In linguistics, an echo response is a way of answering a polar question without using words for yes or no.

Everything Pernicus knows about the Echo People of the Northern Plains comes from Introduction to Astroanthropology, a required text from his early studies.

Each member of the remote Echo tribe is born with an other, and no Echo can survive if his other perishes. The phenomenon has a particularly interesting linguistic component. Each utterance an Echo voices is immediately restated by his other, with reverse polarity. 

If an Echo child tells his mother, ‘I am hungry,’ his other protests, ‘I am not.’

Pernicus had puzzled over how the mother’s response would be calibrated. To offer the child food (‘Eat this’) would provoke her own other to refuse him food (‘Don’t eat this’).

The Echos who survived, Pernicus reasoned, would be those who cultivated rebelliousness and greed.

How strange that his aeronautical accident should leave him stranded in the same Northern Plains that he’d puzzled over those many years ago. The fates must have conspired to expose the naivety of his undergraduate notions. 

‘I am hungry,’ says the Echo child.

‘I’m not,’ says his other. 

‘I’m surprised,’ says the mother. She feeds the child’s other. 

‘I’m not,’ says the mother’s other. She feeds the child. 

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