Suzette Elgin - Native Tongue

“Yeah,” agreed Lanky Pugh. “There’d be an ‘unfortunate incident’ that just conveniently happened to vaporize everything out to about two feet past the G.W. property lines. With no danger whatsoever to the population, of course, no cause for alarm, folks, it’s just one of our little routine explosions. Shitshingles, Dolbe… we’re all in this together.”

Brooks Showard laid the horrible pile of distorted tissues that had only recently been a healthy human infant down on the floor at his feet, and he sat down beside it very gently. He laid his head on his knees, wrapped his arms around them, and began to cry. It was only by the quick intervention of Arnold Dolbe that the servomechanism speeding across the floor to pick up what it interpreted as garbage was intercepted. Dolbe snatched the baby from under the edge of the cylinder and almost ran to the vaporizer slot… and when he had shoved the body through it he rubbed his hands violently against the sides of his lab coat, scrubbing them. There goes your boy , Mr. and Mrs. Ned Landry, he thought crazily, and have we got a medal for you !

“Thank you, Dolbe,” sighed Lanky. “I didn’t want to look at that thing any longer, either. It wasn’t really… decent.”

Lanky was thinking of Mr. and Mrs. Ned Landry too. Because he was the one who had to dump all the data out of the computers after each failure, and he remembered stuff like the names of the parents. He wasn’t supposed to. He was supposed to dump it out of his head at the same time. But he was the one who had to write the names down on a piece of paper before he dumped them, and he was the one that had to transfer the names to the data card in his lockbox, so there wouldn’t be any chance of losing what had been dumped. Lanky knew all forty-three sets of names by heart, in numerical order.

In the small conference room, with Showard in reasonable control of himself once again, if you ignored the shaking hands, the four G.W. techs sat and listened while the representative from the Pentagon laid it out for them. Neat and sweet, wasting nothing. He wasn’t overpoweringly pleased with them.

“We have got to crack that language,” he told them bluntly. “And I mean that one hundred percent. Whatever that thing in the Interface has for a language, we’ve got to get at it — it sure as hell can’t use Pan Sig to communicate. We absolutely must find a way to do that — communicate with it, I mean. With it, and all its flickering friends. This is a matter of the utmost urgency.”

“Oh, sure,” said Brooks Showard. “Sure it is.”

“Colonel,” snapped the Pentagon man, “it’s not a question of just wanting to chat with the things, you know. We need what they’ve got, and we can’t do without it. And there’s no way of getting it without negotiating with them.”

“We need what they’ve got… we always ‘need’ what something’s got, General. You mean we want what they’ve got, don’t you?”

“Not this time. Not this time! This time we really do have to have it.”

“At any cost.”

“At any cost. That’s correct.”

“What is it, the secret of eternal life?”

“You know I can’t tell you that,” the general said patiently, as he would have spoken to a fretful woman he was indulgent with.

“We’re supposed to take it on faith, as usual.”

“You can take it on anything you like, Showard! It makes no difference to me what you take it on. But I sit here, empowered by the federal government of this great nation to support you and a rather sizable staff in the carrying out of acts that are so far past illegal and criminal, and so far into unspeakable and unthinkable, that we can’t even keep records on them. And I’m here to give you my sacred oath that I’m not going to participate in that kind of thing for trinkets and gewgaws and a new variety of beads ; and neither are the officials who — with tremendous reluctance, I assure you — authorize me to serve in this capacity.”

Arnold Dolbe flashed his teeth at the general, trying not to think that the uniform was quaint. There were good and excellent reasons for keeping the ancient uniforms, and he was familiar with them. Tradition. Respect for historical values. Antidote to Future Shock Syndrome. Etc. And he wanted to be certain that the general remembered him as a cooperative fellow, a real Team Player in the finest reaganic tradition. He meant to see to it that the general was fully aware of that. He felt that a brief speech was in order, something tasteful but still memorable, and he thought he was not overstating the case when he considered himself to be topnotch at the impromptu brief speech.

“We understand that, General,” he began, all sugar and snakeoil, “and we appreciate it. We are grateful for it. Bee lieve you me, there’s not one member of this team, not one man on this team, that doesn’t support this effort all the way — those without a need to know always excepted, of course. Not that they don’t support the effort, that is — they just don’t know… in detail… what it is that they’re supporting. We do — those of us in the room — we do know. And we feel a certain humility at being chosen for this noble task. Colonel Showard is a little overstressed at the moment, understandably so, but he’s behind you all the way. It’s just been an unpleasant morning here at Government Work, don’t you see. And yet — ”

“I’m sure it has,” said the Pentagon man, cutting him off in a way that hurt Dolbe deeply. “I’m sure it has been bloody hell. We know what you men go through here, and we honor you for it. But it’s something that’s got to be done, for the sake of preserving civilization on this planet. I mean that, gentlemen! Literally for the sake of preventing the end of humankind on this green and golden Earth of ours — the permanent end, I might add. I’m not talking a few decades in the colonies while things cool off and then we can move back planetside. I’m talking the end . Period. Final. Total.”

He said it as if he believed it. It was in fact possible that he did believe it, if only because he was a good soldier and you cannot be a good soldier if you think that those up the chain of command from you are telling you lies. And of course they were good soldiers too, and they wouldn’t think that those who had fed them the same line were lying to them . Nobody knew precisely where the buck stopped in this business. The general had a feeling that the buck went around and around on a möbius strip. Sometimes he wondered who was in charge. Not the President, certainly. It was one of his primary duties to make certain that the President never knew much about this little twig on the executive branch. The general had no illusions about the Pentagon not being part of the executive branch.

He steepled his fingers, and he looked at them long and hard, noting automatically that only Dolbe began to squirm under his gaze.

“Well, gentlemen?” he asked. “What are you going to do now? I’ve got to take some kind of reasonable answer back to my superiors — no details, mind, just a rough idea — and they aren’t feeling all that patient these days. We’ve run out of fooling around time, gentlemen. We’re right up against the wire on this one.”

There was a thick silence, with the general’s fingers drumming lightly on the table, and the air exchange whirring high and thin, and the American flag jerking limply every now and then in the mechanical breeze.

“Gentlemen?” the general prodded. “I’m a very busy man.”

“Oh, hellfire,” said Brooks Showard. He knew. Either he did the talking, or they’d all sit there until the end of time. Which, to hear the general tell it, wouldn’t be all that long. “You know what we’ve got to do next. You know perfectly well. Since you government/military shits are too chicken to slap every last goddam linguist into prison for treason or murder or inciting to riot or pandering or sodomy or whatever the hell it takes to make the fucking Lingoes cooperate — ”