Native Tongue (9 page)

“Oh, sure,” said Brooks Showard. “Sure it is.”

“Colonel,” snapped the Pentagon man, “it’s not a question of just wanting to chat with the things, you know. We need what they’ve got, and we can’t do without it. And there’s no way of getting it without negotiating with them.”

“We need what they’ve got . . . we always ‘need’ what something’s got, General. You mean we
want
what they’ve got, don’t you?”

“Not this time. Not this time! This time we really do have to have it.”

“At any cost.”

“At any cost. That’s correct.”

“What is it, the secret of eternal life?”

“You know I can’t tell you that,” the general said patiently, as he would have spoken to a fretful woman he was indulgent with.

“We’re supposed to take it on faith, as usual.”

“You can take it on anything you like, Showard! It makes no difference to me what you take it on. But I sit here, empowered by the federal government of this great nation to support you and a rather sizable staff in the carrying out of acts that are so far past illegal and criminal, and so far into unspeakable and unthinkable, that we can’t even keep records on them. And I’m here to give you my sacred oath that I’m not going to participate in that kind of thing for trinkets and gewgaws and a new variety of
beads
; and neither are the officials who—with tremendous reluctance, I assure you—authorize me to serve in this capacity.”

Arnold Dolbe flashed his teeth at the general, trying not to think that the uniform was quaint. There were good and excellent reasons for keeping the ancient uniforms, and he was familiar with them. Tradition. Respect for historical values. Antidote to Future Shock Syndrome. Etc. And he wanted to be certain that the general remembered him as a cooperative fellow, a real Team Player in the finest reaganic tradition. He meant to see to it that the general was fully aware of that. He felt that a brief speech was in order, something tasteful but still memorable, and he thought he was not overstating the case when he considered himself to be topnotch at the impromptu brief speech.

“We understand that, General,” he began, all sugar and snakeoil, “and we appreciate it. We are grateful for it.
Bee
lieve you me, there’s not one member of this team, not one man on this team, that doesn’t support this effort all the way—those without a need to know always excepted, of course. Not that they don’t support the effort, that is—they just don’t know . . . in detail . . . what it is that they’re supporting. We
do
—those of us in the room—we do know. And we feel a certain humility at being chosen for this noble task. Colonel Showard is a little overstressed at the moment, understandably so, but he’s behind you all the way. It’s just been an unpleasant morning here at Government Work, don’t you see. And yet—”

“I’m sure it has,” said the Pentagon man, cutting him off in a way that hurt Dolbe deeply. “I’m sure it has been bloody hell. We know what you men go through here, and we honor you for it. But it’s something that’s got to be done, for the sake of preserving civilization on this planet. I mean that, gentlemen! Literally for the sake of preventing the end of humankind on this
green and golden Earth of ours—the
permanent
end, I might add. I’m not talking a few decades in the colonies while things cool off and then we can move back planetside. I’m talking the
end
. Period. Final. Total.”

He said it as if he believed it. It was in fact possible that he
did
believe it, if only because he was a good soldier and you cannot be a good soldier if you think that those up the chain of command from you are telling you lies. And of course they were good soldiers too, and they wouldn’t think that those who had fed them the same line were lying to
them
. Nobody knew precisely where the buck stopped in this business. The general had a feeling that the buck went around and around on a möbius strip. Sometimes he wondered who was in charge. Not the President, certainly. It was one of his primary duties to make certain that the President never knew much about this little twig on the executive branch. The general had no illusions about the Pentagon not being part of the executive branch.

He steepled his fingers, and he looked at them long and hard, noting automatically that only Dolbe began to squirm under his gaze.

“Well, gentlemen?” he asked. “What are you going to do now? I’ve got to take some kind of reasonable answer back to my superiors—no details, mind, just a rough idea—and they aren’t feeling all that patient these days. We’ve run out of fooling around time, gentlemen. We’re right up against the wire on this one.”

There was a thick silence, with the general’s fingers drumming lightly on the table, and the air exchange whirring high and thin, and the American flag jerking limply every now and then in the mechanical breeze.

“Gentlemen?” the general prodded. “I’m a very busy man.”

“Oh, hellfire,” said Brooks Showard. He knew. Either he did the talking, or they’d all sit there until the end of time. Which, to hear the general tell it, wouldn’t be all that long. “You know what we’ve got to do next. You know perfectly well. Since you government/military shits are too chicken to slap every last goddam linguist into prison for treason or murder or inciting to riot or pandering or sodomy or whatever the hell it takes to make the fucking Lingoes cooperate—”

“You know we can’t do that, Colonel!” The general’s lips were as stiff as two slabs of frozen bacon. “If the linguists had any excuse,
any
excuse, they’d withdraw from every sensitive negotiation we have underway with Aliens, and that
would
be
the end of us! And there wouldn’t be one damn thing we could do about it, Colonel—not one damn thing!”

“—since, like I said, you’re too chicken to do that and do it right and make it stick, there’s only one thing left. You fellows want to keep your pretty hands clean, I’m sure. But
we
fellows have got to steal us a linguist infant, a baby Lingoe. On your behalf, or course. For the good of all mankind. How’s that for Plan B?”

They all squirmed, then. Volunteered babies, that was nasty. But stolen babies? It wasn’t that the effing linguists didn’t deserve it, and it wasn’t that they didn’t have babies in hordes and swarms enough to console themselves with if they came up one short. But the
baby
didn’t exactly deserve it, somehow. They were willing to go along with the religious party line, after a fashion, but none of them was really able to swallow that stuff about the sins of the fathers being visited, etc. Stealing a baby. That was not very nice.

“Their women whelp on the public wards,” Showard observed. “It won’t be difficult.”

“Oh dear.”

The general could hardly believe he’d said that. He tried again.

“Well, by heaven!”

“Yeah?”

“Is that the
only
alternative remaining to us, Colonel Showard? Are you absolutely certain?”

“You have some other suggestion?” Showard snarled.

“General,” Dolbe put in, “we’ve done everything else. We know that our Interface is an exact duplicate of those the linguists use. We know our procedure is exactly the same as theirs—not that it’s much of a procedure. You put the Alien—or better still, two Aliens, if you can get a pair—in one side. You put the baby in the other. And you get out of their way. That’s all there is to it. That’s what we do, just like that’s what they do—we’ve tried it again and again. And you know what happened when we tried the test-tube babies . . . it was the same, only it was worse somehow. Don’t ask me to explain that. And we’ve brought in every computer expert, every scientist, every technician, every—”

“But see here, man—”

“No, General! There’s nothing to see. We have checked and rechecked and re-rechecked. We have gone over every last variable not just once but many many times. And it has to be, General, it has to be that for some reason known only to the
linguists—and I
do
feel, by the way, that it constitutes treason for them to keep that knowledge to themselves—for some reason known only to them, only linguist infants are capable of learning Alien languages.”

“Some genetic reason, you mean.”

“Well? Look how inbred they are, it’s on the fine line of incest, if you ask me! What are we talking about? Thirteen families! That’s not much of a gene pool. They bring in the odd bit of outside stock now and then, sure, but basically it’s those thirteen sets of genes over and over. Sure, I’d say it’s a genetic reason.”

“General,” Beau added, “all we’re doing here is sacrificing the innocent children of nonlinguists, in something that is never going to work. It’s got to be an infant born of one of the Lines, and that is all there is to it.”

“They deny it,” said the general.

“Well, wouldn’t you deny it, in their place? It suits the traitorous bastards, controlling the whole goddam government, doling out their nuggets of wisdom to us on whatever schedule happens to strike their fancy, living off the backs and the blood of decent people. And if we have to murder innocent babies trying to do what they ought to be doing
for
us, well, shit,
they
don’t care. That just puts every American citizen, and every citizen of every country on this globe and in its colonies, all the more at their mercy.
Sure
they deny it!”

“They’re lying,” Showard summed up, feeling that Beau St. Clair had said about all he was going to say. “Plain flat out lying.”

“You’re sure?”

“Damn right.”

The general made the noise a restless horse makes, and then he sat there and chewed his upper lip. He didn’t like it. If the Lingoes suspected . . . if there was a leak . . . and there always were leaks . . .

“Shit,” said Lanky Pugh, “they’ve got so many babies, they’ll never miss one, long as we can get by with a female.
Can
we get by with a female?”

“Why not, Mr. Pugh?”

“Well. I mean. Can a female
do
it?”

The general frowned at Pugh, and then looked at the others for explanation. This was beyond him.

“We keep telling Lanky,” Showard said. “We keep explaining it to him. There is
no
correlation between intelligence and the acquisition of languages by infants, except at the level of
gross retardation where you’ve got a
permanent
infant. We keep telling him that, but it offends him or something. He can’t seem to handle it.”

“I should think,” said the general, “that Mr. Pugh would want to stay abreast of at least the basic literature on language acquisition. Considering.”

The general was wrong. Lanky Pugh, who had tried to learn three different foreign human languages, because he felt that a computer specialist ought to know at least
one
other language that wasn’t a computer language—and had had no success—was not about to keep up with the literature on native language acquisition. If Lingoe females could learn foreign languages . . . Alien languages, for chrissakes! . . . when they were only babies, then how come he couldn’t even master passable
French
? Every linguist kid had to have native fluency in one Alien language, three Terran languages from different language families, American Sign Language, and PanSig—plus reasonable control of as many other Terran languages as they could pick up on the side. And he’d heard that a lot of them were native in
two
Alien tongues. While he, Lanky Pugh, could speak English. Just English. No, he didn’t like it, and he didn’t want to take any close look at the question. It was something he carefully did not think about any longer.

“. . . throw his ass right out of here,” Showard was saying. “But it just so happens that he
is
the top computer tech in the whole world, the top hands-on man, and it just so happens that we can’t do without him, and if he chooses to know absolutely nothing
but
computers, that’s his privilege. That’s all he’s required to know, General, and he knows that better than anybody, anywhere, anytime. And nevertheless, we are not going to crack Beta-2 with a computer. Sorry.”

“I see,” said the general. He said it with utter finality. And he stood up and picked up his funny hat with all the spangled stuff on it. “None of my business, of course. I’m sure Dolbe here runs a tight ship.”

“General?”

“Yes, Dolbe?”

“Don’t you want to discuss—”

“
No
, he doesn’t want to discuss how we do this cute little kidnapping caper, Dolbe!” shouted Brooks Showard. “For gods
sakes
, Dolbe!”

The general nodded smartly.

“Right on target,” he agreed. “
Right
on target. I wish I didn’t know what I already do know.”

“You asked us, General,” Showard pointed out.

“Yes. I know I did.”

He left, with a smile all around, and he was gone before they could say anything else. The general got in, he did his business, he got out. That was why
he
was a general, and
they
were in the baby-stealing business. And the baby-killing business.

The only question now was, which one of them was going to do it? Because it would have to be one of them. There wasn’t anybody you could trust to go snatch a linguist baby out of a hospital nursery. And it had better not be Lanky Pugh, because he was the only Lanky Pugh they could get, and he couldn’t be spared. They didn’t dare risk Lanky Pugh.

Arnold Dolbe and Brooks Showard and Beau St. Clair stared at each other, hating each other. And Lanky Pugh, he went after the straws.