Suzette Elgin - Native Tongue

“Thank you, Thomas.”

“I didn’t do anything to be thanked for, friend. Bringing the child back to you safe, that would call for thanks. This?” He shrugged. “This isn’t something you say thanks for.”

St. Syrus didn’t answer, and Thomas went on.

“You can tell the parents the truth if you feel that’s the appropriate way to handle it — I can’t think of anything better than the truth, myself. But except for them, the story to the Lines is that the baby died in the hospital. One of those mysterious things that takes a baby out sometimes, for no reason anybody can explain. And it was cremated there at the hospital at our request to avoid the possibility of contagion.”

“Thomas, the other women in my Household aren’t going to swallow that. It’s been a month.”

“You tell them that it took the government this long to notify us, Andrew,” said Thomas bitterly. “Tell them there was a computer foulup and the baby’s records got lost — tell them it took this long to straighten it out. They’ll be angry enough about that to get their minds off the mourning. All right?”

“I think so. Yes… that should be all right. It’s plausible enough.”

“If the parents want a small, very quiet, very private memorial service — and if it suits you to permit it — let them have it. No reason why not, so far as I’m concerned.”

“All right, Thomas.”

“It’s all clear to you now, man?”

“The authorities get the truth — they’ll know about Terralone. And the parents. Everybody else gets the killer virus story, with computer foulup for addendum. Logical, reasonable, and the end of the matter.”

“Thank god.”

“Yes. Thank god. And it won’t happen again.”

“You think not?”

“Not if the government wants working linguists,” said Thomas grimly. “I made that very clear. You’ll see security around our infants like they were solid gold, Andrew.”

“On the public wards?”

“That’s their problem. If they want to move the women to the private wings at their expense, I sure as hell won’t cross them; if they want to make a spectacle for the public and think up some fantasy to leak to the media, that’s also up to them. But there’ll be no repetition of this particular incident.”

Thomas watched St. Syrus take off, and then he headed for home, watching the streaks of lightning off to his left, anxious to get inside before the storm broke. Though Paul John would have said he well deserved the rain, and the wind, and a lightning bolt to boot. Cutting pathetic brainwashed government men to shreds and turning their heads to cottage cheese was supposed to be something a linguist resorted to only in emergencies. He’d stomped all over little Smith just because he wanted to do it, just because he was tired.

I’m getting old, Thomas thought, but I’m not getting wise. That’s misrepresentation. I’m supposed to get wise…

Thomas was home before dark, which wasn’t bad considering the farcical piece of silliness he’d been involved in… a Special Awards Session at the Department of Analysis & Translation to honor the staff language specialists who’d just finished a new series of teaching grammars and videotapes for the eastern dialects of REM9-2-84. With the massive help of their computers, of course. And now D.A.T. would be well equipped to teach innocent government personnel a new group of outrageously distorted versions of those languages, so that they could make silly asses of themselves at embassy functions, cocktail parties at the U.N., etc. with even greater ease than they had previously been able to manage. How nice; and how nice that he’d been invited to give the Awards Speech applauding their folly. It was suitable, no doubt, and the hypocrisy of it bothered him not at all; he had waxed positively lyrical about the wondrousness of their accomplishments.

Linguists had been volunteering their services to write the teaching grammars of the Alien languages since the very first one encountered — as they had volunteered to write the teaching grammars of Earth languages down through the centuries — and the government had remained as ever staunchly convinced that its own “language specialists” knew more about grammar than linguists did. It was a kind of religious faith, damn near winsome in its naïve disregard for all observable facts. And a polite thanks-but-no-thanks… FATHer, we’d RATHer do it ourSELVES. Thomas chuckled, thinking that it justified any amount of hypocrisy. And he rationed these appearances carefully, accepting just that bare minimum of invitations of this sort absolutely necessary to keeping up a public image of linguist/government cooperation.

He stopped well away from the house and looked at it, slowly, scrupulously. Not because it was particularly attractive to view. Sheltered in the hillside as it was, with only the fourth floor showing above ground and the earth high over most of that, there wasn’t much of it to see. But what he was looking for was some small difference, something that would catch his attention if he paid attention, something that deviated from the familiar. The women had a tendency to accomplish changes by altering things one infinitestimal fraction at a time, spread over months and months, so that you never saw it happening until suddenly it was just there … he well remembered a rock garden that had appeared once on the east slope of the hill, complete with three giant boulders, seemingly sprung instantaneously from the earth. And when he’d demanded to know how it got there — the wide innocent eyes, and the innocent voices.

“We had no idea you minded, Thomas!”

“Goodness, we’ve been working on it for six months! If you didn’t want us to do it, why didn’t you say something sooner?”

Sometimes you went through the fuss and expense of having their projects torn down and disposed of, as a matter of principle; sometimes you let them alone just out of exhaustion. As the years went by, you learned the value of nipping them in the bud and avoiding the entire problem. He was trying to do that now, scanning the grounds and the entrance, and the solar collectors… looking for detail.

The women had a sly animal cleverness that seved them well, he thought, and that only experience could teach a man to anticipate. Once, years ago, and with his father watching him in amusement, he had issued a flat order that there would be NO CHANGES not specifically initiated by males. And then when the grass stood waist high on the lawn, and the hedges looked like wild bramble thickets, he finally noticed and called the wenches in to demand an explanation.

“But Thomas, dear, you said NO CHANGES, of any kind!”

“But Thomas, we were only doing as you told us to do… Oh dear, it’s so confusing.”

His wife had looked him straight in the eye, presuming a good deal on their years together, and had asked that he please explain to them specifically why a change in the height of the grass or the shape of a hedge did not constitute a change. They would, Rachel had assured him blandly, do better if he would take the time to clarify that for their feeble understanding. Women! Sometimes it amused him and sometimes it infuriated him; always, it made him wonder what in the name of heaven really went on inside their heads. Better that he didn’t know, probably.

Satisfied at last that nothing new was being erected on his premises one grain of sand at a time, and with the light failing rapidly, he turned his key in the antique lock that represented nothing but a concession to female sentimentality — the computer having identified him and released the barriers the moment he stepped within their range — and he went inside. Now, we would have peace. He was looking forward to the evening. He might even get some useful work done.