Suzette Elgin - Native Tongue

“And then?”

“Then comes the number that tells us which humanoid species is referred to. On Earth, there’s only the one… some planets have several. The ‘41’ in this number says that the language is one of those spoken by the 41st species with which we’ve Interfaced. The number ‘1’ won’t ever turn up, because it does mean Terran, in a way.”

“Now you’ve lost me.”

“Well. The digits from 1-1000, with Terran — serving as a sort of cover number for all Terran languages, don’t you see — being #1, those are reserved for the humanoid species. One thousand may not be nearly enough, of course, but we haven’t reached that total yet.”

“I see… I think. And who has #2?”

“Nobody at all,” answered Jennifer. “That number is set aside in case it happens that the cetaceans of this planet turn out to have languages of their own as we primates do. If we ever could get to the bottom of that, those languages would be summarized by the numeral 2.”

“My goodness.”

“Yes. So that’s that much, REM41. And then comes a number from 1 to 6, that classifies the language for one of the possible orderings of verb and subject and object. This one is a 3 — that means its order is verb followed by subject followed by object. Very roughly speaking, of course.”

“We wouldn’t need that one, for all we know,” said Anna, “if we ever acquired a non-humanoid language.”

“Why? Would they all have the same order?”

“No, dear. There’s no particular reason to expect that nonhumanoid languages would have verbs, subjects, or objects, you see.”

“But then how could it be a language?”

“That,” they told her, “is precisely the point.”

“And then,” Anna finished, “there’s the final number. 786 in this one. That just refers to the numerical order the languages are acquired in. So, we have it all. REM41-3-786… it means this is an Alien humanoid language spoken by the 41st encountered humanoid species — which may speak many many other languages besides this one, of course — and it has VSO order and is the 786th language we’ve acquired. That works out better than referring to it as…” Anna paused and looked around. “Anybody know the native name for REM41-3-786?”

Somebody did; it sounded to Michaela like “rxtpt” if it sounded like anything at all, and there was quite a bit more of it.

“It is interesting,” she said slowly. “This kind of thing… I wouldn’t have thought that it could be, but it is.”

And they all smiled at her together as if she’d done something especially praiseworthy.

She was having a very hard time; she slept badly, and woke from nightmares drenched with sweat. She was losing weight, and the women fussed at her to let the other residents of Barren House take over at least a portion of her duties.

“It’s my job,” said Michaela firmly, “and I will do it.”

“But you are up half a dozen times, every night! Someone else could do part of that… or take one night in three…”

“No,” said Michaela. “No. I will do it.”

It wasn’t the disturbed sleep that was making her thin and anxious, and certainly it wasn’t the work itself. She had almost nothing to do in the way of actual nursing. Medications now and then, a few baths to give, and injection, diet lists to make up; really almost nothing. She didn’t even have to see to making up the beds or caring for linen, because Thomas Chornyak had hired someone from outside to take care of such things. As for sleep, she had not had an uninterrupted night within the span of her memory. Women had always had to be up and down all night long; if there weren’t sick children, there were sick animals, or sick people of advanced age. If there were none of those, there would be a child with a bad dream, or a storm that meant someone had to get up and close windows — there was always something. A nurse only extended her ordinary female life when she learned to be instantly awake at a call, on her feet and functioning for as long as she was needed, and instantly asleep as soon as she could lie down again. It had never kept nurses, or women of any kind, from listening respectfully as the physicians whined about the way their vast incomes were justified by the fact that they were awakened during the night to see to patients. They would have said, “It’s not the same thing at all!” As of course it was not. Women had to get up much oftener, stay up longer, and were neither paid nor admired for doing it. Certainly it wasn’t the same thing.

The cause of Michaela’s condition was something unique to Michaela, not one of these universals of womankind. When she had taken this post, she had intended to put an end to the women of Chornyak Barren House one by one, as plausibly and randomly as she could manage… adding forty or more notches to her bow. She had even considered killing all of them at once as a political statement; of course she would have been caught and punished, but it would have been a way of letting the linguists know they weren’t getting off scot free with their murders of innocent babies! She would have been a heroine to the public, who felt as she did about the matter; she had thought it might very well be worth it.

And she had gone so far as to select Deborah as her first victim. Deborah was ninety-seven years old; she had to be fed an enriched gruel and pureed fruit and vegetables with a soft tube. And no little girl went to talk to Deborah, although to Michaela’s consternation almost every little girl went to sit on the old lady’s bed to stroke her forehead and pat her hands for a few minutes during the day.

“She doesn’t know you’re there, sweetheart,” Michaela had told the child the first time she saw that happen. “It’s very kind of you, but it’s useless — Deborah hasn’t been aware of anything for a very long time.”

The child had turned clear eyes up to her, disturbingly adult eyes: she could not have been more than six years old. And she had said: “How do we know that, Mrs. Landry?”

Michaela had admitted that she could not be absolutely sure , of course — but there was no reason to believe anything else, and the doctors would tell her exactly the same thing.

“And that means,” said the little girl reprovingly, “that while we do not know for sure , Aunt Deborah might very well lie there every day unable to speak or move, and wish and wish and wish that someone would come sit with her and pet her a little. Isn’t that so?”

“Child, it’s so un like ly!”

“Mrs. Landry,” and it was a rebuke, no question about it, “ we are not willing to take that chance.”

Michaela had not interfered again. But it had seemed to her in some way a little unwholesome that the children should be thinking about what Deborah might or might not be feeling, and it reinforced her opinion that she was the logical first victim. She had anticipated that she would take care of that rather promptly.

And now she’d been here half a year almost, and Deborah still lay there silent and unmoving under the hands of the little girls and the other women of the house. Michaela could not bring herself to do the act. Worse, with every passing day she felt herself less and less willing to kill any of them. They were not what she had expected. They were not what she had always been told they were. They did not fit the profile of the “bitch linguist” that everyone she had known believed in, that was the staple character in obscene jokes and foolish stories that children used to frighten one another. “Hey, you think the Lingoe males are shits,” people would say. “They’re angels of charity and goodness compared to the Lingoe bitches! ” She had expected it to be easier than the other times — but it hadn’t turned out that way.