Suzette Elgin - Native Tongue

Michaela took her hand, and they hurried, cutting across the greenspace and leaving disapproving glances behind them from the pedestrians standing sedately on the slidewalks. They would think she was a Lingoe, too — it crossed Michaela’s mind as she stretched her legs to keep up with Nazareth’s brisk stride, and she marveled that it did not bother her. What bothered her was the prospect of missing out on Susannah’s pulitzer among spice cakes.

She had a long and busy day, and she gave no more mental space to her dreams; she was occupied with the living. And when she got back to Chornyak Household in midafternoon, ready to make her daily report to Thomas — a farce, but their most discreet opportunity to make arrangements for the nights, and therefore observed punctiliously — she found the house hushed and a message from Thomas that she should not go to his office that day.

“Is something wrong, Clara?” she asked, surprised; Thomas never omitted her “report” if he was in the house, because he was determined that it should be looked upon as an unchangeable item in his daily schedule. “It’s awfully quiet… has something happened?”

“It’s Father, child,” Clara said.

Paul John? Michaela would have run, then, answering the call like an old fire horse answering an alarm, but Clara caught her wrist and held her fast.

“It’s no use, child, and there’s no need for you to go,” said the other woman. “He’s gone — and everything’s been seen to.”

“But why wasn’t I called? He’s my patient! Why didn’t someone send for me, Clara? I was only at Barren House!”

“Michaela, dear child, my father had come down to make a pest of himself in the computer room — ” Clara began.

“Oh heaven, your father … and I am standing here complaining at you! Oh, Clara…”

Clara patted her hand and went right on. “He’d taken it into his head that there was something he wanted changed in one of the tax programs, and he was standing there talking, telling them how they were doing it all wrong and he wouldn’t tolerate it — and he just went , child. In the middle of a phrase. It couldn’t have been easier.”

“But — ”

“And,” Clara continued, “we women were seeing to our dead many and many a long year before ever we had a nurse in this house. There was no need to disturb you.”

“I’m sorry, Clara,” Michaela said softly. “Of course there wasn’t. When did this happen?”

“Oh, perhaps an hour ago, dear. I’m sure someone’s gone over to Barren House with the news by this time… it’s not the sort of thing we announce on the intercoms… but you must have just missed them.”

Michaela drew a long breath, and realized that she was shivering. She was ashamed of herself.

“Clara, I’m so sorry,” she said again.

“Don’t be, my dear; Father was ninety-five, you know. It was to be expected, and I’m not grieving. If he’d been sick, now; if he’d suffered — that would have been another thing entirely. But this was just as he would have wanted it. He died right in the middle of telling someone what to do. It’s all right. Really.”

Michaela tried to smile, and then Clara was gone, saying something about arrangements to be made, and she could, blessedly, sit down at last. She was as weak as if she’d been tapped like a tree, and all her blood drained away. And she knew why. It wasn’t grief, though Paul John had mattered greatly to her; Clara was right that he had died as he would have preferred to die. It was because of what she had thought the instant Clara told her, what had come into her mind the instant she heard the news.

OH THANK GOD, NOW I WILL NOT HAVE TO KILL HIM.

That is what she had thought. She was sick with relief, and sick at her relief. She stayed there a long time, in the unusual stillness of the house, wondering what sort of wickedness wound on itself she nurtured.

After a while a message came through on her wrist computer, from Thomas. Unfortunate incident, but not unexpected, etc. Michaela’s services would, however, still be needed, etc. She was expected to continue in her position… he would meet with her the following day to discuss the necessary changes in her duties, etc.

Michaela acknowledged the message. And then, when she was sure she could walk without trembling, she went to her room.

Time passed, in the ordinary way of time passing, in the cycle of the seasons and the less predictable but equally endless cycle of the government negotiations for conquest and expansion of territory. Languages were acquired, and infants born and Interfaced, and yet more languages acquired. Sophie Ann died, peacefully, in her sleep; and Deborah was gone now, too, with the little girls tending her to the last. Susannah’s arthritis kept her in a wheelchair now, but did not keep her from baking her spice bread. Nazareth remained thin, Caroline abrupt, Aquina excessive. They tried not to think of what Belle-Anne had become, because there was nothing they could do about that; and when Aquina could not keep from thinking about it they soothed her through the horrors and kept careful watch on the herb cupboards until the spasm of memory had eased. Time went by, no different from any other time.

And Nazareth had been right. Every tiny girl in Chornyak Household knew Láadan now, and used it easily. It wasn’t going as rapidly at the other Barren Houses, but the reports coming in from them were not displeasing. A few of the older girlchildren, already out of infancy when the teaching of Láadan began but still too young to be much involved in government contracts, had begun to pick up the language on their own… haltingly, of course. But then, the women were even more halting, and they managed. “Latining by,” they called it, remembering Nazareth’s comment about what the “international” Latin must have been like. They managed. And the men had noticed nothing.

One of the first things that Nazareth had done as the Project was put into effect was to prepare a manual alphabet for Láadan. Like the fingerspelling alphabet of Ameslan in concept, but very different in form, because it had to be something that only the trained and seeking eye could see. The tiniest movements, and made by fingers lying still and unseen in laps — that was all it could be. It was splendid training for the little ones, and for all of them; if you could learn to follow those miniature motions and understand them, all the while behaving as if you weren’t doing so, following ordinary body-parl was absurdly simple by comparison.