Set in the twenty-second century, the novel tells of a world where women are
once again property, denied civil rights and banned from public life. Earth’s
wealth depends on interplanetary commerce with alien races, and linguists — a
small, clannish group of families — have become the ruling elite by controlling
all interplanetary communication. Their women are used to breed perfect
translators for all the galaxies' languages.
Nazareth Chornyak, the most talented linguist of the family, is exhausted by
her constant work translating for trade organizations, supervising the
children’s language education, running the compound, and caring for the
elderly men. She longs to retire to the Barren House, where women past
childbearing age knit, chat, and wait to die. What Nazareth comes to discover
is that a slow revolution is going on in the Barren Houses: there, word by
word, women are creating a language of their own to free them from men’s
control.