Native Tongue (46 page)

“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 should 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.