Cicada Language is one kind of Activity wave. The Golden Cicada vibrates the tymbals on its abdomen and puts out an Activity wave that interferes with an evolved individual's own, and by that route works on its emotions and confuses its senses.

And an Activity wave is itself a kind of perception. The waves of joy and anger and grief and delight each carry their own feeling.

Working through those feelings is what makes communication possible.

Humans included — anyone at all can be talked to in Cicada Language. Set against human speech, though, Cicada Language is finer in its detail and much poorer in what it can actually say. Take anxiety: in Cicada Language you can tell at once precisely how anxious a creature is.

Speech has only its handful of words — I'm worried, worried sick, heart on fire with it — while Cicada Language struggles to convey what the anxiety is about, and speech can lay that out plainly.

A language built straight out of emotional fluctuation cuts both ways.

The ratmen have a language of their own. That much was clear from the rhythm and variation in the rat officer Ah Laosan's noises. Though it came back around to the same few words over and over.

What Shen Cong mostly read was its feeling.

Since being caught, Ah Laosan had been anxious, furious, and quite unafraid. In its feeling it had thousands upon thousands of its own kind; they worked together on a hunt, dug pits and traps, and there were plenty of powerful evolved beasts that were no match for them. So it thought very little of Shen Cong, who stood under three meters and carried no weight of presence at all.

If anything, being caught struck it as a monstrous indignity for a rat officer of its standing.

"Noisy." Shen Cong let a little of the pressure of his Talent off the leash.

Boom.

An Activity wave of pure pressure came roaring over like a breaker and drowned Ah Laosan, whose Talent ran to 0.526H.

In the next second Ah Laosan took it like…