“And I don’t want you to teach him any of your bad habits!” Alice Witten waited for a glib reply from Christopher, but got none. “Are you still there?”
“Yes.”
“Chris, are you feeling all right today?”
Christopher started idly picking at the bandage on his left hand. “I feel fine,” he said.
“What did you do with that life sample you found on Europa?” she asked. “Did you seal it safely so we can remove it for study?”
“I guess so,” he answered. He slowly unwound the bandage from his hand and noticed that his wrist had turned ivory. With mounting curiosity, he unwrapped the rest of his hand faster. All of his fingers were swollen now and none of them had any feeling. Instead of fingernails, all he had on his left hand were clusters of tiny white leaves poking out of his fingertips. All of his hand, including the hair on the back of his wrist had gone white.
In horror, Christopher let out a cry and tried to shake some feeling back into his hand.
“Chris! Chris, what’s going on?” came the voice from the console.
“My hand!” was all he could manage to spit out. Instinctively he reached with his right hand to pluck the leaves from his left, but thought better of it and grabbed the tongs he left out the day before. The slightest tug on any of the leaves brought shooting agony up his arm. Small white viny tendrils, like those found on a morning glory, coiled around two of his fingers. These could also not be pulled without excruciating pain.
Captain Witten’s voice implored Chris to talk to her, but the only response she received were moans, two sharp screams, and then silence.
❖
On Europa, the crew of the Andrea approached the compound with weapons drawn. Silently they stole out of the vapor lock, eyes darting around the first chamber. Captain Witten motioned to the two others to follow her and they padded cautiously into the greenhouse.
There, tangled amid the tomatoes, lay Christopher, naked and pale. A slow drip from a hose ran down his right cheek and dribbled into his open white mouth. His skin had lost so much of its pigment, the blue of his veins could be seen glowing beneath, and his left arm was not visible at all. Attached to his shoulder was a six-meter mass of furry white vines and leaves spilling out of the garden plot and onto the metal floor. Blood-red spherical blooms shot up in clusters from the vines.
“Oh my God,” whispered Witten under her breath.
Christopher looked up at them and moved his mouth. A trail of dried blood ran down from the corners of his cracked lips. Witten approached. She removed her pressurized helmet, knelt beside Chris and took the dripping hose from his face. Chris eyed her thin brown face and black short-cropped hair with silent puzzlement, then closed his eyes and whispered something softly.
“I can’t hear you, Chris. Chris? Come on, look at me. Don’t try to talk, you understand? Relax, we’re going to try to help you.”
“Wat...” Christopher began.
“Daniels, go to the medical supply unit and bring me anything—everything—in it. Hurry!”
Daniels looked helpless and quietly asked, “Where is it? I’ve never been in this class of station before.”
“Find it!” snapped Witten and he bolted from the room.
“W-wat...” Chris stammered again.
She looked into his eyes and brushed a lock of white hair back off his face. “I can’t understand what you’re trying to say.”
“Water... please...”
She looked at the hose on the ground and then at his imploring eyes. “Grant, get him some water,” Witten ordered the third crewman; then to Christopher she said softly, “Chris, don’t worry. We’re going to remove this from your arm.”
Christopher’s eyes got wide. “No,” he said.
Daniels rushed back in with an armload of various items. Witten turned to him. “It looks bad,” she said. “The whole arm may have to come off.” The color ran out of Daniels’ face.
“Don’t cut... don’t,” Christopher gasped. “Don’t hurt her.”
“No, Chris, of course not. Don’t worry, everything will be fine, just relax. We won’t hurt you. We won’t hurt your arm.”
“No,” said Christopher, “don’t hurt... please, don’t hurt her... don’t hurt... the plant... please...” And with that, he lapsed into unconsciousness.
❖
Four months later, as the Andrea glided home, Witten looked up from a console in the ship’s garden and grinned. “You’re looking almost human,” she said to the frail figure standing in the doorway.
Christopher wobbled slightly on his feet and smiled. “Am I bothering you?”
“Not really. It’s good to see you up and around.”
“I’m in training,” he confided. “I’ve done three laps of the ship already. I might even set a new Universe record. I thought you would be blond.” She looked surprised at this statement and said, “Blond like you?”
He ran his one hand self-consciously through his hair. “No. It’s just that all the time I pictured you as a blond.”
“A blond white woman, right?” she laughed. “Well, I knew you were white. It said so on your dossier, but it didn’t say you had no color at all. That was a complete surprise to me.”
“Do you think this white hair is permanent?”
“I don’t know. The rest of your color is coming back and you’re putting on weight. I don’t see any reason why your hair shouldn’t recover its color, too. What color was it?”
“Brown,” he said, “it was brown.” He leaned against the doorway and held his empty left sleeve in his hand.
Alice smiled sadly and said, “I’ve hailed ahead and ordered you a mechanical replacement for your arm. They say you won’t be able to tell the difference.”
“I was kind of attached to the old one,” Chris said and tried to smile. He looked over at what remained of his left arm, vacuum packed in a clear case, the white vines and red blooms still obscuring all the flesh beneath.
“Don’t even look at it,” Witten said, “I’ve never seen anything so vile.”
“All it wanted to do was grow and be happy,” he said. “And it loved me.”
“What?”
“The moonflower. It was like we were married. Somehow. It’s hard... I don’t have a word for it. It was like, like love. It wanted my love and it wanted to live.”
“Well, we all want to live and love,” said Alice, “but that thing only loved your nutritional value. It was eating you alive. Eventually, it would have swallowed you whole.”
“Yes,” he concurred sadly, “I know that.”
Captain Alice Witten adjusted the drip nipples feeding the hydroponic pots of strawberries. She spied a large ripe berry and pinched it off the plant. Christopher watched as she slowly bit down on the strawberry and could see the delight in her face at the flavor.
“Delicious,” she said. “Here.” She walked up to him and held the uneaten half up to his lips.
“I can’t,” he said.
She searched his eyes and suddenly knew what was going on in his mind. Alice Witten’s brow furrowed and she angrily shook the strawberry at him. “Listen here,” she said impatiently, “as long as you’re on my ship you are at the top of the food chain. Do you understand?”
Christopher hesitated, then shyly opened his mouth. They both understood in that moment that Alice Witten was jealous. A woman jealous of a plant. The thought made them both deliciously happy.
He took the strawberry and felt the round and velvety texture on his tongue and tasted the shock of sweetness as he bit down. “Now how’s that for a strawberry?” she purred. “It’s good, huh?”
“Yes,” he said, and for a moment he was sad because he had to agree with her. It tasted divine.
Robert Sheckley
The Language of Love
Robert Sheckley, the first fiction editor of Omni magazine, has mitten some of America’s most elegantly trenchant science fantasy, including tales collected in Untouched by Human Hands, Pi
lgrimage to Earth, Citizen in Space, Shards of Space and Notions: Unlimited, from which the following mordant investigation of “the Grand Passion” is taken.
JEFFERSON TOMS went into an auto-café one afternoon after classes, to drink coffee and study. He sat down, philosophy texts piled neatly before him, and saw a girl directing the robot waiters. She had smoky-gray eyes and hair the color of a rocket exhaust. Her figure was slight but sweetly curved and, gazing at it, Toms felt a lump in his throat and a sudden recollection of autumn, evening, rain and candlelight.
This was how love came to Jefferson Toms. Although he was ordinarily a very reserved young man, he complained about the robot service in order to meet her. When they did meet, he was inarticulate, overwhelmed by feeling. Somehow, though, he managed to ask her for a date.
The girl, whose name was Doris, was strangely moved by the stocky, black-haired young student, for she accepted at once. And then Jefferson Toms’ troubles began.
He found love delightful, yet extremely disturbing, in spite of his advanced studies in philosophy. But love was a confusing thing even in Toms’ age, when spaceliners bridged the gaps between the worlds, disease lay dead, war was inconceivable, and just about anything of any importance had been solved in an exemplary manner.
Old Earth was in better shape than ever before. Her cities were bright with plastic and stainless steel. Her remaining forests were carefully tended bits of greenery where one might picnic in perfect safety, since all beasts and insects had been removed to sanitary zoos which reproduced their living conditions with admirable skill.
Even the climate of Earth had been mastered. Farmers received their quota of rain between three and three-thirty in the morning, people gathered at stadiums to watch a program of sunsets, and a tornado was produced once a year in a special arena as part of the World Peace Day Celebration.
But love was as confusing as ever and Toms found this distressing.
He simply could not put his feelings into words. Such expressions as “I love you,” “I adore you,” “I’m crazy about you” were overworked and inadequate. They conveyed nothing of the depth and fervor of his emotions. Indeed they cheapened them, since every stereo, every second-rate play was filled with similar words. People used them in casual conversation and spoke of how much they loved pork chops, adored sunsets, were crazy about tennis.
Every fiber of Toms’ being revolted against this. Never, he swore, would he speak of his love in terms used for pork chops. But he found, to his dismay, that he had nothing better to say.
He brought the problem to his philosophy professor. “Mr. Toms,” the professor said, gesturing wearily with his glasses, “ah—love, as it is commonly called, is not an operational area with us as yet. No significant work has been done in this field, aside from the so-called Language of Love of the Tyanian race.”
This was no help. Toms continued to muse on love and think lengthily of Doris. In the long haunted evenings on her porch when the shadows from the trellis vines crossed her face, revealing and concealing it, Toms struggled to tell her what he felt. And since he could not bring himself to use the weary commonplaces of love, he tried to express himself in extravagances.
“I feel about you,” he would say, “the way a star feels about its planet.”
“How immense!” she would answer, immensely flattered at being compared to anything so cosmic.
“‘That’s not what I meant,” Toms amended. “The feeling I was trying to express was more—well, for example, when you walk, I am reminded of—”
“Of a what?”
“A doe in a forest glade,” Toms said, frowning.
“How charming!”
“It wasn’t intended to be charming. I was trying to express the awkwardness inherent in youth and yet—”
“But, honey,” she said, “I’m not awkward. My dancing teacher—”
“I didn’t mean awkward. But the essence of awkwardness is—is—”
“I understand,” she said.
But Toms knew she didn’t.
So he was forced to give up extravagances. Soon he found himself unable to say anything of any importance to Doris, for it was not what he meant, nor even close to it.
The girl became concerned at the long, moody silences which developed between them.
“Jeff,” she would urge, “surely you can say something!”
Toms shrugged his shoulders.
“Even if it isn’t absolutely what you mean.”
Toms sighed.
“Please,” she cried, “say anything at all! I can’t stand this!”
“Oh, hell—”
“Yes?” she breathed, her face transfigured.
“That wasn’t what I meant,” Toms said, relapsing into his gloomy silence.
At last he asked her to marry him. He was willing to admit that he “loved” her—but he refused to expand on it. He explained that a marriage must be founded upon truth or it is doomed from the start. If he cheapened and falsified his emotions at the beginning, what could the future hold for them?
Doris found his sentiments admirable, but refused to marry him. “You must tell a girl that you love her,” she declared. “You have to tell her a hundred times a day, Jefferson, and even then it’s not enough.”
“But I do love you!” Toms protested. “I mean to say I have an emotion corresponding to—”
“Oh, stop it!”
In this predicament, Toms thought about the Language of Love and went to his professor’s office to ask about it.
“We are told,” his professor said, “that the race indigenous to Tyana II had a specific and unique language for the expression of sensations of love. To say ‘I love you’ was unthinkable for Tyanians. They would use a phrase denoting the exact kind and class of love they felt at that specific moment, and used for no other purpose.”
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.
&
nbsp; 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.
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