Suzette Elgin - Native Tongue

“It’s not true.”

Smith was clinging to that, because he felt dimly that it was very important that he cling to it. He did not remember why anymore. He did not remember hearing anything in the Training Lectures that had any bearing on the way he felt right now. He did not remember how he had come to be so confused or when he had begun to feel so strange and so ill, but he knew that there was a magic charm in the three words that he could use to ward off evil if he could only keep saying them and let nothing else past them.

“It’s not true, it’s not true, it’s not true,” he said. “It’s not true.”

Thomas had no intention of telling him whether it was true or not. He had more useful things to do than continue this kindergarten exercise, and it was time he got to them.

“Smith!” He snapped the word, cracked it like a whip, cutting through to the man’s attention.

“What?”

“I want you to listen to what I’m going to say, Smith, and I want you to go back and repeat it to your bosses. Do you think you can do that, or shall I send for somebody else to do it for you?”

“I can do it.” Wooden words. Wooden lips.

“This MUST NOT HAPPEN AGAIN,” said Thomas, “This kidnapping trick. This government baby-killing. For the sake of many many factors you do not even dream of, I have put together a story that will keep the lid on it this time, something that we can tell the police, something that I can tell St. Syrus Household. This time! But I can’t do it twice, Smith. I can’t work miracles. I won’t try — it must not be repeated, you hear me? You’ve had your chance, you’ve tried out your ignorant hypothesis about genetic differences and the imperative for putting a baby on the Lines in your cursed government Interface — and it didn’t work , Smith! It didn’t work. As I told you it would not work. And it will never work. I warn you — you tell your bosses, I warn you all — don’t try it again.”

He left the man nodding and mumbling in his chair; he made no effort to hide the contempt he felt for any male so easily broken, slapping down on the table the white card with the cover story Smith was to take back to whoever had the privilege of dealing with him today, and he went out the door of Room DAT40. It closed behind him with a soft sucking noise, but he was certain that Smith would be able to hear it slam in his head.

And it would of course only take Smith twenty minutes to wall off everything he’d heard Thomas say, so that it would never bother him again. Thomas knew all about that process, as did his father, and his father before him. That speech he’d made was a set piece, an extended cliché; it must come up two or three times a year. And nobody, so far as Thomas knew, had ever needed more than half an hour to put it out of their consciousness forever. They marveled sometimes, in the Lines, at the efficiency of the mental filters that kept from the masters even the realization that they were slavers… allowed to be slavers by the grace of the slaves, but slavers nonetheless.

It might have been possible to understand it, he thought as he headed for the roof, if it had been only their women. In the poverty of their perceptions, prevented by nature itself from ever having more than a distorted image of reality, women might very well create for themselves a picture that included nothing but the parts of reality they enjoyed looking at. That was to be expected, and however irritating it might be, it was not something that could be held against them. But it wasn’t just their women who lived in fantasy, it was their men as well — and that, thought Thomas, was not possible to understand. You could despise them for it, or you could try to find it in yourself to forgive them for it — but there was no way to understand it. How could they manage to look straight at the truth, and, like females, not even see it? Or smell it… God knows it stank.

Thomas found it difficult at times to stay out of the ranks of those in the Lines who settled for despising, and never mind the rest of it. That was not the way to solve the problem — it was a womanish surrender to the easy way out — but it was exceedingly tempting.

He had one more thing left to do before he could go home. He was weary, and short on patience now, but he saw no reason why Andrew St. Syrus should have to make the trip to Chornyak Household again to hear his fairy tale. What Thomas had to tell him could have been told by comset just as well as in person… but to do that would be to appear completely without manners or family feeling, and that wouldn’t do. Resigned to the inescapable, he punched the computer keys in the flyer and gave the screen as much of his attention as he could spare from the evening traffic.

The coordinates came up, he punched them in, and the flyer turned toward the west. And when Andrew walked out onto the roof of the building where he’d been tied up in an after-dinner session of the Department of Health he found Thomas waiting for him.

“Chornyak,” he said. “Something’s happened.”

“Yes. And it’s not good, Andrew. I won’t pretend it is.”

“Tell me.”

“There isn’t any easy way to do this, Andrew. It’s a matter of getting it over with, and we can do it right here as well as anywhere. Or we can go somewhere quiet and have a drink, if you like…”

“No, no,” said Andrew. “This will do.” He leaned against the side of his flyer, near Thomas and out of the wind that was bringing in a thunderstorm. “What’s happened?”

“The investigators I’ve hired, Andrew… they got to the bottom of the mess. You remember Terralone?”

“Terralone?” Andrew shook his head. “What is it? Or who is it?”

“It’s a cult. A cult of lunatics, top grade. Real prize lunatics. Terraloners believe that any contact with extra-terrestrials, even if it happens to be the only hope of the human race for survival et cetera, never mind that, any such contact is the essence of evil.”

St. Syrus took a long breath, and let it out slowly.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Oh, yeah, I remember. Mostly, they picket.”

“Picket, squawk for the threedy cameras, do the odd bit of terrorism. Badly. And have ceremonies, Andrew.”

“Well?”

“Well, that’s what happened to the infant, my friend. I wish it was prettier.”

“You’re talking rot, Thomas — there aren’t any pretty ways for kidnappings to end. Let’s have the rest of it.”

“One of their farther-out loonies took the baby, they had a ceremony that they claim is a payment on humanity’s moral debt for contaminating itself by stepping off this little rock, and the baby is dead.”

“Dead how?”

“Andrew,” said Thomas firmly, “you don’t want to know any more than that. I’m not going to tell you any more than that. But the baby is dead, and there’s no way to get the body back to its mother — God be praised — and it’s over. They burned the body, Andrew… it’s finished.”

St. Syrus nodded, jerky and quick, and jumped at the thunderclap that rattled the flyer’s shell.

“We’d better get out of this,” he said, “or we’ll be going home by ground transport.”

Thomas put one hand on his shoulder, as gently as he could.

“They’ve got the son of a bitch,” he said, “and he’ll live the rest of his demented life in the Federal Mental Hospital in the South Bronx. He’ll never set foot outside that place again — that’s been seen to. And he’s young, Andrew. He’s looking at maybe seventy years in that place. You can tell the parents… he’s going to pay, and pay, and pay.”

“Well. It’s done with.”

“Yes. And there won’t be any leaks to the press now either. The authorities have no more interest in a wave of copycats raiding the maternity wards than we do. The lid’s on tight.”