“No,” said Faye. “It would be a nuisance, but not a tragedy. It’s all in our memories. Every last scrap and dot of it.”
Nazareth said nothing else at all. She had begun, laughing and dubious, but enjoying herself; now, as she examined the materials, she grew more and more tense, and they wondered if they had bothered her with this too soon. She was still far from well.
“Nazareth,” asked Susannah cautiously, “are you all right, child? And are you pleased?”
“Pleased!” Nazareth handed the little stack of papers to them as if it were a spoiled fish. “I’m disgusted!”
The silence spread, and they looked at each other, bewildered. Disgusted? They knew about Nazareth; there was no other woman in the Lines as good at languages as she was. But were they really so far from what was needful in a language that Láadan disgusted her?
Nazareth stood up, swaying a bit, but she pushed them away when they would have helped her and went back up the stairs ahead of them. “There’s no excuse for this,’” she announced with her back to them. “No excuse!”
“But it’s a good language,” Aquina cried, saying what the others hesitated to say. “You have no right to judge it like that, on ten minutes’ casual examination! I don’t care what your damn test scores are, or how distinguished your damn Alien language is, you have no right!”
“Aquina,” Grace said disapprovingly. “Please.”
“It’s not that,” Nazareth said, tight-lipped. “It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the language.”
“Then what is it, for the love of heaven?” Aquina demanded.
Nazareth turned on them, where they stood uneasily in the kitchen keeping an eye out for a stray child who might hear something she should not hear, and said, “What is inexcusable is that the language isn’t already being used.”
“But it can’t be used until it’s finished!”
“What nonsense! No living language is ever ‘finished’!”
“Nazareth, you know what we mean.”
“No. I don’t know what you mean.”
Caroline came running then, exclaiming over the racket they were making and the stupidity of keeping Nazareth standing like that, and herded them all into one of the private bedrooms like disorderly poultry, which was precisely what she compared them to. When she had the door closed and her back against it, she said fiercely, “Now! What is all this?”
They told her, and she relaxed against the door and let her hands fall to her sides. “Good heavens! I thought it was an earthquake at the very least… all this fuss because Láadan doesn’t suit little Nazareth? Mercy!”
“But it does suit me, Caroline,” Nazareth insisted. “Not that it would matter if it didn’t — but it does.”
“It isn’t finished, you know. They’re right.”
“They’re wrong.”
“Oh come on, Natha!”
“I assure you, this language that they have just shown me is sufficiently ‘finished’ to be used. It obviously has been for years, while you played with it and fiddled about with it… when I think, that there are little girls of the Lines six or seven years old that could already have been speaking it fluently and who know not one word! I could kill you all, I swear I could.”
“Nonsense.”
“You know what you’re like?” Nazareth demanded. “You’re like those idiot artists who never will let their paintings be put on the wall because they always have to add just one more stroke! Like those novelists never willing to let their books go, who die unpublished, because there’s always just one more line they want to put in. You silly creatures… the men are right, you’re a pack of silly ignorant fools over here! And at all the Barren Houses, obviously, since you’re all muddled equally. Dear heaven, it makes me almost willing to go back to Chornyak Household, not to have to look at you!”
“Nazareth — ”
“Be still!” she commanded them, not caring at all how arrogant or unpleasant she might be. “Please, go away and let me have a little while to think about this! I’m too upset now even to talk to you… go away!”
She was trembling, and if she hadn’t been who she was they knew she would have been crying, and it bothered them to leave her like that. On the other hand, it was clear that their presence was not any comfort to her, and so they did as she asked.
“We’ll wait for you in the parlor,” Susannah said quietly as she went out the door. “That’s the safest place to talk about this — when you are willing to talk, child.”
She wasn’t long, and when she joined them she was calm again. They handed her a stole to work because it required no attention whatsoever and would leave her free to talk and to listen. And they sent someone to watch the door and divert any little girls that came along to the basement to “help with the inventory,” if they didn’t seem willing to simply go back to Chornyak Household because everyone was too busy to keep them company.
“Now then,” Caroline began, stabbing at the sampler that said “There is no such thing as a primitive language,” in elaborate cross stitch, “if what you say is true this is the most important day of my life, of many of our lives. But it seems very unlikely to all of us, Nazareth — think, you’ve been here only a few weeks, and you haven’t been yourself until just the past day or two. We have been here, some of us, for more than twenty years. And we have been working at the language all that time, in every spare moment we could steal. Don’t you think that if the time had come to bring the Encoding Project to a close and start teaching the language we would have noticed it? Without you to tell us?”
“No,” declared Nazareth. “I would have thought so, if anybody had described this absurd situation to me. But I would have been wrong. It must be that you are so close to the matter that you can’t see it — it takes someone with fresh perceptions to peer past the claptrap.”
“And so the good Lord has blessed us with you, Nazareth Joanna Chornyak Adiness… how lucky for us to have the benefit of your ‘fresh perceptions.’ ”
“Caroline,” Nazareth persisted, “I have never been able to get along with anybody. I know that. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I do know that I’m scarcely able to get through a paragraph without offending two people and hurting three others. And I am sorry… I have always been sorry. I have always wished someone would tell me how to be better. But however awful it sounds to you, put in the only way I know how to put it, that language is ready — ‘finished,’ if you prefer — and for it not to be in use is a shame and a scandal.”
“Nazareth!” Caroline was annoyed now, and annoyed that she was annoyed. “You’re very good, of course — but we are not so bad as all that! We do not need you, to instruct us in linguistics.”
“But you do.” Nazareth was as determined as stone.
“You presume,” said Grace stiffly. “We have all been trying to make allowances, but you go too far.”
“All right,” said Nazareth, “I presume. But tell me what it is that the language lacks, and I will listen with an open mind. What doesn’t it have? What do you think it needs before you will call it finished?”
Well… they mentioned a bit here and a piece there, and Nazareth scoffed. Not one thing that they mentioned, she told them, that couldn’t be supplied from the existing mechanisms of the language. Or by adding a bound morpheme — an ending, a little extra piece somewhere in the word. They made their objections until they ran out of objections and she countered every last one of them.