Edward Hoch - Isaac Asimov's Worlds of Fantasy. Book 6 - Mythical Beasties

When the Minor Canon made his appearance in the morning among the citizens, the enthusiasm and cordiality with which he was received were truly wonderful. He was taken to a house which had been occupied by one of the banished high officers of the place, and every one was anxious to do all that could be done for his health and comfort. The people crowded into the church when he held services, so that the three old women who used to be his week-day congregation could not get the best seats, which they had always been in the habit of taking; and the parents of the bad children determined to reform them at home, in order that he might be spared the trouble of keeping up his former school. The Minor Canon was appointed to the highest office of the old church, and before he died he became a bishop.

During the First years after his return from the dreadful wilds, the people of the town looked up to him as a man to whom they were bound to do honor and reverence. But they often, also. looked up to the sky to see if there were any signs of the Griffin coming back. However, in the course of lime they learned to honor and reverence their former Minor Canon without the fear of being punished if they did not do so.

But they need never have been afraid of the Griffin. The autumnal equinox day came round, and the monster ate nothing. If he could not have the Minor Canon, he did not care for anything. So, lying down with his eyes fixed upon the great stone griffin, he gradually declined, and died. it was a good thing for some of the people of the town that they did not know this.

If you should ever visit me old town, you would still see the little griffins on the sides of the church, but the great stone griffin that was over the door is gone.

The sea is a natural repository of enormous beasts, since the buoyancy of water largely neutralizes gravity. The blue whale with a top mark of 150 tons is far larger than any land creature thai ever lived; larger even than the largest dinosaurs.

Furthermore, water, in depths greater than a few yards, is opaque, so who knows what might be hidden in the deep. Even today, the relatively small Loch Ness in Scotland is thought to harbor a "monster," while the ocean itself is supposed to contain "sea serpents" of all kinds.

The Norwegians had legends of an enormous sea monster they called the kraken (is this another form of the Greek drakon? / wonder). It was pictured as an enormous round creature, possibly a mile and a half in circumference. To its rim were attached long tentacles, with which it could seize and pull under even the largest ships. When it submerged suddenly, it left a whirlpool in its wake, and sometimes whirlpools themselves were referred to as krakens.

In 1752, a Norwegian bishop, Erik Pontoppidan, published a Natural History of Norway in which the kraken was popularized.

There may be a germ of truth in even the wildest legend, however. The kraken sounds tike a large and monstrous octopus, and. indeed, in recent times the "giant squid" had been discovered. It does not normally come to the surface but it is the preferred food of the sperm whale, and dying squid that have had a fight with a sperm whale come to the surface on occasion. They are far, far smaller than the kraken, but one must allow for the exaggerations of legend.

In the following story, we have a large sea monster. It is not a giant squid. It is, rather, extraterrestrial, but the author indicates its conceptual origin in its name. which is almost kraken.

Among the people of the Floats caste distinctions were fast losing their old-time importance. The Anarchists and Procurers had disappeared altogether; intercaste marriages were by no means uncommon, especially when they involved castes of approximately the same social status. Society of course was not falling into chaos; the Bezzlers and the Incendiaries still maintained their traditional aloofness; the Advertisermen still could not evade a subtle but nonetheless general disesteem, and where the castes were associated with a craft or trade, they functioned with undiminished effectivesness. The Swindlers comprised the vast majority of those who fished from coracles; Blackguards constructed all the sponge-arbors in every lagoon; the Hoodwinks completely monopolized the field of hood-winking. This last relationship always excited the curiosity of the young, who would inquire, "Which first: the Hoodwinks or hood-winking?" To which the elders customarily replied, "When the Ship of Space discharged our ancestors upon these blessed floats, there were four Hoodwinks among the Eighty-three. Later, when the towers were built and the lamps established, there were hoods to wink, and it seemed nothing less than apposite that the Hoodwinks should occupy themselves at the trade. It may well be that matters stood so in the Outer Wildness, before the Escape. It seems likely. There were undoubtedly lamps to be flashed and hoods to be winked. Of course there is much we do not know, much concerning which the dicta are silent.''

Whether or not the Hoodwinks had been drawn to the trade by virtue of ancient use, it was now me rare Hoodwink who did not in some measure find his vocation upon the towers, either as a rigger, a lamp-tender, or as full-fledged hoodwink.

Another caste, the Larceners, constructed the towers, which customarily stood sixty to ninety feet high at the center of the float, directly above the primary stalk of the sea-plant; there were usually four legs of woven withe, which passed through holes in the pad to join a stout stalk twenty or thirty feet below the surface. At the top of the tower was a cupola, with walls of split withe, a roof of gummed and laminated padskin. Yard-arms extending to either side supported lattices. each carrying nine lamps arranged in a square, three to the side, together with the hoods and trip-mechanisms. Within the cupola, windows afforded a view across the water to the neighboring floats-as much as two miles or as little as a quarter-mile distant. The Master Hoodwink sat at a panel. At his left hand were nine tap-rods, cross-coupled to lamp-hoods on the lattice to his right. Similarly the tap-rods at his right hand controlled the hoods to his left. By this means the configurations he formed and those he received, from his point of view, were of identical aspect and caused him no confusion. During the day time, the lamps were not lit and white targets served the same function. The hoodwink set his configuration with quick strokes of right and left hands, kicked the release, which thereupon flicked the hoods or shutters at the respective lamps or targets. Each configuration signified a word; the mastery of a lexicon and a sometimes remarkable dexterity where the Master Hoodwink's stock in trade- All could send at speeds approximating that of speech; all knew at least four thousand, and some six, seven or even nine thousand configurations. The folk of the floats could in varying degrees read the configurations, which were also employed in the keeping of the archives, and other communications, memoranda and messages.* On Tranque Float, at the extreme east of the group, the Master Hoodwink was one Chaezy Zander, a rigorous and exacting old man with a mastery of over eight thousand configurations. His first assistant, Sklar Hast, had well over five thousand configurations at his disposal. There were two further assistants, as well as three apprentices, two riggers, a lamp-tender and a maintenance witheweaver, this latter a Larcener. Chaezy Zander tended the tower from dusk until middle evening: the busy hours during which gossip, announcements, news and notifications regarding King Kragen flickered up and down the fifty-mile-line of the floats.

Sklar Hast winked hoods during the afternoon; then, when Chaezy Zander appeared in the cupola, he looked to maintenance and supervised the apprentices. A relatively young man, Sklar Hast had achieved his status by working in accordance with a simple and uncomplicated policy: without compromise and with great tenacity he strove for excellence, and sought to instill me same standards into the apprentices. He was an almost brutally direct man, without affability, know*The orthography had been adopted in the earliest days and was highly systematic. The cluster at the left indicated the genus of the idea. the cluster ai die right denoted the specific. In such a fashion… at the left. signified color, and hence: