Suzette Elgin - Native Tongue

“Socialization, Mr. Verdi,” Michaela said.

“Socialization! Damnfool!”

“Mmmmm.”

“I remember what socialization did for me , young lady! Even when they tried to put it in the mass-ed curriculum! It made me de test the Pledge Allegiance and the State Song and the damnfool Civic Anthem and the whole shebang, that’s what it did! Oh, I know, they say that when the kids got nothing but the mass-eds they started to act strange and their folks didn’t feel like they were normal kids… I’ve heard that. I don’t believe a word of it.”

“Mmmmmm.”

“Poor little things. You ever heard Mr. Hampton Carlyle stand up and recite all the verses of Hiawatha at you, little lady?”

“All the verses?”

“Well, it took him a week, you know. Including the gestures… You’re blessed if you never had to go through that, let me tell you. And they’re still doin’ it to the kids, to this day! Oh, and then there’s Artsandcrafts! Whoopee, let’s make a little basket out of paper for the Spring Pageant and stick it full of paper flowers! And there are Special Activites… Oh, I declare, Mrs. Landry, it’d gag a maggot. It’s out of the Middle Ages, that’s what it is.”

“Mmhmmm.”

“When I was a child, I had my work to do. I’d interfaced with an AIRY, and I had to know that. And I had Basque, and one of the Reformed Cherokee dialects, and I had Swedish, and I had Ameslan.”

“Ameslan?”

“American Sign Language, girl, don’t they teach you anything? I had all that, and I had my mass-ed lessons to get, and I had to help out around the place. But I had time to play, and I had time to lie up in a black walnut tree and just dream once in a while, and go wading in the creek… these children now, Mrs. Landry, they don’t have a minute to call their own. Freetime, they’re supposed to get. After they’ve worked all day for the government, and after they’ve gone to Homeroom — if they can fit that in — and done the mass-ed lessons no matter what. And after they’ve put in the extra tutorials with their grammar books and dictionaries, and filled their backup requirements, and after they’ve done such stuff as run hell for leather through a shower and cut their toenails and the like, and after they’ve gone to every family briefing scheduled for them for the evening… if there’s any time left, girl, that’s theirs. That’s their freetime, and precious little of it do they get. Fifteen minutes, if they’re lucky.”

“Mr Verdi?”

“What? What?”

“You say they have to fill their backup requirements. What’s that?”

“Shoot.”

The old man looked cross, and Michaela patted his hand and told him he didn’t have to tell her if he didn’t want to bother with it.

“Oh, no, I’ll tell you!” he said. “Backup… that’s basic.”

“Mmmm.”

“You know how it works, this Interfacing?”

“No, sir. Only what I see on the news.”

“Huh. Bunch of damnfool.”

“I expect it is.”

“Well, now, the Interface is a special environment we build in the Households. There’s two parts to it, each one with all the temperature and humidity regulated down to the dot, and special stuff piped in and whatnot, with the environment on one side exactly right for whichever Patoots or Pateets we’ve got in residence at the time, and the environment on the other side just right for humans. And between the two there’s this barrier… you can’t have cyanide gas coming on through to the kiddies just because the Patoots need it, and vice versa for oxygen and whatall, you see… but it’s a specially made barrier that you can see through and hear through just like it wasn’t hardly there at all. And we put the baby in the human side, and the AIRY’s live in the other, and the AIRY’s and the baby interact for a year or so and pretty soon you’ve got an Earth baby that’s a native speaker of whatever the AIRY speaks, you see.”

“Oh,” said Michaela. “My!”

“But that’s for just the first time!” said the old man emphatically. “That’s just for the very first time an Alien language is acquired as a native language by a human being. And after that, why, the human child is the native speaker and you don’t have to go through all that. You just put that child, the one you Interfaced the first time, together in the ordinary way with another human infant, and that’s backup, don’t you know. The second child will acquire the Alien language from the one that was Interfaced, now there’s a human native speaker available. That’s necessary, let me tell you.”

“Mmmmm.”

“You’re not paying attention to me, are you? You asked me what backup was, you know, and now you’re not paying attention!”

Michaela sat up very straight and insisted that indeed she was.

“You think I’m boring, do you? Everybody thinks I’m boring! Lot of damnfool phooey, if you ask me! What do they know?”

Michaela didn’t think he was boring at all, as it happened, because the more she could learn about the habits and lifestyles of the Lingoes, the more efficiently and safely she could murder them. She considered every word that Stephan Verdi said potentially of the greatest value to her — you never knew when some scrap of information would be precisely the scrap that you most needed — and she was able to assure him with complete honesty that she was listening to every word he said and enjoying it.

“I’d know if you were lying, don’t you forget,” he said.

“Would you?”

“You can’t lie to a linguist, young woman — don’t you try it.” Michaela smiled.

“Al read y tried it, haven’t you! I can tell by that smirk you’ve got on your face! Pretty doesn’t cover up body-parl, girl, never has and never will!”

“Mr. Verdi… all that excitement’s not good for you.”

“Excitement? You don’t excite me, you hussy, it’d take a good deal more than you to excite me ! I’ve seen everything there is, in my time, and taken most of it to bed if I fancied it! Why, I’ve — ”

“Mr. Verdi,” Michaela broke in, “you wanted to explain to me why I can’t lie to a linguist.”

“I did?”

“Mmmhmm.”

“Well… let me tell you this: if you lie to a linguist, girl, and you get away with it, if you lie to a linguist and he doesn’t catch you out, it’s only because he let you lie, for his own very good reasons. You keep that in mind.”

“I will.” And she would.

“Backup,” she reminded him then. She’d almost lost track herself this time.

“Oh, yes. Well. You see, after Interfacing, that human child is the one and the only living human being that can speak the Alien language — and it’s taken years to produce just the one. And you never know what could happen. You’d have important treaties set up, don’t you know, or something else important — and the kiddy gets wiped out in a flyer accident. Struck by lightning. Whatever. You can’t have that, you see. There’s got to be another child coming along behind that knows the language, too, and another one behind that. Providing backup, in case anything happens. And of course grownups can’t ever acquire languages like babies do, but they make a point of picking up a language as best they can every year or two, from tapes and whatall, and trying to talk to the kids that learned it Interfacing, you see. And that way, if the little one that had the AIRY’s language first should go to his Maker before the backup child was old enough to work alone, well, in an emergency you could send along the grownup that had the language sort of half-assed… that’s the only way that grownups can learn languages, most of ’em… and the child that was too young, and they could get by as a team after a fashion. In an emer gency, don’t you know! You wouldn’t want that as a general thing, ’cause it doesn’t work for warm spit. But in an emer gency… well!”