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THE CONTENTS OF THE TELL-MANHATTAN LIBRARY

    Opening Statements by Ristling È: Feminoids, masculoids; haploid-lems and -mels; quartipbloid-blers, -brels, -lerbs, and -relbs; and companion ristlings! The first interpretations of the firma-shaking discovery known as the Tell-Manhattan Library have not yet been completed, but the English-Language-Savants on the archeological team have put together a basic introduction to the Sapiens Age for presentation here at the Rth cyclic convention of Mentation Unlimited. It've chosen to present this information in the form of a body-tape in order that You might more fully appreciate the form of communication that It have discovered to be the basic form of communication among the sapiens. You have all gribed, It are sure, the circumstances surrounding the discovery of this incomparable source of information about the Sapiens Age in the pre-theric mound known through legends as Tell-Manhattan. The gribette has undoubtedly informed You, also, that It have confirmed It's formerly scorned theory that the Sapiens Age was also the age of Warm Blood, truly forming the missing link between the No-Blood and the Cold-Blood Age and Us's own Therma-Blooded Age.
     It's theory was not accepted because of the seemingly backward step postulated by the existence of a Warm-Blooded Age---whose main characteristic was a blood that was viable only in the liquid state---between the Cold-Blooded Age, where the blood could survive in both the liquid and the solid state, and Us's Therma-Blooded Age, in which the blood survives in THREE of the seven states: solid, liquid, and gas. Incidentally, one of It's truly surprising discoveries, appropriate to mention at this time, is that the Sapiens Age seemed to know only four of the seven states: solid, liquid, gas, and plasma---though It must admit that they had a very limited understanding of the universality of the plasma state, since they studied it only under extremely limited conditions of temperature and pressure. Their instrumentation was so crude that their pseudo-science of physics measured every reaction only in terms of temperature, pressure, and volume, completely ignoring the effects of entelechy, potentiation, and synchronicity. They had a peculiarly mechanistic view of existence, based in a limited way on the information available through their crude electromechanical instrumentation. It realize that It shouldn't be so derisive, but It find the situation quite pathetic: even understanding the effects of temperature, pressure, and volume, they quite ignored effects of the gravitational anomaly and the Generative Urge.
     When It look at specifics, It find that the sapiens brain was at an intermediate stage, having three portions as opposed to Us's five. These three seemed capable of response to the gravitational anomaly and the Generative Urge, but without the transponder and omniceptor they could hope to have no knowledge of mentation, and they certainly couldn't ploom, even accidentaly.
     They had a quaint 84-nucleon theory of matter, only the first inklings of posipons and negipons, and no notions of infitrons at all. Their technology was evidently most rudimentary.
     "An unlooked-for surprise was that they were enormous creatures 4000 statons tall, weighing something like half a million unitors when mature, and they---It will get to the conceptual problem underlying pronouns in a moment---consumed over 8500 unitors of solid and liquid palson per Earth-rotation. Their peak population of 40 billion surely overcrowded their homeplanet of Earth.
     They knew of the subconscious and a few of the functions of the conscious, but very few of them sensed anything from the prokelia, the kelia, or the antikelia, and only one or two per millenia could equitate. It find an amusing coincidence that their word "equitation" meant "to ride on a horse"---a horse was a warm-blooded ungulate even grosser than the sapiens. Hence they were confused between the unconscious and the subconscious, since seven to eight "hours" per Earth-rotation, which they called a "day"---but I don't want to introduce too many new terms to you---were passed in a process they called "sleep."
     Copulation was performed in strangely limited modes, barely one step up from the cold-blooded, usually in pairs, in private, in a ritual structure called a bed, and usually just prior to or subsequent to this anomalous process they called sleep. The obvious connection has not yet been totally understood.
     Since they read books, it appears they failed to recognize the cogrelative sense, and of course they couldn't pratulate, having not yet developed the delos component of the brain.
     Now It promised to tape something about their use of pronouns. Since the sapiens were preunitic, they thought that each unit of protoplasm contained one unit of intelligence. They behaved as if they were in a permanent state of isostation. It You stretch Your imagination to the limits, You can see how permanent isostation would produce suspicion, ignorance, disease, and unhappiness. The pronoun for a unit referring to the isostationary unit alone was "I," a word that, except for one or two exceptions It found, was always capitalized. However, oddly, the reflexive pronoun was not capitalized: me, my, and mine. They used It---excuse It---"it," without the capital, to refer to objects. They used the pronoun "you," again without the capital, to refer to other sapiens, though they had occasional use of "thee" and "thy" and "thine" as intimate forms of pronouns. "It" and "You," as such, were not known and never used. As another amusing sidelight, sapiens were divided into only two sexes, called "males" and "females," and each sex had special pronouns: "males" required the pronouns "he" and "his" while "females" required the pronouns "she" and "hers." Communication must have been difficult at best---divisive and unproductive in general. As for verb agreement, the verb "to be" had a special form after "I," namely "am"; but the verb "to have"---It don't know why---used the PLURAL form "have" after "I." Possibly they had some foreknowledge of "You," but that seems difficult in their permanent isostation.
     As another factor in their isostation, sapiens was mortal: at their peak, they wouldn't live much longer than a thousand years, and that was possible only with liberal transplantations of brains, hearts, and all other organs, and rejuvenating processes that were sometimes misleading in their lack of knowledge of the Generative Urge.
     They had a concept called "God," usually capitalized, which in strange ways was similar to "It," though God was usually regarded as something or someone outside the sapiens, rather than immanent. It have read a few of the books about a concept they named "Cosmic Consciousness," which was a fair approximation of the Omnisoul---at least as close as they could get, remembering they lacked BOTH the delos and the pandelos brain components.
     In permanent isostation, they needed a form of organization called a government, which in all cases It have so far studied was overbearing, distrustful of individuality, and hopelessly bureaucratic.
     Lacking a pandelos component, they developed a rich set of legends they called "religion," but no one of them---because they constantly battled---remained in ascendance for more than a minuscule amount of time. Some religions seemed to be struggling toward the idea of the Omnisoul, but again their primitive evolutionary plane defeated their best efforts.
     For the next part of this Mentation, It would like to present to You a fantasy of the future-direction---inspired by the awesome differences between sapiens and You---that begins with The Entity saying "Querm! Primost dortifact av cosma-falpant trin, Mentation Tapes, ha colgized---"