Native Tongue (41 page)

“Caroline,” Nazareth persisted, “I have never been able to get along with anybody. I know that. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I do know that I’m scarcely able to get through a paragraph without offending two people and hurting three others. And I am sorry . . . I have always been sorry. I have always wished someone would tell me how to be better. But however awful it sounds to you, put in the only way I know how to put it, that language is
ready
—‘finished,’ if you prefer—and for it not to be in use is a shame and a scandal.”

“Nazareth!” Caroline was annoyed now, and annoyed that she was annoyed. “You’re very good, of course—but we are not so bad as all that! We do not need you, to instruct
us
in linguistics.”

“But you do.” Nazareth was as determined as stone.

“You presume,” said Grace stiffly. “We have all been trying to make allowances, but you go too far.”

“All right,” said Nazareth, “I presume. But tell me what it is that the language lacks, and I will listen with an open mind. What doesn’t it have? What do you think it needs before you will call it finished?”

Well . . . they mentioned a bit here and a piece there, and Nazareth scoffed. Not one thing that they mentioned, she told them, that couldn’t be supplied from the existing mechanisms of the language. Or by adding a bound morpheme—an ending, a little extra piece somewhere in the word. They made their objections until they ran out of objections and she countered every last one of them.

Finally, Caroline said, “Nazareth . . . the vocabulary is so limited.”

“Is that it?” Nazareth stared around her. “Is it the size of the vocabulary that’s bothering all of you?”

“Well,” Caroline told her, “we know what a language has to have. We did all those things long ago, and you are right about the ones we’ve been discussing. But we can’t begin speaking Láadan to the babies until there is a vocabulary sufficiently large, sufficiently flexible—”

“To what?”

“What?”

“Sufficiently large enough and flexible enough to
what
, Caroline? Write the
Encyclopedia Galactica?
What are you waiting for? The specialized lexicons of the sciences? The complete lexicon of wine-tasting?
What
, precisely?”

Now they were genuinely cross, and their needles flew.

“Certainly not! We simply want it to be possible to speak it with grace and ease in the affairs of ordinary life!”

“Well,” Nazareth pronounced, “it is ready for that.”

“It isn’t!”

“How many words do you have? How many freestanding whole words, even without all those that would come from adding the affixes?”

“About three thousand,” said Susannah. “Only that.”

“Well, for the love of Mary!” Nazareth cried, and they all shushed her together.

“I’m sorry,” she apologized, “but really! Three thousand! The way you were carrying on . . . I thought perhaps you had only a few hundred lexical items.”

“Nazareth,” said Susannah, “English has hundreds of thousands of words. Do think—and don’t shout,
please
.”

“And Basic English, in which the entire New Testament has been most adequately written, has fewer than
one
thousand. As all of you know quite well.”

“But we cannot have the language begin in a state that requires constant paraphrase,” Caroline objected. “Bad enough that it must begin as a variant of a pidgin—at least let it have an adequate vocabulary!”

Nazareth took a long slow breath and laid the length of wool in her lap.

“My dears,” she said, as seriously and as patiently as she could, her voice steady and her eyes holding theirs, “I tell you that language is ready. Ready to use. And what is more, you know it. All of you, every last one, you know languages with no more lexical items than this Láadan of yours has. You are telling
yourselves
fairy tales, and I don’t understand why. If we begin today, if those of you tending infants for the main house begin this very day murmuring to those babies in Láadan instead of English, it will not be until they are adult women and are doing the same for the
next
generation—or maybe the generation after that, because no language has ever, as far as anyone knows, been started in this way—it will be at the very least the generation after those infants before Láadan is a creole. And still another before it can be called a living language with the status of other living languages.”

They showed her defiant faces, and she could hear their minds ticking, spinning the excuses; she stopped them before they could work their way into another tangle.

“Now, wait!” she said. “I know as well as you that in the days when every educated person learned Latin as a second
language for the carrying on of scholarly and legal discourse, people managed. It must have been a barbarous sort of Latin, but they
managed
. Do not go jumping from what I’ve said to still more reasons for delay! If it takes five generations, or ten, before Láadan goes beyond being a barbarous auxiliary language and becomes our native tongue, that is all the more compelling reason to begin at once! Of course it will be dreadful at first, there’s no way it could be anything else . . . but my dear loves, we are talking of at least one hundred years to get past that, if we begin this very day! And you sit there, and you tell me that we must wait until we have . . . what? Five thousand words? Ten thousand words? Ten thousand words and ten thousand Encodings? What arbitrary number have you set as your goal?”

“We don’t know. Not exactly. Only that what we have isn’t enough.”

Nazareth frowned, and bit her lip, and Susannah reached over to put the neglected stole back in her hands.

“Crochet, Natha,” she directed. “That is what we women do . . . ask the men and they will tell you. Any time they come here, they find us chatting and needling away. Frittering our time. Use your hook, please, child, and don’t look so
intense
. It makes wrinkles.”

Nazareth obeyed, absentmindedly putting the small hook through its paces, but she did not change her expression.

“There is something more,” she stated flatly. “Something that you’re hiding. This ‘limited vocabulary’ excuse is just as phony as the ‘not enough Encodings’ you gave me when I was a little girl. You use it to soothe the children, and I’m not a child—it won’t placate me. I want to know the truth. No more lies, now.”

“Nonsense!”

“You are forever saying that!” protested Nazareth. “You could save yourselves a lot of trouble by getting a parrot to say ‘nonsense’ for you all the day long. And it won’t wash . . . there’s something else. Something I’m too stupid to see. Something that isn’t just a question of whether the language is ‘finished’ or not. And I know exactly who to ask, too! Aquina Chornyak—what is the
real
problem here, hiding behind a silly wordcount?”

When Aquina didn’t answer, Nazareth reached over and pulled her hair. “Aquina! You tell me! What sort of radical are you, anyway?”

“All right,” said Aquina. “I’ll tell you—but they won’t be pleased.”

“Never mind that.”

“The real problem is because decisions have to be made, and these . . . persons . . . won’t make them.”

“What decisions are these?”

“You feel that Láadan is finished, right?”

“In the sense that any language is finished. Its vocabulary will grow, as the vocabulary of any language grows.”

“All right, then. Suppose we begin to use it, as you say we should do. And then, as more and more little girls acquire Láadan and begin to speak a language that expresses the perceptions of women rather than those of men, reality will begin to change. Isn’t that true?”

“As true as water,” Nazareth said. “As true as light.”

“Well, then, milady—we must be ready when that shift in reality begins. Ready to
act
, in response to the change! Once that begins we will not be able to go on sitting here in the parlor tatting and twiddling and playing at revolutionary ideas. We will not be able to spend our days like placid cattle, thinking of the time, centuries away, when someone will have to
do
something! And that is where the sticking point is, Nazareth—there’s not a woman in this house, or in any of the other Barren Houses, with guts enough to come to a decision about what we are to do
then
. That’s what keeps us, as you put it, adding one more brush stroke and one more line and going ‘oh no not yet!’ and ‘nonsense!’ and ‘pray spare us!’”

“Oh,” breathed Nazareth. “I understand. Yes.”

“Do you understand, Nazareth? Do you really?” Caroline’s voice was bitter and angry. “Consider, for example, what Aquina would have us do! We would start stockpiling emergency rations and supplies, if she had her way, and bundling them into packs that we could carry on our backs as we fled into the wilderness, each of us with one kidnapped girlchild on our hips, fleeing just one step ahead of the hordes of men determined to slaughter us all!”

“Caroline, you exaggerate,” Aquina scoffed.

“Not much. I’ve heard you often enough.”

“They wouldn’t dare kill us. They’d incarcerate every last one of us that
knew
Láadan; and they’d dope us silly till we forgot every word. They’d destroy our records, they’d punish any child who used a single syllable, and they’d stamp it out forever—but they wouldn’t kill us. I never said they’d kill
us
, Caroline; it’s Láadan they would kill. And we’d have to get away before they could invent some new and horrendous ‘epidemic incurable schizophrenia’ allegedly brought back from a frontier planet in a bag of grain . . . but they wouldn’t kill us.”

“You hear her?” Caroline challenged Nazareth. “That is what we listen to, endlessly.”

“I hear her,” Nazareth said. “I see your point, Caroline. And I also see Aquina’s. And there are many many other possibilities.”

“Certainly there are,” Caroline agreed. “It’s as absurd to think the men could get away with shutting us all away in instituions as it is to think they could kill us. And if Aquina didn’t so love wallowing in extremes she’d know that. They would have to move against us a few at a time, even if they invent half a dozen epidemics from outer space that are conveniently contagious only for females. But the men know the power of a new language just as well as we do—and they
would
stop it, Nazareth. The day we begin to use Láadan, the day we let it out of the basement, that day we put its very existence at risk. You were right about the tub of green stuff bubbling away down there, Nazareth—but we don’t have any virgins to sacrifice.”

“You are afraid.”

“Of course we are afraid!”

“What I think they will do,” said Faye, “the only thing they can possibly do, is break up the Barren Houses. Isolate us from one another. Keep us away from the rest of the women, certainly nver let us near the infant children. It won’t be hard for them to teach the babies that elderly women and barren women are witches, horrid old repositories of wickedness to be feared and avoided—that’s been done before, and it’s always been a smashing success! Some of us they’ll shut away . . . some of us they’ll isolate in the Households. Can’t you imagine the publicity campaign as they ‘decide’ that they were in error all these years putting us in separate buildings and ‘welcome us back to the bosoms of our families’? The public will love it. . . . and they’ll stamp out every vestige of Láadan. And every vestige of Langlish, while they’re at it, just in case it might give someone ideas again someday. And Láadan will die, as every language of women must have died, since the beginning of time.”

“Unless we get away before they realize that it’s happening,” hissed Aquina. “That’s the only chance we have.”

Nazareth got up and went to the window, staring out across the open green through the trees, silent and troubled.

“Nazareth,” pleaded Grace behind her, “if Aquina is right—allowances made for her embellishments, of course—do you perceive now what it means?”

“Yes.”

“And they can’t muster up the courage,” said Aquina with contempt, “to decide what must be done and
do
it.”

“Because we don’t
know
what we must do,” said the others. “We have talked and talked and talked about it . . . we don’t know.”

“We must choose one Barren House,” said Aquina steadily, “the most isolated and the most easily defended, and we must be ready to go there with as many girlchildren as we can take with us, at the first hint that the men know what’s happening. It isn’t a difficult decision. And we must be ready to move on from there, if we have to.”

“It would mean leaving our children!”

“And never seeing our families again.”

“And publicity—think of the lies the men will give to the media!”

“All the old ones, upstairs . . . we’d have to abandon them!”

“No wonder you’ve been stalling,” said Nazareth, turning around again. “Marking time. No wonder.”

“Oh, not you, too!” moaned Aquina. “I can’t stand it.”

Nazareth came back and sat down, and took up the foolish stole again. “Perceive this,” she said with absolute certainty in her voice, “no matter what it means—either we do not really believe in the Encoding Project, in which case the men are right and we are just silly women playing silly games to pass the time—or we must begin.”

“Damn right!” said Aquina.