Native Tongue

Chapter Eighteen

Michaela Landry’s first reaction to the living arrangements provided for the feeble and ill women of Chornyak Barren House was that it showed the men of that Household to be even more callous than other men, which was saying a good deal. She had looked at the situation, twenty-three women in twenty-three narrow beds, all in one big room with twelve beds down each side in rows that faced each other; and she had felt shock, and distaste, at how cheap the Chornyak men would have to be to treat these women so. Surely they could have managed at least the partitions used in the children’s dormitories at the main house, to give their women a semblance of privacy and a place of their own! But no, they were all dumped here like charity patients on a public ward in the oldest hospitals… and even there, Michaela thought, there were curtains to be drawn for those women who did not choose to be on public display. Not here. Here, if one woman must undergo some intimate procedure, or was ill in a way that would distress others to watch, someone would bring panelled screens — a practical use for their everlasting needlework — and set them up around the bed. And the moment the situation was back to normal, the screens would be taken away and the woman left in the midst of a crowd again.

But gradually she came to understand that it wasn’t precisely as it seemed to her. The room had high windows along both sides, so that there was always a soft flood of light, and it had ordinary big windows at either end that gave every woman a view of the Virginia woodlands outside. In the spring it was flowering trees and carpets of wildflowers; in the autumn it was a spectacle of scarlet and gold and yellow. For most of the women, who could rarely leave their beds, it meant nothing that the patches of woodland were really only skillful plantings of wild things in an ample yard, and that just past the edge of the glory of dogwood or scarlet maple there was a slidewalk and a public street; from where they lay it looked like the inner heart of a woodland.

If the room had been cut up into cubicles, only a few of them could have watched the procession of the trees through the cycle of the year, and the others would have only had glimpses when someone had time to wheel them down to the windows. And the sunlight would not have been there to cheer them except for that segment of the day when the sun was at their particular small stretch of the clerestory windows. They would not have looked up and seen open air and two panoramas of the glory of the outdoors, and the faces of the other women who had been their relatives in law if not by blood for most of their lives. They would have looked up to see a flat barren wall, and to wait and hope that someone would come along and look in and perhaps stay for a few moments.

“It was our own choice,” one of the oldest had told her when she felt settled in enough to mention it. “The men, now, they had every intention of putting ‘private rooms’ on this floor. A decent privacy, they called it. We wanted none of that.” And she had laughed softly. “Once they realized they didn’t have to spend any money, they were delighted to let us have our way; in fact, they felt positively magnanimous about indulging us in our exotic fancies.”

“But don’t you tire of always being together?” Michaela asked. “I understand that it’s far more beautiful this way… this openness of light and air, and the views at the end of the room… but don’t you mind, always being in a crowd like this?”

The old lady patted Michaela’s hand reassuringly.

“Sometimes,” she said. “Sometimes we think ‘if I have to look at those stupid faces on those stupid women for one more minute I will go completely out of my mind!’ Of course; each of us does. And that is why there are four bedrooms downstairs, my dear. Separate, proper bedrooms. When one of us truly can’t bear living in this room any longer, we take a week’s rest — or longer, if we like — in a proper bedroom downstairs. And when you go down there you always think you’ll want to stay at least a month — but in three days you’re hankering to come back up here.”

“That’s very hard to believe,” Michaela said.

“Well, my dear, you must realize that all of us, or almost all of us, grew up in linguist Households, scores of us under a common roof. We’ve spent our childhoods in dormitories, we’ve always eaten in communal dining rooms and shared communal bathrooms. We’re much more used to being together all the time than your average person is today.”

“It’s so strange,” Michaela said. “At first, it must have been so hard.”

“No,” said the old lady briskly, “I don’t believe it was especially hard. We went into the communal dwellings after the Anti-Linguist Riots, for security… there was safety in numbers. And to have the Interfaces right there, you see. They cost an enormous sum, and there couldn’t have been an Interface in a small private home. And it was for security, as well as for economy, that we earth-sheltered all the Households instead of… oh, buying up old hotels, or something of that kind. But the main thing that you must understand, and that you don’t understand because you are too young, my dear, is that in the days when the Households were built almost all people in this country lived very crowded lives. Almost all people everywhere did! Only the very wealthy could afford private homes, then, you see; and most people were jammed into apartments and condominiums… the crowding was just terrible. In that situation, the linguists were probably not much more crowded than the average person, and I daresay they were quite a lot more comfortable. Because the Households were carefully planned, you see.”

Michaela shook her head, embarrassed. “It’s hard,” she said. “Hard to imagine. Things have changed so quickly.”

“Mmmm, I suppose so, child. But the situation that you are familiar with, where anyone with a few thousand credits who feels a little crowded can just move out to a frontier planet or asteroid and have all the room he wants… that’s very new. Why, I can remember when there was only one settlement in space, my dear! And to be able to go out to that one, miserable bare hardscrabble that it was, Mrs. Landry, you had to have an enormous fortune at your disposal. Long before frontier colonies became routine, child, we were all jammed in together on this planet Earth in a way that people today would literally find intolerable. And think what I would miss, if I were given a room of my own!”

She waved her hand for Michaela to look around the room, and the other woman had to smile. On almost every bed, sitting most carefully on the edge so that they would not joggle bodies already stiff and aching, were the little girls from Chornyak Household. They came running all day long, in flocks, back and forth between the two buildings. And every patient, unless she was so ill that she could not participate, had two or three little girls of various ages perched on her bed, holding her hand, and talking. Talking, talking, by the hour. If one left, another would come at once to take her place.

Old Julia Dorothy, whose voice was so weak that she could no longer carry on any vocal conversation, was as much the center of the hum of girlchildren as anyone else; while they went to the others to keep up their skills in oral languages, both Terran and Alien, they went to Julia Dorothy to hone their skill with Ameslan and sat on her bed with their fingers flashing and their faces moving constantly in the mobile commentary that went with the signs. Julia Dorothy couldn’t speak aloud, but her fingers were as nimble as spiders, and her old face with its wrinkles and seams was so articulate that at times Michaela — with not even the fingerspelling alphabet at her command — felt that she could grasp something of what Julia was signing.

These women, she had to accept it, were content. Ill, perhaps: feeble, certainly; old, beyond question. But content. They knew they filled a valuable role, that they were a resource without which the community of linguists could not have functioned. The little girls had acquired languages, and they had to use them, or they would fade and be lost. Their mothers and fathers and uncles and aunts had no time to talk with them in their multitude of foreign tongues; if they weren’t on duty on government contracts, they were on duty in the running of the Households. The children could not usefully practice with one another, because except for the English and Ameslan that they all knew, the rest of the languages were parcelled out among them two or three to a customer, and those two or three completely different. A child might have one other younger child who shared her Alien language, preparing to be backup, but the chances were rare that the two of them would be free at the same time except during the hours spent in Homeroom or before the mass-ed computers.

Only Michaela’s patients, who could no longer go out to work with the contracts or fill other useful roles in the economy of the Households, could do what these women did. They were a priceless resource, and they knew their value. When a four-year-old girl was the only person other than her eighteen-month-old backup who could speak some one Alien language on this entire planet, she could run over to Barren House in search of a willing partner in conversation. If no one there had even scraps of the language, the child — with a skill that astonished Michaela — would simply set about teaching it to whichever of the old ladies had caught her fancy and had free time.

Michaela listened because she was charmed, though she understood almost nothing of what she heard.

“You see, Aunt Jennifer, it’s almost like an Athabaskan Earth language! It has postpositions, and it’s ess-oh-vee…”

“Aunt Nathalie, you’ll like this one! It has sixty-three separate classifiers, and every last one of them gets declined at both ends, can you believe that?”

“Aunt Berry, wait until you hear! Aunt Berry, watch my tongue! Do you see? It’s a whole set of fricative liquids, Aunt Berry, six of them in complementary distribution! Did you see that one?”

They might as well have been discussing the latest overturn in physics for all that it meant to Michaela. But she loved to watch. The eager faces of the children, and the way they labored to make themselves so clear and to go slowly — because, they told Michaela, it is so very hard for someone like Aunt Jennifer to learn a new language, you know. And the unbelievable patience of the old women, nodding solemnly and asking the child to repeat it again… they would spend twenty minutes with the aunt trying a sound, and the child shaking her head and modeling it, and the aunt trying it again, over and over, until at last the little one would say “That’s not it, but it’s almost!” and clap her hands. But she would not joggle the bed…

“Don’t you get tired?” Michaela asked once when the last of the children had finally gone home to dinner one very long day.

“Tired of the children?”

“No… not that, exactly. Coming and going like they do, I suppose you don’t have any one of them long enough that it’s all that tiresome. Not if you really like little girls, and you seem to.”

“Well… in the particular, Mrs. Landry, some of them can be maddening. They are normal little girls. But in the general, of course we like little girls.”

“But see here, don’t you get tired of always talking about languages like you do? I would go mad, I’m sure I would.”

“Oh, there’s nothing more interesting than a new language, my dear.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Ugh,” said Michaela. “I don’t think I can believe that.”

“Besides,” put in Vera from the next bed, “when we are actually conversing in the languages — not trying to learn one, or learn about one — we talk about everything in the world and in the worlds beyond.”

“It’s not just lessons all the time, then? So long as you’re talking Jovian, for example, you could be talking about dinner or the threedies or anything else at all?”

“That’s quite right, Mrs. Landry,” said Jennifer. “There is of course no such language as Jovian — but you have the rest of it right.”

“No Jovian?”

“Well, child… is there any such language as Terran? Or Earthish?”

“I suppose not. No, of course there isn’t.”

“Well, if our globe requires five thousand languages or more, why should Jupiter have only one?”

Michaela sighed. “I had never thought about it,” she confessed. “It just never… never came up before.”

And then they explained to her that the humanoid languages weren’t given Earth names like “Jovian” anyway. At the very beginning it had been tried, but it had been a waste of time; people couldn’t even pronounce them, much less remember them.

“So they’re numbered, you see. Like this one… do you perceive, my dear? REM41-3-786.” Pronounced “remfortyone; three; seven-eighty-six.”

“What does it mean? Or does it mean anything?”

“REM… that’s a historical remnant. Long ago there was a computer language called BASIC, that had a word REM for “Remark,” that was used a lot. When they first began putting Alien languages into computers, they were still using REM, and it’s hung on. So they all have REM first now, and it doesn’t ‘mean’ anything except perhaps ‘here comes the number of an Alien humanoid language.’”

“And then?”

“Then comes the number that tells us which humanoid species is referred to. On Earth, there’s only the one… some planets have several. The ‘41’ in this number says that the language is one of those spoken by the 41st species with which we’ve Interfaced. The number ‘1’ won’t ever turn up, because it does mean Terran, in a way.”

“Now you’ve lost me.”

“Well. The digits from 1-1000, with Terran — serving as a sort of cover number for all Terran languages, don’t you see — being #1, those are reserved for the humanoid species. One thousand may not be nearly enough, of course, but we haven’t reached that total yet.”

“I see… I think. And who has #2?”

“Nobody at all,” answered Jennifer. “That number is set aside in case it happens that the cetaceans of this planet turn out to have languages of their own as we primates do. If we ever could get to the bottom of that, those languages would be summarized by the numeral 2.”

“My goodness.”

“Yes. So that’s that much, REM41. And then comes a number from 1 to 6, that classifies the language for one of the possible orderings of verb and subject and object. This one is a 3 — that means its order is verb followed by subject followed by object. Very roughly speaking, of course.”

“We wouldn’t need that one, for all we know,” said Anna, “if we ever acquired a non-humanoid language.”

“Why? Would they all have the same order?”

“No, dear. There’s no particular reason to expect that nonhumanoid languages would have verbs, subjects, or objects, you see.”

“But then how could it be a language?”

“That,” they told her, “is precisely the point.”

“And then,” Anna finished, “there’s the final number. 786 in this one. That just refers to the numerical order the languages are acquired in. So, we have it all. REM41-3-786… it means this is an Alien humanoid language spoken by the 41st encountered humanoid species — which may speak many many other languages besides this one, of course — and it has VSO order and is the 786th language we’ve acquired. That works out better than referring to it as…” Anna paused and looked around. “Anybody know the native name for REM41-3-786?”

Somebody did; it sounded to Michaela like “rxtpt” if it sounded like anything at all, and there was quite a bit more of it.

“It is interesting,” she said slowly. “This kind of thing… I wouldn’t have thought that it could be, but it is.”

And they all smiled at her together as if she’d done something especially praiseworthy.

She was having a very hard time; she slept badly, and woke from nightmares drenched with sweat. She was losing weight, and the women fussed at her to let the other residents of Barren House take over at least a portion of her duties.

“It’s my job,” said Michaela firmly, “and I will do it.”

“But you are up half a dozen times, every night! Someone else could do part of that… or take one night in three…”

“No,” said Michaela. “No. I will do it.”

It wasn’t the disturbed sleep that was making her thin and anxious, and certainly it wasn’t the work itself. She had almost nothing to do in the way of actual nursing. Medications now and then, a few baths to give, and injection, diet lists to make up; really almost nothing. She didn’t even have to see to making up the beds or caring for linen, because Thomas Chornyak had hired someone from outside to take care of such things. As for sleep, she had not had an uninterrupted night within the span of her memory. Women had always had to be up and down all night long; if there weren’t sick children, there were sick animals, or sick people of advanced age. If there were none of those, there would be a child with a bad dream, or a storm that meant someone had to get up and close windows — there was always something. A nurse only extended her ordinary female life when she learned to be instantly awake at a call, on her feet and functioning for as long as she was needed, and instantly asleep as soon as she could lie down again. It had never kept nurses, or women of any kind, from listening respectfully as the physicians whined about the way their vast incomes were justified by the fact that they were awakened during the night to see to patients. They would have said, “It’s not the same thing at all!” As of course it was not. Women had to get up much oftener, stay up longer, and were neither paid nor admired for doing it. Certainly it wasn’t the same thing.

The cause of Michaela’s condition was something unique to Michaela, not one of these universals of womankind. When she had taken this post, she had intended to put an end to the women of Chornyak Barren House one by one, as plausibly and randomly as she could manage… adding forty or more notches to her bow. She had even considered killing all of them at once as a political statement; of course she would have been caught and punished, but it would have been a way of letting the linguists know they weren’t getting off scot free with their murders of innocent babies! She would have been a heroine to the public, who felt as she did about the matter; she had thought it might very well be worth it.

And she had gone so far as to select Deborah as her first victim. Deborah was ninety-seven years old; she had to be fed an enriched gruel and pureed fruit and vegetables with a soft tube. And no little girl went to talk to Deborah, although to Michaela’s consternation almost every little girl went to sit on the old lady’s bed to stroke her forehead and pat her hands for a few minutes during the day.

“She doesn’t know you’re there, sweetheart,” Michaela had told the child the first time she saw that happen. “It’s very kind of you, but it’s useless — Deborah hasn’t been aware of anything for a very long time.”

The child had turned clear eyes up to her, disturbingly adult eyes: she could not have been more than six years old. And she had said: “How do we know that, Mrs. Landry?”

Michaela had admitted that she could not be absolutely sure, of course — but there was no reason to believe anything else, and the doctors would tell her exactly the same thing.

“And that means,” said the little girl reprovingly, “that while we do not know for sure, Aunt Deborah might very well lie there every day unable to speak or move, and wish and wish and wish that someone would come sit with her and pet her a little. Isn’t that so?”

“Child, it’s so unlikely!”

“Mrs. Landry,” and it was a rebuke, no question about it, “we are not willing to take that chance.”

Michaela had not interfered again. But it had seemed to her in some way a little unwholesome that the children should be thinking about what Deborah might or might not be feeling, and it reinforced her opinion that she was the logical first victim. She had anticipated that she would take care of that rather promptly.

And now she’d been here half a year almost, and Deborah still lay there silent and unmoving under the hands of the little girls and the other women of the house. Michaela could not bring herself to do the act. Worse, with every passing day she felt herself less and less willing to kill any of them. They were not what she had expected. They were not what she had always been told they were. They did not fit the profile of the “bitch linguist” that everyone she had known believed in, that was the staple character in obscene jokes and foolish stories that children used to frighten one another. “Hey, you think the Lingoe males are shits,” people would say. “They’re angels of charity and goodness compared to the Lingoe bitches!” She had expected it to be easier than the other times — but it hadn’t turned out that way.

Here were women who had spent their lifetimes in unremitting work. The twenty-three who were her patients were not victims of illnesses, for the most part; they were simply exhausted. Like very old domestic animals who had been worked until one day they lay down and just could not get up again; that’s what they were like. They were not indifferent to the problems of the public… they were concerned about the affairs of the Chornyaks, certainly, but so was anyone concerned about their own families. But they cared just as much for the problems of the public at large as did any other citizens. They were just as interested in the latest events in the colonies, just as excited about the newest discoveries in the sciences, just as eager to hear of events in the world and beyond. The aristocratic disdain, the contempt for the “masses,” all that list of repulsive characteristics she’d been brought up believing marked the woman linguist — none of it was to be found in them. Not in the women she tended. And not in the other twenty who were not her patients.

They were not perfect, were not saints — if they had been, it would have been easier, because they would have been so other. Some of them were petty and silly. Some did everything to excess — for example, there were the absurdities of Aquina Chornyak, which seemed endless. But it was just the sort of distribution of imperfections that you would expect to find in any group of women of such a size. No more, and no less. And their devotion to one another, not just to the invalids who might have called to any woman’s compassion but devotion even to the most irritating among them, touched Michaela’s heart.

She had not seen anything like this outside the Lines. But then outside the Lines women never were together in this way. Every woman was alone in her own house, tending to the needs of her own husband and her own children, until she was of an age when she was sent to a hospital to die — all alone in a private room. Women, asked to consider living as did these linguist women, would have said that the prospect was horrible and declared that nothing could make them choose such a life; Michaela was sure of it. But perhaps they would have been to one another as the linguist women were, if they’d had the opportunity; how could anyone know? It didn’t matter, because other women were never going to have what these women had, they were always going to be shut up, one or two to a house, never going out except as the displayed possession of some man.

These women, living as they did, were wonderful to watch. She envied them what they had, but she could not hate them for it — she had seen in her first post, at Verdi Household, that the women of the Lines were as totally subjugated to the men as any women anywhere. They went out into the world to work, but they had no privileges. The situation was in no way their fault.

How was she to kill them?

But if she did not kill them… then the awful thought could not be kept out of her mind: perhaps she was wrong to have killed the others. Not Ned; she would never believe she had been wrong to kill Ned. But the other linguists? They had been male linguists, but still… it was a seed she could not allow to grow and yet it grew when she was sleeping. What if the male linguists were as innocent of the things she had been taught all her life long to blame them for as the women were? What if she had killed not to do her part in freeing her nation of a pestilence but out of a naïve belief in a stereotype that had no basis in reality? So many things that “everybody knew” had turned out, under her own eyes, to be lies. What if all the rest of the beliefs about linguists were lies, too? And when she remembered that the only evidence she had had for the conviction that linguists were to blame for the baby-slaughter at Government Work was the word of Ned Landry, her stomach twisted viciously. When had Ned Landry ever known anything, about anything? What if he had been entirely wrong?

Michaela lost more weight, and slept even less, and the women made her herb teas and fussed over her and threatened to call Thomas and tell him his nurse was sicker than her patients.

“You would not really do that,” she said.

“No. We would not really do that. But we would insist that you do it — and we will, if you don’t begin to improve.

She was still fretful, still not at ease in herself, as the time for the Christmas holidays drew near. And then one morning something happened that settled at least one part of the issue for her.

It was a morning when she was doing something that required her nursing skills instead of just her woman-wit. Sophie Ann Lopez, born a Chornyak but married into the Lopez family of the Lines, and then come home to Chornyak Barren House when she was left a widow at eighty, was not one of the bedfast ones. She was ninety-four, and she did not get things done speedily, but she got them done. She was up each morning with the birds, and the absolute limit of her concession to her advancing years was the cane she used for going up and down stairs. The moment she reached the level she was headed for she’d put the cane somewhere, and then in an hour or two everyone would be calling, “Has anybody seen Sophie Ann’s cane?” She hated the cane, and nothing but the almost inevitable prospect of months in bed with a broken hip from tumbling down stairs made her give in and accept even that minimal aid.

But in the cold of mid-December Sophie had caught some sort of infection; it had spread to her kidneys, and finally it had been necessary for a surgeon to come with his lasers and do a bit of minor surgery. It had gone uneventfully, behind the panelled screens with their riot of wild roses and blackberry vines in brilliant wools against a background of deep blue, and the surgeon was off to some other task, leaving Michaela to watch over Sophie Ann as she gradually awoke from the anesthetic.

For a while Michaela had thought her patient was only mumbling noises. And then, struggling through the sedative layers, had come recognizable words.

“It won’t be long now,” Sophie kept saying. “Not long now, I tell you!”

She kept it up until Michaela was first amused and then curious.

“What won’t be long now, dear?” she asked, finally.

“Why, Láadan! What a silly question!”

“What is it, Sophie? Is it a celebration?”

Michaela leaned over and stroked the thin white hair gently away from the damp forehead where it clung in limp strands.

“They’ll see, then,” babbled the old woman. “They’ll see! When the time comes, when we old aunts can begin to talk Láadan to the babies, it won’t be long! And then they’ll be talking pidgin Láadan, but when they speak it to their babies… then! Then! Oh, what a wonderful day!”

It was a language?

“Why, Sophie Ann? Why will it be wonderful?”

“Oh, my, it won’t be long now!”

It had come a scrap at a time until Michaela thought she had at least the rough outlines. These women, and the women of linguistics for generations back, had taken on the task of constructing a language that would be just for women. A language to say the things that women wanted to say, and about which men always said “Why would anybody want to talk about that?” The name of this language sounded as if Sophie were trying to sing it. And the men didn’t know.

Michaela stood thinking, tending Sophie Ann, and wondering if this was only the anesthetic talking; the old woman seemed very sure, but Michaela had known surgical patients to be very sure of dragons and giant peacocks in the operating room and similar outrageous delusions. If it was true, how could it have happened? How could they have kept it a secret, how could they work on it and not have the men know, supervised as they were? And how could anyone invent a language? Michaela was quite sure that nobody knew just how the first human language had come to be; she was equally sure that God was supposed to have played a prominent part in the becoming… she remembered that much from Homeroom. Hadn’t there been something called a Tower of Babble? Babbling? Something like that?

It was inevitable that Sophie Ann’s racket, and Michaela’s questions, would draw the attention of the other women; they came pretty quickly. Caroline came, wrapped in her outdoor cape, just back from an assignment, and cocked her head sharply to listen.

“Oh, goodness,” she said at once, “what nonsense she’s talking!”

“Is it?”

“It certainly sounds like it. What’s she been saying, Mrs. Landry?”

“Something about a secret language for women,” Michaela told her. “She calls it Ladin… lahadin… Latin? Almost like Latin, but with a lilt to it. And she keeps saying that it won’t be long now, whatever that might mean.”

“Oh,” Caroline laughed, “it’s just the anesthetic!”

“Are you certain of that?”

“Mrs. Landry, Sophie is almost one hundred years old!”

“So? Her mind is as clear as your own.”

“Yes, but she is talking about something from long long ago… you know how very old people are! They cannot remember what they did five minutes ago — her cane, for example, which she never knows the location of — but things that happened half a century ago are as fresh in their mind as their own names. That’s all this is.”

“Please explain, Mrs. Chornyak,” said Michaela firmly. “I’m afraid it’s a complete muddle to me.”

Caroline held the screen with one hand and unwound her cape with the other, talking easily. “Mrs. Landry, when Sophie was a little girl the women’s language was a secret, I expect. Women were much more frightened then, you know; at least the women of the Lines were. They were afraid that if the men found out about the women’s language they’d make them stop working on it, and so they tried to keep it a secret. But that’s all been over for many many years.”

“There is a woman’s language, then?”

“Certainly,” said Caroline cheerfully. “Why not? It’s called Langlish, Mrs. Landry, not whatever Sophie was mumbling about Latin. And it’s not a secret at all. The men think it’s a silly waste of time, but then they think that everything we do except interpreting and translating and bearing children is a silly waste of time. You can almost always find somebody working on Langlish in the computer room, my dear… you’re perfectly free to go watch if you like.”

“But it’s for linguist women,” said Michaela.

“Did Sophie say that?”

“No… but I assumed it would be.”

“That would be a warped sort of activity,” Caroline observed. “And a real waste of time… no, it’s not reserved for linguist women. We are constructing it, because we have the training. But when it’s finished, when it’s ready for us to begin teaching it, then we will offer it to all women — and if they want it, it will be for all women.”

“Sophie Ann called it a pigeon. A pigeon?”

Caroline frowned, and then she saw what the trouble was. “Not the sort of pigeon you’re thinking of, Mrs. Landry,” she said. “Not the bird. It’s pidgin… p-i-d-g-i-n.”

“What does that mean?”

“Is Sophie Ann all right, Mrs. Landry?”

“Absolutely. I wouldn’t be chatting with you if she weren’t.”

“I’m sorry; I ought to have known that. A pidgin, then… when a language in use has no native speakers, it is called a pidgin.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Say that a conquering nation spoke Hungarian. And they conquered a people who spoke only English. They would have no language in common, you see. But they would need to communicate for trade, for administration, that sort of thing. In such a situation they would work up between them a language that wasn’t quite Hungarian and wasn’t quite English, for use only when the two peoples had to communicate. And a language like that, the native language of nobody, you perceive, is called a pidgin.”

“Is that a good thing? For women to learn one of these pidgins?”

“No… it isn’t. But say that the conquered speakers of English for some reason became isolated from the rest of the world. Say they had children who were born hearing the pidgin and grew up using it and perhaps began to prefer it to English. And by the time they had children, it was the only language the children heard, and it became a native tongue for them, for the children. Then it would be what is called a creole, Mrs. Landry. And it would be a new real language. It would develop then like any other language, change like any other language, behave like any other language.”

“So… women here who know this Langlish only from a book or a computer, they speak it to children. And the children would speak it, but it’s not a real language. But if they speak it to their own children…”

“The situation is very different from the classic one,” said Caroline. “We women are not precisely a conquered people with an existing language… but the analogy is close enough. Basically, yes; it would then become a native language. Remembering, of course, that all children of the Lines are multilingual and have a number of native languages. It would become one of their native languages.”

“For all women to learn, if they chose to.”

“Of course.”

“Would they choose to, do you think?”

Sophie Ann was wide awake now, looking at them with an anxious expression that caught Michaela’s attention at once; she turned to her patient and touched her soothingly, stroking her arm.

“It’s all right, Sophie Ann,” she said. “It’s all over.”

“I’ve just been explaining to Mrs. Landry about Langlish,” Caroline told Sophie Ann. “You were talking about it before you woke up, dearlove — a lot of nonsense, I’m afraid. About long ago, when it was kept secret.”

Michaela saw the look of consternation on Sophie Ann’s face, and spoke quickly to reassure her. “It’s all right, dear,” she said, knowing that the old woman must be embarrassed at her confusion. “Really! Caroline has explained it all to me. It’s all right.”

“Well,” said Sophie Ann weakly. “Well. I’m sure… I’m sure everyone talks a lot of drivel under an anesthetic.”

“Oh, they certainly do,” Michaela reassured her. “Doctors and nurses don’t pay any attention — it’s never anything but nonsense — it was just that in your case it was such interesting nonsense.”

Caroline kissed Sophie’s forehead and went away, and Michaela settled to her care, saying no more. But she knew, nevertheless, that this was the very last straw. She could not harm these women.

She stood calmly before Thomas’ desk and listened to his courteous objections, but she was absolutely firm. He could of course force her to go through the formal procedure of contacting her brother-in-law and having him petition for her release, if he chose to do so. She knew no reason why he should, because he would have no trouble finding a replacement for her; but whatever he did, she was not going to change her mind.

She did not tell him her problem was that her life’s mission was to murder linguists and that she found herself in the uncomfortable dilemma of having for patients only linguists she could not bring herself to kill. She provided him with logical reasons, instead.

“My patients are endangered by this situation,” she told him when he asked for reasons. “There’s no way that I, a single nurse, can provide so many sick women with adequate care. And while I am not in the least afraid of hard work, Mr. Chornyak, I do have standards. When the work reaches a point where it’s literally impossible for me to do, my patients’ welfare must become my primary concern. I can’t any longer pretend that I can fill this post, sir.”

“But surely they haven’t suddenly become so much sicker than they were?” Thomas asked.

“Oh, no… not at all. They are in fact remarkably healthy, all things considered. But they are also remarkably long-lived, these women of your Household. And as more and more of them become extremely aged, sir, they require constant attention to their personal needs. Almost every one of them, Mr. Chornyak, must now be helped even for such simple matters as bathing and eating.”

She thought of all this, waiting, but she said none of it. She had learned enough to know that if Chornyak for one moment suspected that the women of Barren House had any leisure to spend tending others he would find a means for them to put it to gainful work instead; even for the four-year-olds, he would have had strong opinions about the “waste” of their time.

“Well, Mrs. Landry,” said Thomas slowly, “I do see your point. I’m afraid we’ve been rather inconsiderate, as a matter of fact. When I hired you, I thought there was very little for you to do — but I haven’t paid any attention to the facts of the matter, and I should have realized that the situation was a progressive one. I apologize, of course, but you should have spoken to me sooner — it appears that our old ladies are determined to live forever, doesn’t it?”

Michaela had been braced for strong protests, intricate arguments, and a great deal of linguistic manipulation along the lines of doing one’s duty and keeping one’s word. But Thomas didn’t behave as she had anticipated.

“Fine,” he said, nodding agreement and making a quick entry to his wrist computer. “Fine. You may consider yourself released from your contract as of the end of this month, my dear.”

Taken aback, but grateful that it had been so simple, Michaela thanked him.

“Not at all,” Thomas said. “I regret that you were obliged to ask, and I apologize on behalf of the younger women at Barren House, who most assuredly should have spoken to me about this long ago and spared you the task. And now that that’s settled, may I offer you a different post, Mrs. Landry?”

“A different post?”

“Yes, my dear. If you would be so kind as to give me your attention for just a moment.”

“Of course, sir.”

“If I understand you correctly, what’s needed at Barren House is primarily strong backs, not nursing skills. Isn’t that right?”

“For the most part, yes.”

“How many nurses do you think should be available, for all this bathing and feeding and so on?”

“Two at least, perhaps three.”

“Very well. We’ll begin with two, and add another if it becomes clear that it’s necessary. If you agree, what I’ll do is find two strong and willing women looking for work as — what do they call them? practical nurses? — all right, I’ll hire two of those. One in the daytime and one at night?”

“No, sir, I’m sorry; you need two in the day, and then one on duty during the night in case she’s called. They could manage nicely if both were there all day and they alternated spending the night on call, first one and then the other.”

“Well, let’s give that a try. And then I’d want you to stay on for two purposes, Mrs. Landry. Neither would be very burdensome, as I perceive it, but you must feel free to tell me if I am mistaken.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you.”

“My father is vigorous and alert. But he has spells of severe vertigo that trouble him frequently, he has what I understand are mild infections of the urinary tract, he needs someone to keep track of his diet because he has a tendency to gout — as well as a tendency to gluttony, unfortunately. He’s acquired a disgraceful sweet tooth.”

“He needs a nanny with a nursing license, in other words.”

“Exactly. He’s not bedfast except when he’s suffering from one of his illnesses, off and on, but we need someone at hand for those times. We also need someone who will notice that he should be in bed, because we often don’t see it soon enough. I’d like you to move here to the main house to look after Father, as described, but also check in once a day at Barren House to see that everything’s being done properly there. And to do anything that actually requires a trained nurse. And of course if someone there became seriously ill, you could stay at Barren House until the crisis was past and we would manage without you here temporarily. Could I persuade you to do that, my dear? It would be a tremendous help to us all.”

Michaela was delighted. This would let her carry on her vocation of death without having to exercise it on the women; it would let her maintain her relationship with the women of Barren House — which, to her complete astonishment, had come to be something that she treasured — and it would save her the nuisance of hunting for a new post, learning the ways of a new family and patient, all those tiresome things. It was a pleasant surprise, something she had not expected at all and found very welcome.

And perhaps she would be able, once in a while, to see something of the progress of the woman’s language. She had no skills that would let her be part of the work, and she had better sense than to get in the way by trying to help with things she understood not at all. But if she stayed on, and if she observed carefully and discreetly, perhaps she could stay in touch with the project. Now that the women of Barren House knew that she was aware of Langlish, they might talk to her about it sometimes, even teach her a few words — it was at least possible.

“Do you need time to think it over, Mrs. Landry?” Thomas asked her.

“No,” Michaela answered. “I’d be delighted to accept. It wasn’t that I wanted to leave, sir — it’s very beautiful here, and I’m happy with the post. It’s just that the situation as it is currently set up had become impossible. What you propose should solve it, and I’d like to stay.”

“Wel’ll have to put you in a guest room, I’m afraid — and there are no elevators. And no private bath.”

“I don’t mind that, sir. Really.”

“It’s settled, then?”

“If you’re satisfied with the arrangement, Mr. Chornyak.”

“Then I’ll proceed at once to find the two practical nurses… you don’t mind staying on at Barren House until they’re hired and then getting them settled in their duties, I assume.”

“Not at all. I’d be pleased to do it. And if I can do anything else to help in this transition period, Mr. Chornyak, please let me know. For example, sir… I know the Nursing Supervisor well. If you would call him to authorize it, I could probably find competent women quickly and make the necessary arrangements. There’s no reason why you should have to trouble yourself about that.”

“Would you do that?”

“Of course.”

“Excellent, Mrs. Landry. I’ll call the man, and we’ll get all this out of the way. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a great deal of work to tackle.”

Michaela allowed her lashes to fall, modestly presenting him a gesture that would imply the ancient courtesy without demanding it of her, and then looked at him carefully. Yes; he liked that.

Thomas found himself much taken with Michaela Landry. There was something about her, some quality he could neither define nor describe, that made him feel somehow… oh, taller, when she was near him. Taller and stronger and wiser, and in every way a better man. He had no idea what it was she did, and hadn’t time to observe her to find out, but he knew that he enjoyed it. When she was in the room, he found that he tended to move to be closer to her, if he could do it without seeming obvious. And he fell quickly into the habit of calling her to his office each day to discuss various minor matters having to do with the health of Paul John or the Barren House patients.

While she was with him, once the actual purpose of the discussion was accomplished, he noticed that without any awareness of having changed the subject he would suddenly be in the midst of some other discussion entirely. His own projects, his plans, his problems… not indiscreetly, of course. He never let slip anything that it was improper for her to know, or for any nonlinguist to know. But their talk went far beyond the remotest outer fringes of what could be called nursing. And she didn’t seem to mind at all. She was the most remarkable listener Thomas had ever encountered. Never bored, never uneasy and anxious to leave him and get on with something else, never wanting to put her own two cents in. She made him feel that every word he said was a pleasure to her ears… which could not be true, of course, but was a delightful illusion and a credit to her womanhood. If only Rachel could have been like that!

When he found himself sharing her bed, scarcely three months after the move to the Chornyak Household had been accomplished, he was a little disappointed. Not in her performance; she was as skilled in his arms as she was at everything else she did, and he would have been very surprised if that had not been the case. But he had somehow thought of her as a woman of exceptional virtue, still entirely faithful to the memory of her dead husband — a respectable widow of sterling character and decorous charm. He could not help being disappointed that she wasn’t as he had imagined her to be.

On the other hand, there were advantages to the arrangement. It reinforced his conviction that no matter how admirable a woman might seem, no matter how superior to the usual run of her sex she might appear to be, might in fact be, nevertheless all women are truly weak and without genuine strength of character. It was instructive, and it taught him the necessity for keeping an eye on the other women of his Household, an eye that went beyond surface judgments; he had been lax about that, he thought, without realizing it.

They were frail reeds, women, especially in the hands of an experienced man like himself, and a man who was — as he was — a master of the erotic arts. If he’d had any doubts about that mastery, due to his advancing years and Rachel’s dutiful lukewarm attentions, Michaela’s rapt ecstasy at even his most casual efforts would have swiftly dispelled them. She was never in any way indelicate, never demanding, never lustful — lustfulness was abhorrent in a woman, and had she shown any sign of it he would have instantly dispensed with her. But despite her modesty he could always perceive that his touch carried her to the heights, and he realized that her husband had no doubt been one of those bumbling incompetents in the bedroom.

It pleased Thomas to be able to show Michaela how a real man made love to a woman, and he found her reciprocal pleasure precisely what he would have asked for. He had never disappointed her, when her body was what he preferred: and if he wanted to talk rather than make love she was as contented with his words as with his caresses. If he fell asleep, he could be certain that when he woke she would be gone, the bed fresh, the room made neat, and no rumpled and frowsty female presence to interfere with his comfort. Unless he had specifically asked that she stay, in which case she would have somehow managed to arrange her hair and tidy herself without disturbing him, and would be fragrant and ladylike beside him, waiting on his pleasure. An entirely satisfactory woman, this Michaela Landry. As nearly a flawless woman as he had ever encountered. Under the circumstances, he was willing to forgive her her inability to resist his advances and live up to his earlier expectations.

It is unjust, he reminded himself, to expect of a female more than her own natural characteristics allow her to accomplish. Unjust, and always a source of discord. He could not imagine Michaela ever being a source of discord, but he took very seriously his responsibility not to destroy that quality in her by spoiling her or allowing her to take liberties. She was perfect, just as she was; he wanted no changes.