Native Tongue (4 page)

“I don’t think so. Judith and Cecily know my schedule, and if there’s anything not on the usual list they’ll know about that—they’ll alert you. You might tell them to check my journal in the mornings to be certain.”

Clara waited, but Nazareth had nothing more to say, and at last she made the useless gesture again and murmured, “Go in lovingkindness, Nazareth Joanna.”

Nazareth nodded, lips tight and gray in the stark face. The nodding small jerky motions like a windup toy, such as you could see in the museum collections, went on and on, until Clara turned helplessly and left her there. Nazareth did not look again at little Matthew or at the AIRY, except to arrange her body in the obligatory parting-posture of PanSig that politeness required. It was not the Alien’s fault, after all.

Think about that, Nazareth instructed herself. Think about the Alien-in-Residence. Use your unruly mind for something constructive. This is no time for wild thoughts.

The Alien was interesting, by no means always a characteristic of AIRY’s. She looked forward to knowing more about its culture and its language as Matthew grew older and became capable of describing them. Three legs rather than two, and a face was more “face?” . . . tentacles, in a mane from the top of the head down the entire spine, tentacles that either reacted to something in the environment and moved in reflex or were under voluntary control . . . There had been lengthy discussion before it had been accepted, some question as to whether it was truly humanoid. It had taken the unanimous vote of the Heads of the thirteen Lines to put it through and get the contract approved, and the old man at Shawnessey Household in Switzerland had taken considerable persuading.

My child, she thought, her back turned to him. My little son. My last son, my last child. And if they made an error, if that
being is not truly humanoid,
my
child who will be a vegetable, or worse.

There you go again, Nazareth, with your mind that does not behave! She clicked her tongue, “tsk!”, and clasped her hands more tightly. Better to occupy that mind with the interesting characteristics of this latest AIRY, or a review of the current inventory of her children’s linguistic skills. Better to occupy that mind with anything at all but the bitter gall of the simple truth, vile in her throat.

Make herself ready for the street, they had said . . . what did they want of her? She looked down at herself and saw nothing to criticize. No ornament. A plain tunic with modest sleeves to the elbow, in a color that was no color. Clingsoles on her feet, nothing more. Her hair she knew to be orderly. No one could have looked at her and thought “There goes a bitch linguist!” unless they spotted her for a degree of impoverished appearance that could only be the result of having a choice about such things.

She would leave her wrist-computer; there was nobody who did not have one, and hers was plain and worn. She would need it in the public wards, to be able to contact the Household from time to time.

I am all right as I am, she thought. Ready for any street. And any data that the hospital might want from her was easily available from the tattoos in her armpits.

Nazareth went out to the front of the house to wait for the robobus. She did not bother to get anything at all from the room she shared with Aaron. She did not touch her breasts again.

Chapter Two

The linguistic term
lexical encoding
refers to the way that human beings choose a particular chunk of their world, external or internal, and assign that chunk a surface shape that will be its name; it refers to the process of word-making. When we women say “Encoding,” with a capital “E,” we mean something a little bit different. We mean the making of a name for a chunk of the world that so far as we know has never been chosen for naming before in any human language, and that has not just suddenly been made or found or dumped upon your culture. We mean naming a chunk that has been around a long time but has never before impressed anyone as sufficiently important to
deserve
its own name.

You can do ordinary lexical encoding systematiclly—for example, you could look at the words of an existing language and decide that you wanted counterparts for them in one of your native languages. Then it’s just a matter of arranging sounds that are permitted and meaningful in that language to make the counterparts. But there is no way at all to search systematically for capital-E Encodings. They come to you out of nowhere and you realize that you have always needed them; but you can’t go looking for them, and they don’t turn up as concrete entities neatly marked off for you and flashing NAME ME. They are therefore very precious.

(Chornyak Barren House,

Manual for Beginners
, page 71)

WINTER 2179....

Aquina Chornyak was bored. It was a boring negotiation, on a boring contract, for a boring treaty amendment, with a set of almost stupefyingly boring Aliens-in-Transit. You never expected an A.I.T. to be exactly stimulating company—that wasn’t what they were on Earth for, in the first place, and there was no reason to anticipate that what a Terran found stimulating would be anything they found stimulating, or vice versa, in the second place—but sometimes there were a few glimmers of interest in the waste of bureaucratic drivel.

Not this time. The Jeelods were so nearly Terran in physical appearance that it was hard to remember they
were
A.I.T.s . . . no amusing tentacles or tails, no pointy ears, no twin noses. Not even an exotic mode of dress to provide diversion. They were short and they were stocky, a bit more square than was typical with Earth humanoids, and they had long beards. And that was it. In their baggy coveralls they looked like a trio of . . . oh, maybe plumbers. Something of the kind. It was boring. And who cared (except the Jeelods, of course, since if they hadn’t cared they wouldn’t have demanded the negotiation), who cared if the containers Terra shipped them weapons in were blue or not?

They cared. They’d made that clear. Blue, they had said, was a color shocking to every Jeelod, an insult to the honor of every Jeelod; it was a
twx’twxqtldx
matter. Aquina could not begin to pronounce that, but she hadn’t had to; she was here only as backup and social translator for Nazareth, who was the native speaker of REM34-5-720 for Earth. Nazareth could say it, as easily as she might have said “twaddle.” And Nazareth had tried patiently to explain what the word meant.

If Aquina understood it correctly herself, making those shipping containers blue was about equivalent to the Jeelods having shipped freight to Earth in containers smeared with human feces . . . curious how the same idiot taboos turned up in so many humanoids from all over the universe. But the Jeelods weren’t going to participate in handling the matter the way two Earth cultures would have done it, in a similar situation.

“You mean making the containers blue is like smearing shit all over them?”

“Damn right!”

“Jeez, we didn’t know. Our apologies, okay? What’s a color that’s okay with you guys?”

“Make ’em red.”

“You’ve got it.”

And the meeting would be over. No . . . there was clearly something else going on here, and it couldn’t be done that way. (And to be honest, there were Earth cultures that couldn’t have done it that way either.)

Every time Nazareth tried to explain it, speaking first in flawless REM34-5-720 to the Jeelods, and then in flawless English to the representatives of the U.S. Government, the same thing happened. The Jeelods went pale, turned their backs, sat down on the floor, and covered their heads with their hands—a position, Nazareth said, indicating that they were not present in any legal sense of the word. These periods of legal absence lasted, per Jeelod cultural imperatives, exactly eighteen minutes and eleven seconds. After which they would seat themselves at the conference table again and Nazareth would give it another try. Poor kidling.

If
she
was bored, Aquina thought, at her age, Nazareth must be at the end of her tether completely. Eleven is not a patient age, even for a child of the Lines. And unlike the men from the State Department, who had started going out for coffee for exactly eighteen minutes and three seconds every time it happened, Nazareth had to stay there in the room. No telling
what
the A.I.T.’s would have offered up as reaction if their interpreter had left the room during their ritual of insult.

They were fifteen minutes and a bit into the latest episode, and Aquina sighed and considered going for coffee herself; as mere backup, she could presumably be spared. But it would be complicated, since she’d have to find an agreeable male to escort her. And it wouldn’t be kind . . . She was fond of Nazareth, who was something pretty special in eleven-year-old girls. Aquina glanced at her fondly, wishing she could tell her a joke or something to ease the tedium, and saw that the child had her head bent in total concentration over a small pad of paper. Scribbling something on it, with the tip of her tongue sticking out between firmly clamped lips. Aquina touched her gently to get her attention, and then she signed a question at her; with their backs turned, the Jeelods would never know that the Terrans were using sign language.

“You drawing, sweetlove? Can I see?” she signed.

The child looked uneasy, and her shoulders curled protectively toward whatever it was.

“It doesn’t matter,” Aquina signed. “Never mind—I didn’t mean to pry.”

But Nazareth smiled at her and shrugged, signing. “That’s okay,” and passed her the little tablet to look at.

Now that she had it, Aquina didn’t know what she had; it wasn’t drawings, certainly. It appeared to be words, but no words she’d ever seen before. Nazareth would be far ahead of her in REM34-5-720, because it was her responsibility to be far ahead—it was her native language, as much as English and Ameslan were. But these words couldn’t be REM34-5-720. Aquina knew the rules for word-formation in the language . . . these were something else.

“They’re Encodings,” signed Nazareth, seeing her puzzlement.

“What?”

“Encodings,” Nazareth fingerspelled it, to be sure of it, and Aquina stared at her open-mouthed.

Encodings! What on earth—

Before she could ask, she heard the swift hiss of clingsoles behind her, the State Department men were coming back. Nazareth sat up straight in the interpreter’s booth, where she and Aquina were sufficiently hidden from view to spare the delicate egos of the males the humiliation of really seeing the women . . . on whose services they were completely dependent in this interplanetary transaction. Nazareth’s whole attention was on the Jeelods and their Terran counterparts, and she left the little tablet in Aquina’s hands. Nazareth knew her obligations, and she fulfilled them. Aquina heard her speaking, easily producing the impossible consonant clusters with their impossible modifications of clicks and glottalizations and squeaks, trying to find a way of expressing their objections that would not force them to be “absent” from the negotiations again.

Which left Aquina free to study the tablet, casually at first, and then with a steadily increasing excitement. Encodings, the child had said! New language shapes, for concepts not yet lexicalized in any known language . . . Encodings, Capital-E, was that?

She stared at the neat symbols; children of the Lines, trained to do phonetic transcription by the age of six, did not produce anything but tidy symbols. The words themselves she recognized now—they were Nazareth’s attempts at Langlish, and they were pathetic. Given the resources that Langlish offered to a coiner of words, they were bound to be pathetic; and given the very very little that Nazareth could know about Langlish, they weren’t even top quality pathetic. But she was excited nevertheless.

It was the concepts themselves, the semantics of the forms that
Nazareth was trying to make speakable; they made her heart race. They might well exist in some language she did hot know about, sure, and that would have to be checked; but then again they might not. And if they didn’t, well—if they didn’t, they were like finding a carteblanche disc on the slidewalk, with nobody around to see you pick it up. It would be easy enough, now that Nazareth had written down the semantics, to put the
proper
shapes to them, to make them words . . .

There was a fine dampness on her forehead and on her palms; she looked at the child beside her as she would have looked at a
truly
interesting Alien. And saw that Nazareth was exasperated, and not with the Jeelods—Aquina must have been missing cues, and being about as much use as a no backup at all. The tablet would have to wait, and Aquina signed a hasty “Sorry, Natha!” and turned her attention to her work. Nazareth had more than enough to do just trying to solve this tangle of language and custom, without having to take the notes on it and look up forms in the lexicons and make nice at the government flunkies when they got agitated. Aquina put the tablet firmly out of her mind, and bent to her work.

It was nearly midnight before she got back to Chornyak Barren House and could finally talk the whole thing over with someone. First there had been the interminable series of “absences.” By her count, twenty-nine of them, before Nazareth had at last found a pair of equivalent utterances in the two languages that would serve the purpose and offend neither group of negotiators. Then there’d been the long wrangle over what color the containers should be in the future . . . there was no point, Nazareth had advised them, in choosing another color and then finding out that it was also taboo, with all of this to be gone through again.