Ascending - James Alan Gardner [92]
“He was an utter fucking bastard,” I whispered. “And even though he’s been dead for years, he still makes me feel most sad.”
“Obviously, he affected you deeply,” Lajoolie answered with the ghost of a chuckle. “Do you realize you actually used a contraction? You said, ‘even though he’s been dead.’”
I jerked away from her in horror. Then I started to scream. I screamed and I screamed and I screamed and I screamed; then I screamed some more.
Contractions
Here is why I screamed.
My own native tongue has contractions similar to those in English—inelegant short forms created by jamming words together. In the highest literature of my people, you can tell that characters are not well-bred when they use such figures of speech. Cultured persons always speak correctly; it is only the uncultured who treat the language with slovenly lack of enunciation.
This distinction impressed itself deeply on my mother. When my sister and I used contractions—which we did occasionally through carelessness or rebellion—our mother would chide us and say that good clever pretty girls should not speak sloppily. She herself never used contractions…until one day when I was twelve years old and Mother had a slip of the tongue.
You can imagine how Eel and I teased her about it. Mother hotly denied she said any such thing: “You girls must have dirt in your ears if you cannot hear what I say!” We had to go wash thoroughly, then do a number of unpleasant chores that were completely unnecessary, since all chores in our village were handled by automatic devices.
In a day or two, Mother slipped again—another contraction. This time Eel and I prudently did not point it out; but we caught each other’s eye and indulged in a moment of sisterly acknowledgment. We did not have dirt in our ears. It was our mother who had grown lax.
Such slips soon became a common occurrence…increasing to several times a day…then almost every time our mother spoke. Once in a while, when we did not feel like good clever pretty girls—when we felt like defiant clever pretty girls—we would use contractions ourselves, right to Mother’s face, just waiting for her to berate us. We were eager to cry back at her, “You use words like that all the time!”
Alas, our mother had ceased to notice; or more accurately, she had ceased to care. Her brain was becoming Tired. Indifference to enunciation was an early sign.
When we realized that, my sister and I swore an oath to the Hallowed Ones: we would never use a contraction again. We would speak with utmost precision, never letting ourselves get carried away with excitement or emotion. It soon became fierce superstition—that our brains would never grow Tired as long as we avoided untidy speech. Deprived of contractions, Senility had no chink through which it might enter our heads.
From that day to this, I had kept my oath. I had kept myself safe. I had never said the fatal words.
Now the spell was broken.
Or perhaps it was I who was broken. That is why I screamed.
10 I hope you are not surprised that I was familiar with Tales of Romantic Longing. Under the tutelage of the teaching machines in my village, I learned much more than arithmetic and the social graces. Indeed, there was a time when my planet had a thriving literature, rife with tales of Star-Crossed Lovers Separated By Fate…who either pined in stoic silence their whole lives or else threw caution to the winds and thereby precipitated great social upheavals, but either way ended tragically mere inches from each other in the same Ancestral Tower, with their brains too Tired to realize they were together at last.
18
WHEREIN I AM BRIEFLY UNCONSCIOUS
A Short Tussle
I remember Lajoolie