Certainly he had no intention of going back. He was regaining his youth. Though he ate well, he was losing weight, and his muscles were getting stronger and harder. He had a spring in his legs and a sense of joy lost sometime during his early twenties. The seventh morning, he had rubbed his scalp and discovered that it was covered with little bristles. The tenth morning, he woke up with pain in his gums. He rubbed the swollen flesh and wondered if he were going to be sick. He had forgotten that there was such a thing as disease, for he had been extremely well and none of the beach crowd, as he called them, ever seemed ill.
His gums continued to hurt him for a week, after which he took to drinking the naturally fermented liquor in the “punchnut.” This grew in great clusters high at the top of a slender tree with short, fragile, mauve branches and tobacco-pipe-shaped yellow leaves. When its leathery rind was cut open with a sharp stone, it exuded an odor as of fruity punch. It tasted like a gin tonic with a dash of cherry bitters and had a kick like a slug of tequila. It worked well in killing both the pain in his gums and the irritation the pain had generated in him.
Nine days after he first experienced the trouble with his gums, ten tiny, white, hard teeth began to shove through the flesh. Moreover, the gold fillings in the others were being pushed out by the return of the natural material. And a thick black growth covered his formerly bald pate.
This was not all. The swimming, running, and climbing had melted off the fat. The prominent veins of old age had sunk back into smooth firm flesh. He could run for long stretches without being winded or feel as if his heart would burst. All this he delighted in, but not without wondering why and how it had come about.
He asked several among the beach-crowd about their seemingly universal youth. They had one reply: “It’s the Lord’s will.”
At first he thought they were speaking of the Creator, which seemed strange to him. As far as he could tell, they had no religion. Certainly they did not have one with any organized approach, rituals, or sacraments.
“Who is the Lord?” he asked. He thought that perhaps he had mistranslated their word wanaks, that it might have a slightly different meaning than that found in Homer.
Ipsewas, the zebrilla, the most intelligent of all he had so far met, answered, “He lives on top of the world, beyond Okeanos.” Ipsewas pointed up and over the sea, toward the mountain range at its other side. “The Lord lives in a beautiful and impregnable palace on top of the world. He it was who made this world and who made us. He used to come down often to make merry with us. We do as the Lord says and play with him. But we are always frightened. If he becomes angry or is displeased, he is likely to kill us. Or worse.”
Wolff smiled and nodded his head. So Ipsewas and the others had no more rational explanation of the origins or workings of their world than the people of his. But the beach-crowd did have one thing lacking on Earth. They had uniformity of opinion. Everyone he asked gave him the same answer as the zebrilla.
“It is the will of the Lord. He made the world, he made us.”
“How do you know?” Wolff asked. He did not expect any more than he had gotten on Earth when he asked the question. But he was surprised.
“Oh,” replied a mermaid, Paiawa, “the Lord told us so. Besides, my mother told me, too. She ought to know. The Lord made her body; she remembers when he did it, although that was so long, long ago.”
“Indeed?” Wolff said, wondering whether or not she were pulling his leg, and thinking also that it would be difficult to retaliate by doing the same to her. “And where is your mother? I’d like to talk to her.”
Paiawa waved a hand toward the west. “Somewhere along there.”
“Somewhere” could be thousands of miles away, for he had no idea how far the beach extended.
“I haven’t seen her for a long time,” Paiawa added.
“How long?” Wolff said.
Paiawa wrinkled her lovely brow and pursed her lips. Very kissable, Wolff thought. And that body! The return of his youth was bringing back a strong awareness of sex.
Paiawa smiled at him and said, “You are showing some interest in me, aren’t you?”
He flushed and would have walked away, but he wanted an answer to his question. “How many years since you saw your mother?” he asked again.
Paiawa could not answer. The word for “year” was not in her vocabulary.
He shrugged and walked swiftly away, to disappear behind the savagely colored foliage by the beach. She called after him, archly at first, then angrily when it became evident he was not going to turn back. She made a few disparaging remarks about him as compared to the other males. He did not argue with her—it would have been beneath his dignity, and besides, what she said was true. Even though his body was rapidly regaining its youth and strength, it still suffered in comparison with the near-perfect specimens all around him.
He dropped this line of thought, and considered Paiawa’s story. If he could locate her mother or one of her mother’s contemporaries in age, he might be able to find out more about the Lord. He did not discredit Paiawa’s story, which would have been incredible on Earth. These people just did not lie. Fiction was a stranger to them. Such truthfulness had its advantages, but it also meant that they were decidedly limited in imagination and had little humor or wit. They laughed often enough, but it was over rather obvious and petty things. Slapstick was as high as their comedy went—and crude practical jokes.
He cursed because he was having difficulty in staying on his intended track of thought. His trouble with concentration seemed to get stronger every day. Now, what had he been thinking about when he’d strayed off to his unhappiness over his maladjustment with the local society? Oh, yes, Paiawa’s mother! Some of the oldsters might be able to enlighten him—if he could locate any. How could he identify any when all adults looked the same age? There were only a very few youngsters, perhaps three in the several hundred beings he had encountered so far. Moreover, among the many animals and birds here (some rather weird ones, too), only a half-dozen had not been adults.
If there were few births, the scale was balanced by the absence of death. He had seen three dead animals, two killed by accident and the third during a battle with another over a female. Even that had been an accident, for the defeated male, a lemon-colored antelope with four horns curved into figure-eights, had turned to run away and broken his neck while jumping over a log.
The flesh of the dead animal had not had a chance to rot and stink. Several omnipresent creatures that looked like small bipedal foxes with white noses, floppy basset-hound ears, and monkey paws had eaten the corpse within a matter of an hour. The foxes scoured the jungle and scavenged everything—fruit, nuts, berries, corpses. They had a taste for the rotten; they would ignore fresh fruits for bruised. But they were not sour notes in the symphony of beauty and life. Even in the Garden of Eden, garbage collectors were necessary.
At times Wolff would look across the blue, whitecapped Okeanos at the mountain range, called Thayaphayawoed. Perhaps the Lord did live up there. It might be worthwhile to cross the sea and climb up the formidable steeps on the chance that some of the mystery of this universe would be revealed. But the more he tried to estimate the height of Thayaphayawoed, the less he thought of the idea. The black cliffs soared up and up and up until the eye wearied and the mind staggered. No man could live on its top, because there would be no air to breathe.