'Look there.'
The others can't see anything.
'There ... right there....'
They pick out a lizard about four feet high standing on two legs fifty feet way. The lizard is speckled with orange-red and yellow blotches, so perfectly camouflaged it is like picking a face out in a picture puzzle to see him. The lizard knows he has been seen and lets out a high-pitched whistle. He runs towards them on two legs with incredible speed, kicking up a trail of red dust. He stops in front of them, immobile as a stone, while the dust slowly settles behind him. Seen at close range he is clearly humanoid with a smooth yellow face and a wide red mouth, black eyes with red pupils, a patch of red pubic hair at the crotch. A dry spoor smell drifts from his body.
The lizard boy now leads the way setting the fastest pace the others can maintain. As he moves his body changes color to blend into the landscape. In the late afternoon they are making their way down a steep path into a canyon. Leaves spatter the lizard's body with green. They come to a wide valley and a river with deep pools. The boys take off their packs and swim in the cool water. The lizard dives down to the bottom and comes up with fourteen-inch cutthroat trout in his jaws and flips it onto the grass by the pool. Ali and Farnsworth are picking strawberries.
Next day they set out to explore the canyon. The river winds between red cliffs. Here and there are cubicles cut in the rock by ancient cliff-dwellers.
We are heading for the river towns of the fruit-fish people. The staple of their diet is a fruit-eating fish which attains a weight of thirty pounds. To cultivate this fish they plant the riverbanks with a variety of frit trees and vines so that the smell of fruit and fruit blossoms perfumes the air, which is a balmy eighty degrees.
Our boat rides high in the water on two pontoons of paper-thin dugout canoes sealed over to form a sort of sled on which we glide, propelled by a gentle current, past youths in the boughs of trees, masturbating and shaking the ripe fruit into the water with the spasms of their bodies as their sperm falls also to be devoured by the great green-blue fish. It is this diet of fruit and sperm which gives the fruit fish its incomparable flavor.
Little naked boys walk along the banks throwing fruit into the water and masturbating while they emit birdcalls and animal noises, giggling, singing, whining, and growling out spurts of sperm that glitter in the dappled sunlight. As we pass, the boys bend over, waving and grinning between their legs like sheaves of wheat parted by a gentle breeze that wafts us to the jetty.
Who are we? We are migrants who move from settlement to settlement in the vast area now held by the Articulated. These voyages often last for years, and migrants may drop out along the way or adventurous settles join the migrants. We carry with us seeds and plants, plans, books, pictures, and artifacts from the communes we have visited.
On the jetty we are welcomed by a tall statuesque youth with negroid features and kinky yellow hair. It is late afternoon and the boys are trooping back from the riverbanks and orchards and fish hatcheries. Many of them are completely naked. I am struck by the mixtures here displayed: Negro, Chinese, Portuguese, Irish, Malay, Japanese, Nordic boys with kinky red and blond and auburn hair and jet-black eyes, blacks with straight hair gray and blue and green eyes, mixtures of Chinese and Indian of a delicate pink color, Indians of a deep copper red with one blue eye and one brown eye, purple-black skin and red pubic hairs.
Arriving at the port city after a long uncomfortable train journey from the capital, Farnsworth checked into the Survival Hotel. The hotel was a ramshackle wooden building of four stories overlooking the bay, with wide balconies and porches overgrown with bougainvillea where the guests sat in high-backed cane chairs sipping gin slings. A promontory of red and yellow sandstone a thousand feet high cut the town off from the sea, which entered by a narrow channel between the rock and the mainland. Looking down from the balcony of his room on the fourth floor, Farnsworth could see the beaches around the lagoon, where the languid youths stretched naked in the sun. Fatigued from his journey, he decided to take a nap before dinner.
