Native Tongue (26 page)

“Oh . . . Rachel?” Caroline shoved her fingers deep into her hair and looked at the other woman. “Rachel, before you go . . . have you heard the rumors about Government Work?”

“Rumors . . .”

“Rachel, do think! I realize that Nazareth is the main thing on your mind now, and rightly so, but think just for a moment. Have you heard anything about experiments with test-tube babies?”

Rachel frowned, “I don’t think so,” she said. “What are they saying?”

“That they’re feeding the little things hallucinogens . . . and then Interfacing them with non-humanoids.”

“Dear God in heaven.” Even in her state of exhaustion and self-disgust, Rachel could appreciate what that meant.

“It may be only rumor,” said Susannah. “It’s usually rumor. It’s just the kind of thing the government would love to convince the Lines they had going.”

“It’s . . . unspeakable. If it’s true.”

“Yes, it is,” said Caroline. “Rachel, see if you can find out anything about it, will you? From Thomas? He may very well know.”

Rachel nodded, absently, her hand on the door. She could not mourn for test-tube babies this morning. She was too entirely used up with mourning for the daughter she’d failed so shamefully.

“I’ll try,” she said.

“If anyone can find out, it’s you,” said Caroline.

“Oh, yes. I’m so skilled in my . . . marital relations.”

“Rachel—just try.”

“Why? What could we do?”

“It would be good,” said Susannah, “to know that it was
not
true. It would be easier for us all to sleep at night, child.”

When Nazareth came to them later in the day, the women were ready. In a circle of small rockers, in the common room, each with her embroidery or a quilt block or one more intricate lacy shawl to be knitted or crocheted. And their hearts resolutely hardened against the temptation to do the coddling of Nazareth that they had forbidden to her mother. Even so, the girl’s despair and revulsion were hard to watch with the necessary appearance of tranquil unconcern.

She kept saying, “I can’t do this.”

And they kept saying, “You can, Nazareth. You will.”

“I can’t.”

“You have no choice.”

“I
do
” she said. “I do have a choice.”

“What choice?”

“I will kill myself,” she said. “Before I spend a lifetime with that disgusting parody of a man and his ego that is far bigger than he ever could be, I will kill myself. I
will
.”

Something in her voice, some narrow edge, caught their attention. It was an easy threat, easily made, very common and frequent in young girls suddenly confronted with the unpleasant decisions of the males who controlled them. But there was a note of resolution in her words they didn’t care for.

“How would you do that?” scoffed Nile, drawing up a length of emerald silk. “Perceive, Natha . . . there stand your two dear little guards, waiting for you on our doorstep. You can’t even go to the toilet without those two, standing outside the door and counting off the seconds.”

“They can’t follow me in,” said Nazareth. “They can go everywhere else, but they can’t follow me in
there
. And I know ways . . . oh, I know ways that will put an end to this long before they get tired of counting seconds.”

No doubt she did. Every woman did.

They looked at one another, and at the trembling girl, and the same thought was on all their faces:
we can’t have this
.

“Nazareth . . . dear child . . .” Susannah spoke carefully, making certain that there was time for the others to stop her if she was misjudging the situation, “there’s something you should know.”

“I’m not interested in your fairy tales!”

“Not a fairy tale. A truth.”

“I’m not interested—whatever it is, I do not care.”

“Nazareth Chornyak,” said Susannah sternly, “you hear me! Do you remember, long ago, telling Aquina about your Encodings notebook? Do you?”

Nazareth looked up at that, and her lips parted slightly; it had caught her interest after all.

“Why do you ask me that?”

“Because, child, Aquina came back and told us. And she did more than that. She found your hidingplace in the orchards, dearlove, and she’s been going there every month and copying your work out for us to use.”

The outrage was stamped plain and fierce on the girl’s face,
and they were very glad to see it there. If she could be distracted by something like this, she was still safe.

“How
dare
you!” she hissed at them. “You sneaks . . . you contemptible old
sneaks
! My notebook—my private notebook. . . .”

She was so angry she could not even go on talking, the sense of violation choking her. And they agreed with her with all due solemnity, and granted her that every single one of them would have felt just the same way. Exactly the same way.

“But what matters,” Susannah went on when the storm had calmed a little, “is that among those Encodings we have found seven valid ones.
Seven
, Nazareth Joanna. And every last one of them major.”

Susannah was aware of the stillness around her, the stillness of a collective breath being held. It was a terrible risk she was taking—did she have to take it twice? Had Nazareth even heard her, caught as she was in anger?

But when Nazareth finally spoke, she said none of the things they might have expected her to say. She said, “I don’t want to know.”

“What?”

“I do not want to know. I am not listening to you. I will not hear you. I will not be bed and brood for Aaron Adiness, who is only
filth
, do you perceive that,
filth
! I will not listen to you witches and your spells and your foolish incantations . . . I
will not
know!”

Ah. That was much better. That was ordinary young girl’s panic and anger. None of that deadly dull seriousness, but ordinary frantic babble. This, they could handle, and without endangering the Encoding Project any further. But when it is necessary to be cruel, you don’t drag it out; you are swift with the blow. It was over to Grace, whose laughter would hurt Nazareth far more because Grace was one of the tender ones; and Grace did not miss her cue. At the first flickers of Susannah’s signing fingers, seen from the corner of her eye, Grace’s clear laughter rang out and split the silence. And the others joined in.

Flinching, Nazareth cried out, “Don’t
laugh
at me! How
can
you!”

“But child,” said Caroline, struggling to speak over gales of mirth, “how can we not? When you’re so outrageously funny?”

Nazareth was moving her head. Back and forth from side to side. Over and over and over again. Caroline had seen an animal do that once, in a zoo; it was blind, and it moved its head like
that, utterly lost. And she applied the lash of pedantry along with the ridicule, cutting deep and swift.

“Nazareth, you’re a linguist. One cannot
not
hear. One cannot ‘refuse’ to know, no matter how tempting it may be. You cannot ‘refuse to know’ that an angry skunk had just favored you with its perfume—and you cannot ‘refuse to know’ what we have just told you. You have given us seven Major Encodings; they were all valid.
You now know that
. Spare us your drivel, please.”

“Oh,” moaned the cornered girl, “may God curse you all. . . .”

“Dear me,” said Susannah. “How you talk.”

“Such manners, Missy,” added Thyrsis. “Mercy.”

Tears had begun to pour down Nazareth’s face, and the women were delighted to see them; it was when a woman ought to weep and could not that there was cause for alarm. But they hurt for her all the same, as she tongue-lashed them.

“It wasn’t enough that you lied to me,” cried Nazareth, “and stole my things, and sneaked my notebook, and used my work without even asking me, and pretended all the time to be my friends! That wasn’t enough, was it? No, you hadn’t done enough, with just those things! That didn’t satisfy you, did it? It’s like the men say, you’ve got nothing to do, so you think up wicked plots . . . and now you are trying to blackmail me! And you laugh! You blackmail me, and you
laugh
! Oh, God curse you . . . God curse you. . . .”

That was very good, they thought. It showed that she did understand. She had a scrap of knowledge here, a scrap there . . . enough to know that Encodings were precious. The little girls heard the stories at their mother’s knees, when their mothers had time to tell them, and from the women of the Barren Houses otherwise. How women, in the long ago time when women could vote and be doctors and fly spaceships—a fantasy world for those girlchildren, as fabulous and glittering as any tale of castles and dragons—how women, even then, had begun the first slow gropings toward a language of their own.

The tales were told again and again, and embroidered lovingly with detail; and prominent in their ornament were the jewels of the Encodings.
A word for a perception that had never had a word of its own before
. Major Encodings, the most precious because they were truly newborn to the universe of discourse. Minor Encodings, which always came in the wake of a Major one, because it would bring to mind related concepts that could be lexicalized on the same pattern, still valuable. “A woman
who gives an Encoding to other women is a woman of valor, and all women are in her debt forevermore.”

They memorized the list, short because for so many years no one had dared to keep records written down, like the Begats of the Bible. “And Emily Jefferson Chornyak in her lifetime gave to us three Major Encodings and two Minor; and Marian Chornyak Shawnessey, that was sister to Fiona Chornyak Shawnessey, in her lifetime gave us one Major Encoding and nine Minor; and her sister Fiona Shawnessey, in her lifetime . . .” They learned it all, and they gave it the value women put into their voices and their eyes, and they guarded it. “Don’t tell your father, now, or any of the boys, or any of the men at all. They’ll only laugh. It’s a
woman’s
secret.” But of course the little girls were told that this secret was all a part of Langlish. . . .

Nazareth looked as if she would faint, and they put her head down between her knees until the color came back to her face, and then moved her to the company couch in the parlor to lie down. The couch on which no Barren House woman ever sat, because when its coverings wore out they would have to petition the men for money to have it redone. It was the emergency couch.

“Do you feel better now, Natha?”

“I hate you,” was all she said.

Of course she did not hate them. They knew what she was thinking. If she used the motherwit of death she had learned along with the list of names, she did not destroy just her own self. Like every little girl, she had asked, “Why can’t we
talk
it, our language? In private, where the men won’t hear?” And had been told, “Because we do not have enough Encodings yet.” How many years would women wait for their own native tongue, just because she, Nazareth, did not have sufficient strength to cope with her life? It made no difference that she thought the tongue was Langlish, and that she did not even know that Láadan existed; the effect was the same. It was the soft net of guilt, that tightened at every move, that Nazareth hated.

She was a woman of the Lines. It might gnaw her heart hollow, but she would do her duty, because she understood—however dimly—what that duty meant. She lay there dulled, all the light in her put out by their merciless words. A prisoner hears, “You are sentenced to life”; Nazareth felt that now, more sharply than she had ever had to feel it before. But she would learn. Every woman was a prisoner for life; it was not some burden that she bore uniquely. She would have all the company she could ever need.

* * *

Later, lying restless in her bed and listening with half an ear in case one of the invalid women might want her, Caroline wished they could have dared tell her just a little more. That they could have given her some simple gift of knowledge. Told her that there
was
a language called Láadan; that women had chosen its eighteen sounds with tender care—they hadn’t wanted other women to have to struggle to pronounce it just because those whose lot it was to construct it happened to have English as their first Terran language. It would have pleased Nazareth to know that. It would have pleased her even more to know that Langlish, with its endlessly growing list of phonemes and the constant changes in its syntax, all the nonsensical phenomena, was only a charade. A decoy to keep the men from discovering the real language. It might have comforted her a little to know that the lengthy and solemn yearly meeting of the Encoding Project Central Caucus, at which all that had been done on Langlish in the preceding year was either undone or vastly complicated—by unanimous resolution—
was
the elaborate folly the men considered it to be, and just as hilarious as they considered it to be, and that it was so
deliberately
. Because the one thing the women could not risk was that some man should take the Project seriously. It would have been something to give Nazareth, to tell her any one of those things.

But they hadn’t dared do it. Who could know how much resistance Nazareth, not even fifteen yet, would have under stress? All of them feared the day when some woman, driven beyond her endurance, would fling in the face of a detested man, “You think you know so much! You don’t even know that the women have a
real
language of their own, one you men have never even suspected existed! You
stupid
fool, to believe that we women of the Lines would put together a deformity like Langlish and call it a language!”