“Not the way we understand it. If they want to say, ‘Me,’ it’s tickle-pinch-rub, even if it sounds like fwoonk to us, when it doesn’t sound like pwink or tweelt or kroosh. The tactile sensations, to a Svant, feel no more different than a massage by four different hands. Analogous to a word pronounced by four different voices, to us. They’ll have a code for expressing meanings in tactile sensation, just as we have a code for expressing meanings in audible sound.”
“Except that when a Svant tells another, ‘I am happy,’ or ‘I have a stomach-ache,’ he makes the other one feel that way too,” Anna said. “That would carry an awful lot more conviction. I don’t imagine symptom-swapping is popular among Svants. Karl! You were nearly right, at that. This isn’t telepathy, but it’s a lot like it.”
“So it is,” Dorver, who had been mourning his departed telepathy theory, said brightly. “And look how it explains their society. Peaceful, everybody in quick agreement—” He looked at the screen and gulped. The Lord Mayor and his party had formed one clump, and the opposition was grouped at the other side of the plaza; they were screaming in unison at each other. “They make their decisions by endurance; the party that can resist the feelings of the other longest converts their opponents.”
“Pure democracy,” Gofredo declared. “Rule by the party that can make the most noise.”
“And I’ll bet that when they’re sick, they go around chanting, ‘I am well; I feel just fine!’” Anna said. “Autosuggestion would really work, here. Think of the feedback, too. One Svant has a feeling. He verbalizes it, and the sound of his own voice re-enforces it in him. It is induced in his hearers, and they verbalize it, re-enforcing it in themselves and in him. This could go on and on.”
“Yes. It has. Look at their technology.” He felt more comfortable, now he was on home ground again. “A friend of mine, speaking about a mutual acquaintance, once said, ‘When they installed her circuits, they put in such big feeling circuits that there was no room left for any thinking circuits.’ I think that’s a perfect description of what I estimate Svant mentality to be. Take these bronze knives, and the musical instruments. Wonderful; the work of individuals trying to express feeling in metal or wood. But get an idea like the wheel, or even a pair of tongs? Poo! How would you state the First Law of Motion, or the Second Law of Thermodynamics, in tickle-pinch-rub terms? Sonny could grasp an idea like that. Sonny’s handicap, if you call it that, cuts him off from feel-thinking; he can think logically instead of sensually.”
He sipped his cocktail and continued: “I can understand why the village is mounded up, too. I realized that while I was watching Dave’s gang bury the pump house. I’d been bothered by that, and by the absence of granaries for all the grain they raise, and by the number of people for so few and such small houses. I think the village is mostly underground, and the houses are just entrances, soundproofed, to shelter them from uncomfortable natural noises—thunderstorms, for instance.”
The horn was braying in the snooper-screen speaker; somebody wondered what it was for. Gofredo laughed.
“I thought, at first, that it was a war-horn. It isn’t. It’s a peace-horn,” he said. “Public tranquilizer. The first day, they brought it out and blew it at us to make us peaceable.”
“Now I see why Sonny is rejected and persecuted,” Anna was saying. “He must make all sorts of horrible noises that he can’t hear… that’s not the word; we have none for it… and nobody but his mother can stand being near him.”
“Like me,” Lillian said. “Now I understand. Just think of the most revolting thing that could be done to you physically; that’s what I do to them every time I speak. And I always thought I had a nice voice,” she added, pathetically.
“You have, for Terrans,” Ayesha said. “For Svants, you’ll just have to change it.”
“But how—?”
“Use an analyzer; train it. That was why I took up sonics, in the first place. I had a voice like a crow with a sore throat, but by practicing with an analyzer, an hour a day, I gave myself an entirely different voice in a couple of months. Just try to get some pump-sound frequencies into it, like Luis’.”
“But why? I’m no use here. I’m a linguist, and these people haven’t any language that I could ever learn, and they couldn’t even learn ours. They couldn’t learn to make sounds, as sounds.”
“You’ve been doing very good work with Mom on those ideographs,” Meillard said. “Keep it up till you’ve taught her the Lingua Terra Basic vocabulary, and with her help we can train a few more. They can be our interpreters; we can write what we want them to say to the others. It’ll be clumsy, but it will work, and it’s about the only thing I can think of that will.”
“And it will improve in time,” Ayesha added. “And we can make vocoders and visibilizers. Paul, you have authority to requisition personnel from the ship’s company. Draft me; I’ll stay here and work on it.”
The rumpus in the village plaza was getting worse. The Lord Mayor and his adherents were being out- shouted by the opposition.
“Better do something about that in a hurry, Paul, if you don’t want a lot of Svants shot,” Gofredo said. “Give that another half hour and we’ll have visitors, with bows and spears.”
“Ayesha, you have a recording of the pump,” Meillard said. “Load a record-player onto a jeep and fly over the village and play it for them. Do it right away. Anna, get Mom in here. We want to get her to tell that gang that from now on, at noon and for a couple of hours after sunset, when the work’s done, there will be free public pump- concerts, over the village plaza.”
Ayesha and her warrant-officer helper and a Marine lieutenant went out hastily. Everybody else faced the screen to watch. In fifteen minutes, an airjeep was coming in on the village. As it circled low, a new sound, the steady thugg-thugg, thugg-thugg of the pump, began.
The yelling and twittering and the blaring of the peace-horn died out almost at once. As the jeep circled down to housetop level, the two contending faction-clumps broke apart; their component individuals moved into the center of the plaza and squatted, staring up, letting the delicious waves of sound caress them.
“Do we have to send a detail in a jeep to do that twice a day?” Gofredo asked. “We keep a snooper over the village; fit it with a loud-speaker and a timer; it can give them their thugg-thugg, on schedule, automatically.”
“We might give the Lord Mayor a recording and a player and let him decide when the people ought to listen— if that’s the word—to it,” Dorver said. “Then it would be something of their own.”
“No!” He spoke so vehemently that the others started. “You know what would happen? Nobody would be able to turn it off; they’d all be hypnotized, or doped, or whatever it is. They’d just sit in a circle around it till they starved to death, and when the power-unit gave out, the record-player would be surrounded by a ring of skeletons. We’ll just have to keep on playing it for them ourselves. Terrans’ Burden.”
“That’ll give us a sanction over them,” Gofredo observed. “Extra thugg-thugg if they’re very good; shut it off on them if they act nasty. And find out what Lillian has in her voice that the rest of us don’t have, and make a good loud recording of that, and stash it away along with the rest of the heavy-weapons ammunition. You know, you’re not going to have any trouble at all, when we go down-country to talk to the king or whatever. This is better than fire-water ever was.”
“We must never misuse our advantage, Luis,” Meillard said seriously. “We must use it only for their good.”
He really meant it. Only—You had to know some general history to study technological history, and it seemed to him that that pious assertion had been made a few times before. Some of the others who had made it had really meant it, too, but that had made little difference in the long run.
Fayon and Anna were talking enthusiastically about the work ahead of them.
“I don’t know where your subject ends and mine begins,” Anna was saying. “We’ll just have to handle it between us. What are we going to call it? We certainly can’t call it hearing.”
“Nonauditory sonic sense is the only thing I can think of,” Fayon said. “And that’s such a clumsy term.”
“Mark; you thought of it first,” Anna said. “What do you think?”
“Nonauditory sonic sense. It isn’t any worse than Domesticated Type C, and that got cut down to size. Naudsonce.”
OMNILINGUAL
by H. Beam Piper
