"The Persistence of Vision"

1978 Varley, John [Herbert] (b. 1947). “The Persistence of Vision.” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 54.3 (March 1978): 6-50. Rpt. in his The Persistence of Vision (New York: Dial Press/James Wade,  1978), 227-72 (U.K. ed. as In the Hall of the Martian Kings [London: Futura, 1978], 263-316); in The Best Science Fiction Novellas of the Year #1. Ed. Terry Carr (New York: Ballantine Books, 1979), 1-53; and in Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction. Ed. Leigh Ronald Grossman (Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 2011), 670-80 with an editor’s note on 670. PSt

The protagonist is a man who, following a series of recessions and a nuclear reactor accident in the Midwest that left a band of the country radioactive is wandering the country Looking for himself. He spends time in the Taos area of New Mexico living briefly in communes and discovers an intentional community composed of deaf and blind people who were born during a rubella epidemic, although their children can see and hear but only rarely speak. He stays there and learns the various languages they use, beginning with handtalk, or spelling out words in the palm of the hand to bodytalk, where people communicate with their entire bodies. And there is a third language, simply known as Touch, in which people are communicating without any contact that he fears he could never learn.