Native Tongue (45 page)

Coughlake makes what is perhaps the best possible argument in favor of the Unsupportable Position when he says that derivational constraints should be left unrestrained, since, he argues, they have been exploited for too long already by non-derivational chauvinists attempting to exert a kind of interpretivist imperialism, a
pax lexicalis
, as it were, over the realm of syntax.

INSTRUCTIONS: You have thirty minutes. Identify the distinguished linguist who is quoted above, and specify the theoretical model with which he is to be associated. Then
explain, clearly and concisely, the meaning of the quotation. DO NOT TURN THE PAGE UNTIL YOU ARE TOLD TO DO SO. BEGIN.

(question taken from the final examination

administered by

the Division of Linguistics,

U.S. Department of Analysis & Translation)

This was a splendid, and a rare, occasion. Looking down the tables spread with the heavy white linen (real linen, taken from chests in the storage rooms where is had been folded away along with other Household valuables rarely used), looking at the gleaming silver and crystal, Thomas wondered just when they had last done this. It had to have been years ago, unless you counted the Christmas dinners . . . and even for those, they didn’t bring the linens from the chests, or invite guests from the other Households. This opulent display was in honor of his seventieth birthday . . . and the last one, come to think of it, could only have been for some other Head-of-Household’s seventieth birthday. Long ago, in this house, it would have been the celebration for Paul John. As if the number seventy had some significance.

But it was of course only an excuse. To stop the round of work and study and breeding and training and recording. To spend time in eating and drinking and good fellowship. To spend time renewing acquaintances, seeing old friends you might not have seen except in passing for years and years. Such excuses were few and far between, with only thirteen Heads of Lines to turn seventy.

They’d been enjoying themselves, no question about it. First there had been the magnificent food, such food as the public was led to believe the linguists gobbled
every
night, and the fine champagne, and the exotic wines from the colonies. All of that with the women still at the tables, and the conversation restrained by their presence to politics and shop talk . . . but delightful nevertheless.

And now the women had gone off to whatever it is that women do when they are alone together—gossip, Thomas thought, always gossip—and the time for real conversation had come. The solid useful talk of men, who know and enjoy one another and can speak freely together. Not gossip, certainly. The bourbon had come out, and the best tobaccos; the room had a warmth
that it never had at Christmas. Thomas smiled, realizing that he was genuinely contented, for that moment at least. So contented that even the thought of the latest D.A.T. catastrophe could not distract him. Not tonight.

“You look smug, Thomas,” his brother Adam observed, pouring him some more bourbon. “Downright smug.”

“I feel smug.”

“Just because you survived to seventy?” Adam needled him. “That’s not so remarkable. Two more years, and I’ll have done the same.”

Thomas just grinned at him and raised his glass to touch the other man’s in a satisfactory clink of mutual congratulation. Let Adam pester; nothing was going to spoil his mood tonight.

He pointed down the table with his cigarette, at the huddle of men in splendid formal wear complete with neckties. “What are they talking about down there, Adam? If it’s as good as it looks, I may move down where I can get in on it. Which is it, sex or the stock market?”

“Neither one. Surprise.”

“Oh? Not women, not money?”

“Oh, it’s women, Thomas. But not their arms and their bosoms and their bottoms, my dear brother. Nothing erotic.”

“Good lord. What else is there to talk about, when one talks of women?”

He paid attention then, trying to hear, and scraps of it floated up to him over the general hum.

“—damned angel, all the time. Can’t believe—”

“—one single ache or pain, can you believe it? It’s unheard of, but God what a relief! I was—”

“—how it used to be, whine and nag and whine and nag from morning till night—”

“—how to account for it, but—”

“—damn, but it’s
good
, you know, having—”

Thomas shook his head; he couldn’t hear enough. Just a word here and a phrase there, drowned in satisfied discourse.

“All right, Adam,” he said, “I give up. What are they talking about?”

“Well . . . I don’t know anything about it myself, living as I do in single blessedness. But if they are to be believed, something has come over all the women.”

“Come over them? They all looked just as usual to me—what do you mean, come over them?”

“According to them—” Adam made a large gesture, to include
all the men at the tables “—the socialization process has finally begun to take hold, and the women are recovering at last from the effects of the effing feminist corruption. High time, wouldn’t you say?”

“That’s what they’re saying?”

“That’s it. Women, they tell me, do not nag any more. Do not whine. Do not complain. Do not demand things. Do not make idiot objections to everything a man proposes. Do not argue. Do not get sick—can you believe that, Thomas? No more headaches, no more monthlies, no more hysterics . . . or if there still are such things, at least they are never mentioned. So they say.”

Thomas frowned, and he thought about it. Was it true? When had he last had to put up with insolence from Rachel? To his astonishment, he found that he could not remember.

He raised his glass high and shouted down the table, to get their attention; and because it was, after all, his celebration they turned courteously to see what he wanted of them.

“Adam here tells me all our women have gone to open sainthood,” he said, smiling, “and I’m ashamed to say that I not only haven’t noticed, I don’t find it easy to believe—it’s a good deal more likely that Adam’s confused. But if he’s not, it sounds like a damn drastic change . . . is it all of them? Or just a few?”

They answered without any hesitation. It was all of the women in the Households. Oh, perhaps the very oldest were still a bit cross now and then, but that was age—even old men could be annoying. Except for that, it was all of them, all of the time. As Adam had said, the distortions of the twentieth century had apparently finally been laid to rest, and the new Eden was come on Earth.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Thomas declared.

“No doubt, brother, no doubt,” Adam said, with a foolish smirk on his face. Adam had had too much bourbon.

At the next table Andrew St. Syrus raised a hand and said, “Let me just take a poll, Thomas . . . all right? Tell me, all of you—how long has it been since you sat and listened to a woman nag? Or watched one sit and blather endlessly about something that no one in his right mind could possible have any interest in? Or blubber for hours over nothing at all? How long?”

There was a murmur, and some consultation, and then they agreed. It had to be at least six months. Perhaps longer. They had only begun to notice it recently, but it must have been going on quite a long time.

“But that’s amazing!” said Thomas.

“Isn’t it? And wonderful. And all in time for your seventieth!” And up came the bourbon glasses in a toast.

“Oh, and those tiny ones,” said someone across the room. “Oh, to be fifty years younger!”

A roar of laughter went around the room, with the usual jeers about dirty old men, but there was support from the other tables.

“They are so incredibly
sweet
, those tiny tiny girls,” mused the fellow who’d brought it up. A Hashihawa, he was; Thomas could not remember his first name. “And they have the most charming concepts. Chornyak, perceive this, would you? I have a granddaughter—hell, I have two or three dozen granddaughters—but this one in particular, she’s an adorable little thing, name of Shawna, I think. At any rate, I heard her just the other day, talking to one of the other little girls, and she was explaining so gravely how it was, that what she felt for her little brother was not ‘love’ qua ‘love’, you know, it was. . . . I don’t remember the word exactly, but it meant ‘love for the sibling of one’s body but not of one’s heart.’ Charming! Just the kind of silly distinction a female
would
make, of course, but charming. Ah, it’ll be a lucky man of a lucky Line that beds my little Shawna, Thomas!”

“What language was she speaking?”

The man shrugged. “I don’t know . . . who can keep track? Whatever she Interfaced for, I suppose.”

And then the examples began coming from others. The charming examples. The so endearing examples. Just to add to the conversation and explain to Thomas, who clearly had not noticed what was going on around him lately. Not a lot of examples, because the subject went rather quickly to the more interesting question of the next Republican candidate for president of the United States. But at least a dozen.

Thomas sat there, forgetting his bourbon, something tugging at him. Adam was staring blearily at him, accusing him of thinking of business instead of celebrating like he was supposed to do. But he wasn’t thinking of business. Not at all. He was thinking about a dozen examples, a dozen “charming” and “endearing” concepts, from nearly as many different Households. That should have meant roughly a dozen different Alien languages for the examples to have come from. But it didn’t sound that way. Few of the men had remembered the actual surface shapes of the words, but Thomas had been a linguist all his life; he didn’t need all the words to be able to perceive the patterns.
They were all, every one of them, from the
same
language. He would have staked his life on it.

And that could mean only one thing.

“Sweet jesus christ on a donkey in the shade of a lilac tree,” said Thomas out loud, stunned.

“Drink up,” Adam directed. “Do you good. You’re not half drunk enough.”

He was not drunk at all, he was stone cold sober. And a whole bottle of bourbon would not have made him drunk at that moment.

It could only mean one thing.

Because there was no way that the little girls of all those different Households could all be acquiring a single Alien language, all at the same time.
No way
.

And it began to fall together for him. Things he had half noticed, without being aware that he noticed them. Things he had seen from the corner of his eye, heard from the corner of his ear—things he had sensed.

He looked at the men of his blood, the men of the Lines, laughing and hearty and slightly tipsy and contented, surfeited with the rare pleasure of the evening and one another’s good company. And all he could think was: FOOLS. ALL OF YOU, FOOLS. AND I AM THE BIGGEST FOOL AMONG YOU. Because he was Head not of just Chornyak Household, but of all the Households, and that was supposed to mean something. That was supposed to mean that he always knew what was going on in the Lines, before it could go farther than it ought to go.

How could it have happened? Where could his mind have been?

He said nothing to the others, because of course he could be wrong. There could be some other explanation. There could be some cluster of related Alien languages spread out among the Lines by coincidence, something of that sort. Or he could be imagining the patterns, distracted by the liquor he so rarely drank. He put it aside and concentrated on fulfilling his role as host for the rest of the evening, because it was his duty to do so and because he would not spoil this for everyone else when he might be mistaken.

It dragged on, interminably, all the pleasure gone from it for him. Adam passed out and had to be carried to a cubbyhole in the dorms reserved for just such undignified accidents. Adam could not control his women, and he could not handle his liquor, and no doubt it was unpleasant for him to have to always compare himself with Thomas, and so he drank until he could
compare no longer. It seemed to Thomas that this celebration, that had become a mockery, would never end.

When at last it was over, as had to happen despite his distorted time perceptions, Thomas was weak with a mixture of relief and dread. And glad that he could get away now to his office, where no one would dare go at night without his express invitation, and where Michaela Landry would be waiting for him as he had instructed her to be. He had expected to be in an unusually good mood at the end of this evening, and he had wanted her to be there, to talk to.

He still wanted her to be there, frantic as he felt. Not for her body—he had no interest in her body tonight. But for her blessed skill at listening with her whole heart and her whole mind. And for the fact that he could trust her absolutely.

He felt that if he could not have talked to someone about this he would have gone mad. He
could
talk to Michaela, bless her.

“Michaela, do you understand what I’m telling you? Do you follow what I’m saying?”

“I’m not sure,” she said carefully. “I’m not a linguist, my darling . . . I know nothing about these things. Perhaps if you would not mind explaining it to me again, I might understand.”

He badly needed to say it all again, that was clear to her. And for once she badly needed to
hear
it again. To be sure that he was saying what she thought he was saying, and to learn what he had learned. Because the women had not told her, of course, any more than they would have told any other woman who had to live among the men. Not even Nazareth. And Michaela had not guessed.