Suzette Elgin - Native Tongue

“Your mother-in-law’s not available at the moment, Aaron,” said Thomas. “She’s sitting in on some kind of folderol with the Encoding Project this morning. Get one of the other women to do it in her place, or do it yourself.”

Aaron opened his mouth to make a remark. And closed it again. He knew what his father-in-law would say if he objected again to the time the women wasted in their silly “Encoding Project.” It keeps them busy and contented, Aaron, he’d say. The barren ones and those too old for other work need something harmless to do with their time, Aaron, he’d say. If they weren’t involved in their interminable “project” they’d be complaining and getting in the way, Aaron — be glad they are so easily amused. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, Aaron. No point in going through all that yet another time.

Furthermore, Thomas was right. Those rare retired women who weren’t interested in the Project’s addlepated activities were forever under foot, interfering just because they were bored. He said nothing, and headed quickly out through the side door, up the stairs, and into the gardens, where one of his sons was waiting for him to come discuss a problem in translation. He’d been waiting too long, thought Aaron in irritation. At seven even a male child can’t be expected to have unlimited patience.

He was halfway down the path to the garden, already at the banks of orange day-lilies, that the women grew in profusion because not even the most fanatical anti-linguist could consider them an expensive waste, before he realized that he’d forgotten to send his wife the message after all. God, but women were a nuisance with their unending complaints and their fool illnesses. Cancer, for godsakes, in 2205! No male human had had cancer in… oh, fifty years at least, he’d be willing to bet on it. Puny creatures, women, and hardly worth their keep — certainly not worth their irritation.

His annoyance at having to go back to the house and carry out his promise very nearly caused him to rip up by the roots an inexcusable yellow rosebush, half-hidden among the day-lilies. Only one, but it was asking for trouble. He could hear the citizens now. “Work and slave and bleed for every cent and don’t even have money to keep the slide walks decent because half our taxes go to the effing Lingoes, god curse them all, and they throw it all away on their underground palaces and their effing rose gardens…” He could imagine the slogans, the jingles, the media solemnly discussing the actual figures for rosebushes purchased by linguists in the period from 2195 to 2205 — the media were fond of decades because it was so easy to run up the statistics for ten-year chunks. And he’d bet that the luscious yellow rosebush was one more of those little acts of sabotage Great-Aunt Sarah so enjoyed slipping past the accountants.

He reminded himself for the fifteenth time — somehow he must find space in his schedule this year to confer with their Congressional lobbyists about the legislation that would forbid females to buy anything whatsoever without a man’s written approval. This business of letting them have pocket money, and making exceptions for flowers and candy and romance media and bits of frippery was forever leading to unforeseen complications… astonishing how clever women were at distorting the letter of the law! Like the chimps, futzing around with their instructions in the military, and getting into pranks you’d never forbidden because never in your wildest fantasies had you foreseen them. Who’d have thought you had to formally teach a chimp not to shit on its weapons, for example?

He would have preferred to see “No Females Allowed” signs in all places of business, himself. But once again he had to bow to the argument that the creatures were a lot less trouble if they were allowed to spend their idle hours wandering around looking at things in the stores instead of doing all their buying by comset as men did. There was no end to it, always another concession to be made — and it was a certain amount of consolation to be able to say that the women of the Lines, linguist women, had no idle hours.

If anything could have tempted Aaron William Adiness-Chornyak to such black blasphemy as the concept of a Creatress, it was the seemingly irrational creation of females. Surely the Almighty could have had the simple gentlemanly courtesy to make women mute? Or to see to it that they had some biological equivalent of an Off/On switch for the use of the men obliged to deal with them? If He hadn’t had the ingenuity to do without them altogether?

“Count your blessings,” his own father would have said. “You could have been born before the Whissler Amendments, you know. You could have lived in a time when females were allowed to vote, when females sat in the Congress of the United States and a female was allowed to call herself a Supreme Court Justice. You think about that, boy, and you be grateful.”

Aaron chuckled, remembering the first time he’d heard about that. He’d been seven years old, the same age as the boy he hurried now to meet. And he’d been punished, made to memorize a dozen full pages of useless noun declensions from an equally useless artificial language, for standing there seven years old and shocked silly enough to call Ross Adiness a liar. He had forgotten those sets of noun endings long ago, but the shock had never left him.

“Nazareth?” Clara said, and stopped short to stare.

Nazareth Joanna Chornyak Adiness, twin sister of James Nathan Chornyak, eldest daughter in this Household, mother of nine, looked like nothing so much as a battered servomechanism at that moment. Ready to be traded in. Ready for scrap. The unsavory image struck the woman Aaron had sent to deliver his message, struck with a force that she hastily suppressed. It would be inexcusable for her to pass the men’s decision along with a look of repulsion on her own face as its accompaniment.

But there was something repulsive about her. Something about the gaunt body, the graying hair drawn viciously back and skewered to the head with cruel pins, something about the rigid posture that was the reaction of a dogged pride to intolerable exhaustion and strain. She did not look anything like a noble wreck of a woman, or even a tortured animal… could you, Clara wondered, torment any machine into a state like Nazareth’s?

And then Clara caught herself, and shuddered. God forgive me, she thought, that I could see her that way. I will not see her that way! This is a living woman before me, she told herself sternly, not one of those skinny cylinders with a round knob atop that scuttles silently through the houses and workplaces of nonlinguists doing the dirty work. This is a living woman, to whom harm can be done, and I will speak to her without distorted perceptions.

“Nazareth?” she said gently. “My dear. Have you fallen asleep there?”

Nazareth jumped a little, startled, and she turned away from the transparent walls to the Interface where her youngest child was serenely stacking up plastiblocks under the friendly gaze of the current Alien-in-Residence.

“I’m sorry, Aunt Clara,” she said. “I didn’t hear you… I’m afraid my mind was a million miles away. Do you need me for something?”

Putting it off, Clara gestured with the point of her chin at the child, now laughing at some comment from the A.I.R. “He’s doing well, isn’t he?”

“I think so. He seems to be putting sentences together already… little ones, but certainly sentences. Not bad for just barely two years old, with three languages to sort out at once. And his English doesn’t seem slowed down at all.”

“Three languages,” mused Clara. “That’s not so bad, dear… I’ve known them to lay on half a dozen, when there weren’t so many infants available.”