“A hoax, doubtless. But no one can deceive me, for no one knows as much as I about palefaces. Have the merchant come to the palace and show us his wares!”
When they brought the merchant before her, Crystal saw a worthy old man and a cage. In the cage sat the paleface, its face indeed pale, the color of chalk and pyrite, with eyes like a wet fungus and limbs like moldy mire. Ferrix in turn gazed upon the princess, the face that seemed to clank and ring, eyes that sparkled and arced like summer lightning, and the delirium of his heart increased tenfold.
“It does look like a paleface!” thought the princess, but said instead:
“You must have indeed labored, old one, covering this scarecrow with mud and calcareous dust in order to trick me. Know, however, that I am conversant with the mysteries of that powerful and pale race, and as soon as I expose your imposture, both you and this pretender shall be beheaded!”
The sage replied:
“O Princess Crystal, that which you see encaged here is as true a paleface as paleface can be true. I obtained it for five thousand hectares of nuclear material from an inter-galactic pirate—and humbly beseech you to accept it as a gift from one who has no other desire but to please Your Majesty.”
The princess took a sword and passed it through the bars of the cage; the prince seized the edge and guided it through his garments in such a way that the cinnabar bladder was punctured, staining the blade with bright red.
“What is that?” asked the princess, and Ferrix answered:
“Blood!”
Then the princess had the cage opened, entered bravely, brought her face near Ferrix’s. That sweet proximity made his senses reel, but the sage caught his eye with a secret sign and the prince squeezed the bellows that released the rank air. And when the princess asked, “What is that?,” Ferrix answered:
“Breath!”
“Forsooth you are a clever craftsman,” said the princess to the merchant as she left the cage. “But you have deceived me and must die, and your scarecrow also!”
The sage lowered his head, as though in great trepidation and sorrow, and when the prince followed suit, transparent drops flowed from his eyes. The princess asked, “What is that?” and Ferrix answered:
“Tears!”
And she said:
“What is your name, you who profess to be a paleface from afar?”
And Ferrix replied in the words the sage had instructed him:
“Your Highness, my name is Myamlak and I crave nought else but to couple with you in a manner that is liquid, pulpy, doughy and spongy, in accordance with the customs of my people. I purposely permitted myself to be captured by the pirate, and requested him to sell me to this portly trader, as I knew the latter was headed for your kingdom. And I am exceeding grateful to his laminated person for conveying me hither, for I am as full of love for you as a swamp is full of scum.”
The princess was amazed, for truly, he spoke in paleface fashion, and she said:
“Tell me, you who call yourself Myamlak the paleface, what do your brothers do during the day?”
“O Princess,” said Ferrix, “in the morning they wet themselves in clear water, pouring it upon their limbs as well as into their interiors, for this affords them pleasure. Afterwards, they walk to and fro in a fluid and undulating way, and they slush, and they slurp, and when anything grieves them, they palpitate, and salty water streams from their eyes, and when anything cheers them, they palpitate and hiccup, but their eyes remain relatively dry. And we call the wet palpitating weeping, and the dry—laughter.”
“If it is as you say,” said the princess, “and you share your brothers’ enthusiasm for water, I will have you thrown into my lake, that you may enjoy it to your fill, and also I will have them weigh your legs with lead, to keep you from bobbing up…”
“Your Majesty,” replied Ferrix as the sage had taught him, “if you do this, I must perish, for though there is water within us, it cannot be immediately outside us for longer than a minute or two, otherwise we recite the words ‘blub, blub, blub,’ which signifies our last farewell to life.”
“But tell me, Myamlak,” asked the princess, “how do you furnish yourself with the energy to walk to and fro, to squish and to slurp, to shake and to sway?”
“Princess,” replied Ferrix, “there, where I dwell, are other palefaces besides the hairless variety, palefaces that travel predominantly on all fours. These we perforate until they expire, and we steam and bake their remains, and chop and slice, after which we incorporate their corporeality into our own. We know three hundred and seventy-six distinct methods of murdering, twenty-eight thousand five hundred and ninety-seven distinct methods of preparing the corpses, and the stuffing of those bodies into our bodies (through an aperture, called the mouth) provides us with no end of enjoyment. Indeed, the art of the preparation of corpses is more esteemed among us than astronautics and is termed gastronautics, or gastronomy—which, however, has nothing to do with astronomy.”
“Does this then mean that you play at being cemeteries, making of yourselves the very coffins that hold your four-legged brethren?” This question was dangerously loaded, but Ferrix, instructed by the sage, answered thus:
“It is no game, Your Highness, but rather a necessity, for life lives on life. But we have made of this necessity a great art.”
“Well then, tell me, Myamlak the paleface, how do you build your progeny?” asked the princess.
“In faith, we do not build them at all,” said Ferrix, “but program them statistically, according to Markov’s formula for stochastic probability, emotional-evolutional albeit distributional, and we do this involuntarily and coincidentally, while thinking of a variety of things that have nothing whatever to do with programming, whether statistical, alinear or algorithmical, and the programming itself takes place autonomously, automatically and wholly autoerotically, for it is precisely thus and not otherwise that we are constructed, that each and every paleface strives to program his progeny, for it is delightful, but programs without programming, doing all within his power to keep that programming from bearing fruit.”
“Strange,” said the princess, whose erudition in this area was less extensive than that of the wise Polyphase. “But how exactly is this done?”