“She won’t be any use to us for… oh, what, forty years?” Aquina hazarded, her voice thick with resentment even under Belle-Anne’s stroking and soothing. “She’s eleven now… she’ll marry, perhaps marry into another Household, and she’ll have the obligatory dozen children to give birth to — ”
“Aquina! Don’t make it worse than it is! Thomas Blair Chornyak will never let her get out of his sight — you can count on that. And it’s not a dozen children she’ll have to produce, that’s absurd!”
“All right, half a dozen, then. Six children, seven children, whatever you like — lots of children. And every instant given over to working on the government contracts, hardly time to get up out of childbed before she’s back in the interpreting booths again… until she’s worn out at last, and the menopause comes to bless her.”
“Even then,” Caroline put in, “she may not come to us. Not if her husband wants her to stay with him — not if she wears well. Or if she’s lucky and the man’s fond of her beyond just her body.”
“Or if she’s useful to him somehow,” said Thyrsis, with a sharp note to her voice that caught their attention. So that was it… she’d come to Chornyak Barren House against her husband’s wishes, because she was useful to him in some way, clever at something he liked having her do. And if she’d tried to go to Shawnessey Barren House he’d have been close by to be forever pressuring her to come back to the main house. They would be interested in knowing how she’d managed to get around his authority, come the time she felt free to tell them more.
“Damn and damn and damn,” mourned Aquina. “That’s forty years or more wasted. Don’t you understand that? Don’t any of you understand that?”
“Aquina, it’s not as though the whole Encoding Project was dependent on Nazareth — we are all working on it. And women at the other Barren Houses are working on it, Be reasonable.”
They soothed her, all of them. Soothed and coaxed, anxious to restore her perspective on this in spite of her distress. She was overtired, she would feel better about it in the morning, she would see that it was just that she’d been under such a strain. On and on…
Aquina let them talk, and she kept her own counsel. Tomorrow, first thing, what she would do was go looking for Nazareth and begin trying to find out where that notebook was hidden. Her own priorities, thank god, were properly ordered.
Chapter Three
The only way there is to acquire a language, which means that you know it so well that you never have to be conscious of your knowledge, is to be exposed to that language while you are still very young — the younger the better. The infant human being has the most perfect language-learning mechanism on Earth, and no one has ever been able to duplicate that mechanism or even to analyze it very well. We know that it involves scanning for patterns and storing those that are found, and that’s something we can build a computer to do. But we’ve never been able to build a computer that can acquire a language. In fact, we’ve never even been able to build a computer than can learn a language in the imperfect way that a human adult can learn one.
We can take a language that’s already known, and program a computer to use it by putting the language into the computer piece by piece. And we can build a computer that’s programmed to scan for patterns and store them very efficiently. But we can’t put those two computers side by side and expect the one that doesn’t know the language to acquire it from the other one. Until we find out how to do that (as well as a number of other things), we are dependent on human infants for the acquisition of all languages, whether Terran or extraterrestrial; it’s not the most efficient system we can imagine, but it’s the most efficient system that we have.
Ned Landry had been pleased with his wife Michaela, as well he might have been, since she had fit his bill of specifications almost to the last and most trivial detail. (There was that slight tendency to poor muscle tone in the hips — but he wasn’t a fanatic. He knew that he couldn’t expect total perfection.) It had cost his parents a tidy sum to pay the agency fee for her, but it had been well worth it, and he had long since paid them back with interest. Just picking a wife from among whatever gaggle of females happened to be available in his circle of acquaintances had never appealed to Ned; he had wanted something with quality guaranteed, and he had never regretted waiting. It had been a little annoying, having his own marriage nothing but a list of specs in a file when his friends were well on their way to being heads of families already — but they envied him now. They all envied him, and that pleased him.
Michaela did all the things he wanted a wife to do. She saw to his house and his meals and his comfort and his sexual needs. She kept so smoothly running a setup that he never had time to think, I wonder why Michaela hasn’t… done something or other, because she always had done it; often it wasn’t until after she had seen to some detail, some change, that he realized it had been a thing that he wanted. The flowers in the vases were always fresh; clean garments appeared as if by magic in his gardrobes; a tunic that had seemed to him about to show signs of wear either appeared so expertly renovated that it looked new, or was replaced between one day and the next… never once did he have to miss something or do without anything.
Ned had only to mention in passing that a particular food sounded interesting, and in the next day or two it would appear on his table — and if he didn’t care for it after all, it would never appear again. Household repairs, maintenance, cleaning, the small garden of which he was justifiably proud, any sort of household business matter, upkeep on his assets and his collections — all these things were attended to in his absence. His only contribution to the perfect serenity of his home was to look over the printouts his accountant provided for him at the end of every month and sign or refuse the authorization for spending whatever sums Michaela had requested.
It was a blissful existence; he treasured it. Except at his work, where no woman’s influence could intrude and there was therefore no way Michaela could smooth the waters, Ned Landry was spared even the memory of irritation. And she was always there, her butter-blond hair in the elegant chignon he liked so much for the contrast if offered when, in his bed, she let it down to fan over the pillows like a net of pale silk.
He valued Michaela for all the things that she did, he knew her worth, and he saw to it that she was rewarded not only by the customary birthday and holiday gifts expected of any courteous husband but with small extra ones that he had no obligation to make. He was careful not to establish any pattern that might lead her to take that kind of indulgence for granted — when you had something as fine as Michaela in your pocket, you didn’t act like an ass and take chances with her. He had no intention of spoiling her. But once in a while, seemingly for no reason, he would bring her some pretty trinket, the sort of foolishness that women always liked. Ned prided himself on understanding what women liked and on his ability to provide it, and Michaela was worth every credit and penny she cost him. Michaela was a thoroughbred, and superbly trained, just as the agency had guaranteed that she would be.