and the like, and
after
they’ve gone to every family briefing scheduled for them for the evening . . . if there’s any time left, girl, that’s theirs. That’s their freetime, and precious little of it do they get. Fifteen minutes, if they’re lucky.”

“Mr Verdi?”

“What? What?”

“You say they have to fill their backup requirements. What’s that?”

“Shoot.”

The old man looked cross, and Michaela patted his hand and told him he didn’t have to tell her if he didn’t want to bother with it.

“Oh, no, I’ll tell you!” he said. “Backup . . . that’s basic.”

“Mmmm.”

“You know how it works, this Interfacing?”

“No, sir. Only what I see on the news.”

“Huh. Bunch of damnfool.”

“I expect it is.”

“Well, now, the Interface is a special environment we build in the Households. There’s two parts to it, each one with all the temperature and humidity regulated down to the dot, and special stuff piped in and whatnot, with the environment on one side exactly right for whichever Patoots or Pateets we’ve got in residence at the time, and the environment on the other side just right for humans. And between the two there’s this barrier . . . you can’t have cyanide gas coming on through to the kiddies just because the Patoots need it, and vice versa for oxygen and whatall, you see . . . but it’s a specially made barrier that you
can see through and hear through just like it wasn’t hardly there at all. And we put the baby in the human side, and the AIRY’s live in the other, and the AIRY’s and the baby interact for a year or so and pretty soon you’ve got an Earth baby that’s a native speaker of whatever the AIRY speaks, you see.”

“Oh,” said Michaela. “My!”

“But that’s for just the
first
time!” said the old man emphatically. “That’s just for the very first time an Alien language is acquired as a native language by a human being. And after that, why, the human child is the native speaker and you don’t have to go through all that. You just put
that
child, the one you Interfaced the first time, together in the ordinary way with another human infant, and that’s backup, don’t you know. The second child will acquire the Alien language from the one that was Interfaced, now there’s a human native speaker available. That’s necessary, let me tell you.”

“Mmmmm.”

“You’re not paying attention to me, are you? You
asked
me what backup was, you know, and now you’re not paying attention!”

Michaela sat up very straight and insisted that indeed she was.

“You think I’m boring, do you? Everybody thinks I’m boring! Lot of damnfool phooey, if you ask me! What do
they
know?”

Michaela didn’t think he was boring at all, as it happened, because the more she could learn about the habits and lifestyles of the Lingoes, the more efficiently and safely she could murder them. She considered every word that Stephan Verdi said potentially of the greatest value to her—you never knew when some scrap of information would be precisely the scrap that you most needed—and she was able to assure him with complete honesty that she was listening to every word he said and enjoying it.

“I’d know if you were lying, don’t you forget,” he said.

“Would you?”

“You can’t lie to a linguist, young woman—don’t you try it.” Michaela smiled.

“Al
read
y tried it, haven’t you! I can tell by that smirk you’ve got on your face! Pretty doesn’t cover up body-parl, girl, never has and never will!”

“Mr. Verdi . . . all that excitement’s not good for you.”

“Excitement? You don’t excite me, you hussy, it’d take a good deal more than you to excite
me
! I’ve seen everything there is, in my time, and taken most of it to
bed
if I fancied it! Why, I’ve—”

“Mr. Verdi,” Michaela broke in, “you wanted to explain to me why I can’t lie to a linguist.”

“I did?”

“Mmmhmm.”

“Well . . . let me tell you this: if you lie to a linguist, girl, and you get away with it, if you lie to a linguist and he doesn’t catch you out, it’s only because he
let
you lie, for his own very good reasons. You keep that in mind.”

“I will.” And she would.

“Backup,” she reminded him then. She’d almost lost track herself this time.

“Oh, yes. Well. You see, after Interfacing, that human child is the one and the only living human being that can speak the Alien language—and it’s taken years to produce just the one. And you never know what could happen. You’d have important treaties set up, don’t you know, or something else important—and the kiddy gets wiped out in a flyer accident. Struck by lightning. Whatever. You can’t have that, you see. There’s got to be another child coming along behind that knows the language, too, and another one behind that. Providing backup, in case anything happens. And of course grownups can’t ever acquire languages like babies do, but they make a point of picking up a language as best they can every year or two, from tapes and whatall, and trying to talk to the kids that learned it Interfacing, you see. And that way, if the little one that had the AIRY’s language first should go to his Maker before the backup child was old enough to work alone, well, in an emergency you could send along the grownup that had the language sort of half-assed . . . that’s the only way that grownups can learn languages, most of ’em . . . and the child that was too young, and they could get by as a team after a fashion. In an
emer
gency, don’t you know! You wouldn’t want that as a general thing, ’cause it doesn’t work for warm spit. But in an
emer
gency . . . well!”