Suzette Elgin - Native Tongue

There was a fine dampness on her forehead and on her palms; she looked at the child beside her as she would have looked at a truly interesting Alien. And saw that Nazareth was exasperated, and not with the Jeelods — Aquina must have been missing cues, and being about as much use as a no backup at all. The tablet would have to wait, and Aquina signed a hasty “Sorry, Natha!” and turned her attention to her work. Nazareth had more than enough to do just trying to solve this tangle of language and custom, without having to take the notes on it and look up forms in the lexicons and make nice at the government flunkies when they got agitated. Aquina put the tablet firmly out of her mind, and bent to her work.

It was nearly midnight before she got back to Chornyak Barren House and could finally talk the whole thing over with someone. First there had been the interminable series of “absences.” By her count, twenty-nine of them, before Nazareth had at last found a pair of equivalent utterances in the two languages that would serve the purpose and offend neither group of negotiators. Then there’d been the long wrangle over what color the containers should be in the future… there was no point, Nazareth had advised them, in choosing another color and then finding out that it was also taboo, with all of this to be gone through again.

Aquina had been just barely able to follow what the child was doing, and she hadn’t known half the words. (That was the problem of having only an informal backup, instead of another native speaker, of course — but when the only other native speaker wasn’t walking yet, you did the best you could.) Nazareth had told the Jeelods a story, the way you’d tell any story; and all through it she had salted in, one by one, the Jeelod color terms — all eleven basic ones, and a few additional common ones for good measure. She knew what she was doing, that was obvious; presumably this was the Jeelod equivalent of beating around the bush until a safe point was reached. As each color term was introduced into the story, there’d be a certain twitch of Nazareth’s shoulders, a certain flicker of her tongue, a certain sniffing noise… surely a body-language unit of Jeelod, by the patterning, although Aquina didn’t know its significance. And the child had watched with an impressive intensity as she spoke, looking for something from them , some scrap of body-part that would give her the clue she needed. While the government men fidgeted. They had no patience at all, as usual; Aquina had wondered what rock the government found them under. Also as usual.

Finally, finally , there’d been the proper color, and no unpleasant reaction to contend with from the Aliens. Then there was the matter of drawing up the new treaty clause to specify that color… and that had not been easy, for reasons that were no doubt clear to Nazareth Chornyak but that she had been too exhausted by then to bother trying to make clear to the rest of them.

And when it was all over, negotiation successfully concluded, Jeelods homeworld bound and happy, contract all signed and sealed and delivered, Aquina and Nazareth had been kept waiting while the government morons complained at length to the Chornyak man who’d come to retrieve them and take them home. Nazareth was incompetent, etc., etc. Aquina was no help, etc., etc. Disgraceful waste of time and money, etc., etc. If this was the best that the linguists could do, the government could only say et cetera et cetera.

Their driver had listened gravely, nodding once in a while to keep the stream of plaintive piddle flowing and get it over with; and eventually the flunkies had run out of anything to complain about. At which point he’d suggested that if they were truly dissatisfied with Nazareth and Aquina they should feel absolutely free to hire a different interpreter/translator team for their next contact with the Jeelods.

There was no other team, of course, since Nazareth Joanna Chornyak was the only living Terran who could speak the Jeelod’s language with even minimal fluency. There were two Chornyak infants learning it from her, of course, so there’d be someone to step into her shoes at a later date and to serve as formal backup. One of them was nine months old, and the other was going on two… there wasn’t much you could expect of them in the way of negotiating skills for quite some time to come. The flunkies knew that, and the linguists knew they knew that, and it was all just as silly as the Jeelods and their absence rituals. And seemed to take just as long.

“Eighteen minutes eleven seconds,” Aquina had muttered to the weary girl beside her, while they waited for it to be over; and Nazareth had giggled, and then said something genuinely gross in gutter French. All taken, they weren’t in the van until nearly eleven, and even at that hour the Washington traffic was so heavy that it was another twenty minutes before they boarded the flyer… and Nazareth would have to be up at five-thirty for the next day’s routine, as always, and in another interpreting booth by eight o’clock sharp. Such fun, being a child of the Lines!

And fun being a woman of the Lines, too, of course. There were plenty of women still awake at Barren House at midnight, and they were busy enough — and tired enough — to welcome an excuse for a break and listen to what Aquina had to tell them. She started with a small and dubious audience; just herself and Nile and Susannah and a new resident named Thyrsis that she didn’t really know well — who’d decided for some as yet unexplained reason that she preferred being here to living at Shawnessey Barren House. No doubt she’d tell them about it, in her own good time. Aquina began with those four, and then as she talked her audience grew steadily.

“I don’t think I understand,” put in Thyrsis Shawnessey the first time Aquina paused. “In fact, I’m sure I don’t.”

“That’s because Aquina’s so excited. She never can talk straight when she’s excited… fortunately, she’s always bored at negotiations, or lord knows what kind of things she’d have brought upon us by now.”

“How can you be excited, Aquina, at this hour of the night?”

“Because it is exciting,” Aquina insisted.

“Tell us again.”

Aquina told them, trying not to get ahead of herself, and they listened, nodding, and Susannah got up and made three pots of tea and poured it all round.

When she was satisified that everyone was settled with the steaming cups, she called Aquina to a halt, saying, “Now let me just find out if I have this straight, without all the exotic touches. What you’re telling us is that that child, all on her own, has been writing down Encodings and making up words to fit them in Langlish. Without any help or instruction from anyone. And nothing in the way of information about Langlish, really, except the scraps the little girls pick up running back and forth between here and the main house… the bits and pieces they see us fooling with at the computers, and such. Have I got it right, Aquina?”

“Well, it was pissy Langlish, Susannah — you’d expect that.”

“I surely would.”

“But you have it right. Considering what she has to work with, she’d done very well. You could tell the forms were supposed to be Langlish, at least. And that’s not what matters anyway; it’s the semantics that matters, damn it. And I had a chance to ask her a thing or two while we were waiting for the men to wind up their dominance displays and let us come home — she’s been doing it a long time, she says.”

“That would mean a month or two, at her age.”

“Maybe so; maybe not. She says she has lots more pages at home. She’s keeping a notebook, like I kept a diary. What wouldn’t I give to get a look at that notebook!”