“I am the tree,” it said to him. “Come and be nourished.” It sounded like the woman, only the voice was more liquid, and more like the sighing of a wind among the leaves. “I am the woman, Chaldiss” it said, “I am Chaldiss and I am not Chaldiss for I am more than Chaldiss. I am my people and I am not my people for I am more than they. I am that which has been neglected.”
The old man looked upon the god: his friend and not his friend. He stared at the tree rising out of the midst of the waters and felt naked before the presence that spoke to him.
“I will take your disease, though you are no son of mine. I will take your disease and you must take on you the malady of Chaldiss my daughter. For I can absorb and overcome your disease, as you can absorb and overcome hers.”
“What is hers?” the old man asked the tree.
“Hers is mine,” the tree said, and it was as if the sound of rain on the leaves had uttered words. “She is separated from her kind as I am by the religion of the crystals!”
In that moment and for a moment the old man saw the stars again, but they were like trees with roots and branches, and they formed an intricate and beautiful web. And he also saw a tree alone and withering and then he looked on all the scattered stars before the vision passed away.
“Now,” the tree said, “touch me.” And it seemed to stretch a long willow wand toward the old man.
He touched it, and in that instant saw again a great web of beings all connected, and he felt a surge of joy, and everything stood still.
And then time resumed again. The reptilian woman Chaldiss was beside him in the waters, knowing that a transfer had taken place, that she had been forgiven, and that she had looked upon the god at last.
The god, the tree, sighed and faded from view, seeming to sink into the waters. The old man was left with Chaldiss. Everybody else had left.
He looked at Chaldiss.
“What did it forgive you?” the old man asked her, his voice all hoarse.
She looked at him and said, “I was going to take you and to offer you to our gods of light and crystal, our biotechnical gods in the great temple in Andridulla.”
“But you did not.”
“Had you not been an unfit sacrifice I would have seduced and prepared and offered you,” she said. And she looked at him strangely, in a way that reminded him of the medium.
“Yes, and now?”
“Now I am free of them, and now my people must be free of them.”
“How will you do it?” the old man wondered.
“I think . . . . its seems to me that it’s already being done. I am the first and soon others will see. I think it is something the god must do, not I. Perhaps not all will follow, but look! All the people around the pool have left, they’ve already been cured. They will go back to the people that disowned and doomed them. How was it—” she said, turning “—the touch of the god?”
He reflected a while, splashing the waters with his hands. “It was . . . the touch of the god was . . . timeless. It felt like an eternity of joy.”
“And the god took an eternity of sorrow.”
“Did it?” he said, realizing then that she was right. It was the way of exchange.
“And now?” she asked.
“I start my life again,” he said after reflection.
She smiled at him and said, “Me too.”
Logos
by S.R. Hardy
This message is for the Honorable Dr. Ariston Ptoleus, Director of the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Life and Chief Allodapologist of the University.
This message is, as you must have guessed by now, from Dr. Lysanthus Spyro, Professor of Allodapology at the University.
Ariston, I hope you are well. And I hope you will forgive me for the disappearing act I have perpetrated on you and the University. It was not my intention to deceive you, but I saw no other alternative in order to conduct my research, considering the denial of my grant.
For the past few months, while you doubtless thought I was dead, I have been living on a planet which I have decided to call Plato IV. I have remained silent regarding my whereabouts so that I might work in peace.
In the end, my ruse has been successful in that I have now completed the initial fieldwork on a study of breathtaking significance that will bring much credit not only to me, but also to the University, the department and, of course, to you. I wanted to send you this message in order to let you know that I am alive and well and to expect my imminent return. I also wanted to provide you with a brief outline of my findings, which as I have noted, I believe to be quite important. I have put some thought into the structure of the message so that it will be easy for you to forward it to other interested parties at the University should you deem it desirable before my return.
So, without further delay, here is my synopsis.
The people of Plato IV, or at least the tribe with which I have been living, are apparently human, but are unlike any others that I have encountered in my years as an Allodapologist. While there are, as always in these situations, a host of differences between the natives and Earth Human populations, most of these differences relate to mundane matters such as the types of food they eat, their marriage customs, and so on. These are somewhat interesting, but ultimately inconsequential.
The area in which the people of Plato IV seem to be truly different from Earth Humans is the way in which they communicate and, therefore, the way they view reality.
In the following message I will provide an overview of both issues. This will be but a brief summary and upon my return I will provide a full report with data to support my findings. Trust me when I tell you that these findings should be sufficient to garner funding for a large scale expedition, provided that my recent indiscretions are ignored.
First, the language. Following my initial decoding of their speech and writing, it became clear to me that the people of Plato IV hold a special reverence for what we would call nouns, in other words, people, places or things. This is evident in their writing system, in which all nouns are written entirely in capital letters, including an extensive series of suffixes, which I will preface verbally by saying ‘dash’ when the time comes. This should allow whatever transcription program you are using to properly recognize and represent them.
In addition, written nouns are circled in a manner that is reminiscent of the cartouches drawn around the names of Pharaohs in Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions. This orthographical evidence gave me the first indication of something of which I am now convinced, namely that the natives view nouns as being somehow divine in a literal sense. This may seem like a dramatic leap to make, given the limited information I have conveyed so far, but I have spent the past six months studying not only the language of the people of Plato IV, but also the way they communicate, with particular attention to their syntax, or lack thereof, and I believe the evidence supports my conclusion.
Regarding syntax, I can find evidence only of nouns, as I have mentioned, and verbs. There appear to be no adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and so on, though they do conjugate verbs to indicate tense and I should not neglect to mention that they possess an idiosyncratic concept of number, on which I will also touch later.
I realize that neither this recording nor the transcription program will be able to render the cartouches, but it should be able to handle the capitalization based on the description that follows. In the example sentence I will share, I have translated the verb and the second noun into our language, while the first noun, GEPO, is a male personal name and happens to be the person I have heard utter the sentence. Regarding the suffixes, I have attempted to render them phonetically, though I should mention for transcription purposes that the second suffix you will hear has three characters, as the vowel sound is doubled.
So, here is the example sentence: ‘GEPO-LA use-KAA ROCK-PO.’
While this sentence might strike us as fairly primitive and lacking in nuance, it does at least get across that GEPO is, was o
r will be using a rock for some purpose.
I admit that the limitations imposed by the apparent lack of syntax confused and frustrated me initially, but after further consideration I deduced that additional meaning was being communicated in an unexpected manner that I had not yet grasped. At first, I had considered the possibility that body language and facial expression might play a role. While the natives do tend to be physically animated when talking, I came to discount this theory, as body language could not play a role in their written communications and, despite prolonged and particular attention to the issue, I could discern no difference in the levels of meaning being imparted by their verbal as opposed to written communication beyond the normal effects to which we are accustomed related to posture and unconscious tells.
This failure forced me to look for a different source. I was stymied for a number of weeks on this issue when the obvious occurred to me in an instant, as it should have done from the beginning.
The people of Plato IV have a vast and holistic mythology. By this I mean that the inconsistencies, omissions and syncretizations that plague Earth mythologies are not found on Plato IV and, from what I can gather, it is not only the tribe with which I am living that subscribes to it, but all the tribes. Their system of myths is like an infinite net with no tears. Every element, whether it be a god, an event, or a mythical place or time, is woven seamlessly into a series of stories whose number and scope is beyond counting, in a master narrative in which every aspect is connected, however distantly, to all others.
I had known about this mythology from a relatively early point in my stay, but failed to realize its significance. What had never occurred to me until the moment of my revelation was the correlation between the gods that populated the mythology and the suffixes being applied to both nouns and verbs which, in the latter case, I had initially mistaken for an elaborate form of tense inflection.
Each suffix in its base form consists of two characters which indicate the god whose attributes are being attached to the word. For nouns, this is all there is. For verbs, however, a third character is added to the suffix that indicates the tense. In the case of the specific example I have given, I can say that GEPO is planning a future action, which is indicated by the third character on the verb suffix, and that the use to which he is planning to put the rock is somehow connected in the mythology to the god KA.
In addition, I can say that GEPO himself will be acting in a manner consistent with the nature of the god LA and that the rock is connected somehow with the attributes of the god PO. Regarding the specific use to which the rock is to be put, and his reasons for using it in this manner, my presumption is that the key to unlocking this is held in a fuller understanding of the underlying mythology, which I currently lack.
Lastly, I have discovered based on my research and conversations with GEPO that there seem to be exactly 108 gods in their mythology. This means that their grammatical system contains exactly that number of potential suffixes, due to the fact that their language has 27 consonant and only four vowel sounds. What is remarkable, however, is that they seem unable to conceive of any number higher than this, referring to any number beyond 108 as ‘all.’ Please don’t take this to mean that they are unsophisticated mathematically. They are not. As an example of their mathematical skill, they have demonstrated that they can produce complex and predictive astronomical models and the construction of their homes displays a solid understanding of basic and even intermediate engineering principals. They simply seem to regard the number 108 as representing a fullness or completeness beyond which distinctions are futile.
All in all, this is a fascinating method of communication that strikes me as at once very primitive and also very complex and intriguing. The construction of the language opens up a vast number of combinations and possibilities for meaning while at the same time being nearly impenetrable to outsiders, even those like myself who might spend considerable time amongst them attempting to learn it. I cannot help but conjecture that a thorough analysis of these people’s language and mythology might shed light on the origins and formation of our own sense of language.
As I noted at the outset of this report, the second area of the Plato IV culture I can comment on is their worldview. However, my commentary on this subject will be much less extensive than what I have provided related to their language, reflecting the relative paucity of my comparative understanding.
Having said that, what follows is a tentative sketch of what I believe to be their two central beliefs. First, they appear to be what we would call animists in the sense that they see the world as ensouled, with not only every person, but also every thing in the world being in some way alive and possessed of a soul, by which I believe they mean a necessitating spirit or will that dictates a drive to a certain nature or orientation. Second, they seem to see the world as a vast, interwoven and multidimensional fabric in which all possible scenarios are not only foreseen, but have actually happened before and are recounted in their mythology. They are unable to conceive of an action, or even a thing, that is not prefigured in their mythological drama.
It reminds me in some ways of a manifested and formally structured version of the ancient conception of a Universal Mind, in which the potential sum and source of all things has been brought to the level of physical action. And through this network flow various channels of energy that are considered to be gods, with each god-channel’s path through the network reflecting its distinct attributes and experiences.
I believe that more intense study is necessary and plan, as I hinted earlier, to apply for a large grant to mount a fully staffed expedition to study these remarkable people more intensely, and in a manner that does not impact their existing way of life. Further, I believe that the results of this study will be a watershed moment in our field and will bring renown and prestige to the University and to your department.
I have made my intentions clear to GEPO despite the communication difficulties that still sometimes hinder our conversations. At first, he seemed quite agitated at the idea that I might leave, which I found touching. We have developed a sort of friendship over my time here and, despite the sometimes awkward moments, we will truly miss each other when parted.
In fact, GEPO has indicated to me with an enigmatic phrase that I have translated as ‘GEPO-TE save-FUA PEOPLE-MA,’ that tomorrow morning he is going to take me into the woods outside the village to show me something which I believe to be a rock that is considered to be of cultic importance to his people. Perhaps this is the rock to which he had referred earlier and he has a special duty as its caretaker. I am hopeful that whatever he has planned for me helps me to gain some additional clarity in regards to the tribe’s mythology before my departure.
Ariston, I am conscious of the length of this message and will be respectful of your time by ending it now. I am planning to leave tomorrow afternoon and, once back at the University, will begin writing up the formal report on my findings. In the meantime, I have sent you the coordinates of Pluto IV, as well as the location of the tribe with whom I have been living. There is no point in concealing this information any further. As a failsafe against misadventure, I have also included copies of all my research files in electronic format for safekeeping until my arrival in a week’s time.
Until then, guard them well, Ariston.
***
Lysanthus’ voice died out and silence filled the office. The text stopped scrolling on their handhelds. Ariston sat very still, his hands on the large black desk that dominated his office, and looked at his friend Metrates as if to ask what he thought of the message.
Metrates leaned forward in his chair and rested his elbows on his knees. “Ariston, something tells you me you received this message just over a week ago.”
Ariston nodded in response. “He doesn’t seem to be coming back.”
“Well, they obviously killed him. Or this Gepo fellow did, at any rate.”
Ariston nodded again. “That’s what I think.”
/> “And the reason,” Metrates continued, “was that Lysanthus was clearly on to something and Gepo wanted to keep his people safe from further exposure or contacts with outside entities, such as us.”
Ariston nodded again. “Only Lysanthus could have missed that. He lacked common sense.”
Metrates sat back in his chair, thinking. “What do you propose to do?”
Ariston looked serious. “I don’t know. That’s why I asked you to come see me. If I report that I received this message, it will trigger a pointless and invasive investigation.”
Both men sat in silence.
Metrates looked out the window behind Ariston and saw that the sun was setting in a spray of pink, portending a hot day to follow. Finally, he broke the silence. “For all his enthusiasm, I don’t think Lysanthus was being hyperbolic in relation to the potential of the research. What if these people are fully human? What if they are our ancestors?”
“That would be an explosive finding.”
Metrates paused, then spoke. “We could go there ourselves.”
“To Plato IV?”
“Yes.”
“But they killed Lysanthus,” said Ariston.
“Lysanthus was foolish to go alone,” said Metrates. “We will bring along a few others, along with a security detail -- we will have some guns behind us if things go ... awry.”
“What would our stated rationale for choosing that planet be?”
“You’re the head of the department. You’ll come up with something.”
Ariston paused, as if in thought, before speaking. “You are a cruel man, Metrates.”
Metrates looked his friend in the eye. “Ariston, let’s not pretend that you didn’t know what you were doing when you invited me here today. You wanted it to be my idea and I am fine with that. Let’s go make a name for ourselves.”
The Shining Cities: An Anthology of Pagan Science Fiction Page 6
