"You're in a talkative mood this morning. Why don't you go in and talk to Manlegs? You know how his version of what happens in star-realms amuses you.”
"But, Mother, which version is true, his or ours?”
She hesitated before giving him her answer; it was a wretchedly difficult answer, yet only through it lay an understanding of the world of affairs. She said: "Frequently there are several versions of truth.”
He brushed the remark aside.
"But it was the priesthood that went beyond the Triple Suns who first met the Manlegs, wasn't it?”
"Why don't you lie still and ripen up?”
"Didn't you tell me they met on a world called Grud-grodd, only a few years after I was born?”
"Ainson told you that in the first place.”
"It was you who told me that trouble would come from the meeting.
The first encounter between utod and man occurred ten years after the birth of Snok Snok. As Snok Snok said, this encounter was staged on the planet his race called Grudgrodd. Had it happened on a different planet, had different protagonists been involved, the outcome of the whole matter might have been other than it was. Had someone ... but there is little point in embarking on conditionals. There are no "ifs" in history, only in the minds of observers reviewing it, and for all the progress we make, nobody has proved that chance is other than a statistical delusion invented by man. We can only say that events between man and utod fell out in such and such a way.
This narrative will chronicle these events with as little comment as possible, leaving the reader on his honour to remember that what Quequo said applies as much to man as to aliens: truths arrive in as many forms as lies.
Grudgrodd looked tolerable enough to the first utods who inspected it.
Autodian star-realm-ark had landed in a wide valley, inhospitable, rocky, cold, and covered with knee-high thistles for the greater part of its length, but nevertheless closely resembling some of the benighted spots one happened on in the northern hemisphere of Dapdrof. A pair of grorgs were sent out through the hatch, to return in half an hour intact and breathing heavily. Odds were, the place was habitable.
Ceremonial filth was shoveled out on to the ground and the Sacred Cosmopolitan was induced to excrete out of the hatch, in the universal gesture of fertility.
"I think it's a mistake," he said. The utodian for "a mistake" was Grudgrodd (as far as an atonal grunt can be rendered at an into terrestrial script), and from then on the planet was known as Grudgrodd.
Still inclined to protest, the Cosmopolitan stepped out, followed by his three Politans, and the planet was claimed as an appendage of the Triple Suns.
Four priestlings scurried busily about, clearing a circle in the thistles on the edge of the river. With all their six limbs deretracted, they worked swiftly, two of them scooping soil out of the circle, and then allowing the water to trickle in from one side, while the other two trod the resulting mud into a rich rebarbative treacle.
Watching the work abstractedly with his rear eyes, the Cosmopolitan stood on the edge of the growing crater and argued as strongly as ever a utod could on the rights and wrongs of landing on a planet not of the Triple Suns. As strongly as they could, the three Politans argued back.
"The Sacred Feeling is quite clear," said the Cosmopolitan. "As children of the Triple Suns, our defecations must touch no planets unlit by the Triple Suns; there are limits to all things, even fertility." He extended a limb up-wards, where a large mauve globe as big as an ammp fruit peered coldly at them over a bank of cloud. "Is that apology for a sun Saffron Smiler? Do you take it for Welcome White? Can you even mistake it for Yellow Scowler? No, no, my friends, that mauve misery is an alien, and we waste our substance on it.”
The first Politan said, "Every word you say is incontrovertible. But we are not here entirely by option.
We ran into a star-realm turbulence that carried us several thousand orbits off course. This planet just happened to be our nearest haven.”
"As usual you speak only the truth," the Cosmopolitan said. "But we needn't have landed here. A month's flight would have taken us back to the Triple Suns and Dapdrof, or one of her sister planets. It does seem a bit unholy of us.”
"I don't think you need worry too much about that, Cosmopolitan," said the second Politan. He had the heavy grayish green skin of one born while an esod was actually taking place, and was perhaps the easiest going of all the priesthood. "Look at it this way. The Triple Suns round which Dapdrof revolve only form three of the six stars in the Home Ouster. Those six stars possess between them eight worlds capable of supporting life as we know it. After Dapdrof, we count the other seven worlds as equally holy and fit for utodammp, though some of them - Buskey for instance - revolve round one of the three lesser stars of the cluster. So the criterion of what is utodammp-' worthy is not that it has to revolve about one of the Triple Suns. Now we ask -”
But the Cosmopolitan, who was a better speaker than a listener, as befitted a utod in his position, cut his companion short "Let us ask no more, friend. I just observed that it seemed a bit unholy of us. I didn't mean any criticism. But we are setting a precedent." He scratched his grorg judicially.
With great tolerance, the third Politan (whose name was Blue Lugug) said, "I agree with every word you say, Cosmopolitan. But we do not know if we are setting a precedent Our history is so long that it may be that many and many a crew branched out into the star-realm and there, on some far planet, set up a new swamp to the glory of utodammp. Why, if we look around, we may even find utods established here.'1 "You persuade me utterly; in the Revolution Age, such a thing could easily have happened," said the Cosmopolitan, in relief. Stretching out all six of his limbs, he waved them ceremonially to include ground and sky. "I pronounce all this to be land belonging to the Triple Suns. Let defecation commence.”
They were happy. They grew even happier. And who could not be happy? With ease and fertility at hand, they were at home.
The mauve sun disappeared in disgrace, and almost at once a snowball-bright satellite wearing a rakish halo of dust sprang out of the horizon and rose swiftly above them. Used to great changes of temperature, the eight utods did not mind the increasing cold of night. In their newly-built wallow, they wallowed. Their sixteen attendant grorgs wallowed with them, clinging with sucker fingers tenaciously to their hosts when the utods submerged beneath the mud.
Slowly they imbibed the feel of the new world. It lapped at their bodies, yielded up meanings incapable of translation into their terms.
In the sky overhead gleamed the Home Cluster, six stars arranged in the shape - or so the least intellectual of the priestling claimed - of one of the grails that swam the tempestuous seas of Smeksmer.
"We needn't have worried," said the Cosmopolitan happily. "The Triple Suns are still shining on us here. We needn't hurry back at all. Perhaps at the end of the week we'll plant a few ammp seeds and then move homewards.”
"... Or at the end of the week after next," said the third Politan. comfortable in his mud bath.
To complete their contentment, the Cosmopolitan gave them a brief religious address. They lay and listened to the web of bis discourse as it was spun out of his eight orifices. He pointed out how the ammp trees and the utods were dependent upon each other, how the yield of the one depended on the yield of the other. He dwelt on the significances of the word "yield" before going on to point out how both the trees and the utods (both being the manifestations of one spirit) depended on the light yield that poured from whichever of the Triple Suns they moved about. This light was the droppings of the suns, which made it a little absurd as well as miraculous. They should never forget, any of them, that they also partook of the absurd as well as the miraculous. They must never get exalted or puffed up; for were not even their gods formed in the divine shape of a turdling?