Native Tongue (48 page)

“No,” they said. No, he had it exactly right. And by
God
they would not stand for it.

“All right, we’re agreed. We can’t live with the bitches, and we can’t find any way to cure them of whatever it is they’ve come down with.”

“It’s unbearable, Chornyak,” blurted young Luke. “It’s unbearable!”

James Nathan nodded slowly, pleased. This wasn’t going to take as long as he’d expected. He’d thought there would be a lot of hedging and waffling, a lot of “perhaps I am exaggerating the situation” and “it may well be that I have only imagined this” and similar offputting. There’d been none of that.

“The question, then, is what we are going to do about it,” he stated flatly.

“Damn right.”

“Except,” Emmanuel Belview pointed out, “that there isn’t anything we
can
do about it. That’s precisely the problem. They’re fucking
saints
—how are we going to punish them for
that
?”

“I don’t think we should punish them.”

“What?”

“What? What do you mean, not punish them?”

He held up both hands against the clamor, and hushed them.

“If we can’t live with them,” said James Nathan, enjoying himself very much, “let’s live without them.”

“
What?
”

The immediate racket was so completely disorganized that he could only laugh, and wait; and he was sorry he wouldn’t have anyone to listen to him talk about the disorderly way they’d behaved, after this was over. It would have been a relief to talk about it—to talk to a real woman about it.

“Gentlemen? Could I have a little quiet, please?” he tried.

“I said,” he repeated when he finally had them reasonably attentive again, “let’s live without them, since we can’t live with them. We need them for many things, I know that. Not only for breeding. We need them, and need them badly, to do their share in the interpreting and translating booths. We’re spread so thin
already that we couldn’t begin to keep up with the work without them—we can’t afford to dispense with them. But, gentlemen, we do
not
have to live with them!”

“But—”

“They are total wet blankets,” he continued. “They take every smallest fraction of pleasure out of life. Being with them is like being sentenced to life imprisonment with some terribly charming elderly maiden aunt that you hardly know and don’t care to know better. And I repeat, we do not have to
do
it!”

He leaned forward to make his point.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “the solution is right under our noses. I opened this meeting by telling that there hasn’t been one like it since the day our forefathers met to work out the establishment of the first Barren House. Right here. In this room, at this table. And for almost the same reason, different only in scope—because the barren women were an intolerable pain in the ass and they had to be gotten out of the men’s hair. Without—and this is crucial!—without sacrificing any of the essential services they provided. We have only to follow the excellent example they set us!”

“By God,” said one of the Shawnesseys. “He means build them houses. By God!”

“Exactly!” James Nathan struck the table with his fist, and beside him David was laughing openly, delighted. “The precedent already has been set. The barren women have had separate houses, have lived apart from the men, all these years. It’s been no problem. It hasn’t interfered in any way with their performance of their duties. It has worked superbly, agreed? Well! We need only extend that privilege to
all
our women. Not move them to the Barren House, those buildings aren’t large enough or suitably equipped. But build them houses of their own, gentlemen. Women’s Houses! Every one of the Households has land enough to build a separate women’s residence, put it close by as we’ve done with the Barren Houses . . . where it will be convenient when we need to see a woman for some reason, sexual or otherwise, but where the women will be
out of our way
.”

“It could be done,” said a senior man cautiously.

“Of course it could.”

James Nathan could see the relief spreading over them, the loosening of the tension that had held them when they first came into this room. They were thinking what it would be like . . . to have the women out of their lives and yet close enough for those times when only a woman would do.

The objection that he was waiting for, the one about the cost, came almost immediately.

“I was waiting for that,” he said.

“Chornyak, it would cost millions. Thirteen separate residences? There are a hell of a lot of women in the Lines, man. You’re talking about an immense sum of money.”

“I don’t give one scrawny damn,” he told them.

“But, Chornyak—”

“I don’t care what it costs,” he went on grimly. “We have the money. God knows, we’ve never spent any. We have money to build ten Women’s Houses for each of the Lines and not even dent our accounts. You know it, and I know it—that’s one of the very rare benefits of a hundred years of avoiding all conspicuous consumption. The money is there. We have always lived in ostentatious austerity to keep the public happy. . . . we’ve done enough, and we’re entitled. Let’s spend that money, before we all go raving mad.”

“It’s the public that will go raving mad,” said one of the men, “They’ll never stand for it. There’ll be
riots
again, Chornyak! Remember the 25th Amendment to the Constitution? No mistreatment of women allowed. We’ll never get away with it!”

“Perceive this,” James Nathan insisted. “There won’t be any real problem. Not if we do this properly. We point to the precedent, to the Barren Houses . . . we go on and on about how happy our women are to go to them, which is true. And we take pains, gentlemen, we take exquisite pains, to make these Women’s Houses superb places to be. We will not leave ourselves open to even the hint of a charge that we are abusing or neglecting our women! We spend whatever it costs to build them fine houses, beautiful houses, houses furnished and equipped with all the crap women always want, everything they could possibly need within the limits of reason. Our comsets are falling apart, for example, we’ve let that go on as an ecomony measure—we’ll put brand new systems in for the women. We’ll give them gardens—they’re all crazy for gardens. Fountains. Whatever. We’ll build them residences that the public can go through, if they insist, and satisfy themselves that we are providing the women with every comfort, every convenience, every facility. Let them send teams of inspectors out if they like . . . they’ll find nothing to criticize. And gentlemen, the public will
envy
us.”

They thought about that, and he saw a few grins as they began to understand.

“The men will envy us,” he said simply, “because we get to
live every man’s dream. No women in our houses to foul up our lives and interfere with us—but women in abundance just a few steps away, when we choose to enjoy their company.”

“The
men
will envy us,” said Dano Mbal. “The
men
.”

“Isn’t that what matters?”

“It brings the obvious to mind, Chornyak.”

“Explain it to me . . . it may not be as obvious to me as it is to you.”

“Mention the men,” said Dano, “one thinks of the women. Their women will not envy ours, shut off in separate buildings in that fashion. They will pity our poor women—you know they will. And that is a good thing in its way, since the smaller the population that envies us the less trouble there will be. But what about
our
women, James Nathan? They’re not going to just smile and curtsey and move next door into an upgraded harem, man! This is going to put a considerable dent in their saintly demeanor, because they are going to fight like tigresses.”

“Let them fight, then,” said James Nathan. “What can they do? They have no legal rights in this matter, so long as they cannot claim that they’re being deprived of anything—and I have explained to you that we would make absolutely certain they couldn’t make that claim. Nothing but the best for our women, I promise you! So they fight it, so they have hysterics, so what, Dano? Men have been able to control women without difficulty since the beginning of time—surely we are not such poor examples of the
male
homo sapiens that we cannot continue in the ancient tradition? Are you suggesting, Dano Mbal, that we men of the Lines are not
capable
of controlling our women?”

“Of course not, Chornyak. You know I am suggesting no such thing.”

“Very well, then. The women have only themselves to blame for this, my friends.
They
have decided, in some incomprehensible female way, to turn themselves into multilingual robots—it was not we men who set them on that course. They’ve made their beds, as the saying goes; let them lie in them. They have no money, they are legally not even of age . . . what can they do to stop us?”

“They can bitch. They can raise hell.”

“Then the more quickly we get this done, the more quickly we’ll be rid of their bitching and their hell-raising. I move we vote. At once. Time’s a-wasting, gentlemen.”

* * *

There was a certain amount of discussion, a few objections, some grudging compromises had to be made . . . that was to be anticipated. It was how the game was played. But in the end they agreed unanimously, as James Nathan had known from the start they would. And when that point was reached, and the vote properly recorded, he punched the keys that would display the holos he’d had prepared especially for this meeting. He intended to spend plenty of credits; they had the money, they could afford to spend it, and he’d been serious about that. But there was no reason to
waste
money, and he’d spent many careful hours with David, the two of them working out every detail of the basic plan. There was no reason at all why the residences couldn’t be sufficiently uniform to allow for purchasing all the materials in huge quantities, at correspondingly huge savings.

In the Barren Houses, when the announcement was made, the women first sat shocked into total silence, staring at one another. And then their eyes began dancing, and they smiled, and then they laughed until they had no strength left to laugh any more.

“We were going to flee into the woods. . . .”

“With babies on our backs . . .”

“Dig ourselves forts in the desert . . .”

“Oh, dear heaven. . . .”

“We were going to be shut up in the attics . . . oh, lord. . . .”

Even Aquina had to admit that it was funny, although she felt obligated to warn them that this was probably all just a trick to lull them into a sense of false security. Before the men began the
real
action against them.

First they said, “Oh, Aquina, don’t start!”

And then they all thought of it together, and they backed Nazareth to the wall.

“Nazareth, you
knew
.”

“I didn’t.”

“You
did
. That’s why you always stalled . . . always said that it would be all right, always did your best not to be here when we had planning sessions. You
knew
. Nazareth Joanna,
how
did you know?”

Nazareth stared at the floor, and at the ceiling, and everywhere except at them, and begged them to let it pass.

“Can’t you just be satisfied?” she asked them. “We don’t have to flee anywhere, we don’t have to erect battlements and woman ramparts and move into caves with lasers at the ready . . . we just have to go on about our business, with a great deal
less inconvenience than we’ve ever had to put up with in all our lives.”

“Nazareth,” said Caroline, “if we have to tie you to a tree, you are going to explain.”

“I was never
able
to explain anything,” Nazareth wailed.

“Try. At least try.”

“Well.”

“Try!”

“Perceive this . . . there was only one reason for the Encoding Project, really, other than just the joy of it. The hypothesis was that if we put the project into effect it would
change reality
.”

“Go on.”

“Well . . . you weren’t taking that hypothesis seriously. I was.”

“We were.”

“No. No, you weren’t. Because all your plans were based on the
old
reality. The one
before
the change.”

“But Nazareth, how can you plan for a new reality when you don’t have the remotest idea what it would be like?” Aquina demanded indignantly. “That’s not possible!”

“Precisely,” said Nazareth. “We have no science for that. We have pseudo-sciences, in which we extrapolate for a reality that would be nothing more than a minor variation on the one we have . . . but the science of actual reality change has not yet been even proposed, much less formalized.”

She didn’t like the way they were looking at her, or the way they were moving back. She hadn’t liked it before, when they were crowding her, but this was worse. And inevitable; she had known it couldn’t be avoided.

“What did
you
do, then, Nazareth,” Grace asked her in a strange voice, “while we made fools of ourselves?”

Nazareth leaned against the wall, and looked at them bleakly. It was hopeless. Probably the little girls who spoke Láadan well could have said what she needed to say, but she couldn’t even begin.
I had faith?
Could she say that?