Native Tongue (21 page)

There were, for example, Faye’s surgical instruments and medical lab, all of which would have been cause for serious suspicion even in the residence of a man, if he had no medical degree to account for them. For such things to be in the possession of women was absolutely illegal. Especially those items whose only use was for performing abortions or clearing up after them.

And there were the herb cupboards. Not just the ones that were poisonous. There was also the one that contained one of the world’s most efficient contraceptives, smuggled in at terrible risk by an underground railroad of sympathetic women from all over the world.

There was the rest of the contraband. The forbidden books from the time of the Women’s Liberation movement, that were permitted only to adult males. The forbidden, cherished videotapes . . . blurred and scratchy now, but no less precious for that. All the forbidden archives of a time when women dared to speak openly of equal rights.

There were the books of blasphemy . . . that were not even known to exist.
The Theology of Lovingkindness. The Discourse of the Three Marys. The Gospel of the Magdalene
, that began: “I am the Magdalene; hear me. I speak to you from out of time. This is the Gospel of women.” Those books were hidden here. Hand-lettered, and hand-bound, in covers that read
Favorite Recipes From Around the World
. They must not be found.

And there were the secret language files. They would mean nothing to the detectives, of course. But if they were carted back to the main house for the men to examine and explain,
they
would know what they were. . . .

And that was not all. That was by no means all of the secret and forbidden things that were hidden in the walls and the floors and the nooks and crannies of this place where women lived always without men.

It wasn’t that the women of Chornyak Barren House were
afraid of paying the penalty for their crimes. They could face that prospect, as they had always faced it. It was the
loss
, the terrible loss . . . Every Barren House would be searched then. The boards of the floors taken up. The flowerpots dumped out. The grounds dug up. And the only source the women of the Lines had, for so many things that made the difference between a life that was unbearable and one that was only miserable would be gone. Things that women needed, things that women were forbidden to have, things that had taken scores of years and danger to accumulate—they would be gone. And the women would have to start all over again, with the men watching them to be sure they failed.

It could not be allowed to happen, and that was all there was to it; there wasn’t any room for argument. The only question was: what could they do that would prevent it?

Out of the long silence, someone finally spoke, tentative, her voice thin with strain.

“Maybe we could manage,” she hazarded. “Of all women on this planet we are the most skilled at communication and the most practiced at deception. Perhaps we could manage to mislead the police . . . do you think we could? They are only men, like any other men.”

“Trained to search,” said Grace. “Trained to ferret out secrets.”

“And looking for a certain kind of person, who could get pleasure from poisoning little girls,” said Faye. “A psychopath, or a sociopath . . . so far gone in her madness that she feels no need even to be careful. We all know the profile for that sort of madwoman. If we try to ‘mislead’ the men, in this situation, they’ll learn things about us that we’d forgotten even existed to worry about. And we will destroy the Barren Houses. No, Leonora . . . we can’t manage. Not possibly.”

They talked it to death, ignoring Aquina still huddled by the wall but now collapsed forlornly like a bundle of rags. She had brought this on them all, and that was a burden heavy enough to collapse anyone. There was nothing that they could do for Aquina, even if they’d had time to concern themselves with her.

“We
must
come to a decision, quickly,” Susannah said after a while, and the other murmured agreement. “The children tell us that the men won’t get to us until tomorrow morning—but we can’t count on that. It could be a ruse . . . they could knock on that door this very minute. We have to decide what we are going to do.”

Like Thomas, they finally tackled it as they would have tackled a problem in linguistic analysis. They set out all the data
and they formulated certain hypotheses. They proposed certain solutions, and examined each one swiftly for its merits and its flaws.

“Remember,” Caroline cautioned them, “once they find out that there is even
one
secret here, that is the end—they’ll worry at it until they’ve turned up every scrap we have to hide. And what they don’t understand of the things they find, Thomas Blair Chornyak most assuredly will.”

“The only real defense we’ve ever had,” said Thyrsis, grieving, “is that no one has even taken us seriously. The men have always thought we were silly females, playing silly female games . . . they must go on thinking that.”

“We can’t just be unusually silly?”

“No.”

They tolerated it while Aquina proposed alerting all the Barren Houses and burning them down to the ground to destroy the evidence, and let her realize for herself as she babbled that the result would be the same utter catastrophe, only done even more quickly than the men would be able to bring it about.

“You can’t keep them from finding things,” said Grace slowly. “That’s going to happen, if they look.”

“And that is the crucial point,” said Caroline. “That is exactly the point. Now we have the question that matters: what would keep them from coming here at all? What would make them call it off, not
start
looking?”

When they said nothing, she sighed and went on. “Well, I can tell you. Just one thing.”

“And what is that?”

“If they thought the problem was solved. If they thought no investigation was needed, you see . . . because they already had their poisoner, without need to search for her.”

“Ah!” cried Faye. “Yes! That would do it! One of us has to confess, before they can start looking!”

“Convincingly,” said Caroline, nodding. “Not just ‘oh, I’m sorry, officer, I did it with my little potions’.”

“But
who
? It won’t go easy with her . . . who?”

Aquina stared at them as if they’d lost their minds and declared that that was not a question for discussion. This was her fault, she was responsible for it, and it had to be her. And they told her to just shut up.

“You’d say too much, Aquina,” said Susannah, trying in spite of her deep anger at this careless foolish woman to be gentle. “You’d be sure to. You’d go all political, and you’d
make a speech. And first thing you knew you’d have said one word too many . . . I’m sorry. It can’t be you, Aquina.”

Then who? They were terribly afraid that they knew the answer.

It was Susannah who said what all of them knew had to be said.

“There’s only one choice, really,” she mourned. “Only one possible choice. Because it’s not a question of choosing someone eager for self-sacrifice. It’s not a question of choosing someone who is, as the men would put it, dispensable. It’s a matter of choosing someone who will be believable, in view of the profile the police and the men have created for their poisoner. Dearloves, there’s only one woman here who can fit those specifications . . . and they’ll swallow it like a spoonful of fudge and cream. It has to be Belle-Anne.”

Belle-Anne Jefferson had come to Chornyak Household a beautiful young bride. She’d been chosen for a younger son who looked like an “At Stud” ad, and there’d been high hopes. After three years of trying, when there were still no new infants to be groomed for the Interface and the doctors told Thomas Chornyak what the problem was, he refused to believe it.

“That’s not possible,” he’d said flatly. “I’m willing to admit a pretty broad range of possibilities in this universe, having seen many an example that’s basically out of the bottom of the bottle in Terran terms—but I don’t believe
this
. You look again, gentlemen, and you bring me an explanation that doesn’t sound like the Uterus Fairy and The Wicked Testicle.”

But they came right back with exactly the same tale. Belle-Anne Jefferson Chornyak, twenty years old and a lush ripe peach of a girl, could indeed by the force of her own will kill the lustiest little wiggler of a sperm that any man could produce.

Thomas was furious, and declared that he’d never heard of such a thing.

“It isn’t common,” the doctors admitted.

“Are you
sure
?”

“We’re positive. You insert a sperm in that young lady, no matter how you go about it, and she just twitches her little butt and the sperm
dies
. Dead. Gone.”

“Well, bypass that stage!”

“We tried that. We implanted an egg, all nicely fertilized with her husband’s living sperm and healthy as you please.”

“And?”

“And two days later, spontaneous abortion. I think it took her
two days only because it was a new trick for her. When we tried it again on the off chance it wasn’t her doing, it only took her thirty minutes from lab to basin.”

“Judas galloping priest!”

“Yes indeed. You can thank God it isn’t a knack that women can master on any general scale, Chornyak, or we’d have problems . . . not that most women would have any interest in that kind of shenanigan. Most women are crazy about the drippy little creatures.”

“But Belle-Anne isn’t.”

“Belle-Anne most surely isn’t.”

“Have you ever seen this before?”

“No . . . there are half a dozen cases in the entire medical literature. It is truly rare. Fascinatingly rare. Oh, there are women who can work themselves up sufficiently to miscarry a fetus that wouldn’t have made it anyway . . . but basically, this is a green swan.”

“And I had to get it in my house.” Thomas swore, long and low, and the doctors grinned sympathetically.

“How does she do it? Can we bring in the therapists and convince her to cut it effing out?”

“Well . . . we don’t know,” said one of the men, and the others looked dubious. “She says she does it by prayer, as a matter of fact. You care to tackle that?”

“What? You mean the little trollop
admits
this?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Well, for . . .” Thomas was reduced to sputtering silence, a green swan phenomenon of its own.

“It’s not as if she were unaware that she’s doing it, you see,” they told him. “She’s doing it on purpose. I think trying to change the young lady’s head would be a waste of your time, your money, and your son’s energies. She’d be very resistant—you’re talking about years of therapy, at tremendous expense. Chornyak, the world is full of pretty young females . . . is it really worth the trouble?”

Which was how a pretty young woman like Belle-Anne, just turned twenty and eminently beddable, had ended up divorced and a resident at Chornyak Barren House.

The family had given Thomas a certain amount of argument about that. After all, it was a deliberate act of sabogate on the girl’s part that made her unfit for motherhood; why should they have to bear the expense of her upkeep for the rest of her life?

“I say send her back to her father,” said her ex-husband, who was understandably disgruntled, and had to face the bleak prospect
of the decent waiting period as a bachelor required of him before he could take another, more accommodating, woman to wife.

“No,” said Thomas flatly, and Paul John backed him all the way. “When we take anyone under this roof and accept the responsibility for their welfare, we’ve taken it just as it says in the wedding ceremony—for better, for worse, till death do us part. My personal preference would not be to send her back to her father, but to drop her off a tall building. But that is not the way this family does things.” And that had been the end of it.

Belle-Anne would have no trouble at all convincing the policemen; she would be believed. And Thomas Blair Chornyak would not put
any
thing past Belle-Anne.

It would have to be that way, if it broke every one of their hearts.

Chapter Eleven

Religious mania can be exceedingly dangerous in the human female—especially if not caught in the early stages. The stereotype—the woman who prays publicly hour after hour, who hears voices and sees visions and is anxious to tell the world about it—that woman is easily spotted, of course. But few women fit that stereotype unless there is obvious psychosis. Instead, we see what appears to be only a charming modesty and humility of demeanor, a pleasant lack of interest in material things, an almost appealing sweetness of word and deed . . . and only when this seemingly delightful creature is far gone in theophilia do we suddenly realize what we are dealing with.

We must continue to counsel our clients to encourage their females to be religious, because religion offers one of the most reliable methods for the proper management of women ever devised; religion offers a superb cure for the woman who might otherwise tend to be rebellious and uncontrolled. However, gentlemen, however—I must caution you to insist that a man take time every few months to carry on a religious conversation with the women for whom he is responsible, however tiresome that may be. Ten minutes of carefully structured talk on the subject will almost inevitably cause the woman leaning toward religious excess to betray her disorder. It’s time well spent.