Native Tongue

Chapter Ten

Thomas was nobody’s fool. He listened to what the doctors had to tell him, and he looked at the computer printouts, and he gave it about fifteen minutes of his time. You looked at sets of data, each one representing a possible hypothesis, until you had only one left. The one he had was the one he would have considered least plausible; but it was the only one the computers had not eliminated — therefore, it must be taken seriously. And he sent for a chief of detectives to come to his office at Chornyak Household.

The man was called Morse, Bard Morse; he was tall and bulky and ordinary-looking, but he proved to have a quick mind that belied the ponderousness of his movements. He listened while Thomas explained that someone had tried to poison a daughter of the house, and he ran his eyes over the computer printouts swiftly, and he came to an immediate conclusion.

“Oh, you’re quite right, Chornyak,” he said. “No question about it. Did you think there was?”

“Only because it was so unlikely,” said Thomas. “There’s no reason on or off this green globe for anyone to single out this one child — she’s only fourteen years old. And if the motive had only been to score some points off the linguists, it wouldn’t have been just Nazareth who was affected by the stuff. It makes no sense to me, frankly.”

“Furthermore,” mused the detective, “whoever did it isn’t worth a damn, if you know what I mean.”

“I’m not sure I do.”

“Well, there’s various kinds of poisonings, Mr. Chornyak. There’s the kind that’s meant to kill, with a great whopping fatal dose all at one time — this sure as hell wasn’t that. And then there’s the kind that’s meant to kill slowly, small doses given over a year or so, and the victim growing sicker and sicker — but with that plan, they never would have used a dose that would make your kid so sick so fast… and they would have used something that was harder to trace and analyze. That’s not it, either.”

“What else is there?”

“There’s the kind where the poisoner doesn’t really want to kill anybody. He does it for malice, because he enjoys seeing the victim suffer, for instance. Or he does it out of ignorance — say it was another child, that fancies himself a poisoner because he’s seen it on a threedy and thinks it’s exciting, but he doesn’t really understand that what he’s doing is dangerous.”

“Well? Do you see this business as either of those?”

Morse chewed on his mustache and screwed up his forehead, and then he shook his head.

“Naw,” he said. “Hell… it’s possible it was a kid. Maybe. But how a kid would have known to put those particular herbs together, or even which ones would be poisonous, I don’t see. And I don’t see where a kid would have gotten them, Chornyak. Those weren’t dandelion greens and daisy petals, you know, that was some pretty exotic stuff. But the malice bit… would that come in here? Would anybody pick out just that one child, for malice?”

“I don’t know, Morse. I don’t know at all.”

“Is there any reason, Chornyak, why somebody would be jealous of your daughter Nazareth? Is she… oh, spectacularly beautiful, maybe? Spectacularly brilliant? Anything like that?”

Thomas shook his head, and laughed. “She’s not unpleasant to look at, but that’s as far as it goes — just a plain ordinary gawk of a girl. And as for brilliance… her linguistics skills tests are clear off the scales, the highest we’ve ever recorded in the Lines… but only a few of the adults know that, close family members. And none of them would be such fools as to let the information get out for general knowledge where it might cause jealousy. So far as I know, people view Nazareth as an ordinary, reasonably well-liked, very busy linguist child, with nothing to set her off. You realize that there is a sense in which any linguist child is unusual — but not to other linguists.”

“I see,” said Morse. “Well, have you got anyone on the place that’s mentally just plain defective, sir? A retarded adult, for example?”

No… nothing like that. We never have had, to my knowledge.”

“Well, you see, the malicious kind, they’re always a certain kind of person. Retarded sometimes — that’s why I asked — cunning, but not intelligent, you know? And whatever the situation, they love to cause a commotion. They love attention, and everything in an uproar, and the feeling of power that they’re causing it all. They enjoy seeing pain, or they’re indifferent to it — they’re very sick people, as a rule. And always, always and without exception, they are fiendishly clever, Mr. Chornyak. They’re terribly hard to catch, and they enjoy the bloody hell out of running rings around the authorities and proving how easy it is to trick everyone. This isn’t like that, you see. This isn’t like that at all. It’s inefficient and disorganized and — well, it’s just bumbling about, as if the poisoner was either completely confused or maybe didn’t really have his heart in it. If you’ll pardon a joke at a serious time, sir, if a committee was supposed to poison somebody, this is how I’d expect it to look. An amateur committee at that.”

“Ah, yes,” said Thomas with satisfaction. “I see.” There was nothing like getting someone to look at a problem who actually knew what he was supposed to know and could get right to the heart of it.

“It makes perfectly good sense, Chief Morse.” He went on. “I understand exactly what you mean. But doesn’t it leave us in a bit of a mess? That is, if this particular poisoning isn’t any of the usual kinds, doesn’t that mean it will be very hard to solve?”

Morse pursed his lips and rubbed at his chin with his thumb.

“I don’t think it’s that bad, Mr. Chornyak,” he said cautiously. “We may never find out why this has been going on — it doesn’t look as if even the poisoner knows why, you see. But it’s got to be somebody that’s warped more than just a little bit — someone very strange indeed. And someone who isn’t clever enough to be very hard to catch. It may be tedious, and it may take a little time, but if you’ll authorize the investigation we can certainly catch this person. And I might add, sir, that if you don’t authorize it we will have to get on with it all the same — poisoning’s not looked on with much favor by the law, you know, no matter how badly it’s done. Even when the outcome of the investigation is inconvenient.”

“Inconvenient? A curious word, under the circumstances.”

“Well, you can see for yourself, sir — it’s pretty nearly impossible that this could be anybody except a member of your family. And that always means an unpleasant time for everybody.”

“Oh, I hadn’t thought of that,” said Thomas. “Of course. But never mind, my friend. If we’ve got a poisoner, let alone an incompetent poisoner, under this roof, let’s get the bastard.”

“I’m glad to hear you take it like that, Chornyak.”

“There’s some other way to take it?”

“Sometimes people are outraged at the very idea that it could be one of their own, sir. And sometimes they know who it is and they can’t stand to see the person exposed — and that’s perhaps the stickiest of all. You never know where you are when it’s like that, because you never know who’s lying to you. Or why.”

“We’re not one of those Gothic families with decomposing corpses in the closets, Morse,” said Thomas bluntly. “There’s nobody to protect here. You’ll find no barriers to your investigation in this Household except those put in your way by the person responsible for the poison — naturally, you can’t expect cooperation from the criminal. But as for the rest of us, the quicker you settle this the more pleased we will be.”

“That’s a refreshing attitude, Mr. Chornyak. I’ll get on with it, then.”

“Please do.”

“It was explained to me by the powers-that-be about the need to keep all this very quiet, by the way. I understand… all those children of yours out with the public, scattered all over all the time, you’re very vulnerable. You can put your mind at ease, Mr. Chornyak. I’ll need a few men in here to help me, but there’ll be no leaks. You have my word on that.”

“Good man.”

Thomas assumed the interview was over, and would have stood up to see his visitor out; but Bard Morse sat there, staring at the printout.

“Is there something else, Chief Morse?”

“Well, I was just wondering. It was one of you linguist families that had the baby kidnapped and killed by a Terralone group a while back, wasn’t it?”

Feeling his ghosts coming back to haunt him, Thomas agreed that that was true. Another family, but one of the Lines.

“Well, then… is there anybody on your premises that strikes you as likely to have become a Terraloner on the quiet? It would be like them not to be all that bright about it. Does that give you any ideas?”

“I’d have to think about it,” Thomas hedged, “but offhand I can’t imagine such a thing. Our entire existence, not only now but for generations, has been interaction with extraterrestrials. I’d say we’re unlikely candidates for Terralone.”

“Then, is there anybody that can come and go freely in the house here, but doesn’t actually live under your roof?”

“Only the women of Barren House. It’s only a few blocks from here, and there’s a great deal of coming and going among the females.”

“I don’t believe I know exactly what ‘barren house’ is, Mr. Chornyak. The significance of the term, I mean.”

“It may seem a bit odd to you…”

“Try me.”

“Well, of course any family is concerned with the birth of its children and their case and so on. But it’s different in a linguist Household, where an infant represents such an important — in the adult sense of important — unit in the family. Much of our lives revolve around the babies, and the little ones in the various stages of language acquisition. A pregnant woman has an extraordinary importance here, as does one who has a new infant to be Interfaced. It makes it very hard on the women who can’t participate in childbearing; they feel left out, and some of them become terribly depressed. They feel they have no part in it all, although that’s a distorted perception, and typical female emotionalism. We tried for years to make the barren women see that they played just as important a role in the Household economy… and then finally, for their own good, we built them a separate residence. Nearby — because they are important, Morse, not only in their usual roles of interpreters and translators, but because they take so much of the care of the little girls off the shoulders of our other women. We need them, and we’d be in a bad way without them. But they are much happier with their own separate house.”

He felt self-conscious, going on and on about it, but the detective kept nodding encouragement at him, and there didn’t seem to be any quicker way of explaining it.

“I assure you,” Thomas added, “if it was to do over again we wouldn’t call the place Barren House. That seems cruel, and in the worst of taste, looking at it now. But when the place was first built, it was taken for granted that that was just a kind of working title, and that a new name would be chosen quickly — it just never happened, and I don’t know why. It’s a tradition now… and I’m certain that the women who are barren no longer make any connection between their condition and the name. It’s just a name.”

“I see,” said Chief Detective Morse. “I’m sure it’s very sensible if you have all the background.”

“Thank you. I hope so.”

“But if I may say so, sir, now that you’ve laid it out for me like that, it seems to me that this Barren House is the obvious place to begin looking. If you have females that are over-emotional, not quite on balance, that kind of thing, that’s where they’d likely be.”

Thomas thought about it. The women sitting serenely with their eternal needlework, chattering about matters that no sensible human being would waste two words on. The women going routinely to their duties with the government as they’d done all their lives, and performing all their functions as competently as any other woman. The women who were old and bedfast now, with tiny girls from the Household sitting on the edges of their beds, talking and talking, providing the absolutely indispensable practice with the languages. Good, competent, reliable women, with the usual frailties of women, and — as far as he could perceive — nothing more. But this was not his field; this was the detective’s field. He had no business making prejudgments.

“You may very well be right, Morse,” he said then. “I leave it in your capable hands.”

“I’ll have my men look around this building this afternoon, sir, just to do the obvious things. Check the kitchen for arsenic in the sugar. Check your… Interface, is it?… to be sure it’s not leaking anything nasty. That kind of thing.”

“I’m sure there’s no problem with the Interface, Morse — if there were, it wouldn’t be Nazareth who was affected.”

“No, of course not, and the herbs wouldn’t have anything to do with that either, sir. But it’s a matter of systematic routine. We don’t know what this person might try next, you see — we need to look for anything at all that’s not as it ought to be. We’ll just check it out, Mr. Chornyak. And once that’s done, we’ll go over to the Barren House place and get down to the real digging. We’ll have something for you as quickly as possible, I assure you.”

“Lord,” said Thomas, glad to see that it was finally coming to an end, and the other man standing up. “What an absurd business!”

“Be glad it’s only absurd,” said Morse quietly. “It could be a lot more than that, you know. And perhaps it’s a little more than absurd for the little girl that’s getting the worst of it.”

“She’s like any other teenage girl,” Thomas said absently. “She enjoys being the center of attention, and she takes advantage. I very much doubt it’s half as bad as she makes it out to be.”

“Just as you say, Mr. Chornyak,” said the detective. “You know your own daughter, I’m sure — I don’t. But let’s get it set to rights, shall we? Even if she’s just glorying in all the drama, that’s not good for her. She’ll have a serious problem with her character if that’s allowed to continue.”

“Absolutely right,” said Thomas. “I agree.”

“I’ll get at it, then. And you’d help us out if you’d alert the rest of the family to expect us; that’ll save us explaining the same thing over and over again. How many of you are there, by the way? In the family, I mean?”

“Oh…91 of us in the Household proper. Here in this building. And 42 more at Barren House.”

“Good lord, there’s a mob of you!” Morse exclaimed. “I’m not surprised you’ve got a poisoner, man — I’m surprised you don’t have half a dozen! So would anybody in such a situation!”

“But we are accustomed to it,” said Thomas. “We’ve lived this way for so many many years.”

“It’s astonishing! I’d have said it was impossible.”

“Not to us. It’s perfectly ordinary to us.”

Morse whistled, still amazed, and said, “I wouldn’t have thought that kind of crowding was to be found anywhere on Earth in these times, Chornyak — it takes me back, I don’t mind telling you. And since that’s how it is, it’s a damn good thing you’re here to prepare them all for the fact that there’s a crew of police coming. We’d be the rest of the year just introducing ourselves and explaining our intentions, otherwise.”

“We have intercom channels to every part of the buildings,” Thomas told him. “I’ll do an all points immediately.”

“Thank you, sir. Now, if you’ll excuse me…”

Thomas watched him go, and then he wasted no time dawdling over the announcement. He punched the master key that brought in all the intercoms, including those at Barren House, and he told them.

“We seem to have a problem,” he said. “And somebody among us has a warped idea of what constitutes decent human behavior. There will be police investigators on our premises starting this afternoon and continuing for so long as it takes to find out who is responsible for Nazareth’s… illness. I expect every one of you to cooperate fully with these men. I expect you to see to it that they have access to whatever they need, without exception. I expect you to see to it that the children don’t get in their way or make nuisances of themselves. And we intend to get to the bottom of this in short order — if you know anything, anything at all that might be helpful, you are to tell the officers at once. We don’t have time for this sort of business, nor would I have thought any of us had the stomach for it. Let’s get it over with. That’s all.”

At Barren House, the women were silent with the silence that comes of sudden shock and no warning to ease it. Aquina had gone white and shrunk against a wall as Thomas spoke, and she stood there shaking — not one of the others even looked at her.

Barren House could not, could not possibly, undergo an investigation by professional law enforcement officers. It would be quite a different matter from just having to keep their secrets from the occasional male who dropped by to settle some sort of family business or deliver a message… quite a different matter from distracting ordinary visitors with one of their elaborate “needlework circles” in the formal parlor. The men who would come to Chornyak Barren House now were not casual visitors, they were trained investigators, and they had every reason to believe that they were after a dangerous secret — whatever there was to find, they would find it.

And there was a tremendous lot to find, if you really knew how to search.

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 anything past Belle-Anne.

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