Native Tongue (19 page)

“See here, Chornyak, you’ve got a contract!” said the other man indignantly. “And that contract specifies that when you take on a language you put enough of your people on it to cover things like this. That’s what we pay you for, for God’s sake.”

Thomas let a full thirty seconds go by, to give the section chief time to think over the alternatives he had to doing business with the Lines. And then he answered with politeness to spare.

“There are only just so many of us available, my friend,” he said, borrowing from Rachel because it was handy, “and even if we learned fifty languages apiece we still couldn’t be in more than one place at a time. We have two youngsters right now acquiring REM34 from my daughter, but neither one is exactly
suited for sophisticated negotiations—one of them is four and the other is about eighteen months. In time, they’ll be available, but they won’t help matters tomorrow.”

“Ah, shit,” said Donald Cregg. “This is damn tiresome.”

“’It is. I agree with you. Maybe some of you people ought to reconsider and send some of your infants over to Interface along with ours.”

And live with dirty stinking Lingoes? And live packed into a hole in the ground like animals, with no decent privacy and no comfort and a lifestyle just above the poverty level? Thomas watched the man, not able to make out any body-parl with the comset image the only data available, but perfectly able to imagine it. Cregg would be pretending he hadn’t heard that last sentence.

“Look, do what you can to get your kid there as scheduled, will you? This isn’t visiting vippies here for keys to the city, Thomas, this is a matter of real urgency.”

“I’ll do everything possible,” said Thomas.

“And thanks for the warning.”

“Any time. Any time at all.”

The screen cleared, and he sat smiling at it. It was most important to keep the government conscious at all times of their dependency on the linguists. Thomas was careful not to overlook even the smallest opportunity to drive that point home and refresh the federal memory, that sieve of convenience and expediency.

He jabbed the intercom for his room, and got no answer; tried again, and heard the soft beep of the transfer mechanism before Rachel came on line from wherever she’d gotten to. The girldorms, probably.

“Well,” he said abruptly, “are they sending a med-Sammy for this major crisis?”

“No, Thomas,” said Rachel. “Take a half grain of codeine and a muscle relaxant and call them in the morning.”

“I thought so,” said Thomas with satisfaction. “You’ve made a great deal of fuss—and an embarrassing scene—over nothing.”

“Thomas, I’m sorry you feel that way. But Natha is never sick. And she does not ever complain. You will remember . . . the time she fell picking apples and broke three ribs, we didn’t hear a word from her. We wouldn’t have known she was hurt if she hadn’t fainted in the orchards.”

“I don’t remember that, Rachel, but it sounds as if she sets an example you might do well to emulate. Spunky, from the sound of it.”

“Is that all, Thomas?”

“See that she’s at the ILO at five minutes till eight, Rachel—and see that she’s in top form. And
that
is all.”

He reached out and cut off any remarks his wife might have had in mind. Later, he’d have to try to work his way through the gruel in her head long enough to make her remember a few things about decent courtesy, and about her function as role model for younger females under his roof. It would be a nuisance, but it could be done—given sufficient patience, and sufficient skill. But not now. Right now he had contracts to see to.

At Barren House, Aquina was facing the music, and it wasn’t pleasant. They had her pinned at a table in a back room, and it was Susannah and Nile and Caroline—no goodies from Belle-Anne or oil in the waters from Grace this time—who were lambasting her. And they were good at it.

“You fool, Aquina!” Susannah had said for starters. “You contemptible, wicked fool of a woman!”

“And bungling . . . don’t forget bungling,” Caroline added. It was Caroline who had caught her. Caroline who’d been alerted by Faye, their most medically skilled woman, that Aquina had been at the herbs in the basement cupboards. And Caroline who’d caught her coming out of the kitchens at the main house and had forced her to hand over the empty bottle in her pocket and give it to Faye for analysis. . . . not that anything sophisticated had been required. Faye knew what Aquina had taken because she knew the inventory down to the last leaf and fleck; and she’d only had to uncap the bottle and smell it to know what it had contained.

How could she have
been
so bungling? Aquina thought that was a very good question . . . except that she never, never had imagined that the other women could spy on her and follow her around. Or that Caroline could twist her arm so cruelly that she was helpless to keep her from searching her pockets . . . Who would have thought they’d be so suspicious, them with their damned ethics always on such prominent display?

“I’d do it again,” she’d said, defying them. And Caroline had turned on her like a snare set free on a rabbit, and in spite of herself Aquina had gasped between her teeth, sucking air, and jerked away from the other woman. Caroline was much smaller, much thinner, much less powerful of frame than Aquina; she was also stronger than Aquina could ever hope to be, with a grip like a man’s.

“You try that again, you silly bitch,” Caroline hissed at her,
“and so help me God I’ll put you in permanent traction where you can’t do anybody any more harm with your stupidity and your viciousness!”

Susannah clucked her tongue, and objected mildly. “She’s not vicious, Caroline. Stupid, yes. But not vicious.”

“She did her damnedest to poison a fourteen-year-old girl, and she’s not vicious? What
is
that, tenderness and love?”

“Caroline . . . you know very well that Aquina had no intention of harming Nazareth Chornyak. She bellows a right good line, but she wouldn’t really hurt a living creature. Come off it.”

Caroline was so angry that she turned around and smacked the wall with her fist; Aquina was glad that it was the wall and not her.

“Aquina,” Nile said, “whatever did you think you were doing?”

“I’ve told you.”

“You tell us again.”

She told them. The thought of having to wait forty years before Nazareth could work on the women’s language at Barren House, really work on it—especially since Aquina had found her notebook, and it had turned out to be a treasure horde of Encodings, even more valuable than she had hoped—that thought had been intolerable to her. And there was only one way to shorten that forty years. . . . Nazareth had to be made barren. If Aquina could have managed that, the girl would have been kept at Chornyak Household a few more years, to finish her education and her training; but then she would have come to Barren House.

“But Aquina, you know
nothing
about medicine!”

“I can read. I know where Faye’s herbals are. I’m literate.”

“You could have killed her.”

“No, she couldn’t,” chided Susannah. “Good lord. First she followed the formula with substitutions for anything that alarmed her, and then she cut its strength by half. And then she only gave Nazareth half a dose of
that
. I’m sure the child has been miserable, but she’s not in any real danger, nor was she ever.”

“Aquina had no way of being sure of that,” Caroline insisted, and Nile nodded solemn agreement. “It’s luck—just pure blind luck,
not
skill,
not
knowledge—that all she did with her nasty potion was make Nazareth sick!” And she leaned over the table and fairly hissed at Aquina. “Do you realize, you idiot, that you could have cost us not just the forty years you’re whining about, but lost us Nazareth
forever
? You had
no
idea what you were doing!”

Aquina knew that they were right. She could see it now, see it
clearly. She must have been half out of her mind, with frustration and with the constant worrying at the problem in her head. And she was sorry, sorry to the depths of her. But she’d be damned and fried in oil and pickled before she’d admit it.

“It was worth a try,” she said defiantly. And she stared at them, breathing hard and fast and deep, until they threw up their hands and walked out on her.

Chapter Ten

They are encumbered with secret

pregnancies that never come to term.

There
are
no terms, you don’t see.

They drag their swollen brains about with them everywhere;

hidden in pleats and drapes and cunning pouches;

and the unbearable

keep kicking, kicking

under the dura mater.

It is no bloody wonder they have headaches.

Hold them to your ear, lumpy as they are,

and pale;

that roar you hear is the surge of the damned unspeakable

being kept back.

Stone will not dilate

will not stretch

will not tear—

it shivers.

Cleaves.

Moves uneasily.

At its core the burgundy lava simmers,

making room.

There are volcanoes at the bottom of the sea.

Those pretty green things swaying are their false hair.

Deliver us?

Ram inward the forceps of the patriarchal paradigm

and your infernal medicine

and bring forth the ancient offspring

with their missing mouths?

I think not.

Not bloody likely.

(20th century “feminist” poem)

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m not sure I do.”

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

“What else is there?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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