These women, she had to accept it, were content. Ill, perhaps: feeble, certainly; old, beyond question. But content. They knew they filled a valuable role, that they were a resource without which the community of linguists could not have functioned. The little girls had acquired languages, and they had to use them, or they would fade and be lost. Their mothers and fathers and uncles and aunts had no time to talk with them in their multitude of foreign tongues; if they weren’t on duty on government contracts, they were on duty in the running of the Households. The children could not usefully practice with one another, because except for the English and Ameslan that they all knew, the rest of the languages were parcelled out among them two or three to a customer, and those two or three completely different. A child might have one other younger child who shared her Alien language, preparing to be backup, but the chances were rare that the two of them would be free at the same time except during the hours spent in Homeroom or before the mass-ed computers.
Only Michaela’s patients, who could no longer go out to work with the contracts or fill other useful roles in the economy of the Households, could do what these women did. They were a priceless resource, and they knew their value. When a four-year-old girl was the only person other than her eighteen-month-old backup who could speak some one Alien language on this entire planet, she could run over to Barren House in search of a willing partner in conversation. If no one there had even scraps of the language, the child — with a skill that astonished Michaela — would simply set about teaching it to whichever of the old ladies had caught her fancy and had free time.
Michaela listened because she was charmed, though she understood almost nothing of what she heard.
“You see, Aunt Jennifer, it’s almost like an Athabaskan Earth language! It has postpositions, and it’s ess-oh-vee…”
“Aunt Nathalie, you’ll like this one! It has sixty-three separate classifiers, and every last one of them gets declined at both ends, can you believe that?”
“Aunt Berry, wait until you hear! Aunt Berry, watch my tongue! Do you see? It’s a whole set of fricative liquids, Aunt Berry, six of them in complementary distribution! Did you see that one?”
They might as well have been discussing the latest overturn in physics for all that it meant to Michaela. But she loved to watch. The eager faces of the children, and the way they labored to make themselves so clear and to go slowly — because, they told Michaela, it is so very hard for someone like Aunt Jennifer to learn a new language, you know. And the unbelievable patience of the old women, nodding solemnly and asking the child to repeat it again… they would spend twenty minutes with the aunt trying a sound, and the child shaking her head and modeling it, and the aunt trying it again, over and over, until at last the little one would say “That’s not it, but it’s almost!” and clap her hands. But she would not joggle the bed…
“Don’t you get tired?” Michaela asked once when the last of the children had finally gone home to dinner one very long day.
“Tired of the children?”
“No… not that, exactly. Coming and going like they do, I suppose you don’t have any one of them long enough that it’s all that tiresome. Not if you really like little girls, and you seem to.”
“Well… in the particular, Mrs. Landry, some of them can be maddening. They are normal little girls. But in the general, of course we like little girls.”
“But see here, don’t you get tired of always talking about languages like you do? I would go mad, I’m sure I would.”
“Oh, there’s nothing more interesting than a new language, my dear.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Ugh,” said Michaela. “I don’t think I can believe that.”
“Besides,” put in Vera from the next bed, “when we are actually conversing in the languages — not trying to learn one, or learn about one — we talk about everything in the world and in the worlds beyond.”
“It’s not just lessons all the time, then? So long as you’re talking Jovian, for example, you could be talking about dinner or the threedies or anything else at all?”
“That’s quite right, Mrs. Landry,” said Jennifer. “There is of course no such language as Jovian — but you have the rest of it right.”
“No Jovian?”
“Well, child… is there any such language as Terran? Or Earthish?”
“I suppose not. No, of course there isn’t.”
“Well, if our globe requires five thousand languages or more, why should Jupiter have only one?”
Michaela sighed. “I had never thought about it,” she confessed. “It just never… never came up before.”
And then they explained to her that the humanoid languages weren’t given Earth names like “Jovian” anyway. At the very beginning it had been tried, but it had been a waste of time; people couldn’t even pronounce them, much less remember them.
“So they’re numbered, you see. Like this one… do you perceive, my dear? REM41-3-786.” Pronounced “remfortyone; three; seven-eighty-six.”
“What does it mean? Or does it mean anything?”
“REM… that’s a historical remnant. Long ago there was a computer language called BASIC, that had a word REM for “Remark,” that was used a lot. When they first began putting Alien languages into computers, they were still using REM, and it’s hung on. So they all have REM first now, and it doesn’t ‘mean’ anything except perhaps ‘here comes the number of an Alien humanoid language.’”
“And then?”
“Then comes the number that tells us which humanoid species is referred to. On Earth, there’s only the one… some planets have several. The ‘41’ in this number says that the language is one of those spoken by the 41st species with which we’ve Interfaced. The number ‘1’ won’t ever turn up, because it does mean Terran, in a way.”
“Now you’ve lost me.”
“Well. The digits from 1-1000, with Terran — serving as a sort of cover number for all Terran languages, don’t you see — being #1, those are reserved for the humanoid species. One thousand may not be nearly enough, of course, but we haven’t reached that total yet.”
“I see… I think. And who has #2?”
“Nobody at all,” answered Jennifer. “That number is set aside in case it happens that the cetaceans of this planet turn out to have languages of their own as we primates do. If we ever could get to the bottom of that, those languages would be summarized by the numeral 2.”
“My goodness.”
“Yes. So that’s that much, REM41. And then comes a number from 1 to 6, that classifies the language for one of the possible orderings of verb and subject and object. This one is a 3 — that means its order is verb followed by subject followed by object. Very roughly speaking, of course.”
“We wouldn’t need that one, for all we know,” said Anna, “if we ever acquired a non-humanoid language.”