The asomnics lack these states of being. Their brains do not do this. They are like reptiles, who chill down into inertia but do not sleep.
A Hy Brisalian philosopher, To Had, elaborates these paradoxes: To be a self, one must also be nothing. To know oneself, one must be able to know nothing. The asomnics know the world continuously and immediately, with no empty time, no room for selfhood. Having no dreams, they tell no stories and so have no use for language. Without language, they have no lies. Thus they have no future. They live here, now, perfectly in touch. They live in pure fact. But they can’t live in truth, because the way to truth, says the philosopher, is through lies and dreams.
THE NNA MMOY LANGUAGE
THE “GARDEN UTOPIA” of the Nna Mmoy deservedly enjoys the reputation of being absolutely safe—“an ideal plane for children and elderly people.” The few visitors who come, including children and the aged, usually find it very dull and leave as soon as possible.
The scenery is all the same everywhere—hills, fields, park-lands, woods, villages: a fertile, pretty, seasonless monotony. Cultivated land and wilderness look exactly alike. The few species of plants are all useful, yielding food or wood or fabric. There is no animal life except bacteria, some creatures resembling jellyfish in the oceans, two species of useful insect, and the Nna Mmoy.
Their manners are pleasant, but nobody has yet succeeded in talking with them.
Though their monosyllabic language is melodious to the ear, the translatomat has so much trouble with it that it cannot be relied upon even for the simplest conversation.
A look at the written language may yield some light on the problem. Written Nna Mmoy is a syllabary: each of its several thousand characters represents a syllable. Each syllable is a word, but a word with no fixed, specific meaning, only a range of possible significances determined by the syllables that come before, after, or near it. A word in Nna Mmoy has no denotation, but is a nucleus of potential connotations which may be activated, or created, by its context. Thus it would be possible to make a dictionary of Nna Mmoy only if the number of possible sentences were finite.
Texts written in Nna Mmoy are not linear, either horizontally or vertically, but radial, budding out in all directions, like tree branches or growing crystals, from a first or central word which, once the text is complete, may well be neither the center nor the beginning of the statement. Literary texts carry this polydirectional complexity to such an extreme that they resemble mazes, roses, artichokes, sunflowers, fractal patterns.
Whatever language we speak, before we begin a sentence we have an almost infinite choice of words to use. A, The, They, Whereas, Having, Then, To, Bison, Ignorant, Since, Winnemucca, In, It, As… Any word of the immense vocabulary of English may begin an English sentence. As we speak or write the sentence, each word influences the choice of the next—its syntactical function as noun, verb, adjective, etc., its person and number if a pronoun, its tense and number as a verb, etc., etc. And as the sentence goes on, the choices narrow, until the last word may very likely be the only one we can use. (Though a phrase, not a sentence, this quotation nicely exemplifies the point: To be or not to—.)
It appears that in the language of the Nna Mmoy, not only the choice of word—noun or verb, tense, person, etc.—but the meaning of each word is continuously modified by all the words that precede or may follow it in the sentence (if in fact the Nna Mmoy speak in sentences). And so, after receiving only a few syllables, the translatomat begins to generate a flurry of possible alternate meanings which proliferate rapidly into such a thicket of syntactical and connotational possibilities that the machine overloads and shuts down.
Purported translations of the written texts are either meaningless or ridiculously various. For example, I have come upon four different translations of the same nine-character inscription: “All within this space are to be considered friends, as are all creatures under heaven.”
“If you don’t know what is inside, take care, for if you bring hatred in with you the roof will fall upon you.”
“On one side of every door is mystery. Caution is useless. Friendship and enmity sink to nothing under the gaze of eternity.”
“Enter boldly, stranger, and be welcome. Sit down now.” This inscription, the characters of which are written so as to form a shape like a comet with a radiant head, is often found on doors, box lids, and book covers.
The Nna Mmoy are excellent gardeners, vegetarians by necessity. Their arts are cookery, jewelry, and poetry. Each village is able to grow, gather, and make everything it needs. There is some commerce between villages, mostly involving cooked dishes, special preparations of the rather limited vegetable menu by professional cooks. Admired cooks barter their dishes for the raw materials produced by the gardeners, with a bit over. No mining has been observed, but opals, peridots, amethysts, garnets, topazes, and colored quartzes may be picked up in any stream bed; jewels are bartered for unworked or reused gold and silver. Money exists but has only a symbolic, honorary value: it is used in gambling (the Nna Mmoy play various low-keyed gambling games with dice, counters, and tiles) and to buy works of art. The money is the pearly-violet, translucent mantle, about the size and shape of a thumbnail, left by the largest species of jellyfish. Found washed up on the sea beaches, these shells are traded inland for finished jewelry and for poems—if that is what the written texts, single sheets, booklets, and scrolls, so beautiful and teasing to the eye, actually are.
Some visitors confidently assert that these texts are religious works, calling them mandalas or scriptures. Others confidently assert that the Nna Mmoy have no religion.
There are many traces on the Nna Mmoy plane of what people from our plane call civilisation, by which people from our plane, these days, usually mean a capitalist economy and an industrial technology based on intense, exhaustive exploitation of natural and human resources.
Ruins of immense cities, traces of long roads and huge paved areas, vast wastelands of desertification and permanent pollution, and other evidences of progressive society and advanced scientific technology crop up among the fields and border the parklands. All are very ancient and seem to be quite meaningless to the Nna Mmoy, who regard them without awe or interest.
Which is how they also regard visitors.
No one understands the language well enough to know if the Nna Mmoy have any history or legends of the ancestors responsible for the vast works and destructions that litter their placid landscape.
My friend Laure says that he heard the Nna Mmoy use a word in connection with the ruins: nen. As well as he could figure out, the syllable nen, variously modified by the syllables that surround it, may signify a range of objects from a flash flood to a tiny iridescent beetle. He thought the central area of connotation of nen might be “things that move fast” or “events occurring quickly.” It seems an odd name to give the timeless, grass-grown ruins that loom above the villages or serve as their foundations—the cracked and sunken tracts of pavement that are now the silted bottoms of shallow lakes—the immense chemical deserts where nothing grows except a thin, purplish bloom of bacteria on poisonous water seeps.
But then, it’s not certain that anything has a name in Nna Mmoy.