They woke him up and fed him boiled guo, pinkish cereal like sticky tapioca; they rubbed his legs, sat on his shoulders, put heated stones on his stomach, rearranged his cot so that he lay with his head to the north, made him drink a sip of something hot, black, and minty-smelling; Binira sang at him for a while; they left him at last with a fresh hot stone, and went off. He accepted all this with ethnological aplomb or with the satisfaction of the invalid being fussed over. When they had gone he looked comfortable, curled up around the large rock, and half asleep. Tamara was going out when he asked in a remote, tranquil voice, “Did you tape the old lady’s song?”
“No. Sorry.”
“Askiös, askiös,” he whispered. Then, propping himself on his elbow, “I am better. Too bad we didn’t tape that. I missed most of the words.”
“Is Old Ndif a different language?”
“No. Only much fuller. Complete.”
“The Middle-Aged Women seem to have a much bigger vocabulary than the Youngs.”
“At Buvuna, the Young Women averaged 700 words; the Young Men 1,100, since they have the hunting vocabulary; I estimate the Middle-Aged Women here to know at least 2,500 words. I can make no estimate of the Old Men and Women yet. These are odd people.” Ramchandra lay back and cautiously rearranged himself around the hot stone. His tone, also, was cautious. There was a slight pause.
“Do you want to sleep?”
“To talk,” he said.
Tamara sat down on the woven cane stool. Beyond the open doorway the night was growing bright as day had been; Uper, the big gas planet of which Yirdo was a moon, was rising over the forest like a vast striped balloon. Its silver-gilt light pierced every crack in the mud and wattle walls of the hut and pooled incandescent on the ground outside the doorway. The dusk inside the hut was shot through with gleams, shaft, arrows dazzling the eye, a light that revealed nothing, that dissolved bodies and faces into radiant darkness.
“Nothing is real,” Tamara said.
“Of course not,” said the other shadow, amused, precise.
“They’re like actors.”
“No.”
“Yes. I don’t mean consciously acting, deceiving. I mean artificial. Too simple. Beautiful simple people in ever-bountiful paradise.”
“Ha,” Ramchandra said, and a patch of planet light blazed in his hair as he sat up.
“Why shouldn’t there be a South-Sea-Island world?” she argued with herself. “Why does it seem too simple—phony? Am I a Puritan, am I looking for original sin?”
“No, no, of course not, rubbish,” he said. “All that is theories. But listen.” For a minute he said nothing to listen to, then he said some Ndif words: “Vini. Pandsu. Bhasto. Askiös.—Askiös-bhis iyava oe is-bhassa.—What is that in English?”
“Well—‘please let me get by.’ ”
“Literal translation!”
“The great teaching tradition of the Brahman caste,” Tamara said. “I don’t know, the words have so many uses. ‘Sorry, I want to go this way’?”
“You don’t hear it.”
“Hear what?”
“People cannot hear their native language. All right, listen, carefully please!” He was charming when he got excited; the hauteur fell off him like dried mud from a water buffalo. “I’m going to say a sentence in English the way my uncle, who didn’t attend World Government School, spoke English. Now. ‘Excuse please I have to go by this path.’ Repeat!”
“Excuse please I have to go by this path.”
“Askiös-bhis iyava oe is-bhassa.”
A chill, like a touch of that cold dazzling planet light, proceeded slowly up Tamara’s backbone and prickled in the roots of her hair.
“Funny,” she said.
“Saweya: sway. Beliya: belly dance, Bali. Fini: ravine, vines. Bhasto: bat, baseball. Bhani: cabin, cabana. Shuwushu: ocean, sea—”
“Onomatopoeia.”
“Oe: go. Tunu: return. Itunu: I return; utunu: you return; tunusi: he returns. Padu, to hit, strike. Fatu, to build, make—facere, factus—factory. Say a word in Ndif!”
“Sikka.”
“Fishing lines. Wait. No, I can’t get that one. Another please.”
“Fillisa.”
“The Unclean Huts—Filth, filthy.”
“Uvanai.”
“Strangers. Visitors. Foreigners… singular uvana. You-foreigner.”
“Ram, you don’t have diarrhoea. You have paranoia.”
“No,” he said, so harsh and loud that she started. He cleared his throat. She could not see his eyes but she knew him to be looking at her. “I am serious, Tamara,” he said. “I am frightened.”
“Of what?” she jeered.
“Frightened sick,” he said. “Scared shitless. You must take words seriously. They are all we have.”
“What are you frightened of?”
“We are thirty-one light-years from Earth. No one from Earth ever came to this solar system before us. These people speak English.”
“They don’t!”
“The structure and vocabulary of Young Ndif is based at least sixty percent upon the structure and vocabulary of Modern English.”
His voice shook, as if with fear, or with relief.
Tamara sat solidly, clasping her knees, and held fast to incredulity. A Ndif word went through her mind, and another, and another, each one followed by its English root or shadow, shadows that had been waiting for the light to show them; but it was absurd. She should not have said the word “paranoia.” It was true. The man was ill. Weeks of touch-me-not rudeness and now this sudden change to talk, excitement, warmth. A manic change; and paranoid. The Ndif speaking an English-based code, for mysterious purposes, understood by the expert alone Ono, one. Te, two. Ti, three…
“All female names,” Ramchandra said morosely, “end in ‘a.’ That is a cosmic constant established by H. Rider Haggard. Male names never end in ‘a.’ Never.”
His voice, light-timbred, still a little uneven, confused her thoughts. “Listen, Ram.”
“Yes.”
He was listening, all right. She could not ask him, as she had intended, whether he was playing an elaborate and disagreeable joke on her. His trust must be met in kind. She did not know how to go on; and he broke urgently into her pause—“I saw this within a week, Tamara. First the syntax—Then I wouldn’t see it. Meaningless coincidence, et cetera, et cetera. I said no. But it says yes. It is so. It is English.”
“Even the Old language?”
“No, no, that’s different,” he said, hurried, grateful, “that’s not English, that’s itself, wherever it’s not based on the baby talk. But the—”
“All right, then. The Old language is old, the original language, and the Youngs have been influenced, corrupted, by some contact with Space Service people we don’t know about, weren’t told about.”
“How? When? They say we are the first. Why would they lie?”
“The Space Service?”
“Or the Ndif. They both say we are the first!”
“Well, if we are the first, then it’s us. We’re influencing the Ndif. They talk the way we unconsciously expect people to talk. Telepathy. They’re telepaths.”
“Telepaths,” he said, seizing the idea eagerly; and during the pause that followed he was evidently wrestling with it, trying to make it fit the circumstances, for he said at last, with frustration, “If only we knew anything about telepathy!”
Tamara meanwhile had been going around the problem in another direction, and asked, “Why didn’t you say anything about this till now?”