Suzette Elgin - Native Tongue

Then who? They were terribly afraid that they knew the answer.

It was Susannah who said what all of them knew had to be said.

“There’s only one choice, really,” she mourned. “Only one possible choice. Because it’s not a question of choosing someone eager for self-sacrifice. It’s not a question of choosing someone who is, as the men would put it, dispensable. It’s a matter of choosing someone who will be believable, in view of the profile the police and the men have created for their poisoner. Dearloves, there’s only one woman here who can fit those specifications… and they’ll swallow it like a spoonful of fudge and cream. It has to be Belle-Anne.”

Belle-Anne Jefferson had come to Chornyak Household a beautiful young bride. She’d been chosen for a younger son who looked like an “At Stud” ad, and there’d been high hopes. After three years of trying, when there were still no new infants to be groomed for the Interface and the doctors told Thomas Chornyak what the problem was, he refused to believe it.

“That’s not possible,” he’d said flatly. “I’m willing to admit a pretty broad range of possibilities in this universe, having seen many an example that’s basically out of the bottom of the bottle in Terran terms — but I don’t believe this . You look again, gentlemen, and you bring me an explanation that doesn’t sound like the Uterus Fairy and The Wicked Testicle.”

But they came right back with exactly the same tale. Belle-Anne Jefferson Chornyak, twenty years old and a lush ripe peach of a girl, could indeed by the force of her own will kill the lustiest little wiggler of a sperm that any man could produce.

Thomas was furious, and declared that he’d never heard of such a thing.

“It isn’t common,” the doctors admitted.

“Are you sure ?”

“We’re positive. You insert a sperm in that young lady, no matter how you go about it, and she just twitches her little butt and the sperm dies . Dead. Gone.”

“Well, bypass that stage!”

“We tried that. We implanted an egg, all nicely fertilized with her husband’s living sperm and healthy as you please.”

“And?”

“And two days later, spontaneous abortion. I think it took her two days only because it was a new trick for her. When we tried it again on the off chance it wasn’t her doing, it only took her thirty minutes from lab to basin.”

“Judas galloping priest!”

“Yes indeed. You can thank God it isn’t a knack that women can master on any general scale, Chornyak, or we’d have problems… not that most women would have any interest in that kind of shenanigan. Most women are crazy about the drippy little creatures.”

“But Belle-Anne isn’t.”

“Belle-Anne most surely isn’t.”

“Have you ever seen this before?”

“No… there are half a dozen cases in the entire medical literature. It is truly rare. Fascinatingly rare. Oh, there are women who can work themselves up sufficiently to miscarry a fetus that wouldn’t have made it anyway… but basically, this is a green swan.”

“And I had to get it in my house.” Thomas swore, long and low, and the doctors grinned sympathetically.

“How does she do it? Can we bring in the therapists and convince her to cut it effing out?”

“Well… we don’t know,” said one of the men, and the others looked dubious. “She says she does it by prayer, as a matter of fact. You care to tackle that?”

“What? You mean the little trollop admits this?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Well, for…” Thomas was reduced to sputtering silence, a green swan phenomenon of its own.

“It’s not as if she were unaware that she’s doing it, you see,” they told him. “She’s doing it on purpose. I think trying to change the young lady’s head would be a waste of your time, your money, and your son’s energies. She’d be very resistant — you’re talking about years of therapy, at tremendous expense. Chornyak, the world is full of pretty young females… is it really worth the trouble?”

Which was how a pretty young woman like Belle-Anne, just turned twenty and eminently beddable, had ended up divorced and a resident at Chornyak Barren House.

The family had given Thomas a certain amount of argument about that. After all, it was a deliberate act of sabogate on the girl’s part that made her unfit for motherhood; why should they have to bear the expense of her upkeep for the rest of her life?

“I say send her back to her father,” said her ex-husband, who was understandably disgruntled, and had to face the bleak prospect of the decent waiting period as a bachelor required of him before he could take another, more accommodating, woman to wife.

“No,” said Thomas flatly, and Paul John backed him all the way. “When we take anyone under this roof and accept the responsibility for their welfare, we’ve taken it just as it says in the wedding ceremony — for better, for worse, till death do us part. My personal preference would not be to send her back to her father, but to drop her off a tall building. But that is not the way this family does things.” And that had been the end of it.

Belle-Anne would have no trouble at all convincing the policemen; she would be believed. And Thomas Blair Chornyak would not put any thing past Belle-Anne.

It would have to be that way, if it broke every one of their hearts.

At a few minutes before eight o’clock, Belle-Anne was already sitting in the interrogation room of the precinct house, where the officers had rushed her frantically as a way of observing their promise that there’d be no publicity. Belle-Anne had not been concerned about discretion, and she was smiling at Morse as if they were both there on a holiday outing.

“Now, let me get this straight,” Morse was saying. “You came in here, of your own free will, to confess to the attempted murder of Nazareth Joanna Chornyak. Because you didn’t want us to mess up the house. Is that what you’re saying?”

“Detective Morse,” said Belle-Anne, “we work very hard to keep Barren House nice. And we get very little rest, what with the work we do as linguists, and taking care of the women who are sick, and one thing and another. We do not need a whole pack of your men tramping through the house in their boots dirtying the floors and getting finger smudges all over the walls and the furniture.”