Native Tongue (47 page)

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?”