Native Tongue

Chapter Twenty-four

The meeting was an unusual one, in every way. Every place at the table was filled, and it had been necessary to bring in extra chairs to seat the overflow that couldn’t be fit at the table proper. Not only were the full complement of men from Chornyak Household there, but a delegation of three senior men and two junior from each of the other twelve Lines, attending in person. Ordinarily this outside representation would have been handled by computer conference to avoid the inconvenience and overcrowding… And looking at it now, seeing everyone jammed in elbow to elbow at the table, those in the chairs lining the walls already uncomfortable before the meeting even began, James Nathan wondered if he had made a mistake when he chose this alternative.

At his elbow, David Chornyak was wondering the same thing, and he and James Nathan stared at each other in quick consternation, and then looked quickly away. It was too late now, whether it had been an error or not; they were all here, and the best thing to do was get on with the business of the day as swiftly as possible.

“Go on, Jim,” said David under his breath. “Let’s get this over with.”

James Nathan nodded, and pressed the small stud beneath the table. He disliked the sound of the thing… his grandfather Paul John’s choice of a falling minor third would not have been his choice. But the tones did stop the muttering and get everyone turned to face him, which was their function.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” James Nathan began, “and my thanks to all of you for coming here in person. I know you’re not particularly comfortable, and I regret that. I’m afraid we’ve never had any need for conference facilities here at Chornyak Household.”

Nigel Shawnessey, whose Household in Switzerland did have conference facilities, cleared his throat elaborately and gave the ceiling a significant glance. He considered this a ridiculous imposition, carried out only as a vehicle for a display of dominance. And wholly unnecessary. Nobody had ever challenged Chornyak House for the position of Head of the Lines, and so long as the Chornyaks continued to produce men of the traditional caliber nobody ever would.

James Nathan had not missed the bit of body-parl, and he knew what it meant, but he didn’t agree. Filling the shoes of Thomas Blair Chornyak had not been easy; stepping into them at forty-six had come perilously close to being beyond his abilities. Nobody had ever anticipated such a thing, with his father in robust health and only just turned seventy… the Chornyak men filled their posts well into their eighties ordinarily, and sometimes longer than that.

There had been nothing ordinary about having a Head murdered by a madwoman. And the effort of assuming Thomas Blair’s role, so suddenly and without any of the usual mechanisms of transition, had brought painfully home to James Nathan the need to keep a tight rein on the Lines. Which was, even as he thought it, so awkward and unfelicitous a phrase that it made him smile. A tight rein on the Lines, indeed… thank God he hadn’t said that aloud! And he had been adamant about this meeting — under no circumstances would he have called it at Shawnessey Household, and found himself obliged to run the meeting while Nigel Shawnessey played host, with all the intricate burdens that would have laid upon the Chornyak men as guests. Thomas would have done it that way, and never given it a thought, but he was not Thomas, and he knew it. Oh no… he might be young, and he might have tumbled into the Headship a bit abruptly, but he was not stupid.

“Our agenda today,” he said smoothly, “is a single topic, and a most unusual one. The last meeting of this particular kind was held in 2088, when the decision was made to build Chornyak Barren House, and we were fewer in number in those days. I’ve called the meeting only because the time I was having to spend listening to complaints from all of you about this matter had begun to take up an absurd proportion of my days — and my nights. And I insisted on having all of you here in person because leaks to the media would have been more than usually unacceptable in this case. Security on the comset network isn’t adequate, as all of you know to your sorrow — and it would be very distasteful to have this affair become a topic for the popnews commentators.”

“Damn right,” said half a dozen men heartily, and the rest made noises of agreement.

“Very well, then,” said James Nathan. “Since we understand one another, we will move at once to discussion. Our subject today, gentlemen, is… the women.”

“Where are they, by the way?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Well,” said the man from Verdi Household, “talking of leaks and distasteful indiscretions and so on… where are the Chornyak women while this meeting is going on?”

James Nathan answered in a tone that made his resentment of the question clear. “Arrangements have been made,” he said stiffly. “You needn’t concern yourself.”

“Arrangements? What sort of arrangements?”

Verdi was damned rude, and he’d have to be set right at the first opportunity. But not now, thought James Nathan, not now; this was not the place for personal discussions.

“Most of the women are at negotiations,” he said. “Those who were free have been given a variety of assignments off the grounds. There are no females at Chornyak Household today except those under two years of age — I assume my colleague will trust us to prevent any serious indiscretions in those infants.”

Point scored; Luke Verdi flushed slightly, and said no more.

“Now,” James Nathan went on, “I’ve heard essentially the same story, and the same complaints, from every one of you. I am personally aware of the situation as well; this Household is not immune. But we need a summary from someone, to make sure that we are in fact dealing with a general problem; this is far too grave a matter to be settled hastily. I need not remind you that we must anticipate a strong reaction from the public, no matter what we decide to do.”

“The hell with the public,” said a junior man from Jefferson Household.

“We’re in no position to take that stance,” James Nathan told him, “even if it were consistent with the policies of the Lines — which it is not.”

“It’s none of the public’s damn business, if you ask me.”

“I didn’t ask you, and I won’t. But I am going to ask for that summary, and I know precisely whom to ask. Dano, would you do the honors?”

Dano Mbal, of Mbal Household, was an imposing man and one accustomed to narration. He was very good at it. Narration, oration, declamation — all male linguists were trained for those, as they were trained in phonetics or political strategy; all three were essential skills in the use of the voice as a mechanism of power. But Dano had gifts that went beyond the training. He could read you a list of agricultural chemicals and keep you on the edge of the chair. And he inclined his head slightly now, to indicate that he was willing to be spokesman.

“The problem,” he said, “is not difficult to summarize. It can in fact be done in three words, thus: WOMEN ARE EXTINCT.”

He waited a moment, to let that sink in and to let the laughter subside around the room. And then he went on.

“Real women, that is. We have living females of the species homo sapiens moving about our Households, but that is all that can be said for them. They are homo sapiens, they are female, and they are alive. Nothing more, gentlemen, nothing more.”

One of the younger men opened his mouth to ask a question, but James Nathan was alert for interruptions, and he silenced him before he could make a sound, raising one hand.

“Please go on, Dano,” he said, underlining the message that the man was not to be interrupted.

“I believe,” said Mbal, nodding at James Nathan, “that we all first began to realize that something odd was happening with the women on the night that Thomas Blair Chornyak was so brutally murdered… I remember well that it was a subject of discussion that night. Except that we all thought, then, that it signalled some sort of change for the better! Gentlemen, we were quite wrong.”

He paused just long enough to fill a pipe with the aromatic tobacco he was addicted to, and to light it, and then he said, “Gentlemen, our women have become intolerable. And what is most astonishing about this is that we find ourselves curiously… helpless? Yes, I think helpless is the word… helpless to bring any accusation against them.”

This brought a murmur of protest too widely scattered to be silenced by a gesture. The idea of men helpless against women was absurd, and the men were quick to say so. Dano listened to them courteously, and then he raised his broad shoulders and spread his open hands in a gesture of helplessness.

“Well, gentlemen!” he said. “I will stop, then, and hear the accusations. As you would phrase them.”

He waited while they shuffled and muttered, and then he grinned at them.

“Ah, yes,” he said. “Just as I thought! You are eager enough to have them accused — but you are no more able to give those accusations surface shape than I am. Can a man ‘accuse’ a woman of being unfailingly and exquisitely courteous? Can a man ‘accuse’ a woman of being a flawless mother or grandmother or daughter? Can a man, gentlemen, ‘accuse’ a woman of being an ever willing and skillful sexual partner? Tell me… can a man point a finger at a woman and say to her, ‘I accuse you of never frowning, or never complaining, of never weeping, of never nagging, of never so much as pouting?’ Can a man demand of a woman that she nag? Can he demand that she sulk and bitch and argue — in short, that she behave as women used to behave? In the name of sweet reason, gentlemen, I ask you — can one accuse a woman, name her guilty, for ceasing to do every last thing he has demanded that she not do, all his life long?”

The silence was thick, heavy in the air; they were all thinking, and they had forgotten that they were cramped and crowded into this room. Each of them had his own women in mind, and each of them had an image of those women listening to him as he made some sort of speech about how they were so goddam COURTEOUS and COOPERATIVE and REASONABLE and PLEASANT… Oh, no. It was true. There was no way to accuse them of those things. A man would look and sound like an idiot. A kind of sigh, a sigh of being burdened and oppressed, went round the room.

“I take it it is a general problem, then?” asked James Nathan. “None of you disagrees with Dano Mbal’s description?”

The contributions came thick and fast, from every corner and from every Line.

“It’s as if they weren’t really even there at all!”

“They look right at you, and they don’t interrupt or fidget — they fold their hands in their laps and give you what is supposed to be their full attention, right? More attention, God knows, than they ever used to give. But somehow you know, you know, that their minds are a thousand miles away. They’re not really looking at you — and not really listening!”

“They might as well be androids, for all the good they are; androids would at least be uniformly attractive.”

“They are so goddam cursed boring!”

It went on for some time, and James Nathan let it go. He nodded now and then, encouraging them, wanting them to get it all out in the open, wanting the consensus of sullen anger that he could feel building. None of it was new; he’d been listening to it for what seemed to be years and years — though as Dano had said, it couldn’t really be that long. Whatever it was, it was true that at the beginning it had seemed to be something desirable. What man would not be pleased to have his women always serene, always compliant, always courteous, always respectful?

Dano Mbal spoke again.

“It used to be,” he said, “that when a man had done something in which he could take legitimate pride, he could go home and talk to his wife and his daughters about it, and that pride would grow — it would be a reason to do even more, and to do it even better. We all remember that… it was important to us. But now, now, it would be just as satisfying to go outside and talk about our plans and our accomplishments to a tree. As so many of you have said — it’s not that they interrupt, it’s not that they won’t give a man all the time he wants — it’s that they are simply not really there at all. There’s no feedback from them that couldn’t be obtained from a decently programmed computer. It is as frustrating to address your remarks to our women as to address them to your elbow.”

That was true. They all agreed. No question about it, it was the same for all. And there was the other side of the coin, which each secretly suspected mattered only to him, and which would not be mentioned aloud.

It used to be that a man could do something he was ashamed of, too, and then go home and talk to his women about it and be able to count on them to nag him and harangue him and carry on hysterically at him until he felt he’d paid in full for what he’d done. And then a man could count on the women to go right on past that point with their nonsense until he actually felt that he’d been justified in what he’d done. That had been important, too — and it never happened anymore. Never. No matter what you did, it would be met in just the same way. With respectful courtesy. With a total absence of complaint.

And it used to be that three or four women would go off in a corner and talk to each other and make a man feel left out somehow… but that was normal. You could raise hell about it and make them leave off their woman-gibberish. It was annoying, but you could do something about it, and you knew where you were. They never did that anymore, either. They were always at your disposal… it was as if they had no need to talk to one another any longer. But you couldn’t complain about that. You couldn’t raise hell about it. You couldn’t order them to stop it. You knew what they would do if you were fool enough to try it. Those pleasant, serene, obscenely courteous faces… they would look at you, with nobody home back of their eyes, and they would say “Stop what, my dear?” And there’d be no answer. Stop giving me your full attention when I ask for it? Stop doing without the gossip and gabble I always ridiculed you for? It was out of the question.

“Gentlemen,” said James Nathan, “am I correct that it’s unanimous? Our women are a constant irritation? A total royal pain in the butt? Impossible to live with? Useful only for the occasional bed session, and even then it’s like fucking a well-bred rubber doll? Do I have it right, gentlemen? Am I leaving anything out? Overstating the case? Is there anyone here who feels that his women are an exception, or that the rest of us have gone over the edge?”

“No,” they said. No, he had it exactly right. And by God they would not stand for it.

“All right, we’re agreed. We can’t live with the bitches, and we can’t find any way to cure them of whatever it is they’ve come down with.”

“It’s unbearable, Chornyak,” blurted young Luke. “It’s unbearable!”

James Nathan nodded slowly, pleased. This wasn’t going to take as long as he’d expected. He’d thought there would be a lot of hedging and waffling, a lot of “perhaps I am exaggerating the situation” and “it may well be that I have only imagined this” and similar offputting. There’d been none of that.

“The question, then, is what we are going to do about it,” he stated flatly.

“Damn right.”

“Except,” Emmanuel Belview pointed out, “that there isn’t anything we can do about it. That’s precisely the problem. They’re fucking saints — how are we going to punish them for that?”

“I don’t think we should punish them.”

“What?”

“What? What do you mean, not punish them?”

He held up both hands against the clamor, and hushed them.

“If we can’t live with them,” said James Nathan, enjoying himself very much, “let’s live without them.”

“What?”

The immediate racket was so completely disorganized that he could only laugh, and wait; and he was sorry he wouldn’t have anyone to listen to him talk about the disorderly way they’d behaved, after this was over. It would have been a relief to talk about it — to talk to a real woman about it.

“Gentlemen? Could I have a little quiet, please?” he tried.

“I said,” he repeated when he finally had them reasonably attentive again, “let’s live without them, since we can’t live with them. We need them for many things, I know that. Not only for breeding. We need them, and need them badly, to do their share in the interpreting and translating booths. We’re spread so thin already that we couldn’t begin to keep up with the work without them — we can’t afford to dispense with them. But, gentlemen, we do not have to live with them!”

“But — ”

“They are total wet blankets,” he continued. “They take every smallest fraction of pleasure out of life. Being with them is like being sentenced to life imprisonment with some terribly charming elderly maiden aunt that you hardly know and don’t care to know better. And I repeat, we do not have to do it!”

He leaned forward to make his point.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “the solution is right under our noses. I opened this meeting by telling that there hasn’t been one like it since the day our forefathers met to work out the establishment of the first Barren House. Right here. In this room, at this table. And for almost the same reason, different only in scope — because the barren women were an intolerable pain in the ass and they had to be gotten out of the men’s hair. Without — and this is crucial! — without sacrificing any of the essential services they provided. We have only to follow the excellent example they set us!”

“By God,” said one of the Shawnesseys. “He means build them houses. By God!”

“Exactly!” James Nathan struck the table with his fist, and beside him David was laughing openly, delighted. “The precedent already has been set. The barren women have had separate houses, have lived apart from the men, all these years. It’s been no problem. It hasn’t interfered in any way with their performance of their duties. It has worked superbly, agreed? Well! We need only extend that privilege to all our women. Not move them to the Barren House, those buildings aren’t large enough or suitably equipped. But build them houses of their own, gentlemen. Women’s Houses! Every one of the Households has land enough to build a separate women’s residence, put it close by as we’ve done with the Barren Houses… where it will be convenient when we need to see a woman for some reason, sexual or otherwise, but where the women will be out of our way.”

“It could be done,” said a senior man cautiously.

“Of course it could.”

James Nathan could see the relief spreading over them, the loosening of the tension that had held them when they first came into this room. They were thinking what it would be like… to have the women out of their lives and yet close enough for those times when only a woman would do.

The objection that he was waiting for, the one about the cost, came almost immediately.

“I was waiting for that,” he said.

“Chornyak, it would cost millions. Thirteen separate residences? There are a hell of a lot of women in the Lines, man. You’re talking about an immense sum of money.”

“I don’t give one scrawny damn,” he told them.

“But, Chornyak — ”

“I don’t care what it costs,” he went on grimly. “We have the money. God knows, we’ve never spent any. We have money to build ten Women’s Houses for each of the Lines and not even dent our accounts. You know it, and I know it — that’s one of the very rare benefits of a hundred years of avoiding all conspicuous consumption. The money is there. We have always lived in ostentatious austerity to keep the public happy… we’ve done enough, and we’re entitled. Let’s spend that money, before we all go raving mad.”

“It’s the public that will go raving mad,” said one of the men, “They’ll never stand for it. There’ll be riots again, Chornyak! Remember the 25th Amendment to the Constitution? No mistreatment of women allowed. We’ll never get away with it!”

“Perceive this,” James Nathan insisted. “There won’t be any real problem. Not if we do this properly. We point to the precedent, to the Barren Houses… we go on and on about how happy our women are to go to them, which is true. And we take pains, gentlemen, we take exquisite pains, to make these Women’s Houses superb places to be. We will not leave ourselves open to even the hint of a charge that we are abusing or neglecting our women! We spend whatever it costs to build them fine houses, beautiful houses, houses furnished and equipped with all the crap women always want, everything they could possibly need within the limits of reason. Our comsets are falling apart, for example, we’ve let that go on as an ecomony measure — we’ll put brand new systems in for the women. We’ll give them gardens — they’re all crazy for gardens. Fountains. Whatever. We’ll build them residences that the public can go through, if they insist, and satisfy themselves that we are providing the women with every comfort, every convenience, every facility. Let them send teams of inspectors out if they like… they’ll find nothing to criticize. And gentlemen, the public will envy us.”

They thought about that, and he saw a few grins as they began to understand.

“The men will envy us,” he said simply, “because we get to live every man’s dream. No women in our houses to foul up our lives and interfere with us — but women in abundance just a few steps away, when we choose to enjoy their company.”

“The men will envy us,” said Dano Mbal. “The men.”

“Isn’t that what matters?”

“It brings the obvious to mind, Chornyak.”

“Explain it to me… it may not be as obvious to me as it is to you.”

“Mention the men,” said Dano, “one thinks of the women. Their women will not envy ours, shut off in separate buildings in that fashion. They will pity our poor women — you know they will. And that is a good thing in its way, since the smaller the population that envies us the less trouble there will be. But what about our women, James Nathan? They’re not going to just smile and curtsey and move next door into an upgraded harem, man! This is going to put a considerable dent in their saintly demeanor, because they are going to fight like tigresses.”

“Let them fight, then,” said James Nathan. “What can they do? They have no legal rights in this matter, so long as they cannot claim that they’re being deprived of anything — and I have explained to you that we would make absolutely certain they couldn’t make that claim. Nothing but the best for our women, I promise you! So they fight it, so they have hysterics, so what, Dano? Men have been able to control women without difficulty since the beginning of time — surely we are not such poor examples of the male homo sapiens that we cannot continue in the ancient tradition? Are you suggesting, Dano Mbal, that we men of the Lines are not capable of controlling our women?”

“Of course not, Chornyak. You know I am suggesting no such thing.”

“Very well, then. The women have only themselves to blame for this, my friends. They have decided, in some incomprehensible female way, to turn themselves into multilingual robots — it was not we men who set them on that course. They’ve made their beds, as the saying goes; let them lie in them. They have no money, they are legally not even of age… what can they do to stop us?”

“They can bitch. They can raise hell.”

“Then the more quickly we get this done, the more quickly we’ll be rid of their bitching and their hell-raising. I move we vote. At once. Time’s a-wasting, gentlemen.”

There was a certain amount of discussion, a few objections, some grudging compromises had to be made… that was to be anticipated. It was how the game was played. But in the end they agreed unanimously, as James Nathan had known from the start they would. And when that point was reached, and the vote properly recorded, he punched the keys that would display the holos he’d had prepared especially for this meeting. He intended to spend plenty of credits; they had the money, they could afford to spend it, and he’d been serious about that. But there was no reason to waste money, and he’d spent many careful hours with David, the two of them working out every detail of the basic plan. There was no reason at all why the residences couldn’t be sufficiently uniform to allow for purchasing all the materials in huge quantities, at correspondingly huge savings.

In the Barren Houses, when the announcement was made, the women first sat shocked into total silence, staring at one another. And then their eyes began dancing, and they smiled, and then they laughed until they had no strength left to laugh any more.

“We were going to flee into the woods…”

“With babies on our backs…”

“Dig ourselves forts in the desert…”

“Oh, dear heaven…”

“We were going to be shut up in the attics… oh, lord…”

Even Aquina had to admit that it was funny, although she felt obligated to warn them that this was probably all just a trick to lull them into a sense of false security. Before the men began the real action against them.

First they said, “Oh, Aquina, don’t start!”

And then they all thought of it together, and they backed Nazareth to the wall.

“Nazareth, you knew.”

“I didn’t.”

“You did. That’s why you always stalled… always said that it would be all right, always did your best not to be here when we had planning sessions. You knew. Nazareth Joanna, how did you know?”

Nazareth stared at the floor, and at the ceiling, and everywhere except at them, and begged them to let it pass.

“Can’t you just be satisfied?” she asked them. “We don’t have to flee anywhere, we don’t have to erect battlements and woman ramparts and move into caves with lasers at the ready… we just have to go on about our business, with a great deal less inconvenience than we’ve ever had to put up with in all our lives.”

“Nazareth,” said Caroline, “if we have to tie you to a tree, you are going to explain.”

“I was never able to explain anything,” Nazareth wailed.

“Try. At least try.”

“Well.”

“Try!”

“Perceive this… there was only one reason for the Encoding Project, really, other than just the joy of it. The hypothesis was that if we put the project into effect it would change reality.”

“Go on.”

“Well… you weren’t taking that hypothesis seriously. I was.”

“We were.”

“No. No, you weren’t. Because all your plans were based on the old reality. The one before the change.”

“But Nazareth, how can you plan for a new reality when you don’t have the remotest idea what it would be like?” Aquina demanded indignantly. “That’s not possible!”

“Precisely,” said Nazareth. “We have no science for that. We have pseudo-sciences, in which we extrapolate for a reality that would be nothing more than a minor variation on the one we have… but the science of actual reality change has not yet been even proposed, much less formalized.”

She didn’t like the way they were looking at her, or the way they were moving back. She hadn’t liked it before, when they were crowding her, but this was worse. And inevitable; she had known it couldn’t be avoided.

“What did you do, then, Nazareth,” Grace asked her in a strange voice, “while we made fools of ourselves?”

Nazareth leaned against the wall, and looked at them bleakly. It was hopeless. Probably the little girls who spoke Láadan well could have said what she needed to say, but she couldn’t even begin. I had faith? Could she say that?

Faith. That dreadful word, with its centuries of contamination hiding all the light of it.

“Please,” Nazareth said, giving up. “Please. I love you. And everything is going to be all right. Let that be enough.”

It was Aquina that saved her, however.

“Good lord,” Aquina cried, struck with still another call to arms. “We don’t have time for this! We have to decide how we go about offering Láadan to women outside the Lines…”

Dear Aquina.

“Now that,” said Nazareth solemnly, “is something that I do believe I can be helpful with. If you’ll let me make a pot of tea and if we could all sit down and talk about it…”