It was a calming voice that subdued the hysteria. She nodded. A
feeling of relief struggled for recognition within her, but it had not
penetrated all nerve channels. She felt her hands twitching.
Ohashi said: "They are speaking English with you. What of their
language that we were supposed to solve?"
"We leaped to a wrong conclusion, Hiko," she said. "We were asked
to communicate. We were supposed to remember our own language--the
language we knew in childhood, and that was slowly lost to us through
the elevation of reason."
"Ahhhhh," sighed Ohashi.
All anger drained from her now, and she spoke with sadness. "We raised
the power of reason, the power of manipulating words, above all other
faculties. The written word became our god. We forgot that before words
there were actions--that there have always been things beyond words. We
forgot that the spoken word preceded the written one. We forgot that
the written forms of our letters came from ideographic pictures--that
standing behind every letter is an image like an ancient ghost. The
image stands for natural movements of the body or of other living
things."
"The dances," whispered Ohashi.
"Yes, the dances," she said. "The primitive dances did not forget. And
the body did not forget--not really." She lifted her hands, looked at
them. "I am my own past. Every incident that ever happened to every
ancestor of mine is accumulated within me." She turned, faced Ohashi.