A new scent came to my nostrils.
'Follow me,' said the mechanically reproduced voice, and the creature turned from the portal.
I went to the portal.
It was stalking in long, delicate steps down the passageway.
I looked once more at Vika, who lifted her hand to me. 'Don't go,' she said.
I turned scornfully from her and followed the creature.
Behind me I heard her weep.
Let her weep, I said to myself, for she has failed her masters the Priest-Kings, and undoubtedly her punishment will not be light.
Had I the time, had I not more urgent business, I might have punished her myself, teaching her without mercy what could be the meaning of her collar, using her as objectively and ruthlessly as she deserved, brutally administering the discipline of a Gorean master to a treacherous slave girl.
We would see then who would conquer.
I shook these thoughts from my head and continued down the passageway.
I must forget the treacherous, vicious wench.There were more important matters to attend to.The slave girl was nothing.
I hated Vika.
I followed a Priest-King.
Chapter Ten: MISK THE PRIEST-KING
The Priest-Kings have little or no scent of their own which is detectable by the human nostrils, though one gathers there is a nest odour by which they may identify one another, and that the variations in this nest odour permit identifications of individuals.
What in the passageways I had taken to be the scent of Priest-Kings had actually been the residue of odour-signals which Priest-Kings, like certain social insects of our world, use in communicating with one another.
The slightly acrid odour I had noticed tends to be a common property of all such signals, much as there is a common property to the sound of a human voice, whether it be that of an Englishman, a Bushman, a Chinese or a Gorean, which sets it apart from, say, the growling of animals, the hiss of snakes, the cry of birds.
The Priest-Kings have eyes, which are compound and many-faceted, but they do not much rely on these organs.They are, for them, something like our ears and nose, used as secondary sensors to be relied upon when the most pertinent information in the environment is not relayed by vision, or, in the case of the Priest-Kings, by scent.Accordingly the two golden-haired, jointed appendages protruding from their globelike heads, above the rounded, disklike eyes, are their primary sensory organs.I gather that these appendages are sensitive not only to odours but, due to modification of some of the sensory hairs, may also transform sound vibrations into something meaningful in their experience.Thus, if one wishes, one may speak of them not only as smelling but hearing through these appendages.Apparently hearing is not of great importance, however, to them, considering the small number of hairs modified for this purpose.Oddly enough few of the Priest-Kings whom I questioned on this matter seemed to draw the distinction clearly between hearing and smelling. I find this incredible, but I have no reason to believe they deceived me.They recognise that we have different sensory arrangements than they and I suspect that they are as unclear as to the nature of our experience as we are of theirs.In fact, though I speak of hearing and smelling, I am not sure that these expressions are altogether meaningful when applied to Priest-Kings.I speak of them smelling and hearing through the sensory appendages, but what the quality of their experience may be I am uncertain.For example, does a Priest-King have the same qualitative experience that I do when we are confronted by the same scent?I am inclined to doubt it, for their music, which consists of rhapsodies of odours produced by instruments constructed for this purpose, and often played by Priest-Kings, some of whom I am told are far more skillful than others, is intolerable to my ear, or I should say, nose.
Communication by odour-signals can in certain circumstances be extremely efficient, though it can be disadvantageous in others.For example, an odour can carry, to the sensory appendages of a Priest-King, much further than the shout or cry of a man to another man.Moreover, if not too much time is allowed to elapse, a Priest-King may leave a message in his chamber or in a corridor for another Priest-King, and the other may arrive later and interpret it.A disdavantage of this mode of communication, of course, is that the message may be understood by strangers or others for whom it is not intended.One must be careful of what one says in the tunnels of Priest-Kings for one's words may linger after one, until they sufficiently dissipate to be little more than a meaningless blur of scent.
For longer periods of time there are various devices for recording a message, without relying on complex mechanical devices.The simplest and one of the most fascinating is a chemically treated rope of clothlike material which the Priest-King, beginning at an end bearing a certain scent, saturates with the odours of his message.This coiled message-rope then retains the odours indefinitely and when another Priest-King wishes to read the message he unrolls it slowly scanning it serially with the jointed sensory appendages.
I am told that the phonemes of the language of Priest-Kings or, better, what in their language would correspond to phonemes in ours, since their 'phonemes' have to do with scent and not sound, number seventy-three.Their number is, of course, potentially infinite, as would be the number of possible phonemes in English, but just as we take a subset of sounds to be English sounds and form our utterances from them, so they take a subset of odours as similarly basic to their speech.The number of English phonemes, incidentally, is in the neighbourhood of fifty.
The morphemes of the language of Priest-Kings, those smallest intelligible information bits, in particular roots and affixes, are, of course, like the morphemes of English, extremely numerous.The normal morpheme, in their language as in ours, consists of a sequence of phonemes.For example, in English 'bit' is one morpheme but three phonemes, as will appear clear if given some reflection.Similarly in the language of the Priest-Kings, the seventy-three 'phonemes' or basic scents are used to form the meaning units of the language, and a single morpheme of Priest-Kings may consist of a complex set of odours.
I do not know whether there are more morphemes in the language of Priest-Kings or in English, but both are apparently rich languages, and, of course, the strict morpheme count is not necessarily a reliable index to the complexity of the lexicon, because of combinations of morphemes wo form new words.German, for example, tends to rely somewhat more on morpheme combination than does English or French.I was told, incidentally, that the language of the Priest-Kings does possess more morphemes than English but I do not know if the report is truthful or not, for Priest-Kings tend to be somewhat touchy on the matter of any comparisons, particularly those to their disadvantage or putative disadvantage, with organisms of what they regard as the lower orders.On the other hand it may well be the case that, as a matter of fact, the morpheme set of the language of Priest-Kings is indeed larger than that of English.I simply do not know.The translator tapes, incidentally, are approximately the same size, but this is no help, since the tapes represent pairings of approximate equivelants, and there are several English morphemes not translatable into the language of Priest-Kings, and, as I learned, morphemes in their language for which no English equivelants exist.One English expression for which no natural 'word' in their language exists is, oddly enough, 'friendship', and certain of its cognates.There is an expression in their language which translates into English as 'Nest Trust', however, and seems to play something of the same role in their thinking. The notion of friendship, it seems to me, has to do with a reliance and affection between two or more individuals; the notion of Nest Trust, as clearly as I can understand it, is more of a communal notion, a sense of relying on the practices and traditions of an institution, accepting them and living in terms of them.