Suzette Elgin - Native Tongue

“I don’t expect to have to have them tell me,” he said, his face grim and his eyes blazing in a way she’d never seen him look before. “I will put everything else on my schedule for tomorrow aside. I will go to Barren House immediately after breakfast — I may damn well go before breakfast. And I will stay in that warren of iniquity until I get to the bottom of this if it takes me a week. I’ll turn out every cupboard in the place, I’ll look at every program in the computer… and while I’m there, to demonstrate to them that I am not quite as stupid as they may have thought, I will search every container and contraption they allegedly use for ‘needlework,’ with shears in hand if that’s what it takes. I’ll get to the bottom of it, Michaela. Whether they are ‘fond’ of it or not. Whether they dare try to lie to me or not.”

“I see, Thomas. My, what a lot of trouble for you.”

“And if it is what I think it is…”

“Yes, my dear? Then what?”

“Then,” and he struck his desk with his fist so hard that she nearly jumped — not quite, but nearly — “then I will stamp it out . Every last vestige of it. I will destroy it as I’d destroy vermin, and I’ll see to it that it’s done in every one of the Households. And there will be no more Encoding Project, Michaela, I give you my word on that. Not ever. Not ever again.”

Thinking that she must be more careful than she had ever been before, Michaela told him how wonderful it was that he could do all that, and so swiftly and surely. And then she asked him, “But my dear, I don’t think I see why you must trouble yourself in that way. It’s only a language, and they know so many languages already! Is it because they’ve done this without your permission… taught it to the children without asking you first?”

He stared at her fiercely, as if he would bite her, and she sat absolutely still and deliberately tranquil under his gaze until he was satisfied with glaring and clenching his teeth and knotting his brows.

“This Langlish, if they’ve actually pulled it together sufficiently for children to use it, would be as dangerous as any plague,” he told her flatly. “Never mind why, Michaela. It’s complicated. It’s way beyond you, and I’m glad it is. But it represents danger, and it represents corruption — and it shall not happen.”

“Oh, my dear,” Michaela breathed, “if it is so very dreadful as all that… perhaps you should not wait until tomorrow. Perhaps you should go tonight — yes, I am certain that you should go tonight!”

She knew no surer way to keep him from going straight to Barren House than to offer it as her emphatic suggestion, and he responded as she had anticipated.

“If I could be sure that I am right, I would go at once,” he said. “But I’m not quite that sure. There’s no need for hysteria.”

She shivered carefully, and made her eyes wide to tell him that she was frightened, and he laughed.

“Michaela, for heaven’s sake. Nothing could possibly happen before morning, even if I am right — and I’d look like a madman charging over there in the middle of the night if I’ve made an error. Don’t be absurd.”

He went on about it for quite a while; for him, he did a considerable amount of repeating himself. It was the whiskey, she supposed, or the shock of having to entertain the suspicion that the women had put something over on him. Or both.

She let him talk, feeling as if she were not really there in the cramped room but looking at it and at him through a tiny hole in a distant fabric, far from here, high in space and time. Whatever his problems might have been, they were about to be solved; as for her, she had no problems now because he had solved them. For good and for all. Peace filled her like dark slow water… the light in the room was gold melting and flowing.

Here was a murder that she could carry out as she had Ned’s, in good conscience. Here was a service that she could do, for the women of the Lines. She was no linguist and never could be, she couldn’t help them with their language and would only be a burden to them if she tried — but she was as skilled at killing as they were at their conjugations and declensions. She, Michaela Landry, could do something that not one of them, not even silly Aquina with her notions of militancy, could have done. She could save the woman’s language, at least for a time — perhaps long enough, certainly for a good while — and she could pay in some measure for her sins. If there had been deaths before at her hand that were not justified, if she had done harm, this would be a kind of recompense.

And no need to wait for opportunity, no need to be clever, because she had no intention of trying to escape. Not this time. She was tired, so tired, of playing the role of Ministering Angel while something in her writhed over questions she couldn’t answer, and the men she’d killed tormented her nights with their pleading. Now there would be an end to that, and the Almighty had mercifully granted her the privilege of a worthy end!

When he had fallen asleep, worn out with drink and with talk, she took a syringe from the nurse’s case that she kept always with her at night in case of an emergency, and she gave Thomas a single dose of a drug that was swift and sure. He made no sound, and he did not wake; in ten minutes he was quite dead, and past all hope of heroic measures. She moved him to the floor, long enough to close the couch that served them for a bed, and then she bent and maneuvered him onto it again — she had not spent all these years lifting and turning patients for nothing. She was strong enough, even for a man of his bulk, gone limp in death. She dressed him as he’d been dressed for the banquet, loosening the necktie, making it look as if he’d just stretched out there to take a nap. He often slept in his office, and no one would be surprised that he’d done so after the celebration.

And then! Ah, the wicked nurse, her sexual advances spurned by the upright moral Head of Household even in his slightly tipsy state, fell upon him and repaid his years of kindness with murder most foul! Out of nothing more than her wounded pride… She could easily imagine the newslines and the threedy features… CRIME OF PASSION! VINDICTIVE NURSE CRAZED WITH LUST AND MADDENED BY REJECTION, SLAYS TOP DOG LINGOE! It would be a seven days wonder. Maybe eight days. Maybe, since it was Thomas Blair Chornyak, much longer. It should buy the women many months, even if some other of the men had begun to notice what was happening, because the transfer of power for such an empire as the Lines constituted could not be a simple matter.

She had never been so calm, or so content. She was sorry that she would have to leave Nazareth Chornyak… dear Nazareth. But if Nazareth had known of this, she would have been grateful to have Michaela do for her what she could not do herself. It was a fitting gift to leave for her.

Michaela took her nurse’s case and went to her own room and her own bed; she fell asleep at once and slept without a single dream to disturb her rest. And she didn’t bother to undress. When they came for her in the morning, as they would the moment they saw the empty syringe beside the corpse, she would already be dressed to welcome them.