“Good God! I certainly do.” Bethany giggled. “No wonder Montray has his own private linguist to write his speeches!” The women exchanged a conspiratorial chuckle; Montray’s ineptitude in the Darkovan language was a standing joke in the HQ. “And so that’s why you go over all his speeches personally? You know everything about Darkover, don’t you, Magda?”
Ruefully, Magda shook her head. “No, certainly not. No Terran can.” And if any Terran could, no Terran woman could. The thought was as bitter as ever. But she put it aside.
“It would have been different, if the Terran HQ had stayed at Caer Donn. There’, the Terrans and Darkovans met more or less as equals, and we could mingle with them as Terrans. There was no need for undercover agents. But here we have to work undercover; the Comyn have completely refused to cooperate. They leased us land for the spaceport, let us hire workmen for construction jobs and allowed us to build the Trade City, but beyond that-oh, hell, Beth, didn’t you get all that in Basic Orientation?”
“Yes, I did; Class B Closed, very limited trade, spaceport personnel restricted to the Trade City. No fraternization.”
“So, you see? No other Terran children will get the kind of chance that Peter, and Cargill, and I did-to grow up playing with Darkovan children, learn the language from the ground up. That’s why there are so few of us who can actually pass, on the Darkovan side, as Darkovan-and I’m the only woman.”
Bethany asked, “Then why didn’t they keep the HQ at-where was it-Caer Donn? If they were so much friendlier there?”
“Partly the climate,” Magda said. “If you think this is cold, you should see what winter’s like in the Hellers. Everything comes to a dead stop, from midwinter-night to the spring-thaw. The climate of Thendara is pleasant-well, moderate anyway-by contrast. Then there was the problem of roads and transport. There’s just not enough room at Caer Donn for the kind of spaceport the Empire wanted, not without leveling a major mountain or two, and the Ecological Council on Terra wouldn’t have given permission for that even if the locals hadn’t objected. Then there’s the question of trade and influence. The Aldarans back at Caer Donn rule over miles and miles of mountains, forests, valleys, little villages, isolated castles and a few thousand people. In the Domains there are five good-sized cities and a dozen little ones, and Thendara alone has almost fifty thousand people. So there really was no choice at all, for the Empire. But it means Empire agents, anthropologists and linguists, have to work undercover, and we’re still working out the parameters. There are literally thousands of things we don’t know yet about this culture. And the Comyn’s policy of not helping us at all is a terrific blockade; they don’t forbid people to work with us, but the people here just don’t do anything the Comyn disapprove of. And that means that those few of us who can pass as Darkovan can practically name our own terms; because even keeping up with the language is a difficult and complicated undercover job. Of course I can’t do all the things, here, that a male agent would do. One of a male agent’s prime tasks, in linguistics, is to keep up with the dirty jokes; and of course I don’t hear them.”
“Why would anyone need to know dirty jokes? Is this for the Folklore Reference section?”
“Well, that too. But mostly to avoid accidentally offensive-or unintentionally funny-references. You grew up on Terra; would you say, in a serious and formal context, that somebody or other was always in the middle?”
“Not unless I wanted my audience to crack up and start snickering and leering. I see what you mean; you have to red flag the punch line of the current dirty jokes or any specially notorious old ones. But you don’t hear the dirty jokes-”
“No; I have my own specialty. I mentioned that some expressions aren’t used by women-or in front of them, among the polite. There are also special expressions used mostly by women. Darkover isn’t one of those cultures that has a special women’s language- there are some of them, Sirius Nine for instance, and there’s a real translator’s nightmare! But no culture is ever completely free of ‘women’s talk.” Not even Terra. For instance, I came across a footnote in my language history text saying that women in one of the major pre-space cultures used to refer to their menstruation as ‘the curse.'”