And Nazareth had been right. Every tiny girl in Chornyak Household knew Láadan now, and used it easily. It wasn’t going as rapidly at the other Barren Houses, but the reports coming in from them were not displeasing. A few of the older girlchildren, already out of infancy when the teaching of Láadan began but still too young to be much involved in government contracts, had begun to pick up the language on their own… haltingly, of course. But then, the women were even more halting, and they managed. “Latining by,” they called it, remembering Nazareth’s comment about what the “international” Latin must have been like. They managed. And the men had noticed nothing.
One of the first things that Nazareth had done as the Project was put into effect was to prepare a manual alphabet for Láadan. Like the fingerspelling alphabet of Ameslan in concept, but very different in form, because it had to be something that only the trained and seeking eye could see. The tiniest movements, and made by fingers lying still and unseen in laps — that was all it could be. It was splendid training for the little ones, and for all of them; if you could learn to follow those miniature motions and understand them, all the while behaving as if you weren’t doing so, following ordinary body-parl was absurdly simple by comparison.
The children loved it… there’s never been a child who didn’t love a “secret language” and this one was wondrously secret. It let them sit in Homeroom, for example, demure and seemingly attentive while the teachers droned away in their twentieth century rituals; the eyes of the little girls gave away nothing, but their fingers were busy. “STUPID poem! Will he never stop? How long is it till the bell? He’s an old fool!” And much worse, of course. It was exciting, it was just dangerous enough, and it was theirs alone. There was no need to worry about them forgetting that they must keep it a secret. You couldn’t have gotten them to betray Láadan short of using thumbscrews and the rack, because it was theirs, and it was theirs together — nothing else met that description.
It was happening just as Nazareth had told them it would happen, and they willingly granted her that. But there were some things that were surprising, nevertheless. For instance, there was the speed of it.
“It’s happening so fast!” Thyrsis said, and yelped; she had stabbed her finger with her embroidery needle. She put the finger to her mouth, to catch the drop of blood before it spotted her work, and said, “How can it be so fast?”
“Nazareth, you said it would take a long time,” agreed one of the others. “Generations, you said… I remember very well.”
“And it will be generations,” Nazareth said, “before it is anything more than an auxiliary language. That’s unavoidable. I don’t see any change in that constraint.”
“But they use it constantly, and they love it so. And they do strange things.”
“For example?”
Susannah chuckled. “For example… when I thought I’d introduce a new word yesterday, for that new way of dancing that we saw on the threedies. You remember, Grace? The one that looks as if the youngsters are all trying to dislocate their shoulders?”
“I remember,” Grace said. “I would swear it had to be painful.”
“Well! I thought I had a decent proposal for a word, and I suggested it. And one of the littlebits corrected me, I’ll have you know!”
“Corrected you? How could that be — did you make an error in the morphology? At your age?”
“Of course not, it was a perfectly good Láadan word, formed in accordance with every rule. But she did. She said, ‘Aunt Susannah, it could not be that way. I’m very sorry, but it would have to be this way.’”
“And she was right?”
“Goodness, how would I know that? I don’t have native intuitions about Láadan, you know!”
“Nor do the children.”
“Ah, but they seem to think they do. Already.”
“It’s not possible.”
“No… but she said ‘This way, my mouth knows that it’s right.’”
They all shook their heads, admitting bewilderment. And Nazareth said, “I admit it’s happening far more quickly than linguistic theory would allow. But I think I know why, really. I think we just hadn’t realized how much fun it would be for the children. They have so little fun, we ought to have realized… but I never thought of it.”
“Do you notice,” Caroline asked, “do you notice how close they are, to one another?”
“The little girls?”
“Of course, the little girls! Even the older ones, who are just able to use Láadan enough to make the tiny ones laugh at them… they are…”
She stopped, because there was no word for it in any language she knew, and she wanted to use the right word.
“Oh,” she said. “I know… They are héenahal.” And she sighed. “Such a relief, to have a language with the right words in it!”
“Well, no wonder they are so knit together, then,” Nazareth observed. “Remember that some of them have had that blissful resource from the day they were born.”
“I cannot imagine it,” Grace said emphatically. “I try, but I can’t. What that must be like. Not to be always groping, because there aren’t any words — while the person you want so desperately to talk to gets tired of waiting and begins talking of something else. To have a language that works, that says what you want to say easily and efficiently, and to have always had that? No, loves, I cannot imagine it. I am too old.”
“It’s working, then,” Thyrsis said. “We can truly say that it’s working.”
“Oh my, yes,” Nazareth answered. “You surely could not, for even one instant, believe that this reality is the one that you and I were born to deal with? Yes, it is working, and very very quickly.”
“And,” Aquina pointed out, “we are no more ready to deal with the new one than we were the day Nazareth told us to get off our butts!”
“Aquina, don’t start!”
“Well, we aren’t.”
“There’s no hurry, Aquina.”
“No hurry? God almighty, the men are slow, but they are not deaf and blind! How long do you think this can go on, before they notice?”
“A very long time,” Caroline said confidently. “They think we are all fools. They believe that our entire attention is devoted to setting up descriptive matrices for the eighty-four separate phonemes of Langlish at the moment, for instance.”
“Eighty-five.”
“Eighty-five now? Dear heaven… you perceive? Nothing is so outrageous that it doesn’t just reinforce them in their conviction that we have vanilla pudding for brains. And when they are that secure in their perceptions, we are quite safe.”
“Still,” Aquina fretted, “still! They aren’t ordinary men, they are linguists. Trained to observe. They’re sure to notice, and we aren’t ready.”
“Aquina,” Thyrsis protested, “must you? When we are so happy?”