Damon Knight - Orbit 16

“All right,” Canute said. “I’d given up hope of raising the money anyhow. Money is tight this season. Ah, but it was a sweet, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity! Yes, it’s an odd little street here. How much do you sell the filberts for?”

“Three for a mill. Oh, it’s the standard coin of the street. One tenth of a cent.”

One might as well enjoy the drollery. Really, Canute had never seen anything quite like Leptophlebo Street; never such skinny monkeys or such skinny people. There were mysteries about the relationship of the monkeys and the people. The monkeys couldn’t talk properly. There’s an old saying that whenever monkeys do talk there’s some monkey business going on. Well, there was plenty of it going on here, but all that the monkeys could say was “Kmee-fee-eee-eee-eee.” The monkeys wrote notes on little pieces of paper and gave them to the merchants of the street. They brought in fruit and they traded it or sold it. From the merchants they bought a few nuts that were out of season in the woods, bought them for clay coins or in trade for their in-season fruits or nuts. The people asked the monkeys about their families and about the situation in the woods, and the monkeys wrote the answers on little pieces of paper.

“The monkeys are so smart,” Canute said, “that it seems as if they could talk. As long as you are doing business with them anyhow, you could teach them speech.”

“People of the monkey caste are not allowed to talk,” Effie Poorlode said. (She was the wife of Hiram the nut merchant.) “Everyone has his niche in the world, and the monkeys don’t have talking niches. And it would be no profit to us to teach them speech. We have plenty of time to wait for them to write out their notes, and we do make a good profit on the paper that they write them on.”

The people of Leptophlebo Street were the skinniest folks that Canute had ever seen. How the ribs stood out on them! Two ribby young ladies were in a booth down the street.

“What? Do you sell the paper to the monkeys?” Canute asked Effie Poorlode.

“Get your teeth cleaned free, sir!” the boy Marquis Shortribs was soliciting a passer-by. “My father does excellent tooth cleaning free.” But the passer-by continued on.

“If the tooth cleaning is free, and if there are no customers anyhow, then where is the profit?” Canute asked.

“Oh, there will always be customers,” Effie told him. “Suppose that ten thousand persons go by and do not avail themselves of this service. But then the very next person might stop at the Shortribs’ booth, and you can see how that would make all the waiting and solicitation worthwhile. As to your question, no, we don’t sell the pieces of paper to the monkeys. The monkeys make the paper in the woods, and they make the ink too. They write their notes on the paper and they give them to us. You can see that the profit will be enormous. If we get only eight or ten of these little pieces of paper a day, look how they will count up. We dissolve the ink off the paper, and when we have a thousand pounds of the ink we can sell it to the ink bottlers or pen makers of the city.”

“How long will it take to accumulate a thousand pounds?” Canute asked.

“Oh, it would probably take us a thousand years, but what’s lime so long as we keep busy? And we find all sorts of uses for the little pieces of paper. I tell you that there is money in paper; (here is money in everything.”

“How much money is there in everything, Mrs. Poorlode?” Canute questioned.

“Yesterday my husband and I cleared one cent and three mills from all our businesses,” Effie answered. “And we also achieved equities in three other mills. This is better than most of our days, but all our days are good. Oh, the wealth does accumulate!”

Mrs. Poorlode was like the valiant woman in scripture as she Mood proud and skinny, with her garden on top of her head and with her hands busy leaching nutshells in a bowl.

“This processes the nutshells for industrial use,” she said, “and we have the Nutshell Bitter Tea left over to drink. It makes the bones glossy. My husband gives a rebate to every purchaser of one of our nuts if he returns the shell after he has eaten the meat out of it. We are blessed to live on a street that has so many business opportunities.”

There was something very interesting about the gaunt ribcage of Effie Poorlode.

“Yes,” she said, reading the thoughts of Canute Freeboard, “the townsmen lust after our ribs and after our ossuary generally. There is nothing wrapped up about us. There are some persons in the town with so much flesh grown onto their bones that their fundamental persons and passions are buried away and their real impact is never felt. Luckily that is not so with the people of Leptophlebo Street.”

“How is the street kept so clean and swept?” Canute asked.

“Brooms with both astatic and static bristles are the secret,” Effie told him. “Organic dust clings to the static bristles, and the nonorganic dust is swept clean into gathering vessels by the astatic bristles. Then we pass the brushes over degaussing jets that release the organic particles, and we make soup from them. And the nonorganic dust is separated into flammable and inflammable piles.”

“They mean the same thing,” Canute said.

“Not on Leptophlebo Street they don’t,” Effie insisted. “So we make briquettes to burn as fuel out of the one sort. And we make bricks and flagstones and face stones for buildings out of the other sort. So we have our soup and our fuel and our bricks, and we keep the street clean all the time.”

A medium-sized bird, probably a grackle, came down onto the rim of the garden-containing hat that Effie carried balanced on her head. And the bird was stuck fast. Canute saw that the edge of the hat was bird-limed to catch anything that landed there.

“I will wait,” Effie said. “The pot wants a bird, but the pot must wait also. These grackle birds attract one another for a while. This is not one of our own grackles that I know; it’s one of the newly arrived grackles from the countryside. They will not be wary of one bird stuck there, nor of two birds stuck. They will not be wary of less than three stuck birds. I will be patient and I will have three grackles for food and for byproducts. Will you not stay with us this evening and have a look at our night life on Leptophlebo Street?”

“I don’t know what I will do,” Canute said. “I haven’t comprehended it all yet.”

“Lose weight free in seven-minute surgery, sir,” a small boy banted. “My father does good free work. He is one good loser.”

“No, not right now, boy,” Canute said.

“Have your appendix out, sir? Have your appendix out?” Another small boy was putting the shill on. “My father performs faithful appendectomies free.”

“No, not right now,” Canute said.

“This boy is Pat Thingruel, the brother of Piet and the son of Jan Thingruel,” Effie told Canute. “The father is as stylish a free appendectomist as you will find anywhere.”

“I do not understand how all the people of Leptophlebo Street can work for free,” Canute said. “How do they profit by it?”

A second curious grackle bird came down and got itself squawkishly stuck in the bird lime of the edging of Effie’s garden-hat.

“Oh, there’s lots of profit!” Effie exclaimed. “A vermiform appendix, especially when inflamed, is a veritable storehouse of richness. Master microchemists like ourselves can manufacture all sorts of useful things from such rich material. And the teeth that Royal Shortribs cleans, do you realize just how superorganic are the deposits taken from teeth? Do you know how many things can be woven and fabricated from the hair that Claude Halfgram cuts? Garments, rugs, tents, seines, modish gowns for the modish ladies in the town. Almost solid profit. And the head grooming that he does, do you know that there are some very lively products to be had from that? Our greatest industry, though, is the night soil that we gather from the cooperative people of the town. And I will tell you something else if you will promise not to tell the monkeys.”