Suzette Elgin - Native Tongue

“You know we can’t do that, Colonel!” The general’s lips were as stiff as two slabs of frozen bacon. “If the linguists had any excuse, any excuse, they’d withdraw from every sensitive negotiation we have underway with Aliens, and that would be the end of us! And there wouldn’t be one damn thing we could do about it, Colonel — not one damn thing!”

“ — since, like I said, you’re too chicken to do that and do it right and make it stick, there’s only one thing left. You fellows want to keep your pretty hands clean, I’m sure. But we fellows have got to steal us a linguist infant, a baby Lingoe. On your behalf, or course. For the good of all mankind. How’s that for Plan B?”

They all squirmed, then. Volunteered babies, that was nasty. But stolen babies? It wasn’t that the effing linguists didn’t deserve it, and it wasn’t that they didn’t have babies in hordes and swarms enough to console themselves with if they came up one short. But the baby didn’t exactly deserve it, somehow. They were willing to go along with the religious party line, after a fashion, but none of them was really able to swallow that stuff about the sins of the fathers being visited, etc. Stealing a baby. That was not very nice.

“Their women whelp on the public wards,” Showard observed. “It won’t be difficult.”

“Oh dear.”

The general could hardly believe he’d said that. He tried again.

“Well, by heaven!”

“Yeah?”

“Is that the only alternative remaining to us, Colonel Showard? Are you absolutely certain?”

“You have some other suggestion?” Showard snarled.

“General,” Dolbe put in, “we’ve done everything else. We know that our Interface is an exact duplicate of those the linguists use. We know our procedure is exactly the same as theirs — not that it’s much of a procedure. You put the Alien — or better still, two Aliens, if you can get a pair — in one side. You put the baby in the other. And you get out of their way. That’s all there is to it. That’s what we do, just like that’s what they do — we’ve tried it again and again. And you know what happened when we tried the test-tube babies… it was the same, only it was worse somehow. Don’t ask me to explain that. And we’ve brought in every computer expert, every scientist, every technician, every — ”

“But see here, man — ”

“No, General! There’s nothing to see. We have checked and rechecked and re-rechecked. We have gone over every last variable not just once but many many times. And it has to be, General, it has to be that for some reason known only to the linguists — and I do feel, by the way, that it constitutes treason for them to keep that knowledge to themselves — for some reason known only to them, only linguist infants are capable of learning Alien languages.”

“Some genetic reason, you mean.”

“Well? Look how inbred they are, it’s on the fine line of incest, if you ask me! What are we talking about? Thirteen families! That’s not much of a gene pool. They bring in the odd bit of outside stock now and then, sure, but basically it’s those thirteen sets of genes over and over. Sure, I’d say it’s a genetic reason.”

“General,” Beau added, “all we’re doing here is sacrificing the innocent children of nonlinguists, in something that is never going to work. It’s got to be an infant born of one of the Lines, and that is all there is to it.”

“They deny it,” said the general.

“Well, wouldn’t you deny it, in their place? It suits the traitorous bastards, controlling the whole goddam government, doling out their nuggets of wisdom to us on whatever schedule happens to strike their fancy, living off the backs and the blood of decent people. And if we have to murder innocent babies trying to do what they ought to be doing for us, well, shit, they don’t care. That just puts every American citizen, and every citizen of every country on this globe and in its colonies, all the more at their mercy. Sure they deny it!”

“They’re lying,” Showard summed up, feeling that Beau St. Clair had said about all he was going to say. “Plain flat out lying.”

“You’re sure?”

“Damn right.”

The general made the noise a restless horse makes, and then he sat there and chewed his upper lip. He didn’t like it. If the Lingoes suspected… if there was a leak… and there always were leaks…

“Shit,” said Lanky Pugh, “they’ve got so many babies, they’ll never miss one, long as we can get by with a female. Can we get by with a female?”

“Why not, Mr. Pugh?”

“Well. I mean. Can a female do it?”

The general frowned at Pugh, and then looked at the others for explanation. This was beyond him.

“We keep telling Lanky,” Showard said. “We keep explaining it to him. There is no correlation between intelligence and the acquisition of languages by infants, except at the level of gross retardation where you’ve got a permanent infant. We keep telling him that, but it offends him or something. He can’t seem to handle it.”

“I should think,” said the general, “that Mr. Pugh would want to stay abreast of at least the basic literature on language acquisition. Considering.”

The general was wrong. Lanky Pugh, who had tried to learn three different foreign human languages, because he felt that a computer specialist ought to know at least one other language that wasn’t a computer language — and had had no success — was not about to keep up with the literature on native language acquisition. If Lingoe females could learn foreign languages… Alien languages, for chrissakes!… when they were only babies, then how come he couldn’t even master passable French ? Every linguist kid had to have native fluency in one Alien language, three Terran languages from different language families, American Sign Language, and PanSig — plus reasonable control of as many other Terran languages as they could pick up on the side. And he’d heard that a lot of them were native in two Alien tongues. While he, Lanky Pugh, could speak English. Just English. No, he didn’t like it, and he didn’t want to take any close look at the question. It was something he carefully did not think about any longer.

“… throw his ass right out of here,” Showard was saying. “But it just so happens that he is the top computer tech in the whole world, the top hands-on man, and it just so happens that we can’t do without him, and if he chooses to know absolutely nothing but computers, that’s his privilege. That’s all he’s required to know, General, and he knows that better than anybody, anywhere, anytime. And nevertheless, we are not going to crack Beta-2 with a computer. Sorry.”

“I see,” said the general. He said it with utter finality. And he stood up and picked up his funny hat with all the spangled stuff on it. “None of my business, of course. I’m sure Dolbe here runs a tight ship.”

“General?”

“Yes, Dolbe?”

“Don’t you want to discuss — ”

“ No , he doesn’t want to discuss how we do this cute little kidnapping caper, Dolbe!” shouted Brooks Showard. “For gods sakes , Dolbe!”

The general nodded smartly.

“Right on target,” he agreed. “ Right on target. I wish I didn’t know what I already do know.”

“You asked us, General,” Showard pointed out.

“Yes. I know I did.”

He left, with a smile all around, and he was gone before they could say anything else. The general got in, he did his business, he got out. That was why he was a general, and they were in the baby-stealing business. And the baby-killing business.