Native Tongue (6 page)

“Even then,” Caroline put in, “she may not come to us. Not if her husband wants her to stay with him—not if she wears well. Or if she’s lucky and the man’s fond of her beyond just her body.”

“Or if she’s useful to him somehow,” said Thyrsis, with a sharp note to her voice that caught their attention. So that was it . . . she’d come to Chornyak Barren House against her husband’s wishes, because she was useful to him in some way, clever at something he liked having her do. And if she’d tried to go to Shawnessey Barren House he’d have been close by to be forever pressuring her to come back to the main house. They would be interested in knowing how she’d managed to get around his authority, come the time she felt free to tell them more.

“Damn and damn and damn,” mourned Aquina. “That’s forty years or more
wasted
. Don’t you understand that? Don’t any of you understand that?”

“Aquina, it’s not as though the whole Encoding Project was dependent on Nazareth—we are all working on it. And women at the other Barren Houses are working on it, Be reasonable.”

They soothed her, all of them. Soothed and coaxed, anxious to restore her perspective on this in spite of her distress. She was overtired, she would feel better about it in the morning, she would see that it was just that she’d been under such a strain. On and on. . . .

Aquina let them talk, and she kept her own counsel. Tomorrow, first thing, what she would do was go looking for Nazareth and begin trying to find out where that notebook was hidden. Her own priorities, thank god, were properly ordered.

Chapter Three

The only way there is to
acquire
a language, which means that you know it so well that you never have to be conscious of your knowledge, is to be exposed to that language while you are still very young—the younger the better. The infant human being has the most perfect language-learning mechanism on Earth, and no one has ever been able to duplicate that mechanism or even to analyze it very well. We know that it involves scanning for patterns and storing those that are found, and that’s something we can build a computer to do. But we’ve never been able to build a computer that can acquire a language. In fact, we’ve never even been able to build a computer than can learn a language in the imperfect way that a human
adult
can learn one.

We can take a language that’s already known, and program a computer to use it by putting the language into the computer piece by piece. And we can build a computer that’s programmed to scan for patterns and store them very efficiently. But we can’t put those two computers side by side and expect the one that doesn’t know the language to acquire it from the other one. Until we find out how to do that (as well as a number of other things), we are dependent on human infants for the acquisition of all languages, whether Terran or extraterrestrial; it’s not the most efficient system we can imagine, but it’s the most efficient system that we have.

(from Training Lecture #3,

for junior staff—U.S. Department of Analysis & Translation)

SPRING 2180. . . .

Ned Landry had been pleased with his wife Michaela, as well he might have been, since she had fit his bill of specifications almost to the last and most trivial detail. (There was that slight tendency to poor muscle tone in the hips—but he wasn’t a fanatic. He knew that he couldn’t expect total perfection.) It had cost his parents a tidy sum to pay the agency fee for her, but it had been well worth it, and he had long since paid them back with interest. Just picking a wife from among whatever gaggle of females happened to be available in his circle of acquaintances had never appealed to Ned; he had wanted something with quality guaranteed, and he had never regretted waiting. It had been a little annoying, having his own marriage nothing but a list of specs in a file when his friends were well on their way to being heads of families already—but they envied him now. They all envied him, and that pleased him.

Michaela did all the things he wanted a wife to do. She saw to his house and his meals and his comfort and his sexual needs. She kept so smoothly running a setup that he never had time to think,
I wonder why Michaela hasn’t
. . . done something or other, because she always
had
done it; often it wasn’t until after she had seen to some detail, some change, that he realized it had been a thing that he wanted. The flowers in the vases were always fresh; clean garments appeared as if by magic in his gardrobes; a tunic that had seemed to him about to show signs of wear either appeared so expertly renovated that it looked new, or was replaced between one day and the next . . . never once did he have to miss something or do without anything.

Ned had only to mention in passing that a particular food sounded interesting, and in the next day or two it would appear on his table—and if he didn’t care for it after all, it would never appear again. Household repairs, maintenance, cleaning, the small garden of which he was justifiably proud, any sort of household business matter, upkeep on his assets and his collections—all these things were attended to in his absence. His only contribution to the perfect serenity of his home was to look over the printouts his accountant provided for him at the end of every month and sign or refuse the authorization for spending whatever sums Michaela had requested.

It was a blissful existence; he treasured it. Except at his work, where no woman’s influence could intrude and there was therefore no way Michaela
could
smooth the waters, Ned Landry was spared even the memory of irritation. And she was always there,
her butter-blond hair in the elegant chignon he liked so much for the contrast if offered when, in his bed, she let it down to fan over the pillows like a net of pale silk.

He valued Michaela for all the things that she did, he knew her worth, and he saw to it that she was rewarded not only by the customary birthday and holiday gifts expected of any courteous husband but with small extra ones that he had no obligation to make. He was careful not to establish any pattern that might lead her to take that kind of indulgence for granted—when you had something as fine as Michaela in your pocket, you didn’t act like an ass and take chances with her. He had no intention of spoiling her. But once in a while, seemingly for no reason, he would bring her some pretty trinket, the sort of foolishness that women always liked. Ned prided himself on understanding what women liked and on his ability to provide it, and Michaela was worth every credit and penny she cost him. Michaela was a thoroughbred, and superbly trained, just as the agency had guaranteed that she would be.

But the thing that mattered most to him about his wife, the thing that was the heart and core of the marriage for him, was none of those usual things. He could have hired almost anyone to do what she did around the house, including the sexual services—although he would have had to be exceedingly careful about that last. He would have been obliged to give orders rather than having his order anticipated, but he could have managed that. He could have bought servomechanisms to carry out many of those orders. And anything he had no permanent arrangement for, he could have dialed up by comset in a matter of minutes.

What really mattered to him, the one service that he could not have simply purchased, was Michaela’s role as listener. Listener! That was beyond price, and had come as a surprise to him.

When he got home from work in the afternoon, Ned liked to unwind for a while. He liked to stand there, maybe pace a bit, with a cigarette in one hand and a glass of straight whiskey in the other, and tell her about his day. What he’d said, and what so-and-so had said back, the sonofabitch, and what he’d said
then
, and how it had showed the sonofabitch, bygod. The good ideas he’d had and how they’d worked out when he tried them. The ideas that should have worked, and would have if it hadn’t been for so-and-so, the stupid jackass. And what he just happened to know about the stupid jackass that might come in handy one of these days.

He liked to pace a while, and then stand there a while, and then pace some more, until he’d gotten rid of the energy from
the morning, talking all of it out of his system. And then when he’d finally loosened up he liked sitting down in his chair and relaxing with the second glass of Scotch and the fifth cigarette—and talking some more.

That listening function of Michaela’s meant a tremendous amount to Ned Landry, because he loved to talk and he loved to tell stories. He loved to take stories and draw them out to a great length and polish them until he found them flawless. Adding a new detail here, inventing a bit of embroidery there, cutting a line that didn’t quite meet his standards. To Ned, that kind of talking was one of the major pleasures of a man’s life.

Unfortunately, he was not
good
at it, for all his excruciating effort, and nobody would listen to him long if they could help it. Talking to people other than Michaela meant that second of attention that tantalized his need; and then the sudden withdrawal, the blank eyes, the glassed-over face, the restless body, the furtive looks at the timespot on the wrist computer. He knew what they were thinking . . . how long, oh lord, how long? That was what they were thinking, no matter how much some of them tried not to show it, for the sake of politeness.

He didn’t understand it. Because he was a man of taste and intelligence and sophistication, and he really worked
hard
at being a raconteur, at shaping and polishing his narratives until they were works of oral art. It seemed to him that if people were too stupid to realize that and appreciate the skill with which he used language, it was their fault, not his . . . he more than did
his
part, and it was his considered opinion that he did it very very well indeed. Nevertheless, it frustrated him that people didn’t want to listen to him talk; it was their fault, but he was the one who paid.

Except for Michaela. If Michaela thought he was boring and pompous and interminable and a windballoon, no tiniest flicker of that judgment had ever showed on her face or in her body or in her words. Even when he was talking about the injustice of a man such as he was being afflicted with seemingly innumerable allergies—and Ned was willing to admit that his allergies were probably not the most gripping conversational topic of the season, he just needed to talk about them sometimes—even then, Michaela always looked interested. She didn’t have to answer him, because he didn’t have any desire for conversation, he just wanted to be listened to,
attended
to; but when she did answer, her voice never carried any of that taint of impatience and boredom that so irritated him in others.

Michaela listened. And she laughed at the lines that he considered
funny. And her eyes brightened at just the places where he meant the tension to build. And she never, not once, in three years of marriage, said, “Could you get to the point, please?” Not once. Sometimes, before he really got a new story worked out, or when he was just bullshitting along about the morning and hadn’t had time to make stories out of it, he would realize that he had maybe wandered off his subject a little, or said something more than once . . . but Michaela never showed any awareness of that. She hung on his words. As he
wanted
them hung on—not slavishly, but tastefully. That was the difference. He could have paid some female to listen slavishly, at so many credits the hour, sure. But you’d know. You’d know she was only listening because of the money, like some kind of a meter running. It wouldn’t be the same. Penny for your words, Mr. Landry? Sure . . .

Michaela was different, she was a woman with genuine class, and there was nothing slavish about the attention she gave him. It was careful attention, it was intense, it was total; it was not slavish. And it fed him. When he got through talking to Michaela, somewhere into the down slope of the afternoon, and was at last ready to do something else, he was in a state of satisfaction that wiped away the rebuffs he got from others as if they’d never happened. At that point Ned believed that he really
was
one of those irresistible talkers, one of those men that anyone would feel privileged to sit down and listen to for hours, as it seemed to him that he ought to be. He knew his stories were as good as anybody else’s . . . hell, he knew they were better. One hell of a lot better! People were just stupid, that’s all; and Michaela made that trivial.

It was that particular thing that the baby ruined for him, when it came. He could have put up with all the other stuff. Having Michaela look tired in the morning instead of showing her usual fresh perfection was annoying; having her attention distracted during lovemaking because the baby was crying was irritating; twice he’d had to point out to her that the vases of flowers needed to be seen to, and once she had even let him run out of Scotch. (That did get to him, considering that all she had to do was push one button on the comset to get it delivered . . . but still, he could have put up with it.)

He understood all these things. It was her first baby, and she wasn’t getting as much sleep as she wanted; he was a reasonable man, and he understood. She had a lot of things to do that she wasn’t used to doing, it was hard on her, sure. Everybody knew you had to coddle new mothers, like you had to coddle pregnant
women. He was willing. He was confident that she would be able to get herself straightened out and back to normal in a month or two, and he didn’t mind giving her all the time she needed. He had no respect at all for a man that didn’t treat his woman fairly, and he wasn’t that kind of man.

But it had never entered his head that the baby wold interfere with the time of
talking
to Michaela! Jeezus, if it had, he would’ve had her sterilized before he even married her. There were brothers to carry on his family line, and nephews all over the place for him to adopt at a suitable age if he wanted somebody to carry on the “son” role under his roof.