“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 had 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’ 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 cataloged, 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 supreme.
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.