Much time passed before I had extended conversation with the human again. First, it was necessary for me to teach English to the first Plookh thespians so that they could follow Shlestertrap’s direction. Not very difficult, this: it simply required a short period of concentrated griggoing by the seven of them. I could now give them much terminology that even my ancestor, nzred fanobrel, had not been able to use; unfortunately, a good deal of Shlestertrap’s phrase-shadings remained as nothing but unguessable semantic goals, and when it came to many attitudes and implements used exclusively upon Earth—we could do nothing but throw up our tentacles and flippers, our vines and talons, in utter helplessness.
Some day, however—not us, but one of our conceivable descendants, perhaps—we will learn the exact constituents of a “thingumajig.”
After learning the language, the other Plookhh were taken in charge by the robots—the same friendly creatures who would leave the dome occasionally to forage the fresh pink weeds that were essential to our diet—and told to do many incomprehensible things against backgrounds that varied from the artificially constructed to the projected stereo.
Frequently, Shlestertrap would halt the robots in their fluid activity with booms and cameras and lights, turn to me and demand a significant bit of information about our habits that usually required my remembering every page of all our Books of Numbers to give an adequate reply.
Before I could finish, however, he generally signaled to the robots to begin once more—muttering to himself something like: “Oh, well, we can fake up a fair copy with more process work. If it only looks good, who cares about realism?”
Then again, he would express annoyance over the fact that, while some of us had heads, the mlenbb and nzredd had torso-enclosed brains, and the guur were the proud possessors of what the first ship’s biologists had called a “dissolved nervous system.”
“How can you get intriguing close-ups,” Shlestertrap wailed, “when you don’t know what part of the animal you want in them? You’d think these characters would get together and decide what they want to look like, instead of shortening my life with complications!”
“These are the most thoroughly differentiated Plookhh,” I reminded him proudly. “The beauty contest winners.”
“Yeah. I’ll bet the homely ones are a real old-fashioned treat.”
Thus, gently and generously, did he toil on the process of civilizing us. May his name be revered by any Plookhh that survive!