Native Tongue

Chapter Twenty

Nazareth went to Barren House bruised, as Michaela had seen that she was, and numb. The news that she was being divorced hardly penetrated that numbness, so that by the time she became aware of it any chance that it might cause her discomfort was long past. But after a while, under the competent hands of the women, she began to let that numbness go, and she realized that she was like someone who goes home at last after a lifetime of exile.

No more Aaron; he avoided her, and when he could not avoid her he was overpoweringly polite. No more being alone with him, where he did not feel obliged to be polite. Her children only a few steps away, and the little girls routinely here at Barren House in any case. And a kind of freedom. She would never have to bear a man’s eyes upon her scarred body. She would heal, and she would add to her usual clothing the garment with the false and foolish breasts, and she would go out to work as she always had; and no man would ever see her naked, or touch her body, again. Not even, so long as she was conscious, a doctor. Not ever.

She wandered about Barren House at first, absorbing it as if she had never been there before, luxuriating in the voices of the women, glorying in the bed that she could have all to herself without the snoring bulk of a man always waking her, always crowding her against the wall. It was luxury; she had not anticipated that it would be, because she hadn’t known what it was that she lacked.

Finally, when Michaela agreed that it was time, the women told her about the woman-language called Láadan, and explained the nonsense called Langlish. Nazareth sat and listened to them in amazement, saying not one word until they were finished, and then she said, “You women. You women and your fairy tales!”

“It’s true!” they protested. “Really, Nazareth… it’s true.”

“All my life you’ve told me that the tale of Langlish was true.”

“That was necessary,” Aquina retorted. “We are a better judge of what’s required than you are.”

“And now, after a lifetime of lying, you expect me to believe that you are suddenly telling the truth?” Nazareth shook her head. “Go away with your bedtime stories,” she jeered, “tell them to the little girls. Along with the unicorn and the bandersnatch and the Helga Dik! Leave me in peace.”

“Nazareth,” Susannah chided. “You should be ashamed of yourself.”

“Should I?”

“You know you should. We’ve been waiting for so many years to show you this — I’ve grown to be an ancient crone able only to cackle and hiss while I waited. And now you won’t let us show you.”

“Show me, then,” said Nazareth, who loved Susannah dearly. But she could not resist teasing Aquina. “Aquina,” she asked, “does it have one hundred separate vowels, this Láadan?”

“Oh, you’re impossible!”

Nazareth chuckled at Aquina’s disappearing back, and Susannah told her again that she should be ashamed of herself.

“I am,” Nazareth said, with great satisfaction. “I’m so very ashamed I can hardly hold my head up. Now show me.”

“It’s down in the basement,” they warned.

“Of course. With the tub of green bubbling slime that you sacrifice a virgin to every Monday morning. Where else would it be? I can walk to the basement, I’m not crippled — lead on, please.”

She followed them, laughing again as they pulled the scraps of paper from the backs of drawers and the middles of recipes files and other assorted nooks and crannies. But she sat down and looked at the assembled materials when they handed them to her, and she stopped laughing as she read. Once she said, “It would be so easy for all this to be lost! And so awful.”

“No,” said Faye. “It would be a nuisance, but not a tragedy. It’s all in our memories. Every last scrap and dot of it.”

Nazareth said nothing else at all. She had begun, laughing and dubious, but enjoying herself; now, as she examined the materials, she grew more and more tense, and they wondered if they had bothered her with this too soon. She was still far from well.

“Nazareth,” asked Susannah cautiously, “are you all right, child? And are you pleased?”

“Pleased!” Nazareth handed the little stack of papers to them as if it were a spoiled fish. “I’m disgusted!”

The silence spread, and they looked at each other, bewildered. Disgusted? They knew about Nazareth; there was no other woman in the Lines as good at languages as she was. But were they really so far from what was needful in a language that Láadan disgusted her?

Nazareth stood up, swaying a bit, but she pushed them away when they would have helped her and went back up the stairs ahead of them. “There’s no excuse for this,’” she announced with her back to them. “No excuse!”

“But it’s a good language,” Aquina cried, saying what the others hesitated to say. “You have no right to judge it like that, on ten minutes’ casual examination! I don’t care what your damn test scores are, or how distinguished your damn Alien language is, you have no right!”

“Aquina,” Grace said disapprovingly. “Please.”

“It’s not that,” Nazareth said, tight-lipped. “It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the language.”

“Then what is it, for the love of heaven?” Aquina demanded.

Nazareth turned on them, where they stood uneasily in the kitchen keeping an eye out for a stray child who might hear something she should not hear, and said, “What is inexcusable is that the language isn’t already being used.”

“But it can’t be used until it’s finished!”

“What nonsense! No living language is ever ‘finished’!”

“Nazareth, you know what we mean.”

“No. I don’t know what you mean.”

Caroline came running then, exclaiming over the racket they were making and the stupidity of keeping Nazareth standing like that, and herded them all into one of the private bedrooms like disorderly poultry, which was precisely what she compared them to. When she had the door closed and her back against it, she said fiercely, “Now! What is all this?”

They told her, and she relaxed against the door and let her hands fall to her sides. “Good heavens! I thought it was an earthquake at the very least… all this fuss because Láadan doesn’t suit little Nazareth? Mercy!”

“But it does suit me, Caroline,” Nazareth insisted. “Not that it would matter if it didn’t — but it does.”

“It isn’t finished, you know. They’re right.”

“They’re wrong.”

“Oh come on, Natha!”

“I assure you, this language that they have just shown me is sufficiently ‘finished’ to be used. It obviously has been for years, while you played with it and fiddled about with it… when I think, that there are little girls of the Lines six or seven years old that could already have been speaking it fluently and who know not one word! I could kill you all, I swear I could.”

“Nonsense.”

“You know what you’re like?” Nazareth demanded. “You’re like those idiot artists who never will let their paintings be put on the wall because they always have to add just one more stroke! Like those novelists never willing to let their books go, who die unpublished, because there’s always just one more line they want to put in. You silly creatures… the men are right, you’re a pack of silly ignorant fools over here! And at all the Barren Houses, obviously, since you’re all muddled equally. Dear heaven, it makes me almost willing to go back to Chornyak Household, not to have to look at you!”

“Nazareth — ”

“Be still!” she commanded them, not caring at all how arrogant or unpleasant she might be. “Please, go away and let me have a little while to think about this! I’m too upset now even to talk to you… go away!”

She was trembling, and if she hadn’t been who she was they knew she would have been crying, and it bothered them to leave her like that. On the other hand, it was clear that their presence was not any comfort to her, and so they did as she asked.

“We’ll wait for you in the parlor,” Susannah said quietly as she went out the door. “That’s the safest place to talk about this — when you are willing to talk, child.”

She wasn’t long, and when she joined them she was calm again. They handed her a stole to work because it required no attention whatsoever and would leave her free to talk and to listen. And they sent someone to watch the door and divert any little girls that came along to the basement to “help with the inventory,” if they didn’t seem willing to simply go back to Chornyak Household because everyone was too busy to keep them company.

“Now then,” Caroline began, stabbing at the sampler that said “There is no such thing as a primitive language,” in elaborate cross stitch, “if what you say is true this is the most important day of my life, of many of our lives. But it seems very unlikely to all of us, Nazareth — think, you’ve been here only a few weeks, and you haven’t been yourself until just the past day or two. We have been here, some of us, for more than twenty years. And we have been working at the language all that time, in every spare moment we could steal. Don’t you think that if the time had come to bring the Encoding Project to a close and start teaching the language we would have noticed it? Without you to tell us?”

“No,” declared Nazareth. “I would have thought so, if anybody had described this absurd situation to me. But I would have been wrong. It must be that you are so close to the matter that you can’t see it — it takes someone with fresh perceptions to peer past the claptrap.”

“And so the good Lord has blessed us with you, Nazareth Joanna Chornyak Adiness… how lucky for us to have the benefit of your ‘fresh perceptions.’ ”

“Caroline,” Nazareth persisted, “I have never been able to get along with anybody. I know that. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I do know that I’m scarcely able to get through a paragraph without offending two people and hurting three others. And I am sorry… I have always been sorry. I have always wished someone would tell me how to be better. But however awful it sounds to you, put in the only way I know how to put it, that language is ready — ‘finished,’ if you prefer — and for it not to be in use is a shame and a scandal.”

“Nazareth!” Caroline was annoyed now, and annoyed that she was annoyed. “You’re very good, of course — but we are not so bad as all that! We do not need you, to instruct us in linguistics.”

“But you do.” Nazareth was as determined as stone.

“You presume,” said Grace stiffly. “We have all been trying to make allowances, but you go too far.”

“All right,” said Nazareth, “I presume. But tell me what it is that the language lacks, and I will listen with an open mind. What doesn’t it have? What do you think it needs before you will call it finished?”

Well… they mentioned a bit here and a piece there, and Nazareth scoffed. Not one thing that they mentioned, she told them, that couldn’t be supplied from the existing mechanisms of the language. Or by adding a bound morpheme — an ending, a little extra piece somewhere in the word. They made their objections until they ran out of objections and she countered every last one of them.

Finally, Caroline said, “Nazareth… the vocabulary is so limited.”

“Is that it?” Nazareth stared around her. “Is it the size of the vocabulary that’s bothering all of you?”

“Well,” Caroline told her, “we know what a language has to have. We did all those things long ago, and you are right about the ones we’ve been discussing. But we can’t begin speaking Láadan to the babies until there is a vocabulary sufficiently large, sufficiently flexible — ”

“To what?”

“What?”

“Sufficiently large enough and flexible enough to what, Caroline? Write the Encyclopedia Galactica? What are you waiting for? The specialized lexicons of the sciences? The complete lexicon of wine-tasting? What, precisely?”

Now they were genuinely cross, and their needles flew.

“Certainly not! We simply want it to be possible to speak it with grace and ease in the affairs of ordinary life!”

“Well,” Nazareth pronounced, “it is ready for that.”

“It isn’t!”

“How many words do you have? How many freestanding whole words, even without all those that would come from adding the affixes?”

“About three thousand,” said Susannah. “Only that.”

“Well, for the love of Mary!” Nazareth cried, and they all shushed her together.

“I’m sorry,” she apologized, “but really! Three thousand! The way you were carrying on… I thought perhaps you had only a few hundred lexical items.”

“Nazareth,” said Susannah, “English has hundreds of thousands of words. Do think — and don’t shout, please.”

“And Basic English, in which the entire New Testament has been most adequately written, has fewer than one thousand. As all of you know quite well.”

“But we cannot have the language begin in a state that requires constant paraphrase,” Caroline objected. “Bad enough that it must begin as a variant of a pidgin — at least let it have an adequate vocabulary!”

Nazareth took a long slow breath and laid the length of wool in her lap.

“My dears,” she said, as seriously and as patiently as she could, her voice steady and her eyes holding theirs, “I tell you that language is ready. Ready to use. And what is more, you know it. All of you, every last one, you know languages with no more lexical items than this Láadan of yours has. You are telling yourselves fairy tales, and I don’t understand why. If we begin today, if those of you tending infants for the main house begin this very day murmuring to those babies in Láadan instead of English, it will not be until they are adult women and are doing the same for the next generation — or maybe the generation after that, because no language has ever, as far as anyone knows, been started in this way — it will be at the very least the generation after those infants before Láadan is a creole. And still another before it can be called a living language with the status of other living languages.”

They showed her defiant faces, and she could hear their minds ticking, spinning the excuses; she stopped them before they could work their way into another tangle.

“Now, wait!” she said. “I know as well as you that in the days when every educated person learned Latin as a second language for the carrying on of scholarly and legal discourse, people managed. It must have been a barbarous sort of Latin, but they managed. Do not go jumping from what I’ve said to still more reasons for delay! If it takes five generations, or ten, before Láadan goes beyond being a barbarous auxiliary language and becomes our native tongue, that is all the more compelling reason to begin at once! Of course it will be dreadful at first, there’s no way it could be anything else… but my dear loves, we are talking of at least one hundred years to get past that, if we begin this very day! And you sit there, and you tell me that we must wait until we have… what? Five thousand words? Ten thousand words? Ten thousand words and ten thousand Encodings? What arbitrary number have you set as your goal?”

“We don’t know. Not exactly. Only that what we have isn’t enough.”

Nazareth frowned, and bit her lip, and Susannah reached over to put the neglected stole back in her hands.

“Crochet, Natha,” she directed. “That is what we women do… ask the men and they will tell you. Any time they come here, they find us chatting and needling away. Frittering our time. Use your hook, please, child, and don’t look so intense. It makes wrinkles.”

Nazareth obeyed, absentmindedly putting the small hook through its paces, but she did not change her expression.

“There is something more,” she stated flatly. “Something that you’re hiding. This ‘limited vocabulary’ excuse is just as phony as the ‘not enough Encodings’ you gave me when I was a little girl. You use it to soothe the children, and I’m not a child — it won’t placate me. I want to know the truth. No more lies, now.”

“Nonsense!”

“You are forever saying that!” protested Nazareth. “You could save yourselves a lot of trouble by getting a parrot to say ‘nonsense’ for you all the day long. And it won’t wash… there’s something else. Something I’m too stupid to see. Something that isn’t just a question of whether the language is ‘finished’ or not. And I know exactly who to ask, too! Aquina Chornyak — what is the real problem here, hiding behind a silly wordcount?”

When Aquina didn’t answer, Nazareth reached over and pulled her hair. “Aquina! You tell me! What sort of radical are you, anyway?”

“All right,” said Aquina. “I’ll tell you — but they won’t be pleased.”

“Never mind that.”

“The real problem is because decisions have to be made, and these… persons… won’t make them.”

“What decisions are these?”

“You feel that Láadan is finished, right?”

“In the sense that any language is finished. Its vocabulary will grow, as the vocabulary of any language grows.”

“All right, then. Suppose we begin to use it, as you say we should do. And then, as more and more little girls acquire Láadan and begin to speak a language that expresses the perceptions of women rather than those of men, reality will begin to change. Isn’t that true?”

“As true as water,” Nazareth said. “As true as light.”

“Well, then, milady — we must be ready when that shift in reality begins. Ready to act, in response to the change! Once that begins we will not be able to go on sitting here in the parlor tatting and twiddling and playing at revolutionary ideas. We will not be able to spend our days like placid cattle, thinking of the time, centuries away, when someone will have to do something! And that is where the sticking point is, Nazareth — there’s not a woman in this house, or in any of the other Barren Houses, with guts enough to come to a decision about what we are to do then. That’s what keeps us, as you put it, adding one more brush stroke and one more line and going ‘oh no not yet!’ and ‘nonsense!’ and ‘pray spare us!’”

“Oh,” breathed Nazareth. “I understand. Yes.”

“Do you understand, Nazareth? Do you really?” Caroline’s voice was bitter and angry. “Consider, for example, what Aquina would have us do! We would start stockpiling emergency rations and supplies, if she had her way, and bundling them into packs that we could carry on our backs as we fled into the wilderness, each of us with one kidnapped girlchild on our hips, fleeing just one step ahead of the hordes of men determined to slaughter us all!”

“Caroline, you exaggerate,” Aquina scoffed.

“Not much. I’ve heard you often enough.”

“They wouldn’t dare kill us. They’d incarcerate every last one of us that knew Láadan; and they’d dope us silly till we forgot every word. They’d destroy our records, they’d punish any child who used a single syllable, and they’d stamp it out forever — but they wouldn’t kill us. I never said they’d kill us, Caroline; it’s Láadan they would kill. And we’d have to get away before they could invent some new and horrendous ‘epidemic incurable schizophrenia’ allegedly brought back from a frontier planet in a bag of grain… but they wouldn’t kill us.”

“You hear her?” Caroline challenged Nazareth. “That is what we listen to, endlessly.”

“I hear her,” Nazareth said. “I see your point, Caroline. And I also see Aquina’s. And there are many many other possibilities.”

“Certainly there are,” Caroline agreed. “It’s as absurd to think the men could get away with shutting us all away in instituions as it is to think they could kill us. And if Aquina didn’t so love wallowing in extremes she’d know that. They would have to move against us a few at a time, even if they invent half a dozen epidemics from outer space that are conveniently contagious only for females. But the men know the power of a new language just as well as we do — and they would stop it, Nazareth. The day we begin to use Láadan, the day we let it out of the basement, that day we put its very existence at risk. You were right about the tub of green stuff bubbling away down there, Nazareth — but we don’t have any virgins to sacrifice.”

“You are afraid.”

“Of course we are afraid!”

“What I think they will do,” said Faye, “the only thing they can possibly do, is break up the Barren Houses. Isolate us from one another. Keep us away from the rest of the women, certainly nver let us near the infant children. It won’t be hard for them to teach the babies that elderly women and barren women are witches, horrid old repositories of wickedness to be feared and avoided — that’s been done before, and it’s always been a smashing success! Some of us they’ll shut away… some of us they’ll isolate in the Households. Can’t you imagine the publicity campaign as they ‘decide’ that they were in error all these years putting us in separate buildings and ‘welcome us back to the bosoms of our families’? The public will love it… and they’ll stamp out every vestige of Láadan. And every vestige of Langlish, while they’re at it, just in case it might give someone ideas again someday. And Láadan will die, as every language of women must have died, since the beginning of time.”

“Unless we get away before they realize that it’s happening,” hissed Aquina. “That’s the only chance we have.”

Nazareth got up and went to the window, staring out across the open green through the trees, silent and troubled.

“Nazareth,” pleaded Grace behind her, “if Aquina is right — allowances made for her embellishments, of course — do you perceive now what it means?”

“Yes.”

“And they can’t muster up the courage,” said Aquina with contempt, “to decide what must be done and do it.”

“Because we don’t know what we must do,” said the others. “We have talked and talked and talked about it… we don’t know.”

“We must choose one Barren House,” said Aquina steadily, “the most isolated and the most easily defended, and we must be ready to go there with as many girlchildren as we can take with us, at the first hint that the men know what’s happening. It isn’t a difficult decision. And we must be ready to move on from there, if we have to.”

“It would mean leaving our children!”

“And never seeing our families again.”

“And publicity — think of the lies the men will give to the media!”

“All the old ones, upstairs… we’d have to abandon them!”

“No wonder you’ve been stalling,” said Nazareth, turning around again. “Marking time. No wonder.”

“Oh, not you, too!” moaned Aquina. “I can’t stand it.”

Nazareth came back and sat down, and took up the foolish stole again. “Perceive this,” she said with absolute certainty in her voice, “no matter what it means — either we do not really believe in the Encoding Project, in which case the men are right and we are just silly women playing silly games to pass the time — or we must begin.”

“Damn right!” said Aquina.

“You must remember,” said Nazareth, glaring at Aquina, “that it will be many years before the men notice. They’re used to hearing the little girls practicing Alien languages they’ve never heard before and may well never hear again, not to mention any number of Terran languages completely unfamiliar to them. So long as we convince the children that it’s a secret to be kept from the men — like so many other secrets we’ve taught them to keep, loves — ten years will go by, perhaps more, before the men suddenly realize that too many little girls are making the same unfamiliar sounds. Dear heaven, they’re so entirely convinced that the Project is only Langlish, and so entirely convinced that we can barely find our way to the bathroom without a map! It may be decades before anything actually needs to be done, in the way that Aquina means. Please do realize that.”

“But — ”

Nazareth cut Aquina off, raising her hand in the ancient gesture of teachers. “But I agree with Aquina that the decisions have to be made, and made right now, in case they are someday needed. She’s absolutely right. If we did need to make some sort of move, there’d be no time then to decide what it should be, and anything we did in panic would be certain to be the wrong thing. We must make the plans, however unlikely it is that we’ll ever have to use them, and put that behind us.”

“Thank heaven for someone with sense!”

“Thank you, Aquina,” said Nazareth. “Now, you others, can we proceed with this?”

Proceed. From an endless Project, going on generation after generation, to “can we proceed?” It was too much, and they were stunned by the prospect.

“It’s not complicated,” Nazareth assured them. “Word should go out to all the Barren Houses as quickly as can be managed, using the recipe-codes. In each Barren House those women who are best at speaking Láadan are to begin practicing it with one another, never mind how badly they do, until they are at ease enough to serve as roughly adequate models. And then, they are to begin using Láadan and only Láadan with the female infants of the Lines whenever there are no men about.”

“Or women still living in the Households.”

“Or women still living among men, yes,” Nazareth agreed. “Whenever it is as safe as it ever will be safe. Meanwhile, those who know almost nothing about it will turn to and learn. Without drawing the attention of men, and without slacking on our other duties.”

“And the planning?” That was Aquina.

“And the planning must begin,” said Nazareth. “In every Barren House, there must be meetings to discuss alternatives. For every choice of action that you feel the men might take when they learn that they’ve been duped, there needs to be a corresponding action that all the women are agreed upon and are prepared to move on at a moment’s notice. The results should be exchanged among the Barren Houses until there is a consensus — until we all understand just what we would be expected to do in each possible hypothetical crisis. And we will do whatever we must do to prepare.”

“Just like that, Nazareth?”

“Just like that. You’ve put it off far too long already.”

“Well,” said Susannah. “Well! Someone must go upstairs and tell the others. They have a right to know.”

“And someone,” Caroline pointed out, “must set the tables for dinner and call in the sentries before they decide we’ve all died in here.”

They folded up their work and put it away in the deep needlework bags with the jumble of yarns and laces and scraps hiding the useful false bottoms. And tried to decide whether to rejoice or to weep.

“Is it a time for celebration, do you think?” hazarded Grace.

“Who could know? It’s a time for terror. That much is certain.”

“It’s stepping out into the void,” said Susannah solemnly.

“And it’s all Nazareth’s fault,” said Nazareth.

In the abashed silence, she added, “Any beginning is also an ending, you know. You can’t have just the one.”