Suzette Elgin - Native Tongue

“You really think this is important, don’t you, Aquina? Not just a little girl playing, but really important.”

“Well, don’t you?”

“Aquina, we weren’t there — we didn’t see what she had written. And you can’t remember very well. How can we judge, with so little data?”

“I copied one of them.”

“Without asking her.”

“Yes. Without asking her.” Aquina was used to being in trouble with her housemates, and used to being on the wrong side of their ethical lines; she didn’t bother being defiant. “I thought it mattered, and I still think so. Here… please, look at this.” And she showed them a sample of what had been on Nazareth’s tablet.

To refrain from asking, with evil intentions; especially when it’s clear that someone badly wants you to ask — for example, when someone wants to be asked about their state of mind or health and clearly wants to talk about it.

“Well?” she demanded after they’d looked at it long enough to understand it. “Say something!”

“And she gave this a lexicalization as a Langlish word?”

“Well, hellfire and heavengates, woman, Nazareth doesn’t know that there’s any other woman-language but Langlish! Naturally that’s what she tried to do. But can’t you see? If she can formulate semantic concepts like these, we know what to do with them!”

“Oh, but Aquina,” Susannah objected, “then the child would expect to see them turn up on the computers in the Langlish program. And that would mean the men would have access to them. We can’t have that, and you know it.”

There was a chorus of agreement, and Aquina shook her head fiercely and shouted, “I NEVER SAID — ” and then abruptly lowered her voice and started over. She was too tired to yell, even if it had been appropriate.

“I never said that we would tell Nazareth we were using them; lord, I’m not completely stupid!”

“But then how would we get them?”

“I’ll get them,” said Aquina. “I’m Nazareth’s informal backup for all the Jeelod negotiations, and they’re back with some fool complaint about every two weeks. I’ll have plenty of boredom time with her to find out where she keeps that notebook. Not in the girldorm, that’s for sure… I never would have. But she never has any opportunity to take it far from either this house or the big house — it’s in a tree, or down a hole, or something. And she’ll tell me.”

“And then?”

“And then I will — very carefully, so she’ll never know — go every week or so and copy off whatever she’s added.”

There. Now they were shocked. They knew all about breaking eggs to make omelettes, but it didn’t help them any; they had about as much political sense as Nazareth, even when you put the whole bunch of them together.

“You can’t do that,” said Nile flatly, pulling her shawl tighter around her as a sudden lash of sleet rattled the window beside them.

“Why can’t I?”

“How would you have felt if somebody had done that with your diary, when you were little?”

“There’s a difference.”

“Such as?”

“My diary was only important to me . Nazareth’s secret notebook is important to every woman on this planet, and every woman beyond, and all women to come. The two things are not the same at all.”

Susannah reached over then and laid her hand, gnarled with arthritis and swollen with blue veins, but sure and strong and kind, over Aquina’s hand.

“My dear,” she said gently, “we understand you. But please do think! Living as we do, all of us in communal households from the day we’re brought home from the hospital — and on the public wards before that, lord knows! — and no instant away from the Household except the time we spend shut up with one another in interpreting booths… Aquina, we have so little privacy! It’s so precious. You can’t violate Nazareth’s privacy by sneaking her notebook from where she’s hidden it away, just because she’s a child and won’t suspect you — that’s despicable. I don’t believe you mean it.”

“Oh, she means it!” said Caroline, joining them with a mug of black coffee. Caroline didn’t care for tea, and wouldn’t drink it to be polite. “You can be sure she means it!”

“Indeed I do,” said Aquina.

Susannah clucked her tongue, and took her hand away; and Aquina wished for her own shawl, but against the chill inside this house, not the chill of the weather. She could not understand why it never stopped hurting, having all the other women set against her. She’d be fifty-five years old tomorrow, more than half a century, and she’d lived here in Barren House so many years… and still it hurt. She was ashamed, to be so soft. And sorry she’d told them, but it was too late for that.

“I will find out where she keeps the notebook,” she said between her teeth, “and I will check it every week or two to copy what’s been added there, and I will bring that data back here for us to work on.”

“You’ll work on it all by yourself if you do.”

“I’m used to that,” said Aquina bitterly.

“I suppose you must be.”

“And because Nazareth will never know about it, she won’t be looking for those words in the Langlish computer displays — and they’ll be safe. But we will have the good of them.”

“Shame on you.”

“I’m not ashamed,” she said.

“Takes eggs to make an omelette?”

Aquina firmed her mouth and said nothing; she hadn’t learned not to be hurt, but she’d learned not to let them bait her.

And then, because she was so tired and she felt so alone, she started to tell them what she thought of their damnfool ethics, but Susannah cut her off instantly. And Belle-Anne, drawn from her bed by the subdued racket of their arguing, rosy as an angel, and her yellow hair loose down her back, came in to help. She rubbed Aquina’s taut shoulders, and poured her a fresh cup of tea, and there-thered her generally until she was soothed and Susannah had the subject well changed and onto neutral ground.

What was a real shame, they were saying, was that it would be so long before they could have Nazareth with them. With them and working on the woman-language in all her spare moments, with full knowledge of what she was doing.

“Do you know,” asked Nile, “that Nazareth’s mother told me the child’s language-facility scores are the highest ever seen since we’ve been keeping records? Clear off the scale! They’re expecting tremendous things of her… and such luck that it was her they gave that awful Jeelod language to; she has no trouble with it, apparently.”

“She won’t be any use to us for… oh, what, forty years?” Aquina hazarded, her voice thick with resentment even under Belle-Anne’s stroking and soothing. “She’s eleven now… she’ll marry, perhaps marry into another Household, and she’ll have the obligatory dozen children to give birth to — ”

“Aquina! Don’t make it worse than it is! Thomas Blair Chornyak will never let her get out of his sight — you can count on that. And it’s not a dozen children she’ll have to produce, that’s absurd!”

“All right, half a dozen, then. Six children, seven children, whatever you like — lots of children. And every instant given over to working on the government contracts, hardly time to get up out of childbed before she’s back in the interpreting booths again… until she’s worn out at last, and the menopause comes to bless her.”

“Even then,” Caroline put in, “she may not come to us. Not if her husband wants her to stay with him — not if she wears well. Or if she’s lucky and the man’s fond of her beyond just her body.”

“Or if she’s useful to him somehow,” said Thyrsis, with a sharp note to her voice that caught their attention. So that was it… she’d come to Chornyak Barren House against her husband’s wishes, because she was useful to him in some way, clever at something he liked having her do. And if she’d tried to go to Shawnessey Barren House he’d have been close by to be forever pressuring her to come back to the main house. They would be interested in knowing how she’d managed to get around his authority, come the time she felt free to tell them more.