Suzette Elgin - Native Tongue

No, sir. This little lady wasn’t going to have to worry about anything ever again, or even think about anything. When they got through with her, there wouldn’t be enough of her brain left to say the alphabet with. She had absolutely nothing to worry about.

Morse called Thomas Chornyak and told him to forget about expecting detectives prying around his place, watching Belle-Anne out of the corner of his eye as he talked to be sure she had nothing out of the ordinary in what passed for her mind. This case was all sewed up.

Thomas knew how the women loved Belle-Anne, buttburr that she was. He sent somebody firm over to Barren House to tell them. And there was the anticipated weeping and wailing and hysterics, followed by the speech Thomas had specified.

“Now, perceive this,” said Adam, being avuncular as hell. “I want you all to know that we approve in principle of the wholesome interest you good ladies take in being enthusiastic Christians. I’m sure that we’ll all benefit one day from your devotion. But whatever you’ve been up to in the way of religious fervor that caused this — excess — will have to stop. We know that Belle-Anne was never all that stable; she probably went over the edge pretty easily. And we are sure that it’s all been completely innocent on your parts. But it’s gone far enough. You’ll go to church in the usual way, and you’ll do what the Reverend tells you — and you’ll let it go at that. No fancy embellishments. Is that quite clear?”

It was, they told him, still weeping and sniffling.

“And Thomas also wants you to know that while he’s sure there’s nobody else in this house who might feel that the Lord had picked her out personally to take care of Belle-Anne’s unfulfilled divine contract, he intends to take no chances. From now on there will be guards with Nazareth when she’s awake; and a comset camera will be watching her when she’s asleep. Just to be absolutely sure nobody else decides she’s Joan of Arc on a white unicorn sent to do holy deeds. Is that quite clear?”

It was, they assured him; it certainly was. All of it was entirely, perfectly, clear.

“This is stupid,” said Beau St. Clair.

“Second that,” said Lanky Pugh. “I move we cancel it.” And because he knew that Arnold Dolbe found it sickening, he took out his pocket knife and began cleaning his fingernails, with an air of total dedication to the task.

Dolbe tried not to moan, managed a gargled sigh, and made useless flutters with his fingers.

“Look, men,” he said. “See here. It doesn’t matter if it’s stupid. Stupid’s got nothing to do with it. The Pentagon says meet on this — we meet on it. You know that as well as I do, so get off me.”

“Shit,” said Lanky.

Showard considered the situation, and decided that Lanky Pugh offered a satisfactory model to emulate; he took out his pocket knife and began cleaning his fingernails, too, doing his best to make it a sort of duet for two pocket knives, matching his movements to Lanky’s.

“Go on then, Dolbe,” he said. “ Meet .”

“Well, I think we’re up against a blank wall,” said Dolbe. A muscle twitched in his right cheek, and he rubbed at it fretfully. It would get worse, he knew, and pretty soon one of his eyelids would join in the dance of twitches, and he’d be in for weeks of both, with nothing the damn med-Sammys could do for it. Dolbe felt that it was bad enough to be six feet four inches tall and weigh only one hundred fifty rattling pounds, bad enough to be bald and have a skull that was a collage of lumps and lines and irregularities, bad enough to have a face that even his mother had not been fond of — it wasn’t fair that he had to be subject to nervous tics on top of that. He was miserably conscious of his burdens, of the injustice of it all, and the muscle jumped again. He laid one hand with elaborate casualness over the rebellious cheek and said, “I don’t see that there’s anything left for us to do. That’s all.”

The other men stared at him glumly, and it was written on their faces: he was not any sort of inspiration to them.

“Well, really,” he said defensively, “I’m sorry I don’t have the world’s greatest new snazzobang plan to offer here, but I don’t hear any of you doing any better.”

“You’re suppose to lead , Dolbe, remember?” Showard needled. “A major and profound principle — leaders should lead.”

“Damn you, Showard,” said Dolbe, looking sullen as well as twitchy. “Damn your soul.”

“Thanks,” said the other man, and dropped him. “That’s a big help. Since you refuse to do anything but whimper, I shall just move on… let’s run it by one more time, troops. What have we done — and what haven’t we done?”

St. Clair obliged him. “We’ve tried computers — they don’t show us useful patterns, or any other kind of patterns, in nonhumanoid Alien languages. Or so Lanky tells us, and I trust Lanky all the way when it comes to computers. Computers would help us after we cracked a language… but they’re no good at the initial stage. That’s one.”

“Right,” said Lanky Pugh. “That’s one, and it’s final. If computers could do it, we’d have done it.”

“Human infants,” St. Clair went on, “even when we follow the linguist specs down to the last comma, don’t help us… they can’t be Interfaced with nonhumanoid Aliens. And throwing a few dozen more into the pit doesn’t appeal to any of us… it’s useless. And horrible. And stupid. That’s two.”

“One, two, buckle our shoe,” droned Brooks Showard.

“And then there’s the linguist infant strategy — that was a bust, too. No different from any other baby… a complete mess. And we don’t have any idea why. Which means that snatching a few more Lingoe pups and running them through the same drill would be useless, horrible, etc., see above. We’ve spent months analyzing it, and we’ve found out nothing. That’s three.”

He waited for somebody to offer a comment, but nobody did.

“And that’s it,” he concluded. “So far as I know, that’s all there is. Adults can’t acquire languages… there aren’t any other alternatives.”

“Damn it, men,” said Dolbe urgently, “damn it, we’ve got a mission . The fate of this planet, and all who live on it, depends on us . We can’t just quit… we have to do something.”

“I wonder,” mused Lanky Pugh, thinking that if he picked his teeth with his knife Dolbe would get even more antsy, which would be just fine with him, “I wonder how that Beta-2 critter feels about our ‘mission’? I mean, it’s been cooped up here one hell of a long time now…”

“Lanky,” Dolbe pleaded, “please don’t bring that up. Please. For all we know, it loves it here. We’re very good to it.”

“Yeah? How do we know that?”

“Lanky — ”

“Naw, I mean it. How do we know it hasn’t got a wife and kids it’d like to go flicker at instead of us… maybe six wives and kids. Or husbands and kids. Or whatever it’s got.”