Native Tongue (34 page)

If the room had been cut up into cubicles, only a few of them could have watched the procession of the trees through the cycle of the year, and the others would have only had glimpses when someone had time to wheel them down to the windows. And the sunlight would not have been there to cheer them except for that segment of the day when the sun was at their particular small stretch of the clerestory windows. They would not have looked up and seen open air and two panoramas of the glory of the
outdoors, and the faces of the other women who had been their relatives in law if not by blood for most of their lives. They would have looked up to see a flat barren wall, and to wait and hope that someone would come along and look in and perhaps stay for a few moments.

“It was our own choice,” one of the oldest had told her when she felt settled in enough to mention it. “The men, now, they had every intention of putting ‘private rooms’ on this floor. A decent privacy, they called it. We wanted none of that.” And she had laughed softly. “Once they realized they didn’t have to spend any money, they were delighted to let us have our way; in fact, they felt positively magnanimous about indulging us in our exotic fancies.”

“But don’t you tire of always being together?” Michaela asked. “I understand that it’s far more beautiful this way . . . this openness of light and air, and the views at the end of the room . . . but don’t you
mind
, always being in a crowd like this?”

The old lady patted Michaela’s hand reassuringly.

“Sometimes,” she said. “Sometimes we think ‘if I have to look at those stupid faces on those stupid women for one more minute I will go completely out of my mind!’ Of course; each of us does. And that is why there are four bedrooms downstairs, my dear. Separate, proper bedrooms. When one of us truly can’t bear living in this room any longer, we take a week’s rest—or longer, if we like—in a proper bedroom downstairs. And when you go down there you always think you’ll want to stay at least a month—but in three days you’re hankering to come back up here.”

“That’s very hard to believe,” Michaela said.

“Well, my dear, you must realize that all of us, or almost all of us, grew up in linguist Households, scores of us under a common roof. We’ve spent our childhoods in dormitories, we’ve always eaten in communal dining rooms and shared communal bathrooms. We’re much more used to being together all the time than your average person is today.”

“It’s so strange,” Michaela said. “At first, it must have been so hard.”

“No,” said the old lady briskly, “I don’t believe it was especially hard. We went into the communal dwellings after the Anti-Linguist Riots, for security . . . there was safety in numbers. And to have the Interfaces right there, you see. They cost an enormous sum, and there couldn’t have been an Interface in a small private home. And it was for security, as well as for
economy, that we earth-sheltered all the Households instead of . . . oh, buying up old hotels, or something of that kind. But the main thing that you must understand, and that you don’t understand because you are too young, my dear, is that in the days when the Households were built almost
all
people in this country lived very crowded lives. Almost all people everywhere did! Only the very wealthy could afford private homes, then, you see; and most people were jammed into apartments and condominiums . . . the crowding was just terrible. In that situation, the linguists were probably not much more crowded than the average person, and I daresay they were quite a lot more comfortable. Because the Households were carefully planned, you see.”

Michaela shook her head, embarrassed. “It’s hard,” she said. “Hard to imagine. Things have changed so quickly.”

“Mmmm, I suppose so, child. But the situation that
you
are familiar with, where anyone with a few thousand credits who feels a little crowded can just move out to a frontier planet or asteroid and have all the room he wants . . . that’s very
new
. Why, I can remember when there was only
one
settlement in space, my dear! And to be able to go out to that one, miserable bare hardscrabble that it was, Mrs. Landry, you had to have an enormous fortune at your disposal. Long before frontier colonies became routine, child, we were all jammed in together on this planet Earth in a way that people today would literally find intolerable. And think what I would miss, if I were given a room of my own!”

She waved her hand for Michaela to look around the room, and the other woman had to smile. On almost every bed, sitting most carefully on the edge so that they would not joggle bodies already stiff and aching, were the little girls from Chornyak Household. They came running all day long, in flocks, back and forth between the two buildings. And every patient, unless she was so ill that she could not participate, had two or three little girls of various ages perched on her bed, holding her hand, and talking. Talking, talking, by the hour. If one left, another would come at once to take her place.

Old Julia Dorothy, whose voice was so weak that she could no longer carry on any vocal conversation, was as much the center of the hum of girlchildren as anyone else; while they went to the others to keep up their skills in oral languages, both Terran and Alien, they went to Julia Dorothy to hone their skill with Ameslan and sat on her bed with their fingers flashing and their faces moving constantly in the mobile commentary that went with the signs. Julia Dorothy couldn’t speak aloud, but her fingers were
as nimble as spiders, and her old face with its wrinkles and seams was so articulate that at times Michaela—with not even the fingerspelling alphabet at her command—felt that she could grasp something of what Julia was signing.

These women, she had to accept it, were content. Ill, perhaps: feeble, certainly; old, beyond question. But content. They knew they filled a valuable role, that they were a resource without which the community of linguists could not have functioned. The little girls had acquired languages, and they had to
use
them, or they would fade and be lost. Their mothers and fathers and uncles and aunts had no time to talk with them in their multitude of foreign tongues; if they weren’t on duty on government contracts, they were on duty in the running of the Households. The children could not usefully practice with one another, because except for the English and Ameslan that they all knew, the rest of the languages were parcelled out among them two or three to a customer, and those two or three completely different. A child might have one other younger child who shared her Alien language, preparing to be backup, but the chances were rare that the two of them would be free at the same time except during the hours spent in Homeroom or before the mass-ed computers.

Only Michaela’s patients, who could no longer go out to work with the contracts or fill other useful roles in the economy of the Households, could do what these women did. They were a priceless resource, and they knew their value. When a four-year-old girl was the only person other than her eighteen-month-old backup who could speak some one Alien language on this entire planet, she could run over to Barren House in search of a willing partner in conversation. If no one there had even scraps of the language, the child—with a skill that astonished Michaela—would simply set about
teaching
it to whichever of the old ladies had caught her fancy and had free time.

Michaela listened because she was charmed, though she understood almost nothing of what she heard.

“You see, Aunt Jennifer, it’s almost like an Athabaskan Earth language! It has postpositions, and it’s ess-oh-vee. . . .”

“Aunt Nathalie, you’ll like this one! It has sixty-three separate classifiers, and every last one of them gets declined at both
ends
, can you believe that?”

“Aunt Berry, wait until you hear! Aunt Berry, watch my tongue! Do you see? It’s a whole set of fricative liquids, Aunt Berry,
six
of them in complementary distribution! Did you see that one?”

They might as well have been discussing the latest overturn in
physics for all that it meant to Michaela. But she loved to watch. The eager faces of the children, and the way they labored to make themselves so clear and to go slowly—because, they told Michaela, it is so
very
hard for someone like Aunt Jennifer to learn a new language, you know. And the unbelievable patience of the old women, nodding solemnly and asking the child to repeat it again . . . they would spend twenty minutes with the aunt trying a sound, and the child shaking her head and modeling it, and the aunt trying it again, over and over, until at last the little one would say “That’s not it, but it’s
almost!
” and clap her hands. But she would not joggle the bed. . . .

“Don’t you get tired?” Michaela asked once when the last of the children had finally gone home to dinner one very long day.

“Tired of the children?”

“No . . . not that, exactly. Coming and going like they do, I suppose you don’t have any one of them long enough that it’s all that tiresome. Not if you really like little girls, and you seem to.”

“Well . . . in the particular, Mrs. Landry, some of them can be maddening. They are normal little girls. But in the general, of course we like little girls.”

“But see here, don’t you get tired of always talking about languages like you do? I would go mad, I’m sure I would.”

“Oh, there’s nothing more interesting than a new language, my dear.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Ugh,” said Michaela. “I don’t think I can believe that.”

“Besides,” put in Vera from the next bed, “when we are actually conversing in the languages—not trying to learn one, or learn about one—we talk about everything in the world and in the worlds beyond.”

“It’s not just lessons all the time, then? So long as you’re talking Jovian, for example, you could be talking about dinner or the threedies or anything else at all?”

“That’s quite right, Mrs. Landry,” said Jennifer. “There is of course no such language as Jovian—but you have the rest of it right.”

“No Jovian?”

“Well, child . . . is there any such language as Terran? Or Earthish?”

“I suppose not. No, of course there isn’t.”

“Well, if our globe requires five thousand languages or more, why should Jupiter have only one?”

Michaela sighed. “I had never thought about it,” she confessed. “It just never. . . . never came
up
before.”

And then they explained to her that the humanoid languages weren’t given Earth names like “Jovian” anyway. At the very beginning it had been tried, but it had been a waste of time; people couldn’t even pronounce them, much less remember them.

“So they’re numbered, you see. Like this one . . . do you perceive, my dear? REM41-3-786.” Pronounced “remfortyone; three; seven-eighty-six.”

“What does it mean? Or does it mean anything?”

“REM . . . that’s a historical remnant. Long ago there was a computer language called BASIC, that had a word REM for “Remark,” that was used a lot. When they first began putting Alien languages into computers, they were still using REM, and it’s hung on. So they all have REM first now, and it doesn’t ‘mean’ anything except perhaps ‘here comes the number of an Alien humanoid language.’”

“And then?”

“Then comes the number that tells us which humanoid species is referred to. On Earth, there’s only the one . . . some planets have several. The ‘41’ in this number says that the language is one of those spoken by the 41st species with which we’ve Interfaced. The number ‘1’ won’t ever turn up, because it
does
mean Terran, in a way.”

“Now you’ve lost me.”

“Well. The digits from 1-1000, with Terran—serving as a sort of cover number for
all
Terran languages, don’t you see—being #1, those are reserved for the humanoid species. One thousand may not be nearly enough, of course, but we haven’t reached that total yet.”

“I see . . . I think. And who has #2?”

“Nobody at all,” answered Jennifer. “That number is set aside in case it happens that the cetaceans of this planet turn out to have languages of their own as we primates do. If we ever could get to the bottom of that, those languages would be summarized by the numeral 2.”

“My goodness.”

“Yes. So that’s that much, REM41. And then comes a number from 1 to 6, that classifies the language for one of the possible orderings of verb and subject and object. This one is a 3—that means its order is verb followed by subject followed by object. Very roughly speaking, of course.”

“We wouldn’t need that one, for all we know,” said Anna, “if we ever acquired a non-humanoid language.”

“Why? Would they all have the same order?”

“No, dear. There’s no particular reason to expect that nonhumanoid languages would
have
verbs, subjects, or objects, you see.”

“But then how could it
be
a language?”

“That,” they told her, “is precisely the point.”

“And then,” Anna finished, “there’s the final number. 786 in this one. That just refers to the numerical order the languages are acquired in. So, we have it all. REM41-3-786 . . . it means this is an Alien humanoid language spoken by the 41st encountered humanoid species—which may speak many many other languages besides this one, of course—and it has VSO order and is the 786th language we’ve acquired. That works out better than referring to it as . . .” Anna paused and looked around. “Anybody know the native name for REM41-3-786?”