“Caroline, you exaggerate,” Aquina scoffed.
“Not much. I’ve heard you often enough.”
“They wouldn’t dare kill us. They’d incarcerate every last one of us that knew Láadan; and they’d dope us silly till we forgot every word. They’d destroy our records, they’d punish any child who used a single syllable, and they’d stamp it out forever — but they wouldn’t kill us. I never said they’d kill us, Caroline; it’s Láadan they would kill. And we’d have to get away before they could invent some new and horrendous ‘epidemic incurable schizophrenia’ allegedly brought back from a frontier planet in a bag of grain… but they wouldn’t kill us.”
“You hear her?” Caroline challenged Nazareth. “That is what we listen to, endlessly.”
“I hear her,” Nazareth said. “I see your point, Caroline. And I also see Aquina’s. And there are many many other possibilities.”
“Certainly there are,” Caroline agreed. “It’s as absurd to think the men could get away with shutting us all away in instituions as it is to think they could kill us. And if Aquina didn’t so love wallowing in extremes she’d know that. They would have to move against us a few at a time, even if they invent half a dozen epidemics from outer space that are conveniently contagious only for females. But the men know the power of a new language just as well as we do — and they would stop it, Nazareth. The day we begin to use Láadan, the day we let it out of the basement, that day we put its very existence at risk. You were right about the tub of green stuff bubbling away down there, Nazareth — but we don’t have any virgins to sacrifice.”
“You are afraid.”
“Of course we are afraid!”
“What I think they will do,” said Faye, “the only thing they can possibly do, is break up the Barren Houses. Isolate us from one another. Keep us away from the rest of the women, certainly nver let us near the infant children. It won’t be hard for them to teach the babies that elderly women and barren women are witches, horrid old repositories of wickedness to be feared and avoided — that’s been done before, and it’s always been a smashing success! Some of us they’ll shut away… some of us they’ll isolate in the Households. Can’t you imagine the publicity campaign as they ‘decide’ that they were in error all these years putting us in separate buildings and ‘welcome us back to the bosoms of our families’? The public will love it… and they’ll stamp out every vestige of Láadan. And every vestige of Langlish, while they’re at it, just in case it might give someone ideas again someday. And Láadan will die, as every language of women must have died, since the beginning of time.”
“Unless we get away before they realize that it’s happening,” hissed Aquina. “That’s the only chance we have.”
Nazareth got up and went to the window, staring out across the open green through the trees, silent and troubled.
“Nazareth,” pleaded Grace behind her, “if Aquina is right — allowances made for her embellishments, of course — do you perceive now what it means?”
“Yes.”
“And they can’t muster up the courage,” said Aquina with contempt, “to decide what must be done and do it.”
“Because we don’t know what we must do,” said the others. “We have talked and talked and talked about it… we don’t know.”
“We must choose one Barren House,” said Aquina steadily, “the most isolated and the most easily defended, and we must be ready to go there with as many girlchildren as we can take with us, at the first hint that the men know what’s happening. It isn’t a difficult decision. And we must be ready to move on from there, if we have to.”
“It would mean leaving our children!”
“And never seeing our families again.”
“And publicity — think of the lies the men will give to the media!”
“All the old ones, upstairs… we’d have to abandon them!”
“No wonder you’ve been stalling,” said Nazareth, turning around again. “Marking time. No wonder.”
“Oh, not you, too!” moaned Aquina. “I can’t stand it.”
Nazareth came back and sat down, and took up the foolish stole again. “Perceive this,” she said with absolute certainty in her voice, “no matter what it means — either we do not really believe in the Encoding Project, in which case the men are right and we are just silly women playing silly games to pass the time — or we must begin.”
“Damn right!” said Aquina.
“You must remember,” said Nazareth, glaring at Aquina, “that it will be many years before the men notice. They’re used to hearing the little girls practicing Alien languages they’ve never heard before and may well never hear again, not to mention any number of Terran languages completely unfamiliar to them. So long as we convince the children that it’s a secret to be kept from the men — like so many other secrets we’ve taught them to keep, loves — ten years will go by, perhaps more, before the men suddenly realize that too many little girls are making the same unfamiliar sounds. Dear heaven, they’re so entirely convinced that the Project is only Langlish, and so entirely convinced that we can barely find our way to the bathroom without a map! It may be decades before anything actually needs to be done, in the way that Aquina means. Please do realize that.”
“But — ”
Nazareth cut Aquina off, raising her hand in the ancient gesture of teachers. “But I agree with Aquina that the decisions have to be made, and made right now, in case they are someday needed. She’s absolutely right. If we did need to make some sort of move, there’d be no time then to decide what it should be, and anything we did in panic would be certain to be the wrong thing. We must make the plans, however unlikely it is that we’ll ever have to use them, and put that behind us.”
“Thank heaven for someone with sense!”
“Thank you, Aquina,” said Nazareth. “Now, you others, can we proceed with this?”
Proceed. From an endless Project, going on generation after generation, to “can we proceed?” It was too much, and they were stunned by the prospect.
“It’s not complicated,” Nazareth assured them. “Word should go out to all the Barren Houses as quickly as can be managed, using the recipe-codes. In each Barren House those women who are best at speaking Láadan are to begin practicing it with one another, never mind how badly they do, until they are at ease enough to serve as roughly adequate models. And then, they are to begin using Láadan and only Láadan with the female infants of the Lines whenever there are no men about.”
“Or women still living in the Households.”
“Or women still living among men, yes,” Nazareth agreed. “Whenever it is as safe as it ever will be safe. Meanwhile, those who know almost nothing about it will turn to and learn. Without drawing the attention of men, and without slacking on our other duties.”
“And the planning?” That was Aquina.
“And the planning must begin,” said Nazareth. “In every Barren House, there must be meetings to discuss alternatives. For every choice of action that you feel the men might take when they learn that they’ve been duped, there needs to be a corresponding action that all the women are agreed upon and are prepared to move on at a moment’s notice. The results should be exchanged among the Barren Houses until there is a consensus — until we all understand just what we would be expected to do in each possible hypothetical crisis. And we will do whatever we must do to prepare.”