There are other Licking Places to use, Sko thought while they ate; and runners can fetch more of the bulbs from where this one grew. There will be enough for The People . . . And then the pot was empty, and Sko Lyay and his family sat licking their fingers.
After a thousand generations of cooks, hunger and salt and garlic had combined to produce mankind’s first chef.
The Greatest Tertian[1]
One of the outstanding characteristics of the culture of the third planet from the Sun is, as I have stressed earlier, the tendency toward onomatolatry, the worship of great names all but divorced from any true biographical or historical comprehension.
Many of these names, employed with almost magical significance, must be investigated in later chapters; they include (to give approximate phonetic equivalents) Linkn, Mamt, Ung Klsam, Stain, Ro Sflt (who seems to have appeared in several contradictory avatars), Bakh, Sokr Tis, Mi Klan Jlo, Me Uess-tt, San Kloss, and many others, some of them indubitably of legendary origin.
But one name appears pre-eminently in every cultural cache so far investigated. From pole to pole and in every Tertian language, we have yet to decipher any cultural remains of any sizable proportion that do not contain at least a reference to what must have been unquestionably the greatest Tertian of all time: Sherk Oms.
It is well at this point to settle once and for all the confusion concerning the two forms of the name: Sherk Oms and Sherk Sper. A few eccentric scholars, notably Shcho Raz in his last speech before the Academy,[2] have asserted that these names represented two separate individuals; and, indeed, there are small items in which the use of the two forms does differ.
Sherk Sper, for instance, is generally depicted as a writer of public spectacles; Sherk Oms as a pursuer of offenders against society. Both are represented as living in the capital city of the nation[3] of In Gian under the unusual control of a female administrator; but the name of this female is generally given, in accounts of Sherk Sper, as Li Zbet; in accounts of Sherk Oms, as Vi Kto Rya.
The essential identity of these female names I have explained in my Tertian Phonology.[4] The confusion of professions is more apparent than real; the fact of the matter is that Sherk Oms (to use the more widespread of the two forms) was both a writer and a man of action and tended to differentiate the form of his name according to his pursuit of the moment.
Clinching evidence exists in the two facts that:
(1) While we are frequently told that Sherk Oms wrote extensively, no cultural cache has turned up any fragment of his work, aside from two accounts in his personal adventures.
(2) While we know thoroughly the literary work of Sherk Sper, no cultural cache has revealed the slightest reliable biographical material as to his life.
One characteristic, it may be added, distinguished the great Sherk under both names: his love for disguise. We possess full details on the many magnificently assumed characterizations of Sherk Oms, while we also read that Sherk Sper was wont to disguise himself as many of the most eminent writers and politicians of his ear, including Bekn, Ma Lo, Ok Sfud, and others.
Which aspect of the great Sherk was it, you may well ask, which so endeared him to all Tertians? This is hard to answer. Aside from religious writings, there are two items which we are always sure of discovering in any Tertian cultural cache, either in the original language of In Gian or in translation: the biographical accounts[5] of the crime-hunter Sherk Oms, and the plays (to use an untranslatable Tertian word) of Sherk Sper.
Both contributed so many phrases to the language that it is difficult to imagine Tertian culture without them:
The dog did nothing in the nighttime (a proverb equivalent to our: While nature rests, the wise chudz sleeps).
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears (indicating the early Tertian development of plastic surgery).
The game is a foot (a baffling reference, in that no cultural cache has yet yielded evidence of a sport suitable to monopods).
To bee or not to bee (an obvious reference, though by Sherk Sper, to Sherk Oms’ years of retirement).
Difficult though it is to estimate the relative Tertian esteem for the Master in his two guises, we certainly know, at least, from our own annals, which aspect of the great Sherk would in time have been more valuable to the Tertians—and it was perhaps a realization of this fact that caused the dwellers in Ti Bet to address their prayers to him in the form: Oms mani padme Oms.[6]
The very few defeats which Sherk Oms suffered were, as we all know, caused by us. Limited as even he was by the overconventional pattern of Tertian thought, he was quite unable to understand the situation when our advance agent Fi Li Mor was forced to return to his house for the temporospatial rod that Wa Tsn thought to be a rain shield. Our clumsy and bungling removal of a vessel for water transport named, I believe, A Li Sha was still sufficiently alien to perplex him; and he never, to we must thank the Great Maker, understood what we had planted on his Tertian world in what he thought to be a matchbox.
But in time, so penetrating a mind as he reveals under both guises would have understood; and more than that, he might have developed methods of counterattack. We owe our thanks to the absurd brevity of the Tertian life span that he, considered long-lived among his own people, survived fewer than a hundred orbital cycles of the third planet.
If Sherk Oms, most perceptive and inventive of Tertians, had still been living, the ultimate conquest of the third planet by the fourth might well have been foiled, and his planet might even today still swarm with pullulating Tertians, complete with their concepts of nations, wars, and races,[7] rather
