John Brunner: The Whole Man

Then, as though in despair, she uttered a thick bubbling sound, and he understood.

Oh God! You’re deaf and dumb!

Wildly she dropped the bag of food and jumped to her feet, her brain seething with disbelief. She had sensed his thought, projected by his untrained telepathic “voice’, and the total strangeness of the feeling had rocked her already ill-balanced mind on its foundations. Once more the sickening odor of fear colored Howson’s awareness, but this time he knew what was happening and his uncontrolled wave of pity for such another as himself, crippled in a heedless world, reached her also.

Incontinently she dropped to her knees again, this time letting her head fall forward and starting to sob. Uncertainly he put out his hand. She clutched it violently, and a tear splashed, warm and wet, on his fingers.

He registered another first time in his life now. As best he could, he formulated a deliberate message, and let it pass the incomprehensible channel newly opened in his mind. He tried to say don’t be afraid, and then thank you for helping me, and then you’ll get used to me talking to you.

Waiting to see if she understood, he stared at the crown of her head as though he could picture there the strange and dreadful future to which he was condemned.

When he thought it over later, he saw that that first simple attempt at communication had by itself implied his future. His instinctive reaction stemmed from his disastrous and unique essay in making himself significant; he had snatched panicky at the chance of passing on news to the Snake, with no more thought of consequences than a starving man falling on a moldy crust. Arriving simultaneously with his recognition that he was telepathic, the shock of realizing that he had made himself by definition a criminal — an accessory to murder, to be precise — had swung the compass needle of his intentions through a semicircle. He wanted nothing so much as to escape back to obscurity, and the idea of being a telepathist appalled him. Challenged during his terror-stricken flight down darkened streets, he would have sworn that he wanted never to use the gift.

As well declare the intention to be deaf for ever! Eyes might be kept shut by an effort of will, but this thing which had come to him was neither sight, nor hearing, nor touch — it was incomparable, and inevitable.

The sensation was giddying at first. It drew from memory forgotten phrases, in which he sought guidance and reassurance: from a long-ago class in school, something about “men as trees walking” — that was curiously meaningful. His problem was multiplied tenfold by the puzzling, abnormal world in which the girl had spent her life, and paradoxically it was also simplified, because the more he learned about the handicap she labored under, the more he came to consider himself lucky. Faced with Howson as a cripple, people might still come to see there was a person inside the awkward shell. But the deaf-and-dumb girl had never been able to convey more than basic wants, using finger-code, so people regarded her as an animal.

The brain was entire — the lack was in the nerves connecting ears and brain, and in the form of her vocal cords, which were so positioned that they could never vibrate correctly, but only slap loosely together to give a bubbling grunt. Yet it seemed to Howson she should have been helped. He knew of special training schemes reported in newspapers and on TV. Groping, he hunted for the reasons why not.

At first he could make no sense of the impressions he took from her mind, because she had never developed verbal thinking; she used kinesthetic and visual data in huge intermingled blocks, like a sour porridge with stones in it. While he struggled to achieve more than the first broad halting concepts of reassurance, she sat gazing at him and weeping silently, released from loneliness after intolerable years, too overcome to question the mode of their communication.

The clue he sought came when he tried to re-interpret the things he had “said” to her. He had “said’: don’t be afraid, and she had formulated the concept into familiar images, half memory, half physical sensations of warmth and satisfaction that traced clear back to infantile experiences at the breast. He had “said’: thank you for helping me, and there were images of her parents smiling. Those were rare. Struggling, he pursued them to find what her life had been like.

There was a peculiar doubling in the areas he explored next. Half the girl’s mind knew what her father was actually like: a dockland roustabout, always dirty, often drunk, with a filthy temper and a mouth that gaped terrifyingly, uttering something which she compared to an invisible vomit because she had never heard a single word spoken. Much to Howson’s surprise, she was quite aware of the function of normal speech; it was only this rage-driven bellowing of her father that she regarded thus.

But at the same time as she saw her father for what he was, she maintained an idealized picture of him, blended out of the times when he had dressed smartly for weddings and parties, and the times when he had shown loving behavior towards her as his daughter, not as a useless burden. And this image was still further overlaid with traces of an immense fantasy from whose fringes Howson shied away reflexively, in the depths of which the girl was a foundling princess.

Her mother was barely remembered; she had got lost at some stage of the girl’s childhood, and had been replaced by a succession of women of all ages from twenty to fifty, their relationship to her father and herself ill-comprehended. They came and went from the tenement house her father rented, in a pattern she could not fathom because she could not speak to ask the necessary questions.

Out of this background of dirt, frustration and deprivation of affection, she had conceived a need which Howson understood instantly because it paralleled his own desire for importance. Even though it had blown up in his face, he still yearned.

But the girl yearned for a key to the mystery of speech, the glass door shutting her off from everybody. In a frantic attempt to substitute some other link for this missing one, she had developed the habit of spending all her time helping, or working for, nearby families; a smile of thanks for minding a baby, or a small payment for running an errand simple enough to explain by signs, was her only emotional sustenance.

Lately, she had needed this support more than ever; her father had drunk so much he had been warned off his job until he sobered up — at least, that was how Howson interpreted the ill-detailed memories available to his investigations. As a result, he had been more violent and bad-tempered than ever, and his daughter had to stay out of the house to avoid him until he was asleep. Finding Howson when she came to the half-ruined warehouse to hide from the wind, she had helped him automatically — making him comfortable on the pile of old sacks, going in search of food for him, in the hope of a little praise and gratitude.

He reached that stage of his fumbling inquiry, and grew aware that his head was aching. The exercise of his new faculty wasn’t difficult in itself — it was perhaps like seeing a picture for the first time, when the shapes and colors were available to vision just by looking, and what had to be learned was a set of rules for matching them to solid objects already known, using enlightened guesswork. On the other hand, it was tiring to concentrate so long. He made to withdraw contact.

Sensing his intention, the girl shot out her hand and seized his, her eyes wide and pleading. Blazing in her mind, universalized but impossible to misconstrue, was a desperate appeal.