Suzette Elgin - Native Tongue

“Let them fight, then,” said James Nathan. “What can they do? They have no legal rights in this matter, so long as they cannot claim that they’re being deprived of anything — and I have explained to you that we would make absolutely certain they couldn’t make that claim. Nothing but the best for our women, I promise you! So they fight it, so they have hysterics, so what, Dano? Men have been able to control women without difficulty since the beginning of time — surely we are not such poor examples of the male homo sapiens that we cannot continue in the ancient tradition? Are you suggesting, Dano Mbal, that we men of the Lines are not capable of controlling our women?”

“Of course not, Chornyak. You know I am suggesting no such thing.”

“Very well, then. The women have only themselves to blame for this, my friends. They have decided, in some incomprehensible female way, to turn themselves into multilingual robots — it was not we men who set them on that course. They’ve made their beds, as the saying goes; let them lie in them. They have no money, they are legally not even of age… what can they do to stop us?”

“They can bitch. They can raise hell.”

“Then the more quickly we get this done, the more quickly we’ll be rid of their bitching and their hell-raising. I move we vote. At once. Time’s a-wasting, gentlemen.”

There was a certain amount of discussion, a few objections, some grudging compromises had to be made… that was to be anticipated. It was how the game was played. But in the end they agreed unanimously, as James Nathan had known from the start they would. And when that point was reached, and the vote properly recorded, he punched the keys that would display the holos he’d had prepared especially for this meeting. He intended to spend plenty of credits; they had the money, they could afford to spend it, and he’d been serious about that. But there was no reason to waste money, and he’d spent many careful hours with David, the two of them working out every detail of the basic plan. There was no reason at all why the residences couldn’t be sufficiently uniform to allow for purchasing all the materials in huge quantities, at correspondingly huge savings.

In the Barren Houses, when the announcement was made, the women first sat shocked into total silence, staring at one another. And then their eyes began dancing, and they smiled, and then they laughed until they had no strength left to laugh any more.

“We were going to flee into the woods…”

“With babies on our backs…”

“Dig ourselves forts in the desert…”

“Oh, dear heaven…”

“We were going to be shut up in the attics… oh, lord…”

Even Aquina had to admit that it was funny, although she felt obligated to warn them that this was probably all just a trick to lull them into a sense of false security. Before the men began the real action against them.

First they said, “Oh, Aquina, don’t start!”

And then they all thought of it together, and they backed Nazareth to the wall.

“Nazareth, you knew .”

“I didn’t.”

“You did . That’s why you always stalled… always said that it would be all right, always did your best not to be here when we had planning sessions. You knew . Nazareth Joanna, how did you know?”

Nazareth stared at the floor, and at the ceiling, and everywhere except at them, and begged them to let it pass.

“Can’t you just be satisfied?” she asked them. “We don’t have to flee anywhere, we don’t have to erect battlements and woman ramparts and move into caves with lasers at the ready… we just have to go on about our business, with a great deal less inconvenience than we’ve ever had to put up with in all our lives.”

“Nazareth,” said Caroline, “if we have to tie you to a tree, you are going to explain.”

“I was never able to explain anything,” Nazareth wailed.

“Try. At least try.”

“Well.”

“Try!”

“Perceive this… there was only one reason for the Encoding Project, really, other than just the joy of it. The hypothesis was that if we put the project into effect it would change reality .”

“Go on.”

“Well… you weren’t taking that hypothesis seriously. I was.”

“We were.”

“No. No, you weren’t. Because all your plans were based on the old reality. The one before the change.”

“But Nazareth, how can you plan for a new reality when you don’t have the remotest idea what it would be like?” Aquina demanded indignantly. “That’s not possible!”

“Precisely,” said Nazareth. “We have no science for that. We have pseudo-sciences, in which we extrapolate for a reality that would be nothing more than a minor variation on the one we have… but the science of actual reality change has not yet been even proposed, much less formalized.”

She didn’t like the way they were looking at her, or the way they were moving back. She hadn’t liked it before, when they were crowding her, but this was worse. And inevitable; she had known it couldn’t be avoided.

“What did you do, then, Nazareth,” Grace asked her in a strange voice, “while we made fools of ourselves?”

Nazareth leaned against the wall, and looked at them bleakly. It was hopeless. Probably the little girls who spoke Láadan well could have said what she needed to say, but she couldn’t even begin. I had faith? Could she say that?

Faith. That dreadful word, with its centuries of contamination hiding all the light of it.

“Please,” Nazareth said, giving up. “Please. I love you. And everything is going to be all right. Let that be enough.”

It was Aquina that saved her, however.

“Good lord,” Aquina cried, struck with still another call to arms. “We don’t have time for this! We have to decide how we go about offering Láadan to women outside the Lines…”

Dear Aquina.

“Now that,” said Nazareth solemnly, “is something that I do believe I can be helpful with. If you’ll let me make a pot of tea and if we could all sit down and talk about it…”

It was Lanky Pugh’s personal opinion that this latest hooha from Government Work should have been located offplanet. Way offplanet. Preferably somewhere out behind the Extreme Moons.

But the Pentagon didn’t feel that way about it. In the first place, they assured him it was perfectly safe for G.W. to be right where it was. El Centro, California, wasn’t just a ghost town — it was a ghost location . Nobody, but nobody was ever going to drop by the godforsaken broiling spit in the middle of a giant rockpile that had once been a town called El Centro… in a time when you couldn’t be too particular about what square foot or two of this earth you stood on. That time was long gone, now.

The real reason, however, was that the scientists who were required for this project couldn’t be allowed to go offplanet. Some of them might have been willing to do without their labs and their creature comforts, but the government wanted them right there at hand. Right on tap, where you could pick up your comunit and give a call and say, “My God, Professor Blah, will you come take a look at this ?” And Professor Blah could be right there, in about half an hour maximum. The Pentagon was almost violently against the idea of having any of their Professor Blahs more than a half hour out of range.

And so they were set up in an underground installation, all nicely cooled and decorated so you could hardly tell you weren’t at a motel, in the middle of effing nowhere. Lanky Pugh, and a whole platoon of servomechanisms, and the Professors. And what they had going this time surprised even Lanky, who had really believed — when they closed down Arnold Dolbe’s unit — that the U.S. Government had come to the end of its string regarding the Interfacing of human babies and nonhumanoid Aliens. The shutdown had been very convincing, and Lanky had approved of it with all his heart. He’d been glad the baby project was over, glad to see the discreet removal of the media notices calling for volunteer infants, and damn surprised when he found out that it was just one more song-and-dance to a federal tune.