entrance of a fat man clutching the leaden effigy of a black bird to his chest, closely followed by Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Peter Lorre, and – in a surprise cameo appearance – Albert Dekker! ‘This is more like it!’ the writer said, and proceeded to type furiously while smoking two cigarettes.
Crompton ambled on. The setting for the Episodes Division was a long, rather indistinct street in an unknown city. As visitors walked along, looking for amusement, fragments of conversation and bits of action unrolled with pleasing ambiguity. They could walk on and see what the next episode would bring, or stop wherever they pleased and take part in the unfolding situation.
Matters didn’t actually work out that well, due to irreconcilable nomenclatural and procedural differences caused by the crowded presence and divergent demands of various humanoform but mutually unviable races. The producers of Episodes welcomed the resultant dense ambiguous proximities while deploring them publicly; for nearness and strangeness forever lure the curious despite their pious protestations. And that means money, a commodity that the Aaians had arbitrarily decided to value for a few centuries just to see if there was anything in it.
As Crompton walked along, he heard a double-joined and irrepressible trelizond in full autumn plumage remark to its three brothers, ‘I’m leaving for Funthris today, may my place in the nest fall vacant!’ Nearby, a pride of gnoles were tickling a subquasfian tadie into paroxysyms, while chanting, ‘We Move Unmoved through Moving Moves,’ to the consternation of the silent alinopod in the tree. Close to them, one human female was saying to another, ‘I don’t know who could help you with a problem like that, Josie.’ Nearby, seven muns were trying to engage in sexual psillicosis by parentian closure – rather pathetically, since they lacked the all-important badminton equipment. There were more ominous matters happening nearby, where a barbizan in leaf mail and pointed olymphat was tapping a message of disillusion on the thorax and subabdominal feelers of an insidious and falsely smiling lunter, caught red-handed in the illicit and impossible act of surrogate transformation.
None of these scenes caught Crompton’s fancy, of course. Each was intended to titillate the senses of a particular deviant of a particular humanoform – but not necessarily human – species. Most of what these creatures were doing to one another was incomprehensible to Crompton, just as what humans do to each other is meaningless to other humanoforms. This is the situation of ultimate reciprocal bewilderment, and it renders our own vaunted incomprehension of ourselves and our fellow man as pretty small potatoes indeed.
Crompton was reduced to staring around him, bewildered, a disembodied intelligence floating through scenes from some surrealistic hell, as this pageant of creatures acted out exotic emotions representative of their indescribable realities.
It was senseless for him to continue in this way. He turned back, pushing past two tadies tap-dancing on the broad, shovel-shaped nose of a molting barbizan, and other, even less savory sights, until he came to the main gate and the typewriting writer.
‘You seem to know a lot,’ Crompton said to him. ‘Maybe you could tell me where I’d find Edgar Loomis?’
‘You’ve come to the right man,’ the writer said, turning on his cassette recorder and lighting a third cigarette. ‘I am acting as my own deus ex machina , you know, so it will do no disservice to the formal elegance of my scheme if I tell you that Mr. Loomis is in the fourth scene to your left, and his drama is even now ending. I fear you must hurry, my friend. But before you go, let me say a word or two about your overall situation.’ There followed a ten-minute lecture on various nuances and subtleties that Crompton had almost certainly overlooked in his appraisal of where it was all at. During
Crompton ambled on. The setting for the Episodes Division was a long, rather indistinct street in an unknown city. As visitors walked along, looking for amusement, fragments of conversation and bits of action unrolled with pleasing ambiguity. They could walk on and see what the next episode would bring, or stop wherever they pleased and take part in the unfolding situation.
Matters didn’t actually work out that well, due to irreconcilable nomenclatural and procedural differences caused by the crowded presence and divergent demands of various humanoform but mutually unviable races. The producers of Episodes welcomed the resultant dense ambiguous proximities while deploring them publicly; for nearness and strangeness forever lure the curious despite their pious protestations. And that means money, a commodity that the Aaians had arbitrarily decided to value for a few centuries just to see if there was anything in it.
As Crompton walked along, he heard a double-joined and irrepressible trelizond in full autumn plumage remark to its three brothers, ‘I’m leaving for Funthris today, may my place in the nest fall vacant!’ Nearby, a pride of gnoles were tickling a subquasfian tadie into paroxysyms, while chanting, ‘We Move Unmoved through Moving Moves,’ to the consternation of the silent alinopod in the tree. Close to them, one human female was saying to another, ‘I don’t know who could help you with a problem like that, Josie.’ Nearby, seven muns were trying to engage in sexual psillicosis by parentian closure – rather pathetically, since they lacked the all-important badminton equipment. There were more ominous matters happening nearby, where a barbizan in leaf mail and pointed olymphat was tapping a message of disillusion on the thorax and subabdominal feelers of an insidious and falsely smiling lunter, caught red-handed in the illicit and impossible act of surrogate transformation.
None of these scenes caught Crompton’s fancy, of course. Each was intended to titillate the senses of a particular deviant of a particular humanoform – but not necessarily human – species. Most of what these creatures were doing to one another was incomprehensible to Crompton, just as what humans do to each other is meaningless to other humanoforms. This is the situation of ultimate reciprocal bewilderment, and it renders our own vaunted incomprehension of ourselves and our fellow man as pretty small potatoes indeed.
Crompton was reduced to staring around him, bewildered, a disembodied intelligence floating through scenes from some surrealistic hell, as this pageant of creatures acted out exotic emotions representative of their indescribable realities.
It was senseless for him to continue in this way. He turned back, pushing past two tadies tap-dancing on the broad, shovel-shaped nose of a molting barbizan, and other, even less savory sights, until he came to the main gate and the typewriting writer.
‘You seem to know a lot,’ Crompton said to him. ‘Maybe you could tell me where I’d find Edgar Loomis?’
‘You’ve come to the right man,’ the writer said, turning on his cassette recorder and lighting a third cigarette. ‘I am acting as my own deus ex machina , you know, so it will do no disservice to the formal elegance of my scheme if I tell you that Mr. Loomis is in the fourth scene to your left, and his drama is even now ending. I fear you must hurry, my friend. But before you go, let me say a word or two about your overall situation.’ There followed a ten-minute lecture on various nuances and subtleties that Crompton had almost certainly overlooked in his appraisal of where it was all at. During
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