They had no spoken language; their throats were not built for speech. They communicated among themselves by an elaborate combination of telepathy, whistling, and gestures. I tried as hard as I could, and after several weeks of living among them, I began to be able to make a crude, tentative form of mental contact. The ability was built into my brain, as it was built into theirs by evolution, but it would take a long period of training before I could communicate as easily as their babies did.
The Neanderthals had no fear of strangers. Warfare and conflict were virtually unknown to them. At first I thought that might be because their telepathic abilities made it impossible to attack someone without his sensing it beforehand and being prepared to retaliate. I was wrong, although I had been on the right track.
They were peaceful because their telepathic abilities allowed them to understand each other much more thoroughly than speech permits true understanding. It was not that they constantly read each others’ minds, I gradually learned. But the Neanderthals were trained from birth to communicate their feelings, their emotions, as well as rational thoughts and ideas. When a Neanderthal was angry or upset or afraid, everyone around him knew of it instantly, and they all did their best to get to the cause of the problem and solve it. Similarly, when a Neanderthal was happy, everyone knew it and shared in the joy.
How alone we Sapients are! Locked inside our skulls with our individual personalities, we make feeble attempts at communication through speech, where the Neanderthals shared their thoughts as naturally as warmth flows from a fire. There were no psychotherapists among them — or, rather, they were all psychologists.
They were a gentle people, in spite of their powerful muscular bodies. Their innocent brown eyes reminded me of the doe and fawns I had seen my first day in this time. They did not, probably could not, dissemble. Even their method of slaughtering the weakest members of their herds was so gentle that the word slaughter hardly applies: they merely exerted enough mental control over the animal to stop its heart. The animal collapsed and died within moments, painlessly.
The days lengthened into weeks as I dwelled among them, living with the family of the tallest teen-ager of the four who had first encountered me. Their home, like all the others’, was some forty feet above the ground, inside a sturdy sequoia. The family consisted of the parents, Tohon and his wife Huyana, their son Tunu, and their daughter, Yoki, who was about five or six years old. They had accepted me as a guest, after the whole village — some hundred or so people — gathered in a clearing at the base of “their” trees to discuss what they should do with me.
It was an eerie, unsettling feeling to be standing in the midst of all these Neanderthals, knowing that they were talking about me, but unable to hear a word. Except for a few whistles and an occasional wave of a hand or shake of a head, the discussion was carried out in complete silence.
I could not listen to them, so, instead, I studied their faces. They were not at all like the shambling, beetle-browed savages that twentieth-century Sapients depicted the Neanderthals to be. Their faces were broader than mine, their brows heavier, their chins less prominent, but the totality of their facial features were not all that different from my own. They were no hairier than I was. The men’s faces were beardless, and I learned after several painful attempts at shaving with a flint knife that the Neanderthals removed facial hair with an ointment they obtained from the leaves of a shrub.
Apparently they decided that I would live among them, and Tunu’s father accepted the obligation — or, for all I knew then, they might have considered it an honor.
I saw that very first day how they managed to carve living quarters out of the tree trunks. After Tunu painfully introduced himself and his family to me, pointing to each in turn and carefully pronouncing each name several times in his labored, dry whisper, his father led me to their home.
I followed Tohon up the sturdy ladder of vines to their main room, a spacious womb-like chamber set in the living wood, with a round window on one side and an open doorway that led out onto a branch that was broad enough to allow all five of us to stand on its flattened surface at the same time. Their furniture consisted of stools and table-like things that looked oddly out of place, yet strangely familiar. Then I realized that they were actually giant mushrooms, toadstools, that had been shaped to serve the Neanderthals. It was then that I began to understand that they altered the world around them, vegetable as well as animal, to suit their needs.
Tohon took me out on that broad, green veranda and showed me how they enlarged their living quarters to make room for a guest. He sent Tunu scampering out along the big branch toward a smaller limb where thick clusters of needles grew. The lad came back with a wooden bowl filled with a thick, syrupy liquid that must have been some form of tree sap.
I followed Tohon inside and watched him begin to paint the sap onto the wall of their main room. It smelled of pine resin, but stronger. Off to one side, I could see Huyana and Yoki silently studying an array of herbs and leaves that they had spread across the floor: a lesson in botany, or more likely, nutrition.
And all this was being done in nearly total silence. I had never realized how much we Sapients take for granted our constant chattering. Noise is our companion from our first birth cries to. our last dying words. The Neanderthals lived in a world of quiet, broken only by the natural sounds of wind and rustling leaf, of bird song and animal call. As the time went on and I grew accustomed to this hushed way of life, I began to wonder if the Neanderthals’ lack of violence was associated with their lack of noisemaking equipment.
As I stood watching Tohon’s handiwork, that first day, I could feel my eyes widening with surprise as the liquid he smeared onto the curved wall of the room began to eat into the wood. At first it etched the smooth surface of the wall slowly, giving off the faintest hissing sound and a slightly acrid smell. Then the wood seemed to dissolve; it just began to melt away.
Tunu grinned at me, his nearly lipless mouth pulling back to show a wide expanse of gleaming teeth. I must have looked very surprised; I’m sure my jaw was hanging open.
Tohon gestured urgently to his grinning son, and the two of them began smearing the syrupy liquid with great vigor against the sides and back of the niche that had just been created. Why the stuff melted away the wood and yet seemed to have no effect at all on their bare hands, as they stuck them into the bowl and spread the liquid against the wood, was a mystery to me.
Within a few minutes Tohon seemed satisfied with their work. Tunu took the nearly empty bowl back out along the branch while his father sat cross-legged on the floor and gestured to me to sit beside him.
Huyana served a meal of boiled vegetables and fresh fruit. Their kitchen, I soon found out, was a level below this main room. By the time we finished eating, the acidic sap had done its work, and there was a small but comfortable room for me, literally eroded out of the living wood of the tree trunk, connected to the main room by a short corridor that curved so that my room could not be seen from the main room. No need for doors; privacy was maintained by geometrical arrangement.
Tohon inspected the new room, and for a moment seemed somewhat agitated. Without moving or making a sound, he wrinkled his heavy brow in concentration. Tunu came back with the bowl and wordlessly painted a small round window for me. Tohon nodded, satisfied that the job was completed.
I thought that they had forgotten about my asking for Ahriman, that first day. As the weeks rolled leisurely by and I became accustomed to this almost silent life among the Neanderthals, I nearly forgot about him myself. I spent most of my time trying to learn how to communicate with them, mentally, and gradually I began to get the hang of “speaking” without making sounds. My abilities were ludicrously poor, but I found that some of the Neanderthals were better communicators than others. Tunu, the grinning, cheerful teen-ager, was the easiest for me to converse with. So were many of the other youngsters. I had more trouble with the adults, perhaps because they were more withdrawn and circumspect. And the Neanderthal women, even little Yoki, were virtually a complete blank to me, as far as telepathic communication was concerned. I was certain that this was by intent; well enough for the men to converse with this spindly stranger, but the women decided they would keep their distance, physically and mentally.