Native Tongue (29 page)

We think not. We think you want a wife that you can take with you anywhere without hesitation. We think you want a wife you can bring any guest home to in serene confidence. There are few more important investments a man can make in his future—don’t leave
your
future to chance. We look forward to serving you.

(Brochure, from The Perfect Wife,
Inc.)

SPRING 2187. . . .

Nazareth waited in the government car, staring bleakly at the snarled traffic all around her; they would be late, and the others would be angry. She would have to ask the driver to go in with her and explain that the delay had not been avoidable. . . . Happy nineteenth birthday, Nazareth Joanna Chornyak Adiness.

She didn’t feel nineteen. She felt old. Old and used up . . . The children of the Lines had little opportunity to
be
children, and that aged you. And having the children, first the boy born on her sixteenth birthday and then the twin girls two years later . . . that brought a certain maturity. But it wasn’t either of those things that made her feel like one of those ancient wrinkled crones cackling crazy imprecations from the back of a cave. It was living as the wife of Aaron Adiness, who was twenty-five on the outside and just barely three years old on the inside, that had done it.

Aaron was handsome, and virile—exhaustingly virile—and with most people he was charming. Nazareth knew that many women envied her her husband. His astonishing facility at acquiring languages and learning them had waned as he had become older, but before that happened he had run up an impressive total. She had no idea how many languages he could read and write with ease, but certainly it ran to nearly one hundred.

It was the sort of thing the media doted on, and they never tired of filling little holes in programming with a feature about “the man who speaks one hundred languages!” Which was absurd, of course—he spoke perhaps a dozen—but the story was better when it was distorted, and it fed the unhealthy fascination the public had for anything to do with the linguist monsters. It was not all that much of an accomplishment, really, not for the human languages. For someone to be fluent in tongues from five different language families was impressive; to know one hundred just demonstrates that you have had a lot of opportunity and that you look on language learning the way others might look on
surfing or chess. Human languages are so much alike that by the time you’ve learned a dozen well you’ve seen everything that human languages will ever do, and adding others is almost trivial.

But people weren’t willing to believe that, and Aaron didn’t mind encouraging the misunderstanding. Him and his “hundred languages”. . . . Let a two-line filler come on the screen with his name in it, never mind that it said the same thing it had said dozens of times before, Aaron would be there jabbing the key to guarantee him a hard copy for his scrapbook. Which Nazareth was obliged to keep up-to-date, of course.

Living with him, subject to his whims, she felt that she walked from morning to night on eggshells. His feelings were so easily hurt that she rarely knew what had bruised them; but he would say, “You know very well what’s wrong, you smug bitch!” and sulk for hours, until she had apologized not once but several times. And could be awarded his grudging forgiveness for a brief time.

If she didn’t apologize, she could count on humiliation, because he would make her the butt of his wit—and it was fearsome—on every occasion offered him, the more public the better. In private, he would not speak to her at all; in public, he kept everyone weak with laughter at his jokes about her faults and her weight and her one front tooth that was crooked and any tiny miscalculation that she might have made in the course of the day . . . or the course of the night. He would set her up to fall into his traps, and sit back beaming while they roared at her misery; and he would raise one elegant eyebrow and cluck his tongue at her as you do at a pettish child and say, “Poor sweet baby, you have no sense of humor at all, do you?” It was a blessed relief to go to work and escape from him. Always.

The other women laughed at his jokes as well as the men, and Nazareth knew why. If they didn’t, two things would happen to them. First, Aaron would include them in his war of ridicule. Second, their husbands would accuse them of being sullen and of being “wet blankets that spoil everybody’s fun” and of being too stupid to understand even the simplest funny line. The men, most of them, thought Aaron was the most entertaining person they’d ever had the pleasure to have around.

If Nazareth was sufficiently humble, she might gain a day or two of respite, but no more. Not only did things she said hurt his feelings, and looks on her face hurt his feelings, and things she did or failed to do hurt his feelings, he could not
bear
it if she did anything well. If someone complimented her, Aaron was
enraged. If she received a routine note of commendation for a job well done, he was furious. If she had a contract in hand and he had none, he was angry with a foul dark anger. She did not dare beat him at chess or cards, or win a game of tennis from him, or swim a few laps more than he could, because he couldn’t handle any of those things.

And it was Nazareth who bore the brunt of it when Aaron was bested at something by another man. In public he was the good sport, there to shake the winner’s hand and admire his skill; back in their bedroom he would pace endlessly around the room, raving about the bad luck and the series of mysterious accidents that had kept
him
from being the winner.

In public, his children were the apples of his eye, always tucked under Daddy’s arm or bouncing on Daddy’s knee. In private he detested them. They were useful only as possessions, something he could show off as he showed off his collection of swords or his cursed languages; he had no other interest in them. And he made no pretense of having any interest in Nazareth except for her sexual convenience, the money she earned for his private accounts (and how bitterly he complained about the 40 percent of her fees that went into the community accounts when he knew nobody but her could hear him!) and her value as a foil for his wit. If the day came when she could no longer be useful in any of those roles, he would have no more use for her than for a stranger . . . probably less. At least a stranger would have offered him novelty.

She might have complained, but there was no one to complain to. The men loved Aaron, since he had too much guile ever to turn his petulance on them—he had outgrown that, as Thomas had predicted that he would. And complaining to another woman would have been like shouting down a well. “If you live with a man, it’s like that,” they’d say, if they bothered to say anything. She believed Aaron to be far worse than most men—she knew, for example, that although her father was often angry with her mother he was always courteous to her in public, and she had seen no other man who tormented his wife as Aaron tormented her. But the women who did not have her problem had their own problems. There was no end to the inventiveness of men when their goal was to prove their mastery.

It was ironic that she had accepted this life for the sake of the Encodings, for there had not been any since the day of her wedding. It was not only that she never had an instant alone when she could have sat down and worked at them, not only the problem of a hidingplace for the work; she felt as if some sort of
deadness had crept into her mind and removed forever whatever had been the source of her efforts.

I am stupid, Nazareth thought. And I am not alone in that opinion. Aaron thought her stupid, certainly; he would teach her sons to think so. And the one and only time that she had slipped and tried to tell another woman what her life was like, that woman had called her stupid.

“Good Lord, Nazareth,” she had said. “You don’t have to tolerate that kind of thing—you
manage
him, you little ninny. How can you be so stupid?”

Manage him. How do you manage a man? What did it
mean
, to “manage” him?

“Mrs. Chornyak, I’d better go in with you and explain.”

Nazareth jumped . . . she hadn’t realized that the traffic had started moving again, much less that they’d arrived.

“Thank you, Mr. Dressleigh,” she murmured. “I’d be very grateful if you would do that.”

“Part of my job,” said the driver, carefully making the point that nothing else would have caused him to exert himself on behalf of a woman of the Lines. And then he was off, with Nazareth doing her best to keep up with him. He would explain, he would be gone, and this evening some equally reluctant hero would come to collect her. It made no difference to Nazareth; she had never had a driver who was friendly, or even very polite. Or who could be bothered to get her name right. She came from Chornyak Household, she wore a wedding ring—she would, therefore, be “Mrs. Chornyak,” and never mind the details.

But when the explanations and the formalities were over, and she was finally seated in the interpreter’s booth and arranging her dictionaries around her in preparation for beginning her work, she found that the universe had not forgotten her birthday after all. It had in fact prepared for her an absolutely splendid birthday gift, something she never could have conjured up for herself.

She had expected that this day would be more than usually tiresome, because the subject of the negotiation was an import tariff—never a fascinating item—and because she had no help whatsoever. Her nine-year-old backup was solidly locked into a negotiation in his own Interface language that could not be postponed; the six-year-old was down with one of the contagious childhood illnesses; and Aquina Noumarque was working in Memphis and could not come to help her either. That meant no support, either formal or informal; it was not an easy way to work.

Because her mind was taken up with the problems this would
mean for her, she didn’t even realize anything was wrong until she began to hear whispers and to feel the sort of tension that is the product of body-parl shouting distress. It caught her attention at last, and she looked up from her materials to see what minor catastrophe had upset the negotiations . . . perhaps she was in luck and a government man had broken a leg? Not painfully, of course, and not seriously; she wasn’t a vindictive woman.

And there sat her Jeelods in their usual coveralls, staring at heaven knows what, with an expression of grim pleasure on their square faces, and Nazareth gasped aloud.

“Dear sweet suffering saints,” she said under her breath, not even stopping to be sure that the microphones hadn’t yet been activated, “those are
females
!”

They certainly were. Even in the loose garments that were prescribed by their state religion, even with their hair close-cropped in a way that no Terran woman would have ever chosen, it was clear that they were females. Either they were unusual specimens, or the Jeelod woman was typically large of breast; large of breast and distinctly
pointed
of breast.

Nazareth dropped her eyes swiftly to the smooth plastic surface in front of her and fought not to let her delight show on her face. It would never do for the bitch linguist to betray her pleasure in finding herself in this situation—there would be scathing complaints to her father about the undiplomatic manner in which she had approached this diplomatic crisis.

There was a soft tap on the back of the booth, which did not surprise her—after all, they couldn’t just all sit there frozen as if the sun had been brought to a standstill, someone had to do something—and she said “Yes?” without looking around, carefully bringing the expression on her face under control before she had to show it to whoever this might be.

“Mrs. Adiness . . . I hope I didn’t startle you.”

She turned, smiling politely, just as the man slipped into the booth and took the seat beside her. Not a government man, then . . . who was he? He was handsome, and he must have been twice her age, but he wore no uniform or insignia by which she could identify him.

“Mrs. Adiness, I’m going to speak very quickly here,” he said, keeping his voice low. “I’m sorry to be so abrupt, but you will understand the necessity for bypassing the amenities. My name is Jordan Shannontry, of Shannontry Household, and I was supposed to see if I could be of service here in some peripheral fashion . . . we had word that you were completely on your own today, and REM34-5-720 has been a kind of hobby of mine.
Since I was free, and it was obvious that you would have your hands full, I came on over—but I wasn’t expecting
this
.”

“Neither were the government men,” said Nazareth in her most carefully noncommittal voice.

“How could they possibly not know better than this?” he asked her.