Native Tongue Read online

  “Nazareth is barren now,” said Jason, aware that he’d been the only one to laugh at Aaron’s quip and anxious to demonstrate that there was more to him than that. “She’s nearly forty years old, and she was no beauty even when she was young. What earthly need has she got for breasts? It’s absurd. It’s a non-issue. It wasn’t worth five minutes, much less a meeting. I agree with Aaron—I move we end this discussion, vote, and adjourn.”

  “And do what? Let her die?”

  Paul John cleared his throat, and the senior men looked politely at the ceiling. They were going to have to spend more time with Kenneth, that was obvious. Perhaps a few words to Mary Sarah . . .

  “Christ, Kenneth, that’s a stupid thing to say!” That was Jason, feeling his oats. “There’s plenty of money in the women’s Individual Medical Accounts to cover all the treatment Nazareth needs. Who said anything about letting her die? We don’t let women die, you moron—do you believe everything you read in the news about linguists? Still?”

  Thomas sighed then, loud enough to be heard, and caught a sharp glance from Aaron. Aaron would be thinking that he was tired this morning. Tired, and—to the well trained eye—on a thin edge of strain. Aaron would be thinking it was high time Thomas stepped down and passed the running of this Household on to someone younger and more able, preferably Thomas Blair 2nd because Aaron knew he’d be able to push him around. Thomas smiled at Aaron, acknowledging the thought, and let his eyes speak for him—it’ll be many a long year yet before I turn chornyak Household over to anybody, you conceited bastard—and then he raised one hand to end the argument between Kenneth and Jason.

  “See here—” Kenneth began, before Thomas cut him off.

  “Linguists do not say ‘see here,’ Kenneth. Nor do they say ‘Look here’ or ‘Listen here’ or ‘Get this.’ Please try for a less biased manner of expression.” Thomas was a patient man, and he intended to keep trying with this stubborn and impetuous youngster. He’d seen far rougher diamonds in his time—and the four children Kenneth had sired for them so far were superb specimens.

  Kenneth obviously didn’t understand what difference his choice of sensory predicates made here in the bowels of the great house, miles from any member of the public who might risk contamination from his flaws of phrasing, but he had learned manners enough to keep his opinions to himself. (He couldn’t keep it off his face, of course, but he didn’t know that, and they had no reason to tell him.) He nodded his apology, and started over.

  “Perceive this,” he said carefully. “There is also plenty of money in the women’s IMAs to pay for the breast regeneration. I keep the accounts, remember? I’m in a position to know what there is and what there isn’t money for. It’s a piddling sum of money . . . only a cell or two to be implanted, and some rudimentary stimulation to initiate the regeneration of the glands. That is elementary biology—and elementary accounting! It’s about the price of a wrist computer, as a matter of fact, and we’ve bought forty of those this year. How do we explain that we’re unwilling to authorize that small a sum for the benefit of someone who’s been so efficient and so sturdy and so productive a ‘receptacle’? I’m well aware I wasn’t born a linguist—even without Aaron’s constant reminders—but I am a member of this Household now, I am entitled to be heard, I am not ignorant, and I tell you that I am uncomfortable with this decision.”

  “Kenneth,” said Thomas, and the kindness in his voice was genuine, “we value the compassion and the quality of empathy that you bring to us. I want you to know that. We sorely need such input. We spend so much of our time sharing the worldviews of beings who are not human that we are far too likely to become a little other than human ourselves. We need someone like you to remind us of that, from time to time.”

  “Then, why—”

  “Because whatever we can afford in the way of actual monies, actual total numbers of credits expended, we cannot afford to spend them on sentimental gestures. And I’m sorry if it distresses you, Kenneth, but that’s all it would be. We all regret that, but it remains true. The rule which says NO LINGUIST SPENDS ONE CENT THAT THE PUBLIC MIGHT VIEW AS CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION holds here, as it holds for every Household of the Lines, with absolute rigor.”

  “But—”

  “You know very well, Kenneth, because you come from the public—and unlike Aaron, I don’t consider that a deficit—you know that no member of the public would indulge a middle-aged and barren woman in the manner that you are proposing. Do you want us to be the Household responsible for another round of anti-linguist riots, son? For the sake of one foolish woman, already overindulged her whole life long and now making the usual feminine mountain out of a pair of thoroughly worn out mole hills? Surely you don’t want that, Kenneth, however sympathetic you may be toward Nazareth’s demands.”

  “One moment,” said Aaron flatly. “I’ll clarify that. Nazareth has not demanded anything; she has merely asked.”

  “Quite right,” Thomas replied. “I overstated the case.”

  “But the point remains, Thomas; the point remains. I’m sure Kenneth has now come to see this matter in a less . . . maudlin light.”

  Kenneth stared down at the table and said nothing more, and they all relaxed. They could have just overruled him, of course, without the chitchat. That option was always open to them. But it was preferable to avoid that sort of thing whenever it could be avoided. Linguists lived too much and too deeply in one another’s pockets for family feuds not to be a substantial hindrance to the normal conduct of affairs—and with 91 under this roof Chornyak Household was one of the most crowded of them all. You tried for peace, in those circumstances . . . and Aaron’s readiness to sacrifice that peace just to score a point or two was a major reason why Thomas would see to it that he never had an opportunity to achieve any real power in this house. It was Aaron who truly did not learn, and apparently could not. And without Kenneth’s excuses.

  “Well, then,” said Paul John, rubbing his hands together, “we’re agreed, are we? We’ll authorize the transfer of funds for the treatments to destroy the diseased uterus and breasts of the lady and order that done at once, and that is all we will do. Correct, gentlemen?”

  Thomas glanced around the table, and at the comset screens, and waited a few polite seconds to be sure nobody wanted his attention. And nodded, when it became clear that they didn’t.

  “Anything else?” he asked. “Anyone not clear on the new contract in from the Department of Analysis & Translation on those mirror-image dialects? Anyone want to protest the terms they’re offering? Remembering, please, that it’s a computer job from start to finish . . . not much effort there. Any personal business? Any objection to recording the vote on Nazareth’s medical care as unanimous? No?”

  “Good,” he said, and brought the side of his hand down on the table in the chop gesture of adjournment. “Then we’re through. Aaron, you’ll see to it that your wife is advised promptly of our decision and that she goes immediately to the hospital. I want no media accusations later that we delayed and endangered her life, no matter how trivial that may seem. It’s no more to our advantage to be accused of callous mistreatment of a woman than of lavish spending of our misgotten billions. You’ll see to it?”

  “Certainly,” said Aaron stiffly. “I’m familiar with my obligations. And quite as sensitive to the problem of public opinion as anyone else in this room. I’ll have Mother take care of it right away.”

  “Your mother-in-law’s not available at the moment, Aaron,” said Thomas. “She’s sitting in on some kind of folderol with the Encoding Project this morning. Get one of the other women to do it in her place, or do it yourself.”

  Aaron opened his mouth to make a remark. And closed it again. He knew what his father-in-law would say if he objected again to the time the women wasted in their silly “Encoding Project.” It keeps them busy and contented, Aaron, he’d say. The barren ones and those too old for other work need something harmless to do with their time, Aaron, he’d say. If they
weren’t involved in their interminable “project” they’d be complaining and getting in the way, Aaron—be glad they are so easily amused. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, Aaron. No point in going through all that yet another time.

  Furthermore, Thomas was right. Those rare retired women who weren’t interested in the Project’s addlepated activities were forever under foot, interfering just because they were bored. He said nothing, and headed quickly out through the side door, up the stairs, and into the gardens, where one of his sons was waiting for him to come discuss a problem in translation. He’d been waiting too long, thought Aaron in irritation. At seven even a male child can’t be expected to have unlimited patience.

  He was halfway down the path to the garden, already at the banks of orange day-lilies, that the women grew in profusion because not even the most fanatical anti-linguist could consider them an expensive waste, before he realized that he’d forgotten to send his wife the message after all. God, but women were a nuisance with their unending complaints and their fool illnesses. Cancer, for godsakes, in 2205! No male human had had cancer in . . . oh, fifty years at least, he’d be willing to bet on it. Puny creatures, women, and hardly worth their keep—certainly not worth their irritation.

  His annoyance at having to go back to the house and carry out his promise very nearly caused him to rip up by the roots an inexcusable yellow rosebush, half-hidden among the day-lilies. Only one, but it was asking for trouble. He could hear the citizens now. “Work and slave and bleed for every cent and don’t even have money to keep the slidewalks decent because half our taxes go to the effing Lingoes, god curse them all, and they throw it all away on their underground palaces and their effing rose gardens . . .” He could imagine the slogans, the jingles, the media solemnly discussing the actual figures for rosebushes purchased by linguists in the period from 2195 to 2205—the media were fond of decades because it was so easy to run up the statistics for ten-year chunks. And he’d bet that the luscious yellow rosebush was one more of those little acts of sabotage Great-Aunt Sarah so enjoyed slipping past the accountants.

  He reminded himself for the fifteenth time—somehow he must find space in his schedule this year to confer with their Congressional lobbyists about the legislation that would forbid females to buy anything whatsoever without a man’s written approval. This business of letting them have pocket money, and making exceptions for flowers and candy and romance media and bits of frippery was forever leading to unforeseen complications . . . astonishing how clever women were at distorting the letter of the law! Like the chimps, futzing around with their instructions in the military, and getting into pranks you’d never forbidden because never in your wildest fantasies had you foreseen them. Who’d have thought you had to formally teach a chimp not to shit on its weapons, for example?

  He would have preferred to see “No Females Allowed” signs in all places of business, himself. But once again he had to bow to the argument that the creatures were a lot less trouble if they were allowed to spend their idle hours wandering around looking at things in the stores instead of doing all their buying by comset as men did. There was no end to it, always another concession to be made—and it was a certain amount of consolation to be able to say that the women of the Lines, linguist women, had no idle hours.

  If anything could have tempted Aaron William Adiness-Chornyak to such black blasphemy as the concept of a Creatress, it was the seemingly irrational creation of females. Surely the Almighty could have had the simple gentlemanly courtesy to make women mute? Or to see to it that they had some biological equivalent of an Off/On switch for the use of the men obliged to deal with them? If He hadn’t had the ingenuity to do without them altogether?

  “Count your blessings,” his own father would have said. “You could have been born before the Whissler Amendments, you know. You could have lived in a time when females were allowed to vote, when females sat in the Congress of the United States and a female was allowed to call herself a Supreme Court Justice. You think about that, boy, and you be grateful.”

  Aaron chuckled, remembering the first time he’d heard about that. He’d been seven years old, the same age as the boy he hurried now to meet. And he’d been punished, made to memorize a dozen full pages of useless noun declensions from an equally useless artificial language, for standing there seven years old and shocked silly enough to call Ross Adiness a liar. He had forgotten those sets of noun endings long ago, but the shock had never left him.

  “Nazareth?” Clara said, and stopped short to stare.

  Nazareth Joanna Chornyak Adiness, twin sister of James Nathan Chornyak, eldest daughter in this Household, mother of nine, looked like nothing so much as a battered servomechanism at that moment. Ready to be traded in. Ready for scrap. The unsavory image struck the woman Aaron had sent to deliver his message, struck with a force that she hastily suppressed. It would be inexcusable for her to pass the men’s decision along with a look of repulsion on her own face as its accompaniment.

  But there was something repulsive about her. Something about the gaunt body, the graying hair drawn viciously back and skewered to the head with cruel pins, something about the rigid posture that was the reaction of a dogged pride to intolerable exhaustion and strain. She did not look anything like a noble wreck of a woman, or even a tortured animal . . . could you, Clara wondered, torment any machine into a state like Nazareth’s?

  And then Clara caught herself, and shuddered. God forgive me, she thought, that I could see her that way. I will not see her that way! This is a living woman before me, she told herself sternly, not one of those skinny cylinders with a round knob atop that scuttles silently through the houses and workplaces of nonlinguists doing the dirty work. This is a living woman, to whom harm can be done, and I will speak to her without distorted perceptions.

  “Nazareth?” she said gently. “My dear. Have you fallen asleep there?”

  Nazareth jumped a little, startled, and she turned away from the transparent walls to the Interface where her youngest child was serenely stacking up plastiblocks under the friendly gaze of the current Alien-in-Residence.

  “I’m sorry, Aunt Clara,” she said. “I didn’t hear you . . . I’m afraid my mind was a million miles away. Do you need me for something?”

  Putting it off, Clara gestured with the point of her chin at the child, now laughing at some comment from the A.I.R. “He’s doing well, isn’t he?”

  “I think so. He seems to be putting sentences together already . . . little ones, but certainly sentences. Not bad for just barely two years old, with three languages to sort out at once. And his English doesn’t seem slowed down at all.”

  “Three languages,” mused Clara. “That’s not so bad, dear. . . . I’ve known them to lay on half a dozen, when there weren’t so many infants available.”

  “Ah, but you remember Paul Hadley? Remember how worried we all were? Three years in the Interface with that northern Alphan, and nothing in any language but a half dozen baby words.”

  “It turned out all right,” Clara reminded her. “That’s all that matters. That sort of thing happens now and then.”

  “I know that. That’s why I worry that it might happen again. Especially this time.”

  Clara cleared her throat, and her hands made a small useless gesture. “It’s not likely,” she said.

  Nazareth raised her eyes, then, and looked at her aunt. Her face was the faded yellow of cheap paper.

  “You’ve come from the men, Aunt Clara,” she said, “and you’re trying to avoid telling me what they decided. It’s no good . . . we could find a dozen frivolous topics to postpone it with, but you will eventually have to tell me, you know.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s not good, is it?”

  “It could be worse.”

  Nazareth swayed then, and put one hand against the Interface wall to steady herself, but Clara made no move to go help her. Nazareth allowed no one to help her, and she had good reason.

  “We
ll?” she asked. “What have they decided, Clara?”

  “You’re to have the surgery.”

  “The laser surgery.”

  “Yes. But not the breast regeneration.”

  “Are the women’s accounts so low as all that?”

  “No, Natha—it wasn’t a financial decision.”

  “Ah. . . . I perceive.” Nazareth’s hands moved, one to each of her breasts, and she covered them tenderly, as a lover might have covered them against a chill wind.

  The two women looked at each other, silently. And in the same way that Clara ached for the woman who must accept a wholly avoidable mutilation, Nazareth ached for the woman who had been ordered to carry that message. It was the way of the world, however. And as Clara had pointed out, it could have been worse. They could have refused to authorize the surgery—except that the media would have seized on the story as yet another example of the difference between the linguist and the normal human being.

  “You’re to go right away,” said Clara when she could no longer bear the sight of that blind anguish. “There’s a robobus due by in about fifteen minutes, that stops at the hospital. They want you on it, child. You needn’t take anything with you—just get yourself ready for the street. I’ll help you if you like.”

  “No. Thank you, Aunt Clara, I can manage.” Nazareth’s hands dropped, to be clasped behind her back, out of sight.

  “I’ll have someone authorize the transfer of credits to the hospital account, then,” said the older woman. “No need for you to have to sit there waiting for it to be verified. I can have it done before you get there, if I can find a man not occupied with anything urgent.”