The Place of Understanding

A visitor to a planet where language is not used for communication finds himself surprisingly understood, even in the midst of total annihilation.

The Place of Understanding

  “Not words, not music or rhyme I want—not custom or lecture, not even the best; Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.”
        — Walt Whitman

Whitman worked for a nonprofit with an ambitious goal: to consolidate peace among certified “Planets of Good Will.” In practice, Orbits Without Borders (OWB) could barely maintain good relations among its own employees. Whitman, for example, had been sent to yet another backsystem planet on a meet-and-greet errand with which OWB wouldn’t even have burdened an unpaid intern. When his boss looked at him, she saw the cane in his hand and not the doctorate on his wall.

He’d tried everything to shake the stigma, all the more frustrating because it only qualified as a disability on their back-ass-wards home planet, and get put on real assignments. He’d presented coolly professional proposals and he’d begged with tears in his eyes. It didn’t matter. OWB could cross interstellar space, but couldn’t overlook a limp—“concerned for safety on nonstandard surfaces”—or accommodate medical leave—“unpredictable leaves of absence unfortunately incompatible with mission parameters”. Eventually, he gave up trying to get through to his boss and just focused on saving up enough to immigrate to a more progressive world.

Whitman had wanted to work for a nonprof since he was little. He dreamed of exploring new worlds and making friends with fantastical creatures. Lately, though, it had been a lot of semi-sentient vegetable patches, primitive or feudal civs with all the accompanying restrictions on contact, and plain old microbiomes.

Not that these weren’t interesting, but through his doctoral research Whitman had literally pioneered the field of Universal Befriendment. OWB owed its very existence, to some degree, to research Whitman had done to make diplomacy between radically different lifeforms possible in the first place. But while they sent out hotshot agents trained on his findings, they relegated him to busy work on unimportant planets. 

But he found means of payback from time to time. Not all the planets OWB sent him to turned out to be as unremarkable as they’d predicted. Some of the worlds OWB mistook for inconsequential turned out to be chock full of precious minerals and labor power. Whitman wasn’t ignorant of the fact that the for-profits followed close on the heels of the non-. Making peace made money. So he took a special relish in stamping his reportbacks on these worlds with the two red wavy lines which signified Not Worth the Effort.

He was just about ready to stamp such a report on the sophisticated but bizarre planet he’d just wrapped up two weeks on, when the storm started rolling in. Perhaps the most fascinating place he’d visited to date, it deserved far more attention, but not from OWB.

He sat at an old kitchen table in the home of a local with whom he’d been staying for the past week. He was pretty sure he’d been invited to do so, but it was hard to tell. Either way, his host didn’t seem to mind. Whitman wondered what her name was. 

“Beautiful morning,” his host remarked, coming to lean over Whitman’ shoulder and peer out the window at the muscular swells of clouds. Whitman fiddled with his flickering laptop screen, pressing the back panel up against the glass. The clouds had started to gather the day before yesterday, steadily darkening to the point where his solar battery struggled to catch a charge. “Deadly though.”

Whitman barely heard her, anxious to get the report sent before the machine died. With the paperwork behind him, he could relax and take his time really getting to know the world and its unique linguistic phenomenon. Catching himself, he paused and offered a banal “Good morning,” more for his sake than hers. He wasn’t sure politeness existed as a concept here. 

This world, Whitman had been intrigued to find, looked very similar to his own– Humanoid species. City infrastructures. People walking pets in parks. People carrying groceries up apartment steps. People driving scooters down the small, old, but well-maintained roads– with one striking difference.

They didn’t appear to communicate.

That didn’t mean they didn’t talk. They loved to talk. They talked like the old men who posted up in front of the bodegas back home or teen girls on a sleepover. But it didn’t seem to mean the same thing it did on Whitman’s planet. Their “conversations” took the form of swapping discrete monologues. They talked like children play in early development– parallel.

Eavesdropping on these conversations, and trying to engage in a few himself, Whitman got the sense they listened to each other speak as one listens to music—as entertainment with emotional, but not factual, content. They did say meaningful things—it wasn’t gibberish—but listeners didn’t seem to receive meaning. The words of one never seemed to have an impact on the actions of another. They spoke without any sense of urgency, indifferent as to if their intent was understood.

Once, he’d try to purchase something at a cafe. He’d brought enough rations to last for a month, but he was interested in trying some local food if he could manage to barter for it. He couldn’t find anything that looked like a price on display. But he presented the various items he’d brought for trade to the cashier, and asked for one of the pastries in the case.

“Statistically, you’re more likely to die from a broken heart than a head injury,” the cashier had told him, ladling out a bowl of soup and sliding it towards him on a tray.

“Could I pay you with any of these?” he had asked as he took the soup he didn’t order. 

“I’m hurting, but I’m healing,” she had said.

He had ended up sitting down to eat the soup, which was pretty good, without paying anything, and nobody seemed to mind.

After some linguistic experiments, Whitman found there were some hard boundaries his translator chip couldn’t cross. They had no word for “question” or “answer,” although they sometimes posed what sounded like questions to the open air. They didn’t seem to have a word for “government,” but their society had to be administered by some kind of structure to function as well as it did (the closest equivalent his translator could find was “concord,” or secondarily, “understanding”).There must be some means of communication, Whitman gathered, but perhaps by some evolutionary fluke, a technology other than language served this purpose.

 Whitman’ pounded on his laptop’s enter key as the report wavered weakly on the screen. Finally, it glowed a little brighter, and the prompt beneath the stamp asked: Reason?

“Incapable of communication,” Whitman typed, then hit SEND. That was all OWB needed to know.

Quickly, before the laptop could die again, he pulled up one more form, no less familiar to him than the other brief. A medical leave of absence request.

The thought of his boss reading it with self-satisfaction and relief—that she hadn’t sent him on any meaningful mission—wasn’t enough to dissuade him from playing into her prejudice this time. She would approve it, happy to avoid him, “for as long as you need, honey,” and then he could take his time studying the peculiar planet for his own research. Research that would hopefully land him a citizenship offer from a better world.

He was already formulating research questions in his head as he completed his paperwork. Without communication, how had they built a whole city, with paved streets and solar panels and aqueducts and little electric scooters for getting around? How did a civ coordinate all that development without the ability to give detailed, verbal instructions? They did have a kind of nonverbal communication?

When he’d first arrived, Whitman’ host had taken his hand and led him inside, shown him a spare room he could stay in. That seemed a clear invitation, even though her words had been something about how, “fifty years ago, the library floor had to be replaced, but I think they reused the tile to make a mosaic over at the Southside sculpture garden.” But nonverbal communication alone couldn’t coordinate a factory of people assembling microchips or carrying out the research required to invent such a thing.  

Perhaps, Whitman considered, they might only be speaking this way in front of him. Perhaps they only spoke as children, like the Asonu, and grew out of it. Or perhaps they had some other form of language his biases and human senses had hindered him from noticing. They might have a novel language tradition, like only asking and answering questions one day of the year, or the first day of the month, or the last hour of the day, and Whitman hadn’t been around for it. 
Or they might have inherited the technologically advanced city from a prior culture. There was really no way of telling, not without much deeper, experiential investigation.

Whitman took a notebook from his knapsack to jot down these initial ideas, wary of trusting his laptop until it had gotten a thorough dose of sunshine.

His host had left to brew something like coffee at the stove behind him, but now she returned with a mug for each of them. Settling into the chair beside him, she sighed. He glanced up from his notes, and noticed an unsettled look in her eyes. If she were human, he’d would take it for worry or wistfulness. But he tried not to assume.

When he didn’t say anything, she took a sip of coffee and then broke the silence. “The sunrise today was one of the best I’ve ever seen.”

Then she was off, soliloquizing in an almost hypnotic stream of consciousness: “It peeked under the clouds, a brief flash of red and gold, making the whole city look gold. I’m so grateful for these kinds of days, and I guess now I’m feeling like I really should be. I’ve always loved the city, especially in the morning. Of course the country’s lovely, but the city is such a testament to,” she waved her hand in the air, “all of it. Everything that really matters. It sits in the middle. It expresses the concord.”

That word, the one that didn’t quite mean “government,” caught Whitman’s attention, and he made a note of it on his pad. It was no use asking his host what it meant, just like he hadn’t been able to ascertain her name by asking. He sipped his own coffee, something in it making his tongue tingle.

After a while, his host stopped, as suddenly as she’d begun. This was one of the few things he’d been able to figure out about how they talked. It was a dialogue, in a way; they took turns. And now she expected him to speak next.

He bit back the instinct to respond directly. He hadn’t been here long, but already, he sensed something like impropriety in it. Something aggressive. Lunging for the throat of what someone had said.

Outside, the clouds had gathered closer and darker, so dark it almost seemed to be evening. It looked like impending rain would keep him indoors today; he didn’t have an umbrella and couldn’t very well ask for one from a people who didn’t answer questions. That left the person before him as his subject of study.

“It’s good,” he said, eyeing the drink. “It’s similar to something we have back home. I’m maybe allergic to it though? I better wait before drinking some more.”

The coffee-type beverage had left a numbness on his lips, but it didn’t seem to be progressing, thankfully. He did need to be more careful. Such assumptions, a common mistake for travelers to worlds bearing superficial similarities to their own, could be life-threatening.

His host continued to regard him with that somewhat concerned, but actively listening, gaze. He didn’t yet have a feel for the rhythm of these exchanges, but he followed her cue and kept talking.

“The way you speak about your city is very beautiful,” he said. “I’m from a beautiful place myself.”

He tried to evoke her poetic style of description. It was a good idea to emulate as much as you could when engaging new contacts. Mirroring was Universal Befriendment 101.

“It’s a city about twice the size of this one, 150,000 or so inhabitants. It’s called Sanpa,” said Whitman. “On my planet, there are many cities. And Sanpa is considered small among them. It’s built along a mountain ridge, so when the sun rises it sends these dramatic, jagged shadows from the peaks above the city. We use solar to power our city too, only instead of mounting them on the tops of buildings as you do, they plate the eastern side of the mountains. If you fly over from the west, you see the city hugging one side of the ridge, and if you fly from the east you see a slope of black glass. But I don’t think it’s going to be my forever home…”

Whitman paused as the chip in his cheek vibrated, signaling a translation failure. The device had developed a model of the local language fairly quickly since the people here talked so much, but it had still only been a couple weeks. Well, it was as good a place to stop as any. The vocalization was starting to hurt anyway. He massaged his throat and jaw.

“I wasn’t alive for the last storm,” his host began almost immediately. Whitman felt a little pleased he seemed to have spoken the right amount. Maybe he was starting to pick up on the rhythm after all.

“My mother was only a child,” she continued. “I have traced the cracks with my fingers when I walk down the lesser alleys, where it doesn’t matter if things are covered up. Not everything is rebuilt. Sometimes storms take away what you didn’t need in the first place, and you only realize it when you try to put it back. If I were a storm, I would flatten the whole forest and see what wanted to come back. I would push the water out of the lakes and see if the waves rolled down the hills all the way to the sea or if they evaporated with grief. Earlier, I thought about kicking the cane out from under you to see if you could stand back up.”

It took Whitman a moment to process that she had really said that. He grabbed his cane where it leaned against the table and rose. “If you tried to, I might beat you with it,” he said. “What the hell?”

“An egg and cress sandwich would be a delicious lunch,” was all his host gave as a reply.

Unnerved, Whitman quickly collected his things into his knapsack and headed to the door, the host making no move to stop him. It wasn’t raining yet. Maybe he could get somewhere else before it did.

What his host had just said was strange enough, with its suggestion of violence, he wasn’t sure he wanted to stay there anymore.

Outside, the wind attempted what his host had only suggested. It was stronger than it had seemed from behind the sturdy window. But he regained his balance and slowly headed down the street, sticking to a route with ample eaves to shelter under in case the rain broke out, which it seemed likely to do at any moment. A twitch of pain had started in his lower back, the beginning of a flare-up. He needed to find somewhere safe to lay down if it came to it.

He didn’t see anyone else outside. In fact, he didn’t see anyone inside either– not through the windows of shops and homes he passed. He hadn’t gone too far before he was considering that however worrying his host’s remark had been, he might be safer with her than exposed to the coming storm.

And then it was on him.

So sudden it took him a moment to realize the change. One moment, he was looking up the empty street ahead, and the next he couldn’t see more than a foot ahead of him for the wall of water which knocked the air from his chest as it slammed into him as it claimed the city.

He clutched his knapsack to his hunched chest, hoping to save his laptop, and threw himself under the overhang of a building, but it didn’t matter. The rain seemed to come from every direction in lashing sheets, and the wind howled, passing between the buildings as through vocal chords. It reminded him of a hurricane he’d caught the tail end of on another planet, but this city was landlocked far from sea. Panic sent him scrambling for the nearest door.

But just as he reached for it, it exploded in front of him.

He jumped back, his spine spasming at the jerky movement, and he fell, cane clattering away from him.

Hail. The size of cannonballs. Another shattered just yards away. If he didn’t move, he’d be flattened. BAM!

He tried to stand again, but pain obscured his vision. BAM! A hailstone struck only a foot away from him, and he barely covered his face in time. Shards of ice sliced his forearms.

Breathe. He’d had a lifetime of practicing breathing through pain. That’s all he had to keep doing. Breathe.

He started dragging himself over the pavement with bleeding arms, the strap of his knapsack clutched in one fist, bumping along beside him. Wherever his cane had landed, there was no going back for it now. Arm over arm. Arm over arm. Almost to the door with the hole punched in it. BAM!

He was still alive. Arm over arm. BAM!
Still alive. Almost there–

BAM!

As he pulled himself to his feet using the door’s wrought iron handle, a hailstone narrowly missed him. It smacked the knapsack out of his hand and crushed it against the side of the building. He flung his weight desperately against the door, and it yielded.

Collapsing inside, spine spitting like an electrified wire, it was all he could do to remain conscious, lying on his belly, feeling the vibration of the impacts outside through the floor.

But he couldn’t stay there forever. The ceiling shuddered, sending down trickles of dust. How long would it hold?

And then, a few feet away, a head rose from the floor. A pair of eyes, a bemused expression regarding him for a moment, before disappearing back through a hatch. Whitman crawled over, his hip smarting, and looked down. Below, the stranger was descending a narrow staircase without a glance back. But they’d left the door open—a nonverbal invitation.

“Excuse me?” Whitman called down.

The stranger paused and turned to call back. Not, of course, to clarify anything.
“I’ve just acquired a new scooter,” the stranger shouted. “It’s green with a white stripe. It doesn’t go as fast as most scooters, but it holds battery longer. I’ve been tinkering with it myself and I think I may be able to make it run just as fast without using more battery, but that would involve prying off the back panel, and that’s going to mess up the paint job. I know it can be repainted, but I just can’t bear to ruin something nice like that.”

Whitman was surprised to find himself oddly comforted by the non sequitur. It shocked him, for a moment, out of his own panicked thoughts. He felt a hatch door, which he closed over the opening, and followed the stranger down the staircase.

The walls had been carved right through solid rock beneath the building, but worn smooth along the middle by ages of hands running along it. 

 “Not that it matters now,” the stranger continued chattering, their voice echoing up the passage. “Since I left it outside like a fool when I knew the storm was coming, so the whole thing’s surely gone to bits. And I suppose it would be gone to bits anyway, if this storm goes the way it looks like it’s going.”

The initial probe had reported a mild climate on this planet. How could it have missed the potential for a storm like this? The stranger talked about it as a known phenomenon, and come to think of it, his host the past week had said something about storms.

Even knowing these people didn’t do questions, he couldn’t help wondering out loud: “How bad do these storms get?”

They had reached the bottom of the stairs, and the stranger gestured to the cavernous chamber that opened around them. There were many, many others gathered there.

“How bad,” someone perched beside the stairwell echoed.

They did that on occasion—you’d think for a moment they were really answering you. But it was a fluke. Sometimes people just remarked on words, same as commenting on other phenomena in their environment: “how bad,” same as “milk’s expired,” same as “it’s getting dark.”

Looking around, Whitman saw other stairwells and tunnels leading off the main chamber, and could hear distant chatter and laughter. Most seemed to be taking the storm to end all storms in stride, and this underground shelter seemed designed for the occasion. He really couldn’t believe the probe had missed this, and started thinking about the next email he would send chewing out Intel, before remembering his laptop, probably shattered in his knapsack, discarded above.

Whitman’s guide, if he could be called that, had nothing more to do with him, and went on their way. Nobody seemed to mind him there. He seemed equally welcome and irrelevant in the space.

As the adrenaline continued to seep away, he became aware of the cuts on his arms, and looked around for something to wrap them with. There wasn’t much in the large cavernous room, so he started exploring down adjacent tunnels, steadying himself with a hand along the walls.

The next thing he knew, two concerned-looking people were guiding him by the shoulders down another hall and into a clinical-looking room. Though still a cave, it had all the trappings of a doctor’s office.

“My wife brought me a puzzle. It’s a picture of the city skyline at night.” A medic came over and started cleaning his wounds. “Good timing!” she continued cheerfully, “now we have something to do together while we wait out the storm.”

“I suppose,” she continued, wrapping his arms in clean gauze, “by the time we finish putting it together, the city itself might be gone.”

She gave him a pat on the shoulder, as if to say, you’re good to go.

“Thank you,” Whitman tried to say, almost gagging as the words literally caught in his throat. The translation chip buzzed. No equivalent in this language—try similar concept?

Whitman massaged his throat and tried again: “I am grateful that you’ve helped me heal.” The translator flexed his vocal chords for him and sent his tongue dancing to produce the tones and syllables of the local speech. How is that not an equivalent? He wondered. Maybe the device was glitching. He was due to replace the implant next year.

As the locals seemed wont to do, the medic acted entirely disinterested with him once the impetus for the encounter had dissolved, and turned away, without a word or gesture, to do other work.

So he began to wander again, down this hallway and that. There were hundreds of rooms, all fully furnished for living in, cooking in, sleeping in, etc. An entire city beneath the city. There were no doors between rooms and halls, though some had privacy curtains. The halls were not well lit, but clean.

He’d gotten so interested in his exploration, wandering unobstructed through the lives of the whole city, that he’d forgotten about the storm above them. But all of a sudden the earth began to shake, and he dashed through the tunnel into the next room, where people had let off their activities to await what came next.

He joined them and together they all stood there under the city, dust shimmering down onto their faces from the quaking earth. Faces turned upwards with closed eyes. What were they imagining? Or were they really seeing something? Some preternatural sense? Some single note synchronizing through their heads with the last boom of thunder above?

And with it, the storm’s final blow, there came what he couldn’t have thought possible: an even louder crescendo, a cascade of thunder from a thousand directions. It sounded like the entire city must be imploding simultaneously. He fell to his knees, plugging his ears with his palms. But the others remained standing. Witnessing? Worshiping? Waiting.

As the noise finally subsided, Whitman noticed various reactions among the crowd. Some wept, others laughed. Some clapped their hands like at the end of a great performance, while others worked on their feet, a thousand-yard gaze in their eyes.

But nobody seemed disturbed by anyone else’s way of reacting. Whitman even witnessed one who was weeping embrace one who was laughing, as if comforting them, and the embrace returned.

When silence had replaced thunder, it rang nearly as loudly. People began to break off from their waiting trance and set out in different directions through the tunnels, each with a purposeful air.

As they went, they were taking off their shirts and knotting them mask-like over their faces. Whitman followed suit, and ascending a staircase with them, emerged into the dust-choked air.

Above the fog of dust, the sky had completely cleared, as if the storm really had been a one-and-done act of God. The sky seemed impossibly clear, in fact. It seemed bigger.

Of course it did, and Whitman realized why through a numbing shock.

The city was gone. The sky was all that was left, broken free from the intruding height of of trees and towers. It flaunted its crystalline blue above the blotted wreck of them. Through the dust, the horizon silhouetted like a mountain range, jagged hills of rubble in every direction.

But now the people got to work.

Without speaking, not even to make irrelevant monologues, they all came together. With carts and cranes brought up from storage underground they started heaving away fallen stones and objects that could be salvaged. Others set up buffets and water stands for workers, pavilions for smithing and turning parts, and safe areas for the children to run and stretch their legs. All without a word of communication.

Some animals have a migratory instinct, an innate sense of direction and genetic memory of places they’ve never been.

Whitman was struck by the impression these people had a civic instinct, all internally aligned to a common goal, impressed with an internal blueprint of the city and all it entailed.

At first, Whitman just watched them, dizzy with the shock of what had happened, but also the wonder of what was happening now. He could feel the pain in his back flaring up, and he knew it would be even worse this time, after all his body had been through in the last couple of hours. But he decided he wanted to help.

Nearby, he spotted a brigade of workers forming, wordlessly passing out tools and coalescing into groups of four and five with a cart between them. Perhaps they were not so different from the people of his planet, Whitman thought. At times like this, it was clear to anyone that there was work to be done. Nobody needed to say it out loud. 

Shuffling over, he looked for a group he could attach himself to. He noticed the more muscular folks were gearing up for the heavy task of breaking and hauling stone. But there was plenty of work available for those without brawn, like him. Under a recently erected pavilion, he found a seat beside several others who were sorting and chiseling smaller pieces of rubble into usable bricks for the eventual rebuilding.

Though the work was menial, the task felt more meaningful than anything Whitman had ever done. Here was an obvious need and an obvious solution. Looking across the smoky landscape, he saw everyone finding the task that suited them best, and in the current situation, how no task was more pressing than any other. All were needed and no one was turned away.

Whitman relaxed into a soothing rhythm, himself the point of transformation between two baskets at his feet, one of rubble, one of salvaged stone. As the one emptied and the other filled, he felt the potentiality of a new city actualizing. And around him, the others seemed to likewise have resolved into a determined hopefulness.

He thought of what his former host had said, about the “last storm.” He wondered how many times the city had been destroyed and rebuilt from scratch. He thought about how where he came from, and most places he knew, cities were places you got dropped into without having a hand in making. Thought about his body and the lonely work of keeping it.

Then as if his memory of the past broke through into the present, there she was, his former host, walking toward him out of the shimmering gauze of dust. Whitman stiffened, wary after their last encounter. But she gave a wide smile and clapped his shoulder in greeting. 

 “The dust is so thick, I thought I’d never find you again!” she said.

It would have been a nice enough thought, if someone said it to him on his world. Here, it was everything. He knew she wasn’t saying it for Whitman’s benefit, because they didn’t do that here. So that meant it was simply the real, spontaneous, cry of her heart.

It was like overhearing someone praying for you.

On his own planet, where people did use speech to communicate ideas between each other, one could never really be certain of the other’s true feelings. And yet here, where speech was not for communication, and without speaking, Whitman felt heard. 

“Good to see you, too, friend,” Whitman replied. And found that he meant it. Both the “good to see you” and the “friend.”

She held something out to him, a tool, and at first Whitman thought she was inviting him to join another work brigade. But then he realized it was a cane. A new cane. It had been whittled out of the handle of something else, perhaps a shovel. The work had been done recently, as the wood shone clean and new where a knife had pared away the outer layer. 

“Did you make this for me?” Whitman asked, taking it, and standing to try it. It matched his height better than his old one, so that he didn’t have to hunch as far. 

  “There’s work to be done,” his friend said, “that’s the beauty of it.”

“Thank you,” Whitman tried to say, but his translator turned it into a hiccup. So he only stood and opened his arms, and the two embraced. He hoped that gesture communicated something of his gratitude to this alien who had effortlessly seen him in a way his own people struggled to do.

“It will be decades before we watch the sunrise over the city again” said his friend as they pulled away. She turned to survey the rubble. He looked to, and for a moment he saw a new city, gleaming like a promise, in the dust-laden air.

They gazed on it together, not nearly as distraught as one would expect in two people who had lost their former worlds.

“Yes, we’ll lie low for a time,” she said. “But the dust will settle down. And the city will stand back up.”

END