Bram knew that Tha-tha was very talented—the most talented of all the younglings in his group. Bram had tried to Understand the little toccata that Tha-tha had composed, and had stretched himself across the five-pointed star of one of the readers to let his human skin sample its rippling patterns of cilia movement. But as always, the meaning had eluded him; it had only been something that tickled in structured rhythms.
“Anyway,” Bram said, casting about for the perfect squelch, “it was nothing but a lot of squares inside squares that kept marching off the edge. I can make a touch reader do that!”
In fact, Bram had an unusual facility with the Great Language for a human of any age. He was able to manipulate a cilia board well enough to reproduce a few basic commands, and when Voth absentmindedly pressed a limb against his skin, he was often able to recognize some of the simpler morphemes, like numbers.
Tha-tha said, with a baffled earnestness that showed in the slow beat of his tentacle lining, “But it’s not the shapes that count, Bram-bram. You can have outlines with nothing inside. It’s the meaning they enclose that’s important.”
Bram felt all the blood drain from his face. He was numb all over, as he had been the time he had slipped on a sheet of winter ice and come down flat on his belly and had all the wind knocked out of him.
“It is so the shapes that count,” he insisted feebly. “You can tell lots of things from the shapes.”
Tha-tha belatedly remembered that he had been admonished by Voth to make allowances for his four-limbed brother. He damped down the cilia movement in the tentacle that held Bram’s arm and concentrated on the fluting sounds of the Small Language coming from deep within his central gullet.
“Never mind, Bram-bram, Su-su didn’t understand it either.” He gestured with a couple of spare limbs toward one of the wrestling brothers. Su-su was squealing in simpleminded triumph. He had his opponent pinned, with all five of the upper tentacles wrapped up in a tight bundle by Su-su’s encircling grip and the lower limbs off the floor, flailing wildly for purchase.
Bram’s features screwed up, and he found himself ready to cry. Tha-tha, trying to be kind, had just made it worse. Everybody liked Su-su, but he wasn’t much in the brains department. He had trouble doing the simplest arithmetic and, Bram gathered, even the Great Language had been slow to develop in him. He communicated in the Small Language and in tactile baby talk, and it was obvious that Voth was becoming concerned about him.
“Leave me alone!” He jerked his arm out of Tha-tha’s grasp and stomped over to his desk reader. It was the only one with a vision screen. The others’ touch readers didn’t need them, Tha-tha said, because the Great Language, even in its juvenile form, provided a sort of perception that was like pictures, only better—just as it was faster to count in the Great Language with its racing ranks of cilia than on a human-style keyboard. The visual cross-connection had something to do with the way the Nar brain worked. Bram’s touch brothers were capable of appreciating the pictures of his vision screen, but most of the time they watched them without much interest, just to be polite.
Savagely, Bram punched buttons almost at random, but his small fingers were cleverer than his rage, and he found himself looking at some of his favorite sequences from the history lessons about Original Man.
Here were the human race’s achievements in all their splendor and glory, as imagined by human artists with the help of computer reconstructions drawn from clues in the great Message, and interspersed with everyday scenes of the Father World and its family of planets.
Bram caught his breath at the sight of the shining cities as they must have been, with their pyramids and cathedrals and the cloud-reaching spires that were very much like the tall calcified spirals of the cities that the Nar had grown with the aid of humankind’s bioengineering legacy.
The pictures shuffled, and he saw the forests of giant trees grown on comets in the deep beyond the Lesser Sun. And the living spaceships derived-from them—great twinned hemispheres of foliage and roots, hundreds of miles in diameter, voyaging to the nearer stars.
And here was a simulation of a star itself being enclosed in a sort of sphere—the supposition was hazy—and its energy being transformed into the radio waves of the human Message and traveling across the void between galaxies. The Nar themselves couldn’t do anything like that, and would not be able to match such power for tens of thousand of years, if ever.
And now there was another uniquely human glory—music. The scene shifted to the concert hall that the Nar had grown for their wards in the human Compound. The camera panned across the rapt faces of the audience as they listened to a scrap of their heritage—a grand songfest called “The Messiah,” which had been lovingly reconstructed from the computer readouts of the Message. A mighty chorus of human voices rang out, singing “Wonderful! Marvelous!” in recognizable Inglex, while tears rolled down the faces of the listeners.
Bram was fighting his own tears. He put his palms flat against the screen, trying to absorb the experience directly.
Nothing! There never was! Only the hard smooth surface of the screen with the miniature people in it, and the massed voices coming from the speaker. It could not compare with the touch symphonies that so entranced Tha-tha and kept him stretched out on the star-shaped body reader for hours—and that he had tried without success to explain to Bram.
Bram gave a choked sob and felt the hot tears come.
What good was it? What good was it to be a human and talk with your voice, when the Nar could talk with their whole bodies? It was only sounds … or symbols which, when you came down to it, could always be transcribed into sounds.
He began beating on the machine with his small fists, screaming and kicking at it while his touch brothers stopped what they were doing and stared at him in horrified silence.
Tha-tha warbled tentatively, “Bram-bram.”
“Go away!” Bram screamed. “Go away, all of you! I hate you!”
He was still having his tantrum when Voth came in. The old teacher stood in the tall doorway regarding the scene, his cluster of upper limbs writhing thoughtfully. Tha-tha ran in a five-legged scramble over to him and whispered something with one outstretched tentacle, Voth dipping an upper limb to listen.
“All right, Tha-tha, you can take your brothers to the beach now,” Voth said aloud in his deep tones. “I’m putting you in charge. Tell the door proctor I said it was all right.”
As the little decapods swarmed confusedly around Tha-tha and flowed in an intertangled mass out the door, Voth went over to Bram and swept him up in his tentacles.
Bram made a great gulping sound. “Oh, Voth!” he sobbed.
“Hush, little one. It’s all right.”
He let the little boy cry himself out in his warm clasp, then set him down and lowered himself to eye level. “How would you like to go to the observatory with me and see our friend Jun Davd?” he said. “We can take a ride in the bubble car and buy some polysugar candy, and Jun Davd will let you look through his telescope.”
Bram rubbed his eyes with both fists. A small coil of rebellion still burned within him. “I want to go by myself,” he said.
Voth acted not at all surprised. “You’ve never traveled alone before,” he said. “It’s a very long way to go. You’d have to ask directions in the Small Language, make yourself understood. And—” He paused delicately. “Since you can’t imprint your Word directly, you’d have to use a credit transfer device, and use it correctly.”
Bram said stubbornly, “Jun Davd is my human friend, and I want to go see him by myself.”