R. A. Lafferty - Stories 2

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STORIES BY R.A. LAFFERTY PART 2
*45. Camels and Dromedaries, Clem
*46. The Ultimate Creature
47. How They Gave It Back
50. McGruder's Marvels
51. This Grand Carcass Yet
*52. Maybe Jones and the City
*53. One At a Time
55. Cliffs That Laughed
56. Configuration of the North Shore
59. Ride a Tin Can
61. Crocodile
*62. About a Secret Crocodile
63. The Cliff Climbers
66. Condillac's Statue
67. Entire and Perfect Chrysolite
*68. Continued On Next Rock
69. Old Foot Forgot
*70. All Pieces of a River Shore
*71. Interurban Queen
*72. Frog On the Mountain
CAMELS AND DROMEDARIES, CLEM
"Greeks and Armenians, Clem. Condors and buzzards."
"Samoyeds and Malemutes, Clem. Galena and molybdenite."
Oh here, here! What kind of talk is that?
That is definitive talk. That is fundamental talk. There is no other
kind of talk that will bring us to the core of this thing.
Clem Clendenning was a traveling salesman, a good one. He had
cleared $35,000 the previous year. Lie worked for a factory in a midwestern
town. The plant produced a unique product, and Clem sold it over one-third
of the nation.
Things were going well with him. Then a little thing happened, and
it changed his life completely.
Salesmen have devices by which they check and double-check. One
thing they do when stopping at hotels in distant towns; they make sure
they're registered. This sounds silly, but it isn't. A salesman will get
calls from his home office and it is important that the office be able to
locate him. Whenever Clem registered at a hotel he would check back after
several hours to be sure that they had him entered correctly. He would call
in from somewhere, and he would ask for himself. And it sometimes did happen
that he was told he was not registered. At this Clem would always raise a
great noise to he sure that they had him straight thereafter.
Arriving in a town this critical day, Clem had found himself
ravenously hungry and tired to his depths. Both states were unusual to him.
He went to a grill and ate gluttonously for an hour, so much so that people
stared at him. He ate almost to the point of apoplexy. Then he taxied to the
hotel, registered, and went up to his room at once. Later, not remembering
whether he had even undressed or not (it was early afternoon), he threw
himself onto the bed and slept, as it seemed, for hours.
But he noted that it was only a half hour later that he woke,
feeling somehow deprived, as though having a great loss. He was floundering
around altogether in a daze, and was once more possessed of an irrational
hunger. He unpacked a little, put on a suit, and was surprised to find that
it hung on him quite loosely.
He went out with the feeling that he had left something on the bed
that was not quite right, and yet he had been afraid to look. He found a
hearty place and had another great meal. And then (at a different place so
that people would not be puzzled at him) he had still another one. He was
feeling better now, but mighty queer, mighty queer.
Fearing that he might be taken seriously ill, he decided to check
his bearings. He used his old trick. He found a phone and called his hotel
and asked for himself.
"We will check," said the phone girl, and a little bit later she
said, "Just a minute, he will be on the line in a minute."
"Oh, great green goat," he growled, "I wonder how they have me mixed
up this time."
And Clem was about to raise his voice unpleasantly to be sure that
they got him straight, when a voice came onto the phone.
This is the critical point.
It was his own voice.
The calling Clen Denning laughed first. And then he froze. It was no
trick. It was no freak. There was no doubt that it was his own voice. Clem
used the dictaphone a lot and he knew the sound of his own voice.
And now he heard his own voice raised higher in all its unmistakable
aspects, a great noise about open idiots who call on the phone and then
stand silent without answering.
"It's me all right," Clem grumbled silently to himself. "I sure do
talk rough when I'm irritated."
There was a law against harassment by telephone, the voice on the
phone said. By God, the voice on the phone said, he just noticed that his
room had been rifled. He was having the call monitored right now, the voice
on the phone swore. Clem knew that this was a lie, but he also recognized it
as his own particular style of lying. The voice got really wooly and
profane.
Then there was a change in the tone.
"Who are you?" the voice asked hollowly. "I hear you breathing
scared. I know your sound. Gaaah -- it's me!" And the voice on the phone was
also breathing scared.
"There has to be an answer," he told himself. "I'll just go to my
room and take a hot bath and try to sleep it off."
Then he roared back: "Go to my room! Am I crazy? I have just called
my room. I am already there. I would not go to my room for one million one
hundred and five thousand dollars."
He was trembling as though his bones were too loose for his flesh.
It was funny that he had never before noticed how bony he was. But he wasn't
too scared to think straight on one subject, however crooked other things
might be.
"No, I wouldn't go back to that room for any sum. But I wil1 do
something for another sum, and I'll do it damned quick."
He ran, and he hasn't stopped running yet. That he should have
another self-made flesh terrified him. He ran, hut he knew where he was
running for the first stage of it. He took the night plane back to his
hometown, leaving bag and baggage behind.
He was at the bank when it opened in the morning. He closed out all
his accounts. He turned everything into cash. This took several hours. He
walked out of there with $83,000. He didn't feel like a thief; it was his
own; it couldn't have belonged to his other self, could it? If there were
two of them, then let there be two sets of accounts.
Now to get going fast.
He continued to feel odd. He weighed himself. In spite of his great
eating lately, he had lost a hundred pounds. That's enough to make anyone
feel odd. He went to New York City to lose himself in the crowd and to think
about the matter.
And what was the reaction at his firm and at his home when he turned
up missing? That's the second point. He didn't turn up missing. As the
months went by he followed the doings of his other self. He saw his pictures
in the trade papers; he was still with the same firm he was still top
salesman. He always got the hometown paper, and he sometimes found himself
therein. He saw his own picture with his wife Veronica. She looked wonderful
and so, he had to admit, did he. They were still on the edge of the social
stuff."If he's me, I wonder who I am?" Clem continued to ask himself.
There didn't seem to be any answer to this. There wasn't any handle to take
the thing by.
Clem went to an analyst and told his story. The analyst said that
Clem had wanted to escape his job, or his wife Veronica, or both. Clem
insisted that this was not so; he loved his job and his wife; he got deep
and fulfilling satisfaction out of both.
"You don't know Veronica or you wouldn't suggest it," he told the
analyst. "She is -- ah -- well, if you don't know her, then hell, you don't
know anything."
The analyst told him that it had been his own id talking to him on
the telephone.
"How is it that my id is doing a top selling job out of a town five
hundred miles from here, and I am here?" Clem wanted to know. "Other men's
ids aren't so talented."
The analyst said that Clem was suffering from a tmema or diairetikos
of an oddly named part of his psychic apparatus.
"Oh hell, I'm an extrovert. Things like that don't happen to people
like me," Clem said.
Thereafter Clem tried to make the best of his compromised life. He
was quickly well and back to normal weight. But he never talked on the
telephone again in his life. He'd have died most literally if he ever heard
his own voice like that again. He had no phone in any room where he lived.
He wore a hearing aid which he did not need; he told people that he could
not hear over the phone, and that any unlikely call that came for him would
have to be taken down and relayed to him.
He had to keep an eye on his other self, so he did renew one old
contact. With one firm in New York there was a man he had called on
regularly; this man had a cheerful and open mind that would not he spooked
by the unusual. Clem began to meet this man (Why should we lie about it? His
name was Joe Zabotsky.) not at the firm; but at an after-hours place which
he knew Joe frequented.
Joe heard Clem's story and believed it -- after he had phoned (in
Clem's presence) the other Clem, located him a thousand miles away, and
ordered an additional month's supply of the unique product which they didn't
really need, things being a little slow in all lines right then.
After that, Clem would get around to see Joe Zabotsky an average of
once a month, about the time he figured the other Clem had just completed
his monthly New York call.
"He's changing a little bit, and so are you," Joe told Clem one
evening. "Yeah, it was with him just about like with you. He did lose a lot
of weight a while back, what you call the critical day, and he gained it
back pretty quick just like you did. It bugs me, Clem, which of you I used
to know. There are some old things between us that he recalls and you don't;
there are some that you recall and he doesn't; and dammit there are some you
both recall, and they happened between myself and one man only, not between
myself and two men.
"But these last few months your face seems to be getting a little
fuller, and his a little thinner. You still look just alike, but not quite
as just-alike as you did at first."
"I know it," Clem said. "I study the analysts now since they don't
do any good at studying me, and I've learned an old analyst's trick. I take
an old face-on photo of myself, divide it down the center, and then complete
each half with its mirror image. It gives two faces just a little bit
different. Nobody has the two sides of his face quite alike. These two
different faces are supposed to indicate two different aspects of the
personality. I study myself, now, and I see that I am becoming more like one
of the constructions; so he must be becoming more like the other
construction. He mentions that there are disturbances between Veronica and
himself, does he? And neither of them quite understands what is the matter?
Neither do I."
Clem lived modestly, but he began to drink more than he had. He
watched, through his intermediary Joe and by other means, the doings of his
other self. And he waited. This was the most peculiar deal he had ever met,
but he hadn't been foxed on very many deals.
"He's no smarter than I am," Clem insisted. "But, by cracky, if he's
me, he's pretty smart at that. What would he do if he were in my place? And
I guess, in a way, he is."
Following his avocation of drinking and brooding and waiting, Clem
frequented various little places, and one day he was in the Two-Faced Bar
and Grill. This was owned and operated by Two-Face Terrel, a doubledealer
and gentleman, even something of a dandy. A man had just seated himself at a
dim table with Clem, had been served by Two-Face, and now the man began to
talk. "Why did Matthew have two donkeys?" the man asked.
"Matthew who?" Clem asked. "I don't know what you're talking about."
I'm talking about 21:1-9, of course," the man said. The other
Gospels have only one donkey. Did you ever think about that?"
"No, I'd never given it a thought," Clem said.
"Well, tell me then, why does Matthew have two demoniacs?"
"What?"
"8:28-34. The other evangelists have only one crazy man."
"Maybe there was only one loony at first, and he drove the guy
drinking next to him crazy."
"That's possible. Oh, you're kidding. But why does Matthew have two
blind men?"
"Number of a number, where does this happen?" Clem asked.
"9:27-31, and again 20:29-34. In each case the other gospelers have
only one blind man. Why does Matthew double so many things? There are other
instances of it."
"Maybe he needed glasses," Clem said.
"No," the man whispered, "I think he was one of us."
"What 'us' are you talking about?" Clem asked But already he had
begun to suspect that his case was not unique. Suppose that it happened one
time out of a million? There would still be several hundred such sundered
persons in the country, and they would tend to congregate-in such places as
the Two-Faced Bar and Grill. And there was something deprived or riven about
almost every person who came into the place.
And remember," the man was continuing, "the name or cognomen of one
of the other Apostles was 'The Twin.' But of whom was he twin? I think there
was the beginning of a group of them there already."
"He wants to see you," Joe Zabotsky told Clem when they met several
months later. "So does she."
"When did he begin to suspect that there was another one of me?"
"He knew something was wrong from the first. A man doesn't lose a
hundred pounds in an instant without there being something wrong. And he
knew something was very wrong when all his accounts were cleaned out. These
were not forgeries, and he knew it. They were not as good as good forgeries,
for they were hurried and all different and very nervous. But they were all
genuine signatures, he admitted that. Damn, you are a curious fellow, Clem!"
"How much does Veronica know, and how? What does she want? What does
he?" "He says that she also began to guess from the first. 'You act like
you're only half a man, Clem,' she would say to him, to you, that is. She
wants to see more of her husband, she says, the other half. And he wants to
trade places with you, at least from time to time on a trial basis."
"I won't do it! Let him stew in it!" Then Clem called Clem a name so
vile that it will not be given here.
"Take it easy, Clem," Joe remonstrated. "It's yourself you are
calling that."
There was a quizzical young-old man who came sometimes into the
Two-Faced Bar and Grill. They caught each other's eye this day, and the
young-old began to talk.
"Is not consciousness the thing that divides man from the animals?"
he asked. "But consciousness is a double thing, a seeing one's self; not
only a knowing, but a knowing that one knows. So the human person is of its
essence double. How this is commonly worked out in practice, I don't
understand. Our present states are surely not the common thing."
"My own consciousness isn't intensified since my person is doubled,"
Clem said. "It's all the other way. My consciousness is weakened. I've
become a creature of my own unconscious. There's something about you that I
don't like, man."
"The animal is simple and single," the young-old man said "It lacks
true reflexive consciousness. But man is dual (though I don't understand the
full meaning of it here) and he has at least intimations of true
consciousness And what is the next step?"
I fathom you now," Clem said. "My father would have called you a
Judas Priest."
I don't quite call myself that. But what follows the singularity of
the animal and duality of man? You recall the startling line of Chesterton?
-- 'we trinitarians have known it is not good for God to be alone.' But was
His case the same as ours? Did He do a violent double take, or triple take,
when He discovered one day that there were Three of Him? Has He ever
adjusted to it? Is it possible that He can?"
"Aye, you're a Judas Priest. I hate the species."
But I am not, Mr. Clendenning. I don't understand this sundering any
more than you do. It happens only one time in a million, but it has happened
to us. Perhaps it would happen to God but one time in a billion billion, hut
it has happened. The God who is may be much rarer than any you can imagine.
"Let me explain: my other person is a very good man, much better
than when we were conjoined. He's a dean already, and he'll be a bishop
within five years. Whatever of doubt and skepticism that was in me
originally is still in the me here present, and it is somehow intensified. I
do not want to be dour or doubting. I do not want to speak mockingly of the
great things. But the bothering things are all in the me here. The other me
is freed of them.
"Do you think that there might have a been a sundered-off Napoleon
who was a bumbler at strategy and who was a nervous little coward? Did there
remain in backwoods Kentucky for many years a sundered-off Lincoln who gave
full rein to his inborn delight in the dirty story, the dirty deal, the
barefoot life, the loutishness growing? Was there a sundered-off Augustine
who turned ever more Manichean, who refined more and more his arts of false
logic and fornication, who howled against reason, who joined the cultishness
of the crowd? Is there an anti-Christ -- the man who fled naked from the
garden at dusk leaving his garment behind? We know that both do not keep the
garment at the moment of sundering."
"Damned if I know, Judas Priest. Your own father-name abomination,
was there another of him? Was he better or worse? I leave you."
"She is in town and is going to meet you tonight," Joe Zabotsky told
Clem at their next monthly meeting. "We've got it all set up."
"No, no, not Veronica!" Clem was startled. "I'm not ready for it."
"She is. She's a strong-minded woman, and she knows what she wants."
"No she doesn't, Joe. I'm afraid of it. I haven't touched a woman
since Veronica."
"Damn it, Clem, this is Veronica that we're talking about. It isn't
as though you weren't still married to her."
"I'm still afraid of it, Joe. I've become something unnatural now.
Where am I supposed to meet her? Oh, oh you son of a snake! I can feel her
presence. She was already in the place when 1 came in. No, no, Veronica, I'm
not the proper one. It's all a case of mistaken identity."
"It sure is, Clem Clam," said the strong-minded Veronica as she came
to their table. "Come along now. You're going to have more explaining to do
than any man I ever heard of."
But I can't explain it, Veronica. I can't explain any of it."
"You will try real hard, Clem. We both will. Thank you, Mr.
Zabotsky, for your discretion in an odd situation."
Well, it went pretty well, so well in fact there had to be a catch
to it. Veronica was an unusual and desirable woman, and Clem had missed her.
They did the town mildly. They used to do it once a year, but they had been
apart in their present persons for several years. And yet Veronica would
want to revisit "that little place we were last year, oh, but that wasn't
you, was it, Clem? -- that was Clem," and that kind of talk was confusing.
They dined grandly, and they talked intimately but nervously. There
was real love between them, or among them, or around them somehow. They
didn't understand how it had turned grotesque.
"He never quite forgave you for clearing out the accounts," Veronica
said. "But it was my money, Veronica," Clem insisted. "I earned it by the
sweat of my tongue and my brain. He had nothing to do with it."
"But you're wrong, dear Clem. You worked equally for it when you
were one. You should have taken only half of it."
They came back to Veronica's hotel, and one of the clerks looked at
Clem suspiciously.
"Didn't you just go up, and then come down, and then go up again?"
he asked.
"I have my ups and downs, but you may mean some thing else," Clem
said. "Now don't be nervous, dear," Veronica said. They were up in
Veronica's room now, and Clem was looking around very nervously. He had
jumped at a mirror, not being sure that it was.
"I am still your wife," Veronica said, "and nothing has changed,
except everything. I don't know how, but I'm going to put things together
again. You have to have missed me! Give now!" And she swept him off his feet
as though he were a child. Clem had always loved her for her sudden
strength. If you haven't been up in Veronica's arms, then you haven't been
anywhere.
"Get your pumpkin-picking hands off my wife, you filthy oaf!" a
voice cracked out like a bullwhip, and Veronica dropped Clem thuddingly from
the surprise of it.
"Oh, Clem!" she said with exasperation, "you shouldn't have come
here when I was with Clem. Now you've spoiled everything. You can't be
jealous of each other. You're the same man. Let's all pack up and go home
and make the best of it. Let people talk if they want to."
"Well, I don't know what to do," Clem said. "This isn't the way.
There isn't any way at all. Nothing can ever be right with us when we are
three."
"There is a way," Veronica said with sudden steel in her voice. "You
boys will just have to get together again. I am laying down the law now. For
a starter each of you lose a hundred pounds. I give you a month for it.
You're both on bread and water from now on. No, come to think of it, no
bread! No water either; that may be fattening, too. You're both on nothing
for a month."
"We won't do it," both Clems said. "It'd kill us."
"Let it kill you then," Veronica said. "You're no good to me the way
you are. You'll lose the weight. I think that will be the trigger action.
Then we will all go back to Rock Island or whatever town that was and get
the same hotel room where one of you rose in a daze and left the other one
unconscious on the bed. We will recreate those circumstances and see if you
two can't get together again."
"Veronica," Clem said, "it is physically and biologically
impossible."
"Also topologically absurd."
"You should have thought of that when you came apart. All you have
to do now is get together again. Do it! I'm laying down an ultimatum.
There's no other way. You two will just have to get together again."
"There is another way," Clem said in a voice so sharp that it scared
both Veronica and Clem.
"What? What is it?" they asked him.
"Veronica, you've got to divide," Clem said. "You've got to come
apart."
"Oh, no. No!"
"Now you put on a hundred pounds just as fast as you can, Veronica.
Clem," Clem said, "go get a dozen steaks up here for her to start on. And
about thirty pounds of bone meal, whatever that is. It sounds like it might
help.""I'll do it, I'll do it," Clem cried, "and a couple of gallons of
blood-pudding. Hey, I wonder where I can get that much blood-pudding this
time of night?"
"Boys, are you serious? Do you think it'll work?" Veronica gasped.
"I'll try anything. How do I start?"
"Think divisive thoughts," Clem shouted as he started out for the
steaks and bone meal and blood-pudding.
"I don't know any," Veronica said. "Oh, yes I do! I'll think them.
We'll do everything! We'll make it work."
"You have a lot going for you, Veronica," Clem said. "You've always
been a double-dealer. And your own mother always said that you were
two-faced."
"Oh, I know it, I know it! We'll do everything. We'll make it work.
We'll leave no stone unthrown."
"You've got to become a pair, Veronica," Clem said at one of their
sessions. "Think of pairs."
"Crocodiles and alligators, Clem," she said, "frogs and toads. Eels
and lampreys."
"Horses and asses, Veronica," Clem said, "elk and moose. Rabbits and
hares."
"Mushrooms and toadstools, Veronica," Clem said. "Mosses and
lichens. Butterflies and moths."
"Camels and dromedaries, Clem," Veronica said. "Salamanders and
newts, dragonfly and damselfly."
Say, they thought about pairs by the long ton. They thought every
kind of sundering and divisive thought. They plumbed the depths of
psychology and biology, and called in some of the most respected quacks of
the city for advice.
No people ever tried anything harder. Veronica and Clem and Clem did
everything they could think of. They gave it a month. "I'll do it or bust,"
Veronica said.
And they came close, so close that you could feel it. Veronica
weighed up a hundred pounds well within the month, and then coasted in on
double brandies. It was done all hut the final thing.
Pay homage to her, people! She was a valiant woman! They both said
that about her after it was over with.
They would admire her as long as they lived. She had given it
everything.
"I'll do it or bust," she had said.
And after they had gathered her remains together and buried her, it
left a gap in their lives, in Clem's more than in Clem's, since Clem had
already been deprived of her for these last several years.
And a special honor they paid her.
They set two headstones on her grave. One of them said 'Veronica.'
And the other one said 'Veronica.'
She'd have liked that.
THE ULTIMATE CREATURE
I
The old Galaxy maps (imitating early Earth maps, partly in humor and
partly through intuition) pictured strong creatures in the far arms of the
system -- Serpents bigger than Spaceships, Ganymede-type Tigers, fish-tailed
Maids, grand Dolphins, and Island-sized Androids. We think particularly of
the wry masterpieces of Grobin. And at the end of the Far or Seventh arm of
the Galaxy is shown the Ultimate Creature.
The Ultimate Creature had the form of a Woman, and it bore three
signs in Chaldee: The Sign of Treasure; the Sign of the Fish Mashur (the
queerest fish of them all); and the Sign of Restitution or of Floating
Justice.
Floating Justice is the ethical equivalent of the Isostasis of the
Geologists. It states in principle that every unbalance will be brought into
new balance, sometimes gently, sometimes as by planet-quake; that the most
submerged may be elevated, by a great sundering of strata, to the highest
point, if such is required for compensation. And there is a final tenet of
this Floating Justice, that some day, somewhere, the meanest man of all the
worlds will possess the ultimate treasure of the worlds. Without this
promise, the worlds would be out of balance forever.
The meanest man of all the worlds was Peter Feeney -- a low-down sniveler, a
weak man. In one thing only he was exceptional -- he had the finest eye for
beauty in a woman of any man anywhere: this, though of all men he was the
least successful with women. His purity of appraisal was not dulled by close
contact or possession. His judgments of beauty were sound and uncompromised,
though sometimes bitter.
And really, how many beautiful women are there in the Universe?
Six.
Only six? Are you sure? All that noise has been about only six of
them?
Pete Feeney was sure. His rapid eyes -- the only rapid things about
him -- had scanned millions of women in his random travels. And only six of
the women could be called beautiful.
There was the lady on Mellionella, seen only once in a crowd,
followed and lost, and never seen again in a year's search.
There was the girl in a small town on East Continent of Hokey
Planet. And this girl there was something that caused agony to Peter: he
had heard her speak; she spoke like a girl in a small town on East Continent
of Hokey Planet. He prayed that she might be struck dumb; knowing that it
was an evil prayer, knowing that she was one of the really beautiful ones,
whatever the sound of her.
There was the girl of shallow virtue on Leucite. She was perfect.
What else can you say after that?
There was the mother of six on Camiroi -- no longer young, of no
particular repose or station or ease, hurried, impatient, and quite likely
the most beautiful woman who ever lived.
On Trader Planet there was a young Jewess of bewildering kindness
and frankness and of inextricably entangled life.
In San Juan, on old Earth, there was a fine creature who conbined
the three main ethnic strains of old mankind. Peter made a second journey
there to see her; after first vision and departure he had not been able to
believe what he had seen.
Six in all the worlds? Somehow there should have been more beautiful
women than that.
Then Peter saw Teresa.
And she made the seventh?
No. She made the first. The six faded. There was only one. The most
beautiful woman ever, in the farthest arm of the Galaxy -- the Ultimate
Creature.
II
This was on Groll's Planet. To get there, said the agent in
Electrum, you go to the end of the Galaxy, and turn left. It was a shabby
little world in the boondocks that are beyond the boondocks, and only shabby
people came there.
Peter Feeney was a salesman of a Universe-wide product. He wasn't a
good salesman. He was shuffled off to poorer and poorer territories. Now he
had fallen to the poorest territory of all.
And on that day on Groll's Planet, he beard a sound as though a
swish of silk had passed over him, a thread, a mesh. It was the invisible
net. "Oh how strange are the Fish of Far Ocean!" an ancient poet
exclaimed.
Peter had seen Teresa, and it was all over with him.
Peter was eating that day by peculiar arrangement. It was the
smallest of the towns of Groll's Planet and there was no public eating place
there. But a Grollian man raked clean sand and set a mat for Peter to sit
on, and served him a meal there on a crate or box. The man also gave him
coffee -- good coffee, but not like the coffee you know.
It was very like a sidewalk-cafe. It was in the way where people
came and went, though not properly a sidewalk. Teresa came and sat down
opposite Peter on the raked sand.
"Hari bagus," Peter said, which is all the words that a man needs to
get along in the Grollian language.
"Bagus," said Teresa. And that is all that they said to each other
that dav.
Peter finished his meal and attempted to light a cigar. The cigars
of that world are not factory made. They are rolled by hand of an oblong
leaf for the flier and a triangular leaf for the wrapper. Often they will
keep their form for an hour or more, but Peter had made his cigar badly and
it was not stable.
Now it exploded into an unmanageable disarray of leaves and pieces,
and Peter was unable to cope with it. Teresa took the pieces and rolled and
folded them into a green cylinder that was sheer art. She licked it with the
most beautiful tongue in the world and gave the reconstituted cigar to
Peter.Then it was luxurious to sit there in the green shade and smoke
opposite the most beautiful woman ever. When he had finished, Peter rose
awkwardly and left. But he was pleased.
He watched from a distance. Teresa with quick competence ate up all
that he had left. "She was very hungry," Peter said, and admired her
quickness about things. She rose with flowing grace, retrieved the
smoldering remnants of Peter's cigar, and went toward the beach, trailing
smoke from the green-leaf stogie and moving like a queen.
The next day Peter again sat on the mat on the raked sand and ate
the food that the Grollian man sold him. Once more he felt the swish of the
invisible net over him, and again Teresa sat opposite him on the sand.
"A senhora tem grande beleze," said Peter, which is all the words
that a man needs to get along in the Galactic Brazilian language.
"Noa em nossos dias," said Teresa, "porem outrora." And that is all
that they said to each other that day.
But he had told her that she was beautiful. And she had answered:
No, she was not so now, but in a former time she had been.
When he had finished the meal and pulled the cigar from his pocket
he was pleased when it exploded into its constituent parts. Teresa rescued
it, reassembled it, and licked it. Her tongue had a tripart curve in it,
more extensible, more flexible, more beautiful than other tongues. Then
Peter rose and left as he had the day before. And again Teresa cleaned up
the remnants -- ravenously and beautifully. He watched her till she finally
went toward the beach haloed in blue smoke from the stub of the cigar.
Peter wrote up an order that day. It was not a good order, not
sufficient to pay expenses, but something. Groll's Planet had acquired a
glow for him, just as if it was a good order he had written up.
On the third day, Peter again sat on the mat that was very like a
sidewalk-cafe, and Teresa was opposite him. Peter told the Grollian man that
he should also bring food for the woman. He brought it, but angrily.
"You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen," said Peter,
which is all the words that a man needs to get along in the English
language.
"I have told you that I am not now beautiful, but that once I was,"
Teresa told him. "Through the grace of God, I may again regain my lost
beauty."
"How is it that you know English?"
"I was the school-teach."
"And now?"
"Now it goes bad for our world. There is no longer schools. I am
nothing."
"What are you, girl? Old human? Groll's Troll? That isn't possible.
What?""Who can say? A book-man has said that the biology of our planet
goes from the odd to the incredible. Was that not nice thing to say about
us? My father was old human, a traveling man, a bum."
"And your mother?"
"A queer fish, mama. Of this world, though."
"And you were once even more beautiful than you are now, Teresa? How
could you have looked?"
"How I looked then? As in English -- Wow! -- a colloquialism." "To me you
are perfect."
"No. I am a poor wasted bird now. But once I was beautiful."
"There must be some livelihood for you. what did your father do?"
"Outside of bum, he was fisherman."
"Then why do you not fish?"
"In my own way, I fish."
Peter heard again the swish of the invisible net, but he was very willing
to be taken by it. After this, things went famously between them.
But two days later there came a shame to Peter. He and Teresa were
sitting and eating together on the mat, and the Grollian man came out.
"Are you near finished?" he asked Peter.
"Yes, I am near finished. Why do you ask?"
"Are you finished with the fork yet?"
"No, not quite finished with it."
"I must have the fork," the Grollian man said. "There is another
摘要：

STORIESBYR.A.LAFFERTYPART2*45.CamelsandDromedaries,Clem*46.TheUltimateCreature47.HowTheyGaveItBack50.McGruder'sMarvels51.ThisGrandCarcassYet*52.MaybeJonesandtheCity*53.OneAtaTime55.CliffsThatLaughed56.ConfigurationoftheNorthShore59.RideaTinCan61.Crocodile*62.AboutaSecretCrocodile63.TheCliffClimbers6...

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