“Teach me to talk,” I pleaded on paper, “in order that I may explain to her that she has nothing to fear from me, and that I will guard her honor with my life.”
Doggo could not understand my sentiments, but he had enough friendship for me so that he respected them on my account. Accordingly he set to work instructing me, chiefly by making me read aloud and take dictation. The language turned out to be phonetic, after all. In fact, it is very like Pitman shorthand, although not quite so compact.
As I already knew the written language pretty thoroughly, I made rapid progress in the radiated language, so that in a very few weeks I became really proficient. Now I learned the names “Cupian” and “Formian” and a great many other words which I have used earlier in this narrative, although only their written forms were known to me at that time.
I was now able to write my name phonetically. Heretofore I had used for my name the plural of the character for their unit of measure, stad, a poor pun for Myles.
Every few days I saw the lady briefly. At first our conversations were very formal, consisting on my part almost entirely of set speeches committed to memory. But gradually as I mastered the language I became able to understand her and to improvise a bit.
One afternoon, about fifty days after my return from Mooni, I said to Doggo, doubtless apropos of something that was in my lesson:
“Tell me, have you any name of your own? I have called you Doggo right along, and you haven’t seemed to mind it; so it has never occurred to me before to ask your real name.”
“No,” he replied, “I have no name. That is why I felt highly honored when you called me one. Cupians have names, but we Formians, except in the case of our Queen Formis, have merely numbers. These numbers are in three parts, the first part representing the year of hatching, the second the month of hatching, and the third the serial registration number of the individual. Thus my number ‘344-2-18’ means that I was the twentieth Formian hatched in the second month of the four hundred and eighty-fourth year following the Great Peace.”
Let me explain here, that a year on Poros is made up of twenty months of twelve days each. A day is twelve parths, or about twenty-two and a half earth hours; so that a parth is about one hour and fifty-two and a half minutes of earth time.
I would have asked him then what was the meaning of the other and smaller numbers on his back, but I was more interested in learning about the beautiful lady. It was strange that I had never asked her name of either herself or Doggo. But I had always called her “gracious lady,” with never a thought of any further title.