It was very like a sidewalk-café. 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 day.
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 filler 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-café, 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 human man here, of the better sort. I must have the fork for him to eat with.”
“Have you but one?”
“Am I a millionaire that I should have a multiplicity of forks in my house? He is a man with an important look, and I will not have him wait.”
“This is humiliating,” said Peter.
“I don't know what that is. I want my fork.”
Peter gave the fork back to the Grollian man, and that man took it in and set it before the human man of the better sort as a sign of the modernity of his house.
“Were I not the meanest and weakest of men, he would not have abused me so,” Peter said.
“Do you not feel it at all,” Teresa said. “Somebody has to be the meanest and the weakest. The worlds are full of humiliating things. This brings us close together.”
This would have to be the final day for Peter Feeney on Groll's Planet. He had already garnered all the insufficient orders possible for his product. He walked with Teresa and said the difficult things.
“When you have caught one, Teresa, you must do something with it. Even turn it loose if you do not mean to keep it.”
“Do you want I should turn you loose, Peter?”
“No. I want you to go with me on the ship when it goes tonight.”
“There is only one way I will go.”
“I have never thought of any other way.”
“You will never have cause to be ashamed of me, Peter. I can dress, where I have the means for it. I can play the lady, I understand how it is done. I have even learned to walk in shoes. Were we in some more lucky place, it might be that I would regain my beauty. It is the grinding hard times that took it from me. I would change your luck. I have the languages, and the sense of things, and I am much more intelligent than you are. With me, you could attain a degree of success in even your miserable trade. It can be a good life we make.”
There is a sound when the invisible net is cast over one. There is another sound when it is pulled in — the faint clicking of the floats, the tugging whisper of the weights, the squeaking of the lines when pulled taut. Teresa was a fisherman's daughter, and she knew how to do it. The Peter-fish was not a large nor a fat one, but she knew that he was the best she could take in these waters.
They were married. They left in the ship for a happier place, a better planet in a more amenable location where Teresa might regain her lost beauty. Floating Justice was achieved. All inequities were compensated. The meanest and weakest man in the universe now possessed the Ultimate Treasure of the universe.
Naturally they were happy. And naturally their happiness endured.
“There wasn't a catch to it?” you ask out of a crooked face. “There is always a catch to it. It always goes sour at the end.”
No. There was not a catch to it. It was perfect, and forever. It is only in perverted fables that things go wrong at the end.
They grew in understanding of each other, received the glad news of coming progeny, waxed (by former standards) in wealth, and were no longer mean and inconsequential. Only one man can be married to the most beautiful woman in the universe, and it passes all understanding that that one man should
be Peter Feeney.
This was perfection. It wasn't just that Teresa had regained her “former beauty” and now weighed well over two hundred pounds. Peter liked that part of it.
But is it possible for perfection to become too perfect?
III
For this was perfection. They lived on a kindred but larger and better world, one of richer resources and even more varied biology. They had a love so many-sided and deep that there is no accounting for it, and children so rare and different! Floating Justice had been achieved. The least man in all the worlds did possess the Ultimate Creature. The balance was consummated. But Floating Justice had a grin on his face; there is something a little fishy about anything, even justice, that floats. You understand that there wasn't really a catch to this, nor any deficiency. It was rather a richness almost beyond handling. It was still better for Peter Feeney than for anyone else anywhere. That must be understood.
But, for all that, there was a small adjustment after the great compensation; a proportion must be re-established in all things, even happiness. It was the joke that the old Interior Ocean always cast up, and it must be taken in the salty humor that is intended. Children so rare and so different — and so many of them! No couple was ever so blessed as were Peter and Teresa with a rich variety of children. Some of them were playing and leaping in the hills and rocks behind Peter, and some of them were sporting in the Ocean before him.
Peter whistled some of these sea children up now as he pondered things in the marina. Some of them broke water, splashed, and waved to him. So many of the kids there were, and such good ones!
“Whistle about four of them to come in for dinner!” Teresa called, and Peter did so. It had been an odd business about the children, not unpleasant certainly, but not what he had expected either. And even yet, every possibility was still open to them.
“I'd like to have a people-kid sometime,” Teresa said. “After all, mama had me. A people kid have fun playing with the fish kids, and they like him, too. And he could climb in the rocks with the Groll's Trolls. He would sort of knit our family together. You think about it, Peter, and I think about it too, and we see what we come up with at the next milting time.”
Peter Feeney gazed out at his children in the pools of the sea, and at his other sort of children climbing in the rocks, and he felt an uneasy pride in them all. One comes quickly to love Fish Kids and Groll's Trolls when they are the product of one's own loins. There was ever hope, there would ever be hope to the last, of children of Peter's own kind. But he loved his present progeny not the less for it. The four kids that he had whistled in came now. “Oh, four such pretty kids of ours!” Teresa said. “Fry them, Peter.”
And Peter took the pretty fish kids that came from the water and began to fix them for the pan.
This had taken the longest to get used to. But when you have so many of them — more than ten thousand, and more coming all the time — and when they are so good; and when, moreover, they are already flesh of your flesh.
Peter Feeney fixed the fish kids for the pan. And out of his fullness and mingled emotions, salt tears rolled down his shining face to the salt sea.
Ginny Wrapped In The Sun
“I'm going to read my paper tonight, Dismas,” Dr. Minden said, “and they'll hoot me out of the hall. The thought of it almost makes the hair walk off my head.” “Oh well, serves you right, Minden. From the hints you've given me of it, you can't expect easy acceptance for the paper; but the gentlemen aren't so bad.”
“Not bad? Hauser honks like a gander! That clattering laugh of Goldbeater! Snodden sniggers so loud that it echos! Cooper's boom is like barrels rolling downstairs, and your own — it'll shrivel me, Dismas. Imagine the weirdest cacophony ever — Oh no! I wasn't thinking of one so weird as that!”
Musical screaming! Glorious gibbering with an undertone that could shatter rocks! Hooting of a resonance plainly too deep for so small an instrument! Yowling, hoodoo laughing, broken roaring, rhinoceros grunting! And the child came tumbling out of the tall rocks of Doolen's Mountain, leaping down the flanks of the hill as though she was a waterfall. And both the men laughed.
“Your Ginny is the weirdest cacophony I can imagine, Dismas,” Dr. Minden said. “It scares me, and I love it. Your daughter is the most remarkable creature in the world.
“Talk to us, Ginny! I wish I could fix it that you would be four years old forever.”
“Oh, I've fixed it myself, Dr. Minden,” Ginny sang as she came to them with a movement that had something of the breathless grace of a gazelle and something of the scuttering of a little wild pig. “I use a trick like the hoodoo woman did. She ate water-puppy eggs. She never got any older, you know.”
“What happened to her, Gin?” Dr. Minden asked Ginny Dismas.
“Oh, after a while she got gray-headed and wrinkled. And after another while her teeth and hair fell out, and then she died. But she never did get any older. She had everybody fooled. I got everybody fooled too.”
“I know that you have, Ginny, in very many ways. Well, have you eaten water-puppy eggs to get no older?”
“No. I can't find out where they lay them, Dr. Minden. I've got my own trick that's even better.”
“Do you know, Ginny, that when you really cut loose you are the loudest little girl in the world?”
“I know it. I won it yesterday. Susanna Shonk said that she was the loudest. We hollered for an hour. Susanna's home with a sore throat today, but there isn't anything the matter with me. Hey, has that house ever been there before?”
“That house? But it's our own house, Ginny,” her father, Dr. Dismas, said softly. “You've lived in it all your life. You're in and out of it a thousand times a day.”
“Funny I never saw it before,” Ginny said. “I better go see what it looks like on the inside.” And Ginny hurtled into the house that she was in and out of a thousand times a day.
“I'll tell you a secret, Dismas,” Dr. Minden said. “Your small daughter Ginny is not really beautiful.”
“Everybody thinks that she is, Minden.”
“I know. They all believe her the most beautiful child in the world. So did I till a moment ago. So will I again in minute when I see her come out of the house. But her contemporary, my small son Krios, told me how to look at her; and I do so. For an instant, out of her incessant movement, I forced myself to see her as stopped cold, at rest. She is grotesque, Dismas. If ever she pauses, she is grotesque.”
“No, she is like ultimate matter. Existence and motion are the same thing for her, and there cannot be the one without the other. But I've never seen her stopped, even in sleep. She's the liveliest sleeper anyone ever watched — a laughing and singing sleeper. Her mother calls her our beautiful goblin.”
“Exactly, she's a goblin, a monkey, a kobald. She's even grown a little pot like one of them. Dismas, she has a monkey face and bandy legs and a goblin's own pot.”
“No, she hasn't! There she goes! Out of the house and up into the rocks again, and she's so beautiful that it shakes me. Four years old — and she can still look at the world and say, ‘Funny I never saw you before!’ Yes, I've got a multidimensional daughter, Minden. Also a neighbor who is either deep or murky. You keep feeding me snatches of that paper of yours so I suppose that you want to excite my curiosity about it. And the title — The Contingent Mutation. What is? Who is?”
“We are, Dismas. We are contingent, conditional, temporary, makeshift and improbable in our species. Mine is a paper badly conceived and badly put together, and I shiver at the reception that it will get. But it is about man, who is also badly conceived and badly put together. The proposition of my paper is that man is descended, recently and by incredible mutation, from the most impossible of ancestors, Xauenanthropus or Xauen Man. The answer of that descent scares me.”
“Minden, are you out of your mind? Where is the descent? Where is the mutation? The Xauens were already men. No descent and no mutation was required. The finds are all fifteen years old. One l
ook at Xauen, and everybody saw instantly that the Neanderthals and Grimaldi and Cro-Magnon were all close cousins of the same species — ourselves. They were the template, the master key. They unriddled every riddle. We saw why the chin or lack of chin was only a racial characteristic. We saw it all. There is nothing to distinguish the Xauens from ourselves except that their adults were badly made ganglers, and probably unhealthy. The Xauens are modern men. They are ourselves. There is nothing revolutionary about stuttering out fifteen-year-old certainties, Minden. I thought your paper was to be a giant stride. But it is only stepping off a two-inch curb.”
“Yes, an abysmal step off a two-inch curb, Dismas, backward and around the world, and standing on one's head and turning into a howling monkey in the process. It isn't a simple step. If I am correct, Dismas, then our descent from the Xauens was by an incredible, sudden and single mutation; one that has been misunderstood both as to effect and direction.”
“I've never been quite satisfied with the Xauens myself. There is something misshapen about the whole business. Of course we know the Xauens only by the skeletons of ninety-six children, three adolescents, and two adults. We are bound to find more.”
“If we do, we will find them in the same proportion. Oh, we will not recognize them at all. But does it not seem an odd proportion to you? How come there were so many kids? And how come — think about this a long, long time, will you? — that eighty-six of those kids were of the same size and apparently of the same age? The Xauen skeletons came out of nine digs, close together both in location and age. And of the total of one hundred and one skeletons, eighty-six of them are of four-year-old kids. Sure the Xauens are modern man! Sure they are ourselves chin to chin. But eighty-six four-year-old kids out of a hundred and one people is not a modern proportion.”
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 79