Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley

by Robert Sheckley

  Toms nodded, and the professor continued. “Of course, developed with this language was, necessarily, a technique of love-making quite incredible in its perfection. We are told that it made all ordinary techniques seem like the clumsy pawing of a grizzly in heat.” The professor coughed in embarrassment.

  “It is precisely what I need!” Toms exclaimed.

  “Ridiculous,” said the professor. “The technique might be interesting, but your own is doubtless sufficient for most needs. And the language, by its very nature, can be used with only one person. To learn it impresses me as wasted energy.”

  “Labor for love,” Toms said, “is the most worthwhile work in the world, since it produces a rich harvest of feeling.”

  “I refuse to stand here and listen to bad epigrams. Mr. Toms, why all this fuss about love?”

  “It is the only perfect thing in this world,” Toms answered fervently. “If one must learn a special language to appreciate it, one can do no less. Tell me, is it far to Tyana II?”

  “A considerable distance,” his professor said, with a thin smile. “And an unrewarding one, since the race is extinct.”

  “Extinct! But why? A sudden pestilence? An invasion?”

  “It is one of the mysteries of the galaxy,” his professor said somberly.

  “Then the language is lost!”

  “Not quite. Twenty years ago, an Earthman named George Varris went to Tyana and learned the Language of Love from the last remnants of the race.” The professor shrugged his shoulders. “I never considered it sufficiently important to read his scientific papers.”

  Toms looked up Varris in the Interspatial Explorers Who’s Who and found that he was credited with the discovery of Tyana, had wandered around the frontier planets for a time, but at last had returned to deserted Tyana, to devote his life to investigating every aspect of its culture.

  After learning this, Toms thought long and hard. The journey to Tyana was a difficult one, time-consuming, and expensive. Perhaps Varris would be dead before he got there, or unwilling to teach him the language. Was it worth the gamble?

  “Is love worth it?” Toms asked himself, and knew the answer.

  So he sold his ultra-fi, his memory recorder, his philosophy texts, and several stocks his grandfather had left him, and booked passage to Cranthis IV, which was the closest he could come to Tyana on a scheduled spaceway. And after all his preparations had been made, he went to Doris.

  “When I return,” he said, “I will be able to tell you exactly how much—I mean the particular quality and class of—I mean, Doris, when I have mastered the Tyanian Technique, you will be loved as no woman has ever been loved!”

  “Do you mean that?” she asked, her eyes glowing.

  “Well,” Toms said, “the term ‘loved,’ doesn’t quite express it. But I mean something very much like it.”

  “I will wait for you, Jeff,” she said. “But—please don’t be too long.”

  Jefferson Toms nodded, blinked back his tears, clutched Doris inarticulately, and hurried to the spaceport.

  Within the hour, he was on his way.

  Four months later, after considerable difficulties, Toms stood on Tyana, on the outskirts of the capital city. Slowly he walked down the broad, deserted main thoroughfare. On either side of him, noble buildings soared to dizzy heights. Peering inside one, Toms saw complex machinery and gleaming switchboards. With his pocket Tyana-English dictionary, he was able to translate the lettering above one of the buildings.

  It read: COUNSELING SERVICES FOR STAGE-FOUR LOVE PROBLEMS.

  Other buildings were much the same, filled with calculating machinery, switchboards, ticker tapes, and the like. He passed THE INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH INTO AFFECTION DELAY, stared at the two-hundred-story HOME FOR THE EMOTIONALLY RETARDED, and glanced at several others. Slowly the awesome, dazzling truth dawned upon him.

  Here was an entire city given over to the research and aid of love.

  He had no time for further speculation. In front of him was the gigantic GENERAL LOVE SERVICES BUILDING. And out of its marble hallway stepped an old man.

  “Who the hell are you?” the old man asked.

  “I am Jefferson Toms, of Earth. I have come here to learn the Language of Love, Mr. Varris.”

  Varris raised his shaggy white eyebrows. He was a small, wrinkled old man, stoop-shouldered and shaky in the knees. But his eyes were alert and filled with a cold suspicion.

  “Perhaps you think the language will make you more attractive to women,” Varris said. “Don’t believe it, young man. Knowledge has its advantages, of course. But it has distinct drawbacks, as the Tyanians discovered.”

  “What drawbacks?” Toms asked.

  Varris grinned, displaying a single yellow tooth. “You wouldn’t understand, if you don’t already know. It takes knowledge to understand the limitations of knowledge.”

  “Nevertheless,” Toms said, “I want to learn the language.”

  Varris stared at him thoughtfully. “But it is not a simple thing, Toms. The Language of Love, and its resultant technique, is every bit as complex as brain surgery or the practice of corporation law. It takes work, much work, and a talent as well.”

  “I will do the work. And I’m sure I have the talent.”

  “Most people think that,” Varris said, “and most of them are mistaken. But never mind, never mind. It’s been a long time since I’ve had any company. We’ll see how you get on, Toms.”

  Together they went into the General Services Building, which Varris called his home. They went to the Main Control Room, where the old man had put down a sleeping bag and set up a camp stove. There, in the shadow of the giant calculators, Toms’s lessons began.

  Varris was a thorough teacher. In the beginning, with the aid of a portable Semantic Differentiator, he taught Toms to isolate the delicate apprehension one feels in the presence of a to-be-loved person, to detect the subtle tensions that come into being as the potentiality of love draws near.

  These sensations, Toms learned, must never be spoken of directly, for frankness frightens love. They must be expressed in simile, metaphor, and hyperbole, half-truths and white lies. With these, one creates an atmosphere and lays a foundation for love. And the mind, deceived by its own predisposition, thinks of booming surf and raging sea, mournful black rocks and fields of green corn.

  “Nice images,” Toms said admiringly.

  “Those were samples,” Varris told him. “Now you must learn them all.”

  So Toms went to work memorizing great long lists of natural wonders, to what sensations they were comparable, and at what stage they appeared in the anticipation of love. The language was thorough in this regard. Every state or object in nature for which there was a response in love-anticipation had been catalogued, classified, and listed with suitable modifying adjectives.

  When he had memorized the list, Varris drilled him in perceptions of love. Toms learned the small, strange things that make up a state of love. Some were so ridiculous that he had to laugh.

  The old man admonished him sternly. “Love is a serious business, Toms. You seem to find some humor in the fact that love is frequently predisposed by wind speed and direction.”

  “It seems foolish,” Toms admitted.

  “There are stranger things than that,” Varris said, and mentioned another factor.

  Toms shuddered. “That I can’t believe. It’s preposterous. Everyone knows—”

  “If everyone knows how love operates, why hasn’t someone reduced it to a formula? Murky thinking, Toms, murky thinking is the answer, and an unwillingness to accept cold facts. If you cannot face them—”

  “I can face anything,” Toms said, “if I have to. Let’s continue.”

  As the weeks passed, Toms learned the words which express the first quickening of interest, shade by shade, until an attachment is formed. He learned what that attachment really is and the three words that express it. This brought him to the rhetoric of sensation, where the body becomes supr
eme.

  Here the language was specific instead of allusive, and dealt with feelings produced by certain words, and above all, by certain physical actions.

  A startling little black machine taught Toms the thirty-eight separate and distinct sensations which the touch of a hand can engender, and he learned how to locate that sensitive area, no larger than a dime, which exists just below the right shoulder blade.

  He learned an entirely new system of caressing, which caused impulses to explode—and even implode—along the nerve paths and to shower colored sparks before the eyes.

  He was also taught the social advantages of conspicuous desensitization.

  He learned many things about physical love which he had dimly suspected, and still more things which no one had suspected.

  It was intimidating knowledge. Toms had imagined himself to be at least an adequate lover. Now he found that he knew nothing, nothing at all, and that his best efforts had been comparable to the play of amorous hippopotami.

  “But what else could you expect?” Varris asked. “Good love-making, Toms, calls for more study, more sheer intensive labor than any other acquired skill. Do you still wish to learn?”

  “Definitely!” Toms said. “Why, when I’m an expert on love-making, I’ll—I can—”

  “That is no concern of mine,” the old man stated. “Let’s return to our lessons.”

  Next, Toms learned the Cycles of Love. Love, he discovered, is dynamic, constantly rising and falling, and doing so in definite patterns. There were fifty-two major patterns, three hundred and six minor patterns, four general exceptions, and nine specific exceptions.

  Toms learned them better than his own name.

  He acquired the uses of the Tertiary Touch. And he never forgot the day he was taught what a bosom really was like.

  “But I can’t say that!” Toms objected, appalled.

  “It’s true, isn’t it?” Varris insisted.

  “No! I mean—yes, I suppose it is. But it’s unflattering.”

  “So it seems. But examine, Toms. Is it actually unflattering?”

  Toms examined and found the compliment that lies beneath the insult, and so he learned another facet of the Language of Love.

  Soon he was ready for the study of the Apparent Negations. He discovered that for every degree of love, there is a corresponding degree of hate, which is in itself a form of love. He came to understand how valuable hate is, how it gives substance and body to love, and how even indifference and loathing have their place in the nature of love.

  Varris gave him a ten-hour written examination, which Toms passed with superlative marks. He was eager to finish, but Varris noticed that a slight tic had developed in his student’s left eye and that his hands had a tendency to shake.

  “You need a vacation,” the old man informed him.

  Toms had been thinking this himself. “You may be right,” he said, with barely concealed eagerness. “Suppose I go to Cythera V for a few weeks.”

  Varris, who knew Cythera’s reputation, smiled cynically. “Eager to try out your new knowledge?”

  “Well, why not? Knowledge is to be used.”

  “Only after it’s mastered.”

  “But I have mastered it! Couldn’t we call this field work? A thesis, perhaps?”

  “No thesis is necessary,” Varris said.

  “But damn it all,” Toms exploded, “I should do a little experimentation! I should find out for myself how all this works. Especially Approach 33-CV. It sounds fine in theory, but I’ve been wondering how it works out in actual practice. There’s nothing like direct experience, you know, to reinforce—”

  “Did you journey all this way to become a super-seducer?” Varris asked, with evident disgust.

  “Of course not,” Toms said. “But a little experimentation wouldn’t—”

  “Your knowledge of the mechanics of sensation would be barren, unless you understand love, as well. You have progressed too far to be satisfied with mere thrills.”

  Toms, searching his heart, knew this to be true. But he set his jaw stubbornly. “I’d like to find out that for myself, too.”

  “You may go,” Varris said, “but don’t come back. No one will accuse me of loosing a callous scientific seducer upon the galaxy.”

  “Oh, all right. To hell with it. Let’s get back to work.”

  “No. Look at yourself! A little more unrelieved studying, young man, and you will lose the capacity to make love. And wouldn’t that be a sorry state of affairs?”

  Toms agreed that it would certainly be.

  “I know the perfect spot,” Varris told him, “for relaxation from the study of love.”

  They entered the old man’s spaceship and journeyed five days to a small unnamed planetoid. When they landed, the old man took Toms to the bank of a swift flowing river, where the water ran fiery red, with green diamonds of foam. The trees that grew on the banks of that river were stunted and strange, and colored vermilion. Even the grass was unlike grass, for it was orange and blue.

  “How alien!” gasped Toms.

  “It is the least human spot I’ve found in this humdrum corner of the galaxy,” Varris explained. “And believe me, I’ve done some looking.”

  Toms stared at him, wondering if the old man was out of his mind. But soon he understood what Varris meant.

  For months, he had been studying human reactions and human feelings, and surrounding it all was the now suffocating feeling of soft human flesh. He had immersed himself in humanity, studied it, bathed in it, eaten and drunk and dreamed it. It was a relief to be here, where the water ran red and the trees were stunted and strange and vermilion, and the grass was orange and blue, and there was no reminder of Earth.

  Toms and Varris separated, for even each other’s humanity was a nuisance. Toms spent his days wandering along the river edge, marveling at the flowers which moaned when he came near them. At night, three wrinkled moons played tag with each other, and the morning sun was different from the yellow sun of Earth.

  At the end of a week, refreshed and renewed, Toms and Varris returned to G’cel, the Tyanian city dedicated to the study of love.

  Toms was taught the five hundred and six shades of Love Proper, from the first faint possibility to the ultimate feeling, which is so powerful that only five men and one woman have experienced it, and the strongest of them survived less than an hour.

  Under the tutelage of a bank of small, interrelated calculators, he studied the intensification of love.

  He learned all of the thousand different sensations of which the human body is capable, and how to augment them, and how to intensify them until they become unbearable, and how to make the unbearable bearable, and finally pleasurable, at which point the organism is not far from death.

  After that, he was taught some things which have never been put into words and, with luck, never will.

  “And that,” Varris said one day, “is everything.”

  “Everything?”

  “Yes, Toms. The heart has no secrets from you. Nor, for that matter, has the soul, or mind, or the viscera. You have mastered the Language of Love. Now return to your young lady.”

  “I will!” cried Toms. “At last she will know!”

  “Drop me a postcard,” Varris said. “Let me know how you’re getting on.”

  “I’ll do that,” Toms promised. Fervently he shook his teacher’s hand and departed for Earth.

  At the end of the long trip, Jefferson Toms hurried to Doris’s home. Perspiration beaded his forehead, and his hands were shaking. He was able to classify the feeling as Stage Two Anticipatory Tremors, with mild masochistic overtones. But that didn’t help—this was his first field work, and he was nervous. Had he mastered everything?

  He rang the bell.

  She opened the door and Toms saw that she was more beautiful than he had remembered, her eyes smoky-gray and misted with tears, her hair the color of a rocket exhaust, her figure slight but sweetly curved. He felt again the lump in his th
roat and sudden memories of autumn, evening, rain, and candlelight.

  “I’m back,” he croaked.

  “Oh, Jeff,” she said, very softly. “Oh, Jeff.”

  Toms simply stared, unable to say a word.

  “It’s been so long, Jeff, and I kept wondering if it was all worth it. Now I know.”

  “You—know?”

  “Yes, my darling! I waited for you! I’d wait a hundred years, or a thousand! I love you, Jeff!”

  She was in his arms.

  “Now tell me, Jeff,” she said, “Tell me!”

  And Toms looked at her, and felt, and sensed, searched his classifications, selected his modifiers, checked and double-checked. And after much searching, and careful selection, and absolute certainty, and allowing for his present state of mind, and not forgetting to take into account climatic conditions, phases of the Moon, wind speed and direction, Sun spots, and other phenomena which have their due effect upon love, he said:

  “My dear, I am rather fond of you.”

  “Jeff! Surely you can say more than that! The Language of Love—”

  “The Language is damnably precise,” Toms said wretchedly. “I’m sorry, but the phrase ‘I am rather fond of you’ expresses precisely what I feel.”

  “Oh, Jeff!”

  “Yes,” he mumbled.

  “Oh, damn you, Jeff!”

  There was, of course, a painful scene and a very painful separation. Toms took to traveling.

  He held jobs here and there, working as a riveter at Saturn-Lockheed, a wiper on the Helg-Vinosce Trader, a farmer for a while on a kibbutz on Israel IV. He bummed around the Inner Dalmian System for several years, living mostly on handouts. Then, at Novilocessile, he met a pleasant, brown-haired girl, courted her, and, in due course, married her and set up housekeeping.

  Their friends say that the Tomses are tolerably happy, although their home makes most people uncomfortable. It is a pleasant enough place, but the rushing red river nearby makes people edgy. And who can get used to vermilion trees, and orange-and-blue grass, and moaning flowers, and three wrinkled moons playing tag in the alien sky?