Native Tongue (35 page)

Somebody did; it sounded to Michaela like “rxtpt” if it sounded like anything at all, and there was quite a bit more of it.

“It
is
interesting,” she said slowly. “This kind of thing . . . I wouldn’t have thought that it could be, but it is.”

And they all smiled at her together as if she’d done something especially praiseworthy.

She was having a very hard time; she slept badly, and woke from nightmares drenched with sweat. She was losing weight, and the women fussed at her to let the other residents of Barren House take over at least a portion of her duties.

“It’s my job,” said Michaela firmly, “and I will do it.”

“But you are up half a dozen times, every night! Someone else could do part of that . . . or take one night in three . . .”

“No,” said Michaela. “No. I will do it.”

It wasn’t the disturbed sleep that was making her thin and anxious, and certainly it wasn’t the work itself. She had almost nothing to do in the way of actual nursing. Medications now and then, a few baths to give, and injection, diet lists to make up; really almost nothing. She didn’t even have to see to making up the beds or caring for linen, because Thomas Chornyak had hired someone from outside to take care of such things. As for sleep, she had not had an uninterrupted night within the span of her memory. Women had always had to be up and down all night long; if there weren’t sick children, there were sick animals, or sick people of advanced age. If there were none of those, there would be a child with a bad dream, or a storm that meant someone had to get up and close windows—there was always something. A nurse only extended her ordinary female life when
she learned to be instantly awake at a call, on her feet and functioning for as long as she was needed, and instantly asleep as soon as she could lie down again. It had never kept nurses, or women of any kind, from listening respectfully as the physicians whined about the way their vast incomes were justified by the fact that they were awakened during the night to see to patients. They would have said, “It’s not the same thing at all!” As of course it was not. Women had to get up much oftener, stay up longer, and were neither paid nor admired for doing it. Certainly it wasn’t the same thing.

The cause of Michaela’s condition was something unique to Michaela, not one of these universals of womankind. When she had taken this post, she had intended to put an end to the women of Chornyak Barren House one by one, as plausibly and randomly as she could manage . . . adding forty or more notches to her bow. She had even considered killing all of them at once as a political statement; of course she would have been caught and punished, but it would have been a way of letting the linguists
know
they weren’t getting off scot free with their murders of innocent babies! She would have been a heroine to the public, who felt as she did about the matter; she had thought it might very well be worth it.

And she had gone so far as to select Deborah as her first victim. Deborah was ninety-seven years old; she had to be fed an enriched gruel and pureed fruit and vegetables with a soft tube. And no little girl went to talk to Deborah, although to Michaela’s consternation almost every little girl went to sit on the old lady’s bed to stroke her forehead and pat her hands for a few minutes during the day.

“She doesn’t know you’re there, sweetheart,” Michaela had told the child the first time she saw that happen. “It’s very kind of you, but it’s useless—Deborah hasn’t been aware of anything for a very long time.”

The child had turned clear eyes up to her, disturbingly adult eyes: she could not have been more than six years old. And she had said: “How do we know that, Mrs. Landry?”

Michaela had admitted that she could not be absolutely
sure
, of course—but there was no reason to believe anything else, and the doctors would tell her exactly the same thing.

“And that means,” said the little girl reprovingly, “that while we do not know for
sure
, Aunt Deborah might very well lie there every day unable to speak or move, and wish and wish and wish that someone would come sit with her and pet her a little. Isn’t that so?”

“Child, it’s so un
like
ly!”

“Mrs. Landry,” and it was a rebuke, no question about it, “
we
are not willing to take that chance.”

Michaela had not interfered again. But it had seemed to her in some way a little unwholesome that the children should be thinking about what Deborah might or might not be feeling, and it reinforced her opinion that she was the logical first victim. She had anticipated that she would take care of that rather promptly.

And now she’d been here half a year almost, and Deborah still lay there silent and unmoving under the hands of the little girls and the other women of the house. Michaela could not bring herself to do the act. Worse, with every passing day she felt herself less and less willing to kill
any
of them. They were not what she had expected. They were not what she had always been told they were. They did not fit the profile of the “bitch linguist” that everyone she had known believed in, that was the staple character in obscene jokes and foolish stories that children used to frighten one another. “Hey, you think the Lingoe males are shits,” people would say. “They’re angels of charity and goodness compared to the Lingoe
bitches!
” She had expected it to be easier than the other times—but it hadn’t turned out that way.

Here were women who had spent their lifetimes in unremitting work. The twenty-three who were her patients were not victims of illnesses, for the most part; they were simply exhausted. Like very old domestic animals who had been worked until one day they lay down and just could not get up again; that’s what they were like. They were
not
indifferent to the problems of the public . . . they were concerned about the affairs of the Chornyaks, certainly, but so was anyone concerned about their own families. But they cared just as much for the problems of the public at large as did any other citizens. They were just as interested in the latest events in the colonies, just as excited about the newest discoveries in the sciences, just as eager to hear of events in the world and beyond. The aristocratic disdain, the contempt for the “masses,” all that list of repulsive characteristics she’d been brought up believing marked the woman linguist—none of it was to be found in them. Not in the women she tended. And not in the other twenty who were not her patients.

They were not perfect, were not saints—if they had been, it would have been easier, because they would have been so
other
. Some of them were petty and silly. Some did everything to excess—for example, there were the absurdities of Aquina Chornyak, which seemed endless. But it was just the sort of distribution of imperfections that you would expect to find in any
group of women of such a size. No more, and no less. And their devotion to one another, not just to the invalids who might have called to any woman’s compassion but devotion even to the most irritating among them, touched Michaela’s heart.

She had not seen anything like this outside the Lines. But then outside the Lines women never were together in this way. Every woman was alone in her own house, tending to the needs of her own husband and her own children, until she was of an age when she was sent to a hospital to die—all alone in a private room. Women, asked to consider living as did these linguist women, would have said that the prospect was horrible and declared that nothing could make them choose such a life; Michaela was sure of it. But perhaps they would have been to one another as the linguist women were, if they’d had the opportunity; how could anyone know? It didn’t matter, because other women were never going to have what these women had, they were always going to be shut up, one or two to a house, never going out except as the displayed possession of some man.

These
women, living as they did, were wonderful to watch. She envied them what they had, but she could not hate them for it—she had seen in her first post, at Verdi Household, that the women of the Lines were as totally subjugated to the men as any women anywhere. They went out into the world to work, but they had no privileges. The situation was in no way their fault.

How was she to kill them?

But if she did not kill them . . . then the awful thought could not be kept out of her mind: perhaps she was wrong to have killed the others. Not Ned; she would never believe she had been wrong to kill Ned. But the other linguists? They had been male linguists, but still . . . it was a seed she could not allow to grow and yet it grew when she was sleeping. What if the male linguists were as innocent of the things she had been taught all her life long to blame them for as the women were? What if she had killed not to do her part in freeing her nation of a pestilence but out of a naïve belief in a stereotype that had no basis in reality? So many things that “everybody knew” had turned out, under her own eyes, to be lies. What if all the rest of the beliefs about linguists were lies, too? And when she remembered that the only evidence she had had for the conviction that linguists were to blame for the baby-slaughter at Government Work was the word of Ned Landry, her stomach twisted viciously. When had Ned Landry ever known
any
thing, about anything? What if he had been entirely wrong?

Michaela lost more weight, and slept even less, and the women
made her herb teas and fussed over her and threatened to call Thomas and tell him his nurse was sicker than her patients.

“You would not really do that,” she said.

“No. We would not really do that. But we would insist that
you
do it—and we will, if you don’t begin to improve.

She was still fretful, still not at ease in herself, as the time for the Christmas holidays drew near. And then one morning something happened that settled at least one part of the issue for her.

It was a morning when she was doing something that required her nursing skills instead of just her woman-wit. Sophie Ann Lopez, born a Chornyak but married into the Lopez family of the Lines, and then come home to Chornyak Barren House when she was left a widow at eighty, was not one of the bedfast ones. She was ninety-four, and she did not get things done speedily, but she got them done. She was up each morning with the birds, and the absolute limit of her concession to her advancing years was the cane she used for going up and down stairs. The moment she reached the level she was headed for she’d put the cane somewhere, and then in an hour or two everyone would be calling, “Has anybody seen Sophie Ann’s cane?” She hated the cane, and nothing but the almost inevitable prospect of months in bed with a broken hip from tumbling down stairs made her give in and accept even that minimal aid.

But in the cold of mid-December Sophie had caught some sort of infection; it had spread to her kidneys, and finally it had been necessary for a surgeon to come with his lasers and do a bit of minor surgery. It had gone uneventfully, behind the panelled screens with their riot of wild roses and blackberry vines in brilliant wools against a background of deep blue, and the surgeon was off to some other task, leaving Michaela to watch over Sophie Ann as she gradually awoke from the anesthetic.

For a while Michaela had thought her patient was only mumbling noises. And then, struggling through the sedative layers, had come recognizable words.

“It won’t be long now,” Sophie kept saying. “Not long now, I tell you!”

She kept it up until Michaela was first amused and then curious.

“What won’t be long now, dear?” she asked, finally.

“Why, Láadan! What a silly question!”

“What
is
it, Sophie? Is it a celebration?”

Michaela leaned over and stroked the thin white hair gently away from the damp forehead where it clung in limp strands.

“They’ll see, then,” babbled the old woman. “They’ll see! When the time comes, when we old aunts can begin to talk Láadan to the babies, it won’t be long! And then they’ll be talking pidgin Láadan, but when they speak it to
their
babies . . . then! Then! Oh, what a wonderful day!”

It was a language?

“Why, Sophie Ann? Why will it be wonderful?”

“Oh, my, it won’t be long now!”

It had come a scrap at a time until Michaela thought she had at least the rough outlines. These women, and the women of linguistics for generations back, had taken on the task of constructing a language that would be just for women. A language to say the things that women wanted to say, and about which men always said “Why would anybody want to talk about
that?
” The name of this language sounded as if Sophie were trying to sing it. And the men didn’t know.

Michaela stood thinking, tending Sophie Ann, and wondering if this was only the anesthetic talking; the old woman seemed very sure, but Michaela had known surgical patients to be very sure of dragons and giant peacocks in the operating room and similar outrageous delusions. If it was true, how could it have happened? How could they have kept it a secret, how could they work on it and not have the men know, supervised as they were? And how could anyone invent a language? Michaela was quite sure that nobody knew just how the first human language had come to be; she was equally sure that God was supposed to have played a prominent part in the becoming . . . she remembered that much from Homeroom. Hadn’t there been something called a Tower of Babble? Babbling? Something like that?

It was inevitable that Sophie Ann’s racket, and Michaela’s questions, would draw the attention of the other women; they came pretty quickly. Caroline came, wrapped in her outdoor cape, just back from an assignment, and cocked her head sharply to listen.