Suzette Elgin - Native Tongue

But it was of course only an excuse. To stop the round of work and study and breeding and training and recording. To spend time in eating and drinking and good fellowship. To spend time renewing acquaintances, seeing old friends you might not have seen except in passing for years and years. Such excuses were few and far between, with only thirteen Heads of Lines to turn seventy.

They’d been enjoying themselves, no question about it. First there had been the magnificent food, such food as the public was led to believe the linguists gobbled every night, and the fine champagne, and the exotic wines from the colonies. All of that with the women still at the tables, and the conversation restrained by their presence to politics and shop talk… but delightful nevertheless.

And now the women had gone off to whatever it is that women do when they are alone together — gossip, Thomas thought, always gossip — and the time for real conversation had come. The solid useful talk of men, who know and enjoy one another and can speak freely together. Not gossip, certainly. The bourbon had come out, and the best tobaccos; the room had a warmth that it never had at Christmas. Thomas smiled, realizing that he was genuinely contented, for that moment at least. So contented that even the thought of the latest D.A.T. catastrophe could not distract him. Not tonight.

“You look smug, Thomas,” his brother Adam observed, pouring him some more bourbon. “Downright smug.”

“I feel smug.”

“Just because you survived to seventy?” Adam needled him. “That’s not so remarkable. Two more years, and I’ll have done the same.”

Thomas just grinned at him and raised his glass to touch the other man’s in a satisfactory clink of mutual congratulation. Let Adam pester; nothing was going to spoil his mood tonight.

He pointed down the table with his cigarette, at the huddle of men in splendid formal wear complete with neckties. “What are they talking about down there, Adam? If it’s as good as it looks, I may move down where I can get in on it. Which is it, sex or the stock market?”

“Neither one. Surprise.”

“Oh? Not women, not money?”

“Oh, it’s women, Thomas. But not their arms and their bosoms and their bottoms, my dear brother. Nothing erotic.”

“Good lord. What else is there to talk about, when one talks of women?”

He paid attention then, trying to hear, and scraps of it floated up to him over the general hum.

“ — damned angel, all the time. Can’t believe — ”

“ — one single ache or pain, can you believe it? It’s unheard of, but God what a relief! I was — ”

“ — how it used to be, whine and nag and whine and nag from morning till night — ”

“ — how to account for it, but — ”

“ — damn, but it’s good , you know, having — ”

Thomas shook his head; he couldn’t hear enough. Just a word here and a phrase there, drowned in satisfied discourse.

“All right, Adam,” he said, “I give up. What are they talking about?”

“Well… I don’t know anything about it myself, living as I do in single blessedness. But if they are to be believed, something has come over all the women.”

“Come over them? They all looked just as usual to me — what do you mean, come over them?”

“According to them — ” Adam made a large gesture, to include all the men at the tables “ — the socialization process has finally begun to take hold, and the women are recovering at last from the effects of the effing feminist corruption. High time, wouldn’t you say?”

“That’s what they’re saying?”

“That’s it. Women, they tell me, do not nag any more. Do not whine. Do not complain. Do not demand things. Do not make idiot objections to everything a man proposes. Do not argue. Do not get sick — can you believe that, Thomas? No more headaches, no more monthlies, no more hysterics… or if there still are such things, at least they are never mentioned. So they say.”

Thomas frowned, and he thought about it. Was it true? When had he last had to put up with insolence from Rachel? To his astonishment, he found that he could not remember.

He raised his glass high and shouted down the table, to get their attention; and because it was, after all, his celebration they turned courteously to see what he wanted of them.

“Adam here tells me all our women have gone to open sainthood,” he said, smiling, “and I’m ashamed to say that I not only haven’t noticed, I don’t find it easy to believe — it’s a good deal more likely that Adam’s confused. But if he’s not, it sounds like a damn drastic change… is it all of them? Or just a few?”

They answered without any hesitation. It was all of the women in the Households. Oh, perhaps the very oldest were still a bit cross now and then, but that was age — even old men could be annoying. Except for that, it was all of them, all of the time. As Adam had said, the distortions of the twentieth century had apparently finally been laid to rest, and the new Eden was come on Earth.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Thomas declared.

“No doubt, brother, no doubt,” Adam said, with a foolish smirk on his face. Adam had had too much bourbon.

At the next table Andrew St. Syrus raised a hand and said, “Let me just take a poll, Thomas… all right? Tell me, all of you — how long has it been since you sat and listened to a woman nag? Or watched one sit and blather endlessly about something that no one in his right mind could possible have any interest in? Or blubber for hours over nothing at all? How long?”

There was a murmur, and some consultation, and then they agreed. It had to be at least six months. Perhaps longer. They had only begun to notice it recently, but it must have been going on quite a long time.

“But that’s amazing!” said Thomas.

“Isn’t it? And wonderful. And all in time for your seventieth!” And up came the bourbon glasses in a toast.

“Oh, and those tiny ones,” said someone across the room. “Oh, to be fifty years younger!”

A roar of laughter went around the room, with the usual jeers about dirty old men, but there was support from the other tables.

“They are so incredibly sweet , those tiny tiny girls,” mused the fellow who’d brought it up. A Hashihawa, he was; Thomas could not remember his first name. “And they have the most charming concepts. Chornyak, perceive this, would you? I have a granddaughter — hell, I have two or three dozen granddaughters — but this one in particular, she’s an adorable little thing, name of Shawna, I think. At any rate, I heard her just the other day, talking to one of the other little girls, and she was explaining so gravely how it was, that what she felt for her little brother was not ‘love’ qua ‘love’, you know, it was… I don’t remember the word exactly, but it meant ‘love for the sibling of one’s body but not of one’s heart.’ Charming! Just the kind of silly distinction a female would make, of course, but charming. Ah, it’ll be a lucky man of a lucky Line that beds my little Shawna, Thomas!”

“What language was she speaking?”

The man shrugged. “I don’t know… who can keep track? Whatever she Interfaced for, I suppose.”

And then the examples began coming from others. The charming examples. The so endearing examples. Just to add to the conversation and explain to Thomas, who clearly had not noticed what was going on around him lately. Not a lot of examples, because the subject went rather quickly to the more interesting question of the next Republican candidate for president of the United States. But at least a dozen.

Thomas sat there, forgetting his bourbon, something tugging at him. Adam was staring blearily at him, accusing him of thinking of business instead of celebrating like he was supposed to do. But he wasn’t thinking of business. Not at all. He was thinking about a dozen examples, a dozen “charming” and “endearing” concepts, from nearly as many different Households. That should have meant roughly a dozen different Alien languages for the examples to have come from. But it didn’t sound that way. Few of the men had remembered the actual surface shapes of the words, but Thomas had been a linguist all his life; he didn’t need all the words to be able to perceive the patterns. They were all, every one of them, from the same language. He would have staked his life on it.