Suzette Elgin - Native Tongue

“You’re sure? Hell… ten minutes, one glass of wine… it’d do you good, Tom.”

He shook his head firmly, and Adam gave it up and wandered off to hunt somebody else who’d help him stave off the inevitable confrontation with sweet Gillian. She’d be at him for hours about the unfavorable contrast between the courtesy Thomas showed Rachel and the discourtesy Adam showed her , blah blah shrieking blah. Poor Adam; he was a good man, steady and reliable, but somewhere along the line he’d missed out on the essential ingredient for managing a woman: never, never for an instant, lose track of the knowledge that when you interact with a woman you interact with an organism that is essentially just a rather sophisticated child suffering from delusions of grandeur. Adam kept forgetting that, when Gillian went at him; he kept dealing with her as if she were a man, with a man’s rational mind and skills. Thomas didn’t think Gillian would be under the roof of his house much longer.

And then, because he at last had solitude, and silence, and peace, he put his brother’s domestic difficulties out of his mind along with his own very different ones and went to his office. He sat down at the comset and waited, with his eyes closed, until the appearance of composure had been replaced by the real thing. And before he turned his attention to the stack of contracts in his computer awaiting his review, he saw to one last chore.

“I realize it’s late,” he told the young man with the fretful face who answered his call to the ILO section chief’s residence. “And I am aware that calling your chief at home is not usual procedure.” And he smiled. “Would you get him for me, please, young man?”

The screen flickered; there was a brief pause; and then the face of the ILO chief appeared, a bit fuzzier than Thomas approved of when he had to use it as a data source. Rachel must have the Emergency Room computers locked in; that always meant transmission interference.

“Donald,” he said, fuzzy image or not, since it wasn’t going to get any better, “sorry to bother you at home.”

“Quite all right, Thomas,” said the other man, his face twisted diagonally across the screen. “What’s the problem?”

“You’ve got the delegation at eight tomorrow for those seldron labor dispute meetings, I understand, and one of my offspring’s handling the interpreting.”

“Fortunately,” said the image. “Last time they were here we had to make do with PanSig and somebody who couldn’t do much more than say howdeedo… some smartass from D.A.T. It wasn’t very successful. It was in fact damn near a disaster. I don’t want to hear, Thomas, that we’re up against that again tomorrow. Those Jeelods aren’t going to give us many more chances on this, they’re really furious. I don’t know exactly what kind of idiot misunderstanding is responsible this time, but I know we need somebody who really knows the language.”

“Well,” said Thomas, “we’ll do the best we can, of course. But the youngster we’re sending you has come down with something suddenly — she’s not at all well.”

“Oh, God. That’s all we need. Thomas…”

“Now, I didn’t say she wouldn’t be there,” said Thomas. Remember, federal man, he was thinking, and remember good — without us you don’t do anything much. “I felt you should be warned that there is that possibility, just as a matter of professional courtesy. The doctor’s with her now.” A minor, but useful, modification of the facts.

“The doctor?” Donald Cregg was of course aware of what a medical house call, especially at night, meant. Even through the blur and the sputter, Thomas could see the worry on his face. “It’s serious, then.”

“Maybe not. You know how young girls are. Every twinge, they think they’re dying. It may be nothing at all. Nevertheless — just on the off-chance — I called to let you know you may be without an intrepreter tomorrow morning.”

“Damn it!”

“You could call D.A.T.,” Thomas needled him. “They’ve really been putting their backs into the federal language courses, I understand.”

“Sure… sure, Thomas. Come on, man — who else have you got for REM34 if the kid can’t make it?”

“Nobody. That’s one hell of a language.”

“Aren’t you linguists always spouting off about no language being harder than any other language?” the image demanded.

“No human language is harder than any other human language,” said Thomas. “Quite right. But Alien languages are something else again. All of them are hard, and some of them are harder than others. REM34 happens to be one of the hardest. We’ve got some people here good enough to translate written materials, but nobody who can interpret.”

“See here, Chornyak, you’ve got a contract!” said the other man indignantly. “And that contract specifies that when you take on a language you put enough of your people on it to cover things like this. That’s what we pay you for, for God’s sake.”

Thomas let a full thirty seconds go by, to give the section chief time to think over the alternatives he had to doing business with the Lines. And then he answered with politeness to spare.

“There are only just so many of us available, my friend,” he said, borrowing from Rachel because it was handy, “and even if we learned fifty languages apiece we still couldn’t be in more than one place at a time. We have two youngsters right now acquiring REM34 from my daughter, but neither one is exactly suited for sophisticated negotiations — one of them is four and the other is about eighteen months. In time, they’ll be available, but they won’t help matters tomorrow.”

“Ah, shit,” said Donald Cregg. “This is damn tiresome.”

“’It is. I agree with you. Maybe some of you people ought to reconsider and send some of your infants over to Interface along with ours.”

And live with dirty stinking Lingoes? And live packed into a hole in the ground like animals, with no decent privacy and no comfort and a lifestyle just above the poverty level? Thomas watched the man, not able to make out any body-parl with the comset image the only data available, but perfectly able to imagine it. Cregg would be pretending he hadn’t heard that last sentence.

“Look, do what you can to get your kid there as scheduled, will you? This isn’t visiting vippies here for keys to the city, Thomas, this is a matter of real urgency.”

“I’ll do everything possible,” said Thomas.

“And thanks for the warning.”

“Any time. Any time at all.”

The screen cleared, and he sat smiling at it. It was most important to keep the government conscious at all times of their dependency on the linguists. Thomas was careful not to overlook even the smallest opportunity to drive that point home and refresh the federal memory, that sieve of convenience and expediency.

He jabbed the intercom for his room, and got no answer; tried again, and heard the soft beep of the transfer mechanism before Rachel came on line from wherever she’d gotten to. The girldorms, probably.

“Well,” he said abruptly, “are they sending a med-Sammy for this major crisis?”

“No, Thomas,” said Rachel. “Take a half grain of codeine and a muscle relaxant and call them in the morning.”

“I thought so,” said Thomas with satisfaction. “You’ve made a great deal of fuss — and an embarrassing scene — over nothing.”

“Thomas, I’m sorry you feel that way. But Natha is never sick. And she does not ever complain. You will remember… the time she fell picking apples and broke three ribs, we didn’t hear a word from her. We wouldn’t have known she was hurt if she hadn’t fainted in the orchards.”

“I don’t remember that, Rachel, but it sounds as if she sets an example you might do well to emulate. Spunky, from the sound of it.”