The Judas Rose Read online

  THE NATIVE TONGUE TRILOGY

  by Suzette Haden Elgin

  NATIVE TONGUE

  THE JUDAS ROSE

  EARTHSONG

  Published by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York

  The Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406, New York, NY 10016 feministpress.org

  First Feminist Press edition, 2002

  Originally published in 1987 by DAW Books, Inc., New York

  Copyright © 1987 by Suzette Haden Elgin

  Afterword copyright © 2002 by Susan M. Squier and Julie Vedder

  All rights reserved.

  All of the characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or used, stored in an information retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior written permission of the Feminist Press at the City University of New York except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Elgin, Suzette Haden.

  Native tongue / Suzette Haden Elgin ; afterword by Susan Squier and Julie Vedder.—1st Feminist Press ed.

  p. cm.

  Originally published: New York: DAW, 1984.

  ISBN 978-1-5586-1912-8

  1. Language and languages—Fiction. 2. Languages, Secret—Fiction. 3. Women—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3555.L42 N38 2000

  813’.54—dc2

  00-042958

  Wild grape vine wreath logo by Randy Farran.

  Contents

  PREFACE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  EPILOGUE

  Afterword

  PREFACE

  Some years ago, it was our great privilege to publish the novel called Native Tongue. So extraordinary did we find that privilege that we published the work as a book in paper, rather than in microfiche or chiplet. The book was more than simply unusual; it brought with it two mysteries. First, we did not know who its author was, only that it had been written by one or more women of Chornyak Household. Second, we did not know the name of the scholar who had safeguarded the manuscript; it was sent to us by messenger, and the brief note of transmittal was unsigned. We have no more information on either of those matters today than we did then. But we have new reason to be grateful to our unknown benefactor, because a second volume of the work has now been made available to us for publication.

  Our publishing problems this time at first appeared severe. It had taken us ten years to secure the funds and the skilled workers to produce Native Tongue, and we had its uniqueness and its historical significance as forceful arguments of persuasion of its favor. This time our situation was very different. Of course, for those who had enjoyed the first volume, the new book would make pleasant reading—but it could not be said to constitute a historic landmark. How, then, does it happen that once again we are able to put this work into your hands in realbook form?

  The answer is another mystery; the only information we have is a few sparse details. Someone—we have no idea who, whether man or woman, linguist or lay—made it possible for the women of the linguist families to open a secret bank account and to contribute to it over the years. This was in the time when Terran women were legally not adults, and were allowed no money of their own except in the most unusual circumstances. Ordinarily they could have only small amounts of what was called “pocket money,” doled out to them at the whim of their male guardians, to be spent for a restricted list of personal items such as candy or trinkets or household trivia. We are informed that the women saved tiny sums, perhaps by simply lying about what those personal items cost them, and were permitted to deposit those sums in the secret account through an unidentifed intermediary. The single purpose for which this fund can be used is to pay for the publication, in realbook form, of items described to us only as “the works of the women of Lines.”

  We have been granted no access to the bank records. We do not know whether money continues to go into the account now that the situation of women is different, or what amount might remain as a balance. But even small sums, if left to gather compound interest over many years, can turn into substantial amounts of money, and there was enough to let us offer you this book.

  Here, then, is Native Tongue: Book Two.

  —Patricia Ann Wilkins, Executive Editor

  (Native Tongue: Book Two is a joint publication for the following organizations: The Historical Society of Earth; WOMANTALK, Earth Section; The Metaguild of Lay Linguists, Earth Section; The Láadan Group.)

  CHAPTER 1

  Oh, once again, amazing grace,

  abundantly to hand,

  for those that journey into space

  and those that keep to land.

  I am a child of galaxies,

  of planets all unknown;

  a child of One whose majesty

  requires nor sword nor throne.

  On other worlds and other seas,

  lit by another star,

  and hearing other harmonies,

  my myriad kindred are.

  Oh, as ye sow, so shall ye reap;

  the ancient truth lives on—

  and I shall guide me by those words

  till all my life is gone.

  Around me spread the endless skies,

  ablaze with star and sun;

  no world so small it cannot rise

  to greet the Holy One.

  (popular hymn, sung to the tune of “Amazing Grace”)

  Heykus Joshua Clete, Chief of the Department of Analysis & Translation of the State Department’s Foreign Service, winner of the Reagan Medal for Statesmanship, recipient of dozens of honorary degrees and countless awards and citations, father of three and grandfather of seven, Senior High Deacon of the United Reformed Baptist Church, was a great bulky giant of a man out of rural southern Missouri. His many honors sat easily on his shoulders; he was six feet five inches tall, weighed two hundred seventy pounds, and carried not a single ounce of fat. His silver-white hair was cropped close in almost military fashion, so that his daily hour-long swim could be fit in anywhere, no matter how formal the occasions flanking that hour on either side. He allowed himself an elegant short beard that, like his heavy eyebrows, was gray flecked with silver; it hid a chin that to his mind was just the slightest touch weaker than the chin he would have chosen for himself. His eyes were the classic bright Missouri blue carried by durable inbred Scotch-Irish genes that were not ever going to give up; he was imposing, and distinguished, and in superb health. And he was feared. Not because he was cruel or vicious or wicked but because he applied to everyone the same inflexible ethical standards that he applied to himself. The fact that you were in dire straits when you committed some infraction of the rules would not impress Heykus Clete in any way whatsoever. Your previous flawless record of lifetime service to the government of the United States would not matter either. If you were seen in a bar in New St. Louis with a d
rink in your hand, and were subsequently seen by reliable witnesses to actually consume some portion of that drink, however small, you no longer worked for the Department of Analysis & Translation. That the D.A.T. regulation was a stupid one, there being no difference between bars on New St. Louis and bars anywhere else, made absolutely no difference to Heykus: a rule was a rule. And you would find yourself both unemployed and saddled with a censure notation in your government file.

  Heykus wore glasses because his father and grandfather had worn glasses, because he liked the slight edge of privacy they gave him behind the heavy lenses, and because there were a number of useful clusters of bodyparl that he could carry out with his glasses during language interactions. He didn’t need glasses; if he had needed them, it had been half a century since the laser surgeons had perfected the techniques that made glasses obsolete. He wore glasses because that was the tradition to which male heads of family in his family subscribed. He had not pressured his own son to adhere to that tradition, but he had been serenely confident that when the boy got past the normal state of rebellion against parental values he would take it up of his own accord, and he had been right. At the age of twenty-six Heykus Jr. had appeared at a Sunday family dinner properly bespectacled despite his perfect vision. Heykus had made no comment, nor had anyone else; no comment is necessary when all things are precisely as they should be.

  When the computer announced the incoming call from John Bellena of Government Work, Heykus was not seated inside his desk. He was standing in the center of his office at parade rest, glaring at an area of space that displeased him mightily. A map of the known universe took up three walls of the office, floor to ceiling, and it kept him as up to date on interplanetary conditions as it was possible for anyone to be. Every planet, moon, asteroid or other body capable of supporting even one usable installation was shown on the map, with the vast intervening distances collapsed according to a formula about which he knew little and cared less. Heykus was adamantly ignorant about such things as astronomy and astrophysics and space science; that was what his staff of experts was for. What he did understand was the system of lights that he had devised for himself; they told him what he really needed to know.

  Heykus had every known usable body in space indicated on his map by a single tiny light. A world lost to the Soviet hordes glowed red; a discovered but as yet unclaimed world—still available for exploration and colonization or other practical use, and still neutral—glowed green. And every world claimed by the Christian nations of Earth, as Heykus defined “Christian,” was marked by a light of clear bright yellow. Heykus was much too shrewd to let anyone, be it a member of his private staff or a member of Congress, know that he viewed those lights as golden crosses; he referred to them as “X’s” and used the expression “worlds I can cross off my list” as a private joke.

  What he was glaring at right now was a nice little cluster of planets that he was accustomed to seeing and had long hankered for. Just the sort of three-cluster that put him in mind of the Holy Trinity and spoke loudly to his esthetic sense, as well as to his experience of the sort of planetary arrangement that was likely to be both efficient and profitable. And he was positive that yesterday all three of those lights had been a steady emerald green. This morning they were neither green nor steady. They were a deep and bloody red, and they were blinking at him.

  The blinking meant their status had changed within the previous twenty-four hours; it was intended to get his attention. The red meant they had gone from Status 3 (Unexplored, Uncolonized, Not Off Limits) to Status 7 (Claimed for Exploration by the Soviet Union.) And that galled him. That was bitter. That made his gut twist and his chest ache. Heykus’ gestures, like his carefully nurtured country drawl, were smooth and slow; he smacked his right fist into the palm of his left hand and swore softly, calling upon the beards of various prophets to witness his outrage. Three more worlds gone, and no way to get them back! Three more opportunities lost. Three more nests of Communists polluting the immensity of space, and only the Almighty knew how many thousands of souls condemned to eternal damnation.

  It made Heykus sick. Physically sick. He had to swallow hard, and breathe deeply, for just a minute. As often happened in such situations, he had the feeling that the portrait of Ronald Reagan that hung on the outer wall of his desk behind him was frowning at the back of his head. He was always careful not to look.

  “Heykus Joshua Clete,” said the computer again in its clear mellow Panglish, as entirely free of regional taint as technology could make it, “you have an incoming call from John Oliver Bellena of Division Twelve, on Line Six.” It would give him four chances before it told Bellena that Heykus Joshua Clete was not answering his comset.

  Heykus heard it this time, and went straight into his desk, setting aside his fury at the new red cluster of lights. He was always willing and ready to talk to anyone from Division Twelve, which was more generally known as “Government Work”; the projects of GW were dear to his heart. Even today, when a lifespan of one hundred and thirty was not unusual, and vigorous men in their late nineties or early hundreds were no longer a matter for comment in government service, a man of seventy-eight knew the years left to accomplish his goals were beginning to wind down. Heykus was counting on the younger men at GW to carry on when he was gone. Or when he could no longer do more than sit and fidget and polish the voluminous journals that he had kept since his fiftieth birthday for publication after his death.

  He touched the stud to complete the circuit for the line, but he didn’t bother with any of his scramblers or printers. If the call had been anything rigorously confidential the computer would not have announced it aloud, and it would not have come in on Line Six. He sat down and watched the comset screen, giving it his full attention.

  “Heykus? John Bellena here,” said the man who appeared on the screen. “Good morning.”

  “Morning, John,” Heykus said easily. He liked and trusted young John Bellena, and expected great things of him. “What can I do for you?”

  “We need a favor, Heykus.”

  “If I can do it, you’ve got it. What’s the problem?”

  Bellena cleared his throat. “You’re alone?” he asked.

  “All secure here, unless you called in on the wrong line.”

  “Heykus, I had a call yesterday from the orphanage at Arlington.”

  “Mmhmm.”

  “Do you remember a baby called Selena Opal Hame, Chief?”

  “Should I?”

  “It was an awfully long time ago. Long before I went to work for the State Department, and a little while before you did, maybe. You would have known about the kid, but it wasn’t anything you were personally involved in.”

  “You’ll have to refresh my memory, John. The name doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  “Selena Opal Hame,” said Bellena, fixing his eyes on some vague point beyond Clete’s massive shoulders so that there’d be no embarrassment, “was one of the infants we Interfaced with the Beta-2 Alien. The time it was the Alien who died in the Interface, for once. That would be at least sixty years ago. I was still in school.”

  Heykus never wasted time beating around bushes unless no other course seemed indicated. He still didn’t remember the name, but he was painfully familiar with the records of the incident and the resulting mess. It had taken weeks of negotiations, and a stunning sum of money that had to be hidden from Congress, to keep that one quiet. And this Hame had been a womb infant, not a tubie. Tubies didn’t have names, they had numbers, and Heykus preferred not to think about them. It was true that nowhere in the Bible was there a command, “Thou shalt not make tubies,” but he was much afraid there ought to have been. He had no trouble imagining some translator, back in the dimness of time, looking at whatever strange word the Lord God had then provided for the semantic concept of the infant-conceived-in-a-test-tube-and-brought-to-term-in-a-laboratory-incubator and deciding that some even earlier translator or scribe must have been either drunk or deliriou
s. He could easily see the man deleting the offending piece of nonsense from the Holy Scriptures on the assumption that it was not the inspired word of God but the clerical error of man.

  “What does Selena Opal Hame want?” he asked abruptly, to avoid having to consider the theological question further. “Compensation? I wouldn’t blame her, and we can certainly provide it. Within reason, of course.”

  “She’s not involved in this directly at all,” Bellena answered quickly. “It’s nothing like that. As for what she might want, nobody knows. What happened is that a Lingoe doing a routine language check at the orphanage somehow stumbled over Miss Hame—and he didn’t like it one damn bit, Heykus.”

  Heykus frowned. “What was a linguist doing at The Maples, John? That’s supposed to be a job for our own people.”

  “Heykus, if we don’t let the linguists in there every once in a while, they get suspicious. That part was routine. The mistake was not keeping him away from Selena Hame, and that happened—I’m going to be frank, Chief—that happened because we’d simply forgotten all about her. But let me tell you, the Lingoe really did not like what he saw.”

  “So? Do we care what a Lingoe does or does not like? Is he threatening a shutdown over one lapse of the federal memory?” The linguists could wreak havoc if they chose to do so; they were crucial to dozens of ongoing negotiation sessions at all times. But they had never pulled out yet, and they’d had far more compelling reasons to do so.

  “He’s a member of the Lines, Heykus. From Chornyak Household. You know how they are. He immediately started filling out forms. Rocking boats. Left, right, and center.”

  “Huh.” Heykus considered that, and John Bellena waited courteously for him to go on.

  “I don’t understand,” Heykus said finally, slowly. “Why should a linguist of the Lines, with all the myriad of important things he has to deal with, care about one insignificant woman at a federal orphanage?”

  Bellena sighed, and spread his hands wide. “She’s all alone out there, Heykus,” he explained. “You know what happens to the tubies we use—they all die by the time they’re twelve or thirteen, god only knows why. I wish we knew why, so we could fix it. But this Hame wasn’t a tubie, and she didn’t die. And now she’s a middle-aged woman in her sixties, still living in that orphanage full of infants and young children. I suppose the Lingoe’s right—she probably is lonely, and it probably is disgraceful.”