Michaela Landry’s first reaction to the living arrangements provided for the feeble and ill women of Chornyak Barren House was that it showed the men of that Household to be even more callous than other men, which was saying a good deal. She had looked at the situation, twenty-three women in twenty-three narrow beds, all in one big room with twelve beds down each side in rows that faced each other; and she had felt shock, and distaste, at how cheap the Chornyak men would have to be to treat these women so. Surely they could have managed at least the partitions used in the children’s dormitories at the main house, to give their women a semblance of privacy and a place of their own! But no, they were all dumped here like charity patients on a public ward in the oldest hospitals… and even there, Michaela thought, there were curtains to be drawn for those women who did not choose to be on public display. Not here. Here, if one woman must undergo some intimate procedure, or was ill in a way that would distress others to watch, someone would bring panelled screens — a practical use for their everlasting needlework — and set them up around the bed. And the moment the situation was back to normal, the screens would be taken away and the woman left in the midst of a crowd again.
But gradually she came to understand that it wasn’t precisely as it seemed to her. The room had high windows along both sides, so that there was always a soft flood of light, and it had ordinary big windows at either end that gave every woman a view of the Virginia woodlands outside. In the spring it was flowering trees and carpets of wildflowers; in the autumn it was a spectacle of scarlet and gold and yellow. For most of the women, who could rarely leave their beds, it meant nothing that the patches of woodland were really only skillful plantings of wild things in an ample yard, and that just past the edge of the glory of dogwood or scarlet maple there was a slidewalk and a public street; from where they lay it looked like the inner heart of a woodland.
If the room had been cut up into cubicles, only a few of them could have watched the procession of the trees through the cycle of the year, and the others would have only had glimpses when someone had time to wheel them down to the windows. And the sunlight would not have been there to cheer them except for that segment of the day when the sun was at their particular small stretch of the clerestory windows. They would not have looked up and seen open air and two panoramas of the glory of the outdoors, and the faces of the other women who had been their relatives in law if not by blood for most of their lives. They would have looked up to see a flat barren wall, and to wait and hope that someone would come along and look in and perhaps stay for a few moments.
“It was our own choice,” one of the oldest had told her when she felt settled in enough to mention it. “The men, now, they had every intention of putting ‘private rooms’ on this floor. A decent privacy, they called it. We wanted none of that.” And she had laughed softly. “Once they realized they didn’t have to spend any money, they were delighted to let us have our way; in fact, they felt positively magnanimous about indulging us in our exotic fancies.”
“But don’t you tire of always being together?” Michaela asked. “I understand that it’s far more beautiful this way… this openness of light and air, and the views at the end of the room… but don’t you mind, always being in a crowd like this?”
The old lady patted Michaela’s hand reassuringly.
“Sometimes,” she said. “Sometimes we think ‘if I have to look at those stupid faces on those stupid women for one more minute I will go completely out of my mind!’ Of course; each of us does. And that is why there are four bedrooms downstairs, my dear. Separate, proper bedrooms. When one of us truly can’t bear living in this room any longer, we take a week’s rest — or longer, if we like — in a proper bedroom downstairs. And when you go down there you always think you’ll want to stay at least a month — but in three days you’re hankering to come back up here.”
“That’s very hard to believe,” Michaela said.
“Well, my dear, you must realize that all of us, or almost all of us, grew up in linguist Households, scores of us under a common roof. We’ve spent our childhoods in dormitories, we’ve always eaten in communal dining rooms and shared communal bathrooms. We’re much more used to being together all the time than your average person is today.”
“It’s so strange,” Michaela said. “At first, it must have been so hard.”
“No,” said the old lady briskly, “I don’t believe it was especially hard. We went into the communal dwellings after the Anti-Linguist Riots, for security… there was safety in numbers. And to have the Interfaces right there, you see. They cost an enormous sum, and there couldn’t have been an Interface in a small private home. And it was for security, as well as for economy, that we earth-sheltered all the Households instead of… oh, buying up old hotels, or something of that kind. But the main thing that you must understand, and that you don’t understand because you are too young, my dear, is that in the days when the Households were built almost all people in this country lived very crowded lives. Almost all people everywhere did! Only the very wealthy could afford private homes, then, you see; and most people were jammed into apartments and condominiums… the crowding was just terrible. In that situation, the linguists were probably not much more crowded than the average person, and I daresay they were quite a lot more comfortable. Because the Households were carefully planned, you see.”
Michaela shook her head, embarrassed. “It’s hard,” she said. “Hard to imagine. Things have changed so quickly.”
“Mmmm, I suppose so, child. But the situation that you are familiar with, where anyone with a few thousand credits who feels a little crowded can just move out to a frontier planet or asteroid and have all the room he wants… that’s very new. Why, I can remember when there was only one settlement in space, my dear! And to be able to go out to that one, miserable bare hardscrabble that it was, Mrs. Landry, you had to have an enormous fortune at your disposal. Long before frontier colonies became routine, child, we were all jammed in together on this planet Earth in a way that people today would literally find intolerable. And think what I would miss, if I were given a room of my own!”
She waved her hand for Michaela to look around the room, and the other woman had to smile. On almost every bed, sitting most carefully on the edge so that they would not joggle bodies already stiff and aching, were the little girls from Chornyak Household. They came running all day long, in flocks, back and forth between the two buildings. And every patient, unless she was so ill that she could not participate, had two or three little girls of various ages perched on her bed, holding her hand, and talking. Talking, talking, by the hour. If one left, another would come at once to take her place.
Old Julia Dorothy, whose voice was so weak that she could no longer carry on any vocal conversation, was as much the center of the hum of girlchildren as anyone else; while they went to the others to keep up their skills in oral languages, both Terran and Alien, they went to Julia Dorothy to hone their skill with Ameslan and sat on her bed with their fingers flashing and their faces moving constantly in the mobile commentary that went with the signs. Julia Dorothy couldn’t speak aloud, but her fingers were as nimble as spiders, and her old face with its wrinkles and seams was so articulate that at times Michaela — with not even the fingerspelling alphabet at her command — felt that she could grasp something of what Julia was signing.