Flinching, Nazareth cried out, “Don’t laugh at me! How can you!”
“But child,” said Caroline, struggling to speak over gales of mirth, “how can we not? When you’re so outrageously funny?”
Nazareth was moving her head. Back and forth from side to side. Over and over and over again. Caroline had seen an animal do that once, in a zoo; it was blind, and it moved its head like that, utterly lost. And she applied the lash of pedantry along with the ridicule, cutting deep and swift.
“Nazareth, you’re a linguist. One cannot not hear. One cannot ‘refuse’ to know, no matter how tempting it may be. You cannot ‘refuse to know’ that an angry skunk had just favored you with its perfume — and you cannot ‘refuse to know’ what we have just told you. You have given us seven Major Encodings; they were all valid. You now know that. Spare us your drivel, please.”
“Oh,” moaned the cornered girl, “may God curse you all…”
“Dear me,” said Susannah. “How you talk.”
“Such manners, Missy,” added Thyrsis. “Mercy.”
Tears had begun to pour down Nazareth’s face, and the women were delighted to see them; it was when a woman ought to weep and could not that there was cause for alarm. But they hurt for her all the same, as she tongue-lashed them.
“It wasn’t enough that you lied to me,” cried Nazareth, “and stole my things, and sneaked my notebook, and used my work without even asking me, and pretended all the time to be my friends! That wasn’t enough, was it? No, you hadn’t done enough, with just those things! That didn’t satisfy you, did it? It’s like the men say, you’ve got nothing to do, so you think up wicked plots… and now you are trying to blackmail me! And you laugh! You blackmail me, and you laugh! Oh, God curse you… God curse you…”
That was very good, they thought. It showed that she did understand. She had a scrap of knowledge here, a scrap there… enough to know that Encodings were precious. The little girls heard the stories at their mother’s knees, when their mothers had time to tell them, and from the women of the Barren Houses otherwise. How women, in the long ago time when women could vote and be doctors and fly spaceships — a fantasy world for those girlchildren, as fabulous and glittering as any tale of castles and dragons — how women, even then, had begun the first slow gropings toward a language of their own.
The tales were told again and again, and embroidered lovingly with detail; and prominent in their ornament were the jewels of the Encodings. A word for a perception that had never had a word of its own before. Major Encodings, the most precious because they were truly newborn to the universe of discourse. Minor Encodings, which always came in the wake of a Major one, because it would bring to mind related concepts that could be lexicalized on the same pattern, still valuable. “A woman who gives an Encoding to other women is a woman of valor, and all women are in her debt forevermore.”
They memorized the list, short because for so many years no one had dared to keep records written down, like the Begats of the Bible. “And Emily Jefferson Chornyak in her lifetime gave to us three Major Encodings and two Minor; and Marian Chornyak Shawnessey, that was sister to Fiona Chornyak Shawnessey, in her lifetime gave us one Major Encoding and nine Minor; and her sister Fiona Shawnessey, in her lifetime…” They learned it all, and they gave it the value women put into their voices and their eyes, and they guarded it. “Don’t tell your father, now, or any of the boys, or any of the men at all. They’ll only laugh. It’s a woman’s secret.” But of course the little girls were told that this secret was all a part of Langlish…
Nazareth looked as if she would faint, and they put her head down between her knees until the color came back to her face, and then moved her to the company couch in the parlor to lie down. The couch on which no Barren House woman ever sat, because when its coverings wore out they would have to petition the men for money to have it redone. It was the emergency couch.
“Do you feel better now, Natha?”
“I hate you,” was all she said.
Of course she did not hate them. They knew what she was thinking. If she used the motherwit of death she had learned along with the list of names, she did not destroy just her own self. Like every little girl, she had asked, “Why can’t we talk it, our language? In private, where the men won’t hear?” And had been told, “Because we do not have enough Encodings yet.” How many years would women wait for their own native tongue, just because she, Nazareth, did not have sufficient strength to cope with her life? It made no difference that she thought the tongue was Langlish, and that she did not even know that Láadan existed; the effect was the same. It was the soft net of guilt, that tightened at every move, that Nazareth hated.
She was a woman of the Lines. It might gnaw her heart hollow, but she would do her duty, because she understood — however dimly — what that duty meant. She lay there dulled, all the light in her put out by their merciless words. A prisoner hears, “You are sentenced to life”; Nazareth felt that now, more sharply than she had ever had to feel it before. But she would learn. Every woman was a prisoner for life; it was not some burden that she bore uniquely. She would have all the company she could ever need.
Later, lying restless in her bed and listening with half an ear in case one of the invalid women might want her, Caroline wished they could have dared tell her just a little more. That they could have given her some simple gift of knowledge. Told her that there was a language called Láadan; that women had chosen its eighteen sounds with tender care — they hadn’t wanted other women to have to struggle to pronounce it just because those whose lot it was to construct it happened to have English as their first Terran language. It would have pleased Nazareth to know that. It would have pleased her even more to know that Langlish, with its endlessly growing list of phonemes and the constant changes in its syntax, all the nonsensical phenomena, was only a charade. A decoy to keep the men from discovering the real language. It might have comforted her a little to know that the lengthy and solemn yearly meeting of the Encoding Project Central Caucus, at which all that had been done on Langlish in the preceding year was either undone or vastly complicated — by unanimous resolution — was the elaborate folly the men considered it to be, and just as hilarious as they considered it to be, and that it was so deliberately. Because the one thing the women could not risk was that some man should take the Project seriously. It would have been something to give Nazareth, to tell her any one of those things.
But they hadn’t dared do it. Who could know how much resistance Nazareth, not even fifteen yet, would have under stress? All of them feared the day when some woman, driven beyond her endurance, would fling in the face of a detested man, “You think you know so much! You don’t even know that the women have a real language of their own, one you men have never even suspected existed! You stupid fool, to believe that we women of the Lines would put together a deformity like Langlish and call it a language!”
Oh, yes. It would be so easy to do, and it was so tempting. Such a glory to see the man’s astonished face. Not one woman in Barren House who couldn’t tell a tale of the time she’d come within an inch of doing something like that. And not one who didn’t bless the wisdom that had kept her from learning anything dangerous to the Native Tongue until she had reached an age, and a serenity, when words no longer leaped from her mouth in spite of her best intentions — and when she was not obliged to live all day and all night among males.