Native Tongue (43 page)

There was a touch on her arm, and she jumped; she hadn’t heard whoever it was coming up behind her. Clingsoles were wonderful for a house with scores of busy people coming and going; they kept down the racket. But they gave you no warning that someone was near you, which could be inconvenient at times.

It was Nazareth who had touched her, though, and that was a note of hope at last in this otherwise miserable morning.

“Natha,” she said. “You’re late.”

“So are you. Disgustingly late. Come have breakfast with me, and we can be disgustingly late together.”

“Here?”

“Of course not here. Come on, I happen to know that there’s a health crisis at Barren House that demands our immediate attention, Nurse Landry. I’ll vouch for it if necessary. You don’t want to eat with those old creakers, do you?”

“Not particularly,” Michaela admitted. “But I expect I ought to do it anyway. Sort of a public health service.”

“No, you come along with me, I need you worse than they do; I feel this terrible pain coming on,” said Nazareth. And
before anything more could be said she had moved Michaela out the door, across the atrium—where the latest A.I.R.’s had not yet come out of their privacy area, which meant nothing at all to be seen there—and through the service rooms onto the street. Nazareth wasted no time in anything she did, and years of experience with her brood of nine had given her a firm way of bustling another person along that was impressive even to a professional nurse who did professional person-bustling. At the slidewalk, Michaela applied the brakes, both to catch her breath and for the principle of the thing.

“Hey!” she protested, laughing. “It’s too early for running! I wasn’t brought up jogging and hoeing before daybreak like you mad linguists—could we walk now? Please?”

“We could. But I had to get outside before someone saw me and invented an emergency for
me
.”

“They do that, do they? I suppose that’s why I see you here at the big house so rarely.”

“Absolutely right,” said Nazareth. “My father devoutly believes that a linguist not in use is a linguist being wasted, and he allows
no
linguist to be wasted. I stop by very early to see whichever of my kidlings happens to be around, and then I hightail it back home.”

Home. That would be Barren House.

“You could get caught, going by the diningroom,” Michaela noted.

“Yes . . . but how else was I to get your attention? I assure you that if I stood in the atrium and shouted at you I would
definitely
get caught. It was safer to slip in and grab you, you perceive.”

The walk had started to turn into a jog again, and Michaela knew Nazareth couldn’t help it; hurrying was as natural to her as eating and drinking. But she stopped, and reached out to turn the other woman round to face her.

“Let me take a look at you,” she said, holding Nazareth firmly with a hand on each shoulder. “No, Nazareth, don’t go tugging away from me! I’m not at all sure you’re well . . . perhaps I should suggest to your father that you spend another few days at the hospital, since it’s so pleasant there? Hold still, woman, so that I can
see
you! They’ll still feed us, if we don’t get to Barren House till noon—hold
still
.”

Nazareth smiled at her, declaring that she gave up, and Michaela looked her over thoroughly in the morning light; it was more reliable than indoor light. Still much too thin, she thought.
Much
too thin. Tall as she was, a good four inches taller than Michaela,
the gauntness was still obvious. Especially in the plain tunics she wore. Her hipbones stuck out, still.

“I won’t eat more,” announced Nazareth with determination, reading her mind. “Don’t bother instructing me, Nurse. I eat enough already. I have always been a gawk—just ask my erstwhile husband—and I am not going to change to one of those motherly types at my advanced age.”

“Hush,” said Michaela, and laid a gentle finger to Nazareth’s lips, getting a kiss for her trouble; she moved her hands to trace the stark cheekbones, and narrowed her eyes to study the face of this self-proclaimed gawk. Yes, she was too thin; but the look of intolerable strain was gone. There was a touch of color in her cheeks, her eyes glowed with the beginnings of health, and she had let her hair down from that vicious knot she’d always worn it in and put it in a single braid down her back.

“Really, Nazareth,” Thomas had commented the first time he’d seen the change of hairstyle. “At your age.” Michaela was delighted that Nazareth had ignored him.

“You look better, Nazareth,” she said, finally satisfied. “So much better.”

“I
am
better, that’s why. Nothing like chopping away all the dead wood and decay at one whack to improve the basic structure.”

“When I remember how you looked in the hospital that day. . . .”

“Don’t remember,” advised Nazareth sensibly. “Don’t think of it. You think of the past too much . . . it’s not good for you.”

And how did she know that? Michaela stared at her, thinking how dear she was, and Nazareth clucked her tongue at her.

“Could we go on now, do you suppose?” she demanded, pretending to be cross. “If you’re through with inspection? I’m willing to eat, if you’d give me half a chance. And I happen to know that Susannah made spice bread this morning, Michaela.”

“It’ll all be gone.”

“If you keep us standing here like this, it certainly will.”

Michaela took her hand, and they hurried, cutting across the greenspace and leaving disapproving glances behind them from the pedestrians standing sedately on the slidewalks. They would think she was a Lingoe, too—it crossed Michaela’s mind as she stretched her legs to keep up with Nazareth’s brisk stride, and she marveled that it did not bother her. What bothered her was the prospect of missing out on Susannah’s pulitzer among spice cakes.

* * *

She had a long and busy day, and she gave no more mental space to her dreams; she was occupied with the living. And when she got back to Chornyak Household in midafternoon, ready to make her daily report to Thomas—a farce, but their most discreet opportunity to make arrangements for the nights, and therefore observed punctiliously—she found the house hushed and a message from Thomas that she should not go to his office that day.

“Is something wrong, Clara?” she asked, surprised; Thomas
never
omitted her “report” if he was in the house, because he was determined that it should be looked upon as an unchangeable item in his daily schedule. “It’s awfully quiet. . . . has something happened?”

“It’s Father, child,” Clara said.

Paul John?
Michaela would have run, then, answering the call like an old fire horse answering an alarm, but Clara caught her wrist and held her fast.

“It’s no use, child, and there’s no need for you to go,” said the other woman. “He’s gone—and everything’s been seen to.”

“But why wasn’t I
called?
He’s my patient! Why didn’t someone send for me, Clara? I was only at Barren House!”

“Michaela, dear child, my father had come down to make a pest of himself in the computer room—” Clara began.

“Oh heaven, your
father
. . . and I am standing here complaining at you! Oh, Clara. . . .”

Clara patted her hand and went right on. “He’d taken it into his head that there was something he wanted changed in one of the tax programs, and he was standing there talking, telling them how they were doing it all wrong and he wouldn’t tolerate it—and he just
went
, child. In the middle of a phrase. It couldn’t have been easier.”

“But—”

“And,” Clara continued, “we women were seeing to our dead many and many a long year before ever we had a nurse in this house. There was no need to disturb you.”

“I’m sorry, Clara,” Michaela said softly. “Of course there wasn’t. When did this happen?”

“Oh, perhaps an hour ago, dear. I’m sure someone’s gone over to Barren House with the news by this time . . . it’s not the sort of thing we announce on the intercoms . . . but you must have just missed them.”

Michaela drew a long breath, and realized that she was shivering. She was ashamed of herself.

“Clara, I’m so sorry,” she said again.

“Don’t be, my dear; Father was ninety-five, you know. It was to be expected, and I’m not grieving. If he’d been sick, now; if he’d suffered—that would have been another thing entirely. But this was just as he would have wanted it. He died right in the middle of telling someone what to do. It’s all right. Really.”

Michaela tried to smile, and then Clara was gone, saying something about arrangements to be made, and she could, blessedly, sit down at last. She was as weak as if she’d been tapped like a tree, and all her blood drained away. And she knew why. It wasn’t grief, though Paul John had mattered greatly to her; Clara was right that he had died as he would have preferred to die. It was because of what she had thought the instant Clara told her, what had come into her mind the instant she heard the news.

OH THANK GOD, NOW I WILL NOT HAVE TO KILL HIM.

That is what she had thought. She was sick with relief, and sick
at
her relief. She stayed there a long time, in the unusual stillness of the house, wondering what sort of wickedness wound on itself she nurtured.

After a while a message came through on her wrist computer, from Thomas. Unfortunate incident, but not unexpected, etc. Michaela’s services would, however, still be needed, etc. She was expected to continue in her position . . . he would meet with her the following day to discuss the necessary changes in her duties, etc.

Michaela acknowledged the message. And then, when she was sure she could walk without trembling, she went to her room.

Chapter Twenty-two

Now, the only song a woman knows is the song she learns at birth, a sorrowin’ song, with the words all wrong, in the many tongues of Earth. The things a woman wants to say, the tales she longs to tell . . . they take all day in the tongues of Earth, and half of the night as well. So nobody listens to what a woman says, except the men of power who sit and listen right willingly, at a hundred dollars an hour . . . sayin’ “Who on Earth would want to talk about such foolish things?” Oh, the tongues of Earth don’t lend themselves to the songs a woman sings! There’s a whole lot more to a womansong, a whole lot more to learn; but the words aren’t there in the tongues of Earth, and there’s noplace else to turn. . . . So the woman they talk, and the men they laugh, and there’s little a woman can say, but a sorrowin’ song with the words all wrong, and a hurt that won’t go away. The women go workin’ the manly tongues, in the craft of makin’ do, but the women that stammer, they’re everywhere, and the wellspoken ones are few. . . .
’Cause the only song a woman knows is the song she learns at birth; a sorrowin’ song with the words all wrong, in the manly tongues of Earth.

(a 20th century ballad,

set to an even older tune called “House of the Rising Sun”;

this later form was known simply as

“Sorrowin’ Song, With the Words All Wrong”)

SUMMER 2212 . . .

Time passed, in the ordinary way of time passing, in the cycle of the seasons and the less predictable but equally endless cycle of the government negotiations for conquest and expansion of territory. Languages were acquired, and infants born and Interfaced, and yet more languages acquired. Sophie Ann died, peacefully, in her sleep; and Deborah was gone now, too, with the little girls tending her to the last. Susannah’s arthritis kept her in a wheelchair now, but did not keep her from baking her spice bread. Nazareth remained thin, Caroline abrupt, Aquina excessive. They tried not to think of what Belle-Anne had become, because there was nothing they could do about that; and when Aquina could not keep from thinking about it they soothed her through the horrors and kept careful watch on the herb cupboards until the spasm of memory had eased. Time went by, no different from any other time.

And Nazareth had been right. Every tiny girl in Chornyak Household knew Láadan now, and used it easily. It wasn’t going as rapidly at the other Barren Houses, but the reports coming in from them were not displeasing. A few of the older girlchildren, already out of infancy when the teaching of Láadan began but still too young to be much involved in government contracts, had begun to pick up the language on their own . . . haltingly, of course. But then, the women were even more halting, and they managed. “Latining by,” they called it, remembering Nazareth’s comment about what the “international” Latin must have been like. They managed. And the men had noticed nothing.

One of the first things that Nazareth had done as the Project was put into effect was to prepare a manual alphabet for Láadan. Like the fingerspelling alphabet of Ameslan in concept, but very different in form, because it had to be something that only the trained and seeking eye could see. The tiniest movements, and made by fingers lying still and unseen in laps—that was all it
could be. It was splendid training for the little ones, and for all of them; if you could learn to follow those miniature motions and understand them, all the while behaving as if you weren’t doing so, following ordinary body-parl was absurdly simple by comparison.

The children loved it . . . there’s never been a child who didn’t love a “secret language” and this one was wondrously secret. It let them sit in Homeroom, for example, demure and seemingly attentive while the teachers droned away in their twentieth century rituals; the eyes of the little girls gave away nothing, but their fingers were busy. “STUPID poem! Will he never stop? How long is it till the bell? He’s an old fool!” And much worse, of course. It was exciting, it was just dangerous enough, and it was theirs alone. There was no need to worry about them forgetting that they must keep it a secret. You couldn’t have gotten them to betray Láadan short of using thumbscrews and the rack, because it was theirs, and it was theirs together—nothing else met that description.