'I, too, have feelings,' said the second man.
'We all do,' I said.
'Of course,' said the first man, 'for we are human.'
I looked at him very carefully.'Which of you,' I asked, 'has been synthesised?'
'We do not know,' said the first man.
'No,' said the second man.'We have never been told.'
The two Priest-Kings had watched this small concourse with some interest, but now the voice of Sarm's translator was heard: 'It is growing late,' it said, 'let the Matok be processed.'
'Follow me,' said the first man and turned, and I followed him, leaving the room, the second man falling into stride beside me.
Chapter Thirteen: THE SLIME WORM
I followed Mul-Al-Ka and Mul-Ba-Ta through several rooms and down a long corridor.
'This is the Hall of Processing,' said one of them.
We passed several high steel portals in the hallway and on each of these, about twenty feet high, at the antennae level of a Priest-King, were certain dots, which I was later to learn were scent dots.
If the scent-dots were themselves not scented one might be tempted to think of them as graphemes in the language of the Priest-Kings, but since they themselves are scented they are best construed as analogous to uttered phonemes or phoneme combinations, direct expressions of the oral syllabary of the Priest-Kings.
When surrounded by scent-dots one might suppose the Priest-King to be subjected to a cacophony of stimulation, much as we might be if environed by dozens of blaring radios and television sets, but this is apparently not the case; the better analogy would seem to be our experience of walking down a quiet city street surrounded by printed signs which we might notice but to which we do not pay much attention.
In our sense there is no distinction between a spoken and written language for the Priest-Kings, though there is an analogous distinction between linguistic patterns that are actually sensed and those which are potentially to be sensed, an example of the latter being the scents of a yet uncoiled scent-tape.
'You will not much care for the processing,' said one of my guides.
'But it will be good for you,' said the other.
'Why must I be processed?' I asked.
'To protect the Nest from contamination,' said the first.
Scents, of course, will fade in time, but the specially prepared synthetic products or the Priest-Kings can last for thousands of years and, in the long run, will surely outlast the fading print of human books, the disintegrating celluloid of our films, perhaps even the carved, weathering stones so imperishably attesting the incomparable glories of our numerous kings, conquerors and potentates.
Scent-dots, incidentally, are arranged in rows constituting a geometrical square, and are read beginning with the top row from left to right, then right to left, and then left to right and so on again.
Gorean, I might note, is somewhat similar, and though I speak Gorean fluently, I find it very difficult to write, largely because of the even-numbered lines which, from my point of view, must be written backwards.Torm, my friend of the Caste of Scribes, never forgave methis and to this day, if he lives, he undoubtedly considers me partly illiterate.As he said, I would never make a Scribe.'It is simple,' he said.'You just write it forward but in the other direction.'
The syllabary of the Priest-Kings, not to be confused with their set of seventy-three 'phonemes', consists of what seems to me to be a somewhat unwieldy four hundred and eleven characters, each of which stands of course for a phoneme or phoneme combination, normally a combination.Certain juxtapositions of these phonemes and phoneme combinations, naturally, form words.I would have supposed a simpler syllabary, or even an experimentation with a nonscented perhaps alphabetic graphic script, would have been desirable linguistic ventures for the Priest-Kings, but as far as I know they were never made.
With respect to the rather complex syllabary, I originally supposed that it had never been simplified because the Priest-King, with his intelligence, would absorb the four hundred and eleven characters of his syllabary more rapidly than would a human child his alphabet of less than thirty letters, and thus that the difference to him between more than four hundred signs and less than thirty would be negligible.
As far as it goes this was not bad guesswork on my part, but deeper reasons underlay the matter.First, I did not know then how Priest-Kings learned.They do not learn as we do. Second, they tend in many matters to have a penchant for complexity, regarding it as more elegant than simplicity. One practical result of this seems to be that they have never been tempted to oversimplify physical reality, biological processes or the operations of a functioning mind.It would never occur to them that nature is ultimately simple, and if they found it so they would be rather disappointed.They view nature as a set of interrelated continua rather than as a visually oriented organism is tempted to do, as a network of discrete objects which must be somehow, mysteriously, related to one another.Their basic mathematics, incidentally, begins with ordinal and not cardinal numbers, and the mathematics of cardinal numbers is regarded as a limiting case imposed on more intuitively accepted ordinalities.Most significantly however I suspect that the syllabary of Priest-Kings remains complex, and that experiments with unscented graphemes were never conducted, because, except for lexical additions, they wish to keep their language much as it was in the ancient past.The Priest-King, for all his intelligence, tends to be fond of established patterns, at least in basic cultural matters such as Nest mores and language, subscribing to them however not because of genetic necessity but rather a certain undoubtedly genetically based preference for that which is comfortable and familiar.The Priest-King, somewhat like men, can change its ways but seldom cares to do so.
And yet there is probably more to these matters than the above considerations would suggest.
I once asked Misk why the syllabary of Priest-Kings was not simplified, and he responded, 'If this were done we would have to give up certain signs, and we could not bear to do so, for they are all very beautiful.'
Beneath the scent-dots on each high portal which Mul-Al-Ka and Mul-Ba-Ta and I passed there was, perhaps for the benefit of humans or others, a stylised outline picture of a form of creature.
On none of the doors that we had passed thus far was the stylised outline picture of a human.
Down the hall running towards us, not frantically but rather deliberately, at a steady pace, came a young human female, of perhaps eighteen years of age, with shaved head and clad in the brief plastic tunic of a Mul.
'Do not obstruct her,' said one of my guides.
I stepped aside.
Scarcely noticing us and clutching two scent-tapes in her hands the girl passed.
She had brown eyes and, I thought, in spite of her shaved head, was attractive.
Neither of my companions showed, or seemed to show, the least interest in her.
For some reason this annoyed me.
I watched her continue on down the passageway, listened to the slap of her bare feet on the floor.
'Who is she?' I asked.
'A Mul,' said one of the slaves.
'Of course she is a Mul,' I said.
'Then why do you ask?' he asked.
I found myself nastily hoping that he was the one who had been synthesised.
'She is a Messenger,' said the other, 'who carries scent-tapes between portals in the Hall of Processing.'
'Oh,' said the first slave.'He is interested in things like that.'