Name: Penelope Flute.
        Birthplace: Dalar ken Halvar.
        Occupation: priestess of an Evolutionary cult.
        Status: large-scale debtor.
        Description: woman of Frangoni race, built to a truly
magnificent scale.
        Hobby: macrame
        Quote: "Why do men always get the good things?"

                                                 * * *

        During his sojourn inside the minor mountain of Cap Foz Para
Lash, Guest Gulkan was often in contact with the demon which ran
the place, the demon which went by the name of Paraban Senk. This
demon never manifested itself in the flesh, preferring to restrict
its manifestations to a face on a screen.
        While the Weaponmaster Guest Gulkan was in no great hurry to
learn the Secret of Secrets and the Wisdom of Wisdom from a face
on a screen which called itself Paraban Senk, the wizard Sken-
Pitilkin was much more forward in having dealings with this
entity.
        Sken-Pitilkin was long in discourse with Paraban Senk;
allowed himself to be interrogated by Senk; and did some intense
and detailed questioning of his own. To Sken-Pitilkin, Paraban
Senk explained many things, including the secret of the Chasm
Gates and the nature of the Nexus; though most of what Senk said
was so frankly incredible that Sken-Pitilkin gave it precious
little credence.
        Nevertheless, while Sken-Pitilkin thought Senk to be for the
most part a deluded confabulator, the wizard of Skatzabratzumon
still thought it worthwhile to appraise Paraban Senk of a
suggestion once made by the Great God Jocasta - namely, that
airflight could be made a possibility through management of the
sustained destruction of abnormal artefacts exposed to the
normalizing effects of the universe.
        Sken-Pitilkin then told Senk of the long and danger-fraught
process of experimentation which had resulted from this
suggestion.
        "So you actually got airborne?" said Senk.
        "Twice," said Sken-Pitilkin.
        "And lived to tell the tale?" said Senk in amazement.
        "Unless I died and was casually reincarnated without noticing
the fact," said Sken-Pitilkin.
        "Tell me the details," said Senk.
        "The first flight was from the island of Ema-Urk," said Sken-
Pitilkin. "That's an island in the Swelaway Sea. We flew to the
mountains of Ibsen-Iktus, where Guest's brother Eljuk Zala met the
wizard Ontario Nol, to whom he is now apprenticed."
        "And the second?"
        "The second flight was from Locontareth," said Sken-Pitilkin.
"We didn't get as far that time. I levitated the roof of a hall
and flew it to the outskirts of the city where I, ah, landed it.
Crashed it, to be honest."
        Then Senk took Sken-Pitilkin through a jolt-by-jolt
recapitulation of those flights, after which Senk did a great many
calculations, ultimately working out how Sken-Pitilkin could
harness the powers of destructive magic to make a functional
airship.
        "This is how," said Paraban Senk, at last displaying upon a
screen an illustration of something that looked like an overgrown
bird's nest.
        "Why," said Sken-Pitilkin, "it looks like a bird's nest."
        "So it does, so it does," said Senk. "But I think it will
work regardless."
        Then, acting on Senk's detailed instructions, the sagacious
wizard Hostaja Sken-Pitilkin began to build a functional airship
on some flat land by the Yamoda River.
        While Sken-Pitilkin went to work on the airship problem,
Plandruk Qinplaqus was exerting his talents to resolve Guest
Gulkan's woman shortage, with the result that the Frangoni warrior
Asodo Hatch shortly introduced his sister Penelope to young Guest,
and suggested that they would make a good match in marriage.
        Since the woman Penelope was a handsome wench built to
generous specifications Guest promptly agreed that marriage would
be a very good idea.
        So it was that Guest Gulkan was wed to Penelope Flute, to the
general satisfaction of all concerned.
        Some women might have had reservations about marrying a man
whose arms and legs were currently no larger than those of a baby,
but Asodo Hatch explained to his sister that Guest Gulkan's
condition was due to the fact that he had been born as a fish, and
had only lately begun to evolve into a human being. Since Penelope
was a dedicated Evolutionist, she believed this without
reservation, and was excited and fascinated to be presented with
living proof of the Evolutionary theory which had long been
preached to her by her personal guru.
        Of course the story of Guest Gulkan's fish-to-man transition
was a patent tissue of nonsense, as indeed is the whole of the
Evolutionary heresy. As everyone with the faintest acquaintance
with human history knows full well, there has never been any firm
historical evidence to indicate that spontaneous organic
transmogrification takes place, for all that tens of thousands of
Evolutionists believe in it fervently. In the whole of human
history there has never been so much as one single Evolutionist
who has ever been able to produce either a grandparent or a
grandchild or any other relative who has spontaneously made the
transformation to fish, lizard, dog, cat, cow or budgerigar.
Furthermore, it can be stated with confidence that no Evolutionist
ever will be able to thus match proof to theory.
        Admittedly, a change in organic form can be effected by the
application of sufficient Power, and this can be done by either
occult resource or by sophisticated machinery. But this is
difficult. Very difficult. So difficult that the idea of a
species-to-species shift occurring naturally must surely be seen
as the absurdity it is.
        Despite the passion with which Evolutionists defend their
ideas, the whole basis of Evolutionary theory is irredeemably
flawed, for the world we live in is simply not possessed of the
massive instability which would be necessary for Evolutionary
processes to take place.
        The truth of the matter is that Evolution never takes place
in our day-to-day world, but instead is restricted to the World
Beyond, those realms of almost infinitely flexible improbability
where gods, demons and devils have their existence. Unlike us, the
entities of the World Beyond are not bound to brute matter and the
mundane flesh, and hence they are capable of evolving, and do so
on a regular basis, and with alarming regularity.
        Again, the proof of this is to be found in human history, for
the same history which demonstrates that humans have never evolved
also serves to demonstrate that the gods are in a state of
constant flux. There is not one god known to the human race which
has remained stable in its form for so short a time as recorded
history; and many are the gods which have radically altered their
shapes, powers and attributes in a generation or less.
        While the World Beyond is doubtless the site of the most
promiscuously fevered Evolution imaginable, Penelope Flute was in
error when she believed Evolutionary instability to be a property
of the world in which she lived. However, Guest made no attempt to
argue her out of her ridiculous beliefs - for the simple and
sufficient reason that they had no language in common.
        For want of the language of the tongue, Guest and Penelope
had to rely much on the language of the flesh, and here they came
to swift agreement, so that the buxom Penelope was often to be
found sitting astride her champion, thrashing and screaming as she
soared toward the crest of her pleasure.
        Guest had never before met a woman who thrashed and screamed,
for the females with whom he had previously mated had lacked
Penelope's taste for melodrama; and he was flattered by the whole
performance, quite failing to recognize that a full nine tenths of
it was pure theater.
        But, though Guest and his beloved were satisfied in bed, and
though they did not argue, it would not be true to say that their
marital relationship was entirely harmonious. For one thing, Guest
disliked the uninhibited manner in which Penelope would grab hold
of his ears in the course of her physical raptures. Not only did
she grab them: she was inclined to haul upon them as she forgot
herself in her climax, as if anchoring herself to these prominent
aspects of reality lest ecstasy claim her forever. Her fingernails
were inclined to bite into the flesh as she hauled on it, and the
combined effect of all this abuse was that Guest, in his hours of
detumescence, usually felt as if he had been attacked by a pack of
homicidal man-eating crabs.
        Guest also wished that sometimes, just sometimes, he could
have been left alone with his thoughts, for as their relationship
progressed it seemed that Penelope spent virtually the entire
course of every day and night at his bedside.
        He often wondered why she never went out into the city.
        The reason why Penelope never went out into the city was that
her life would have been endangered had she wandered the streets
of Dalar ken Halvar, for the Nexus religion known as Nu-chala-nuth
was in the ascendant in that city, and its ascendancy was
accompanied by the systematic slaughter of every Evolutionist who
could be caught.
        Since the Frangoni warrior Asodo Hatch was a priest of Nu-
chala-nuth, he should by rights have murdered his sister himself,
but instead he had chosen to bury her in the Combat College.
        While thus buried alive inside the minor mountain of Cap Foz
Para Lash, Penelope had nothing to do except sit with her husband
and watch entertainment shows sourced in the Nexus, which played
endlessly on a screen which took up one whole wall of Guest
Gulkan's room.
        The shows Guest Gulkan favored were those featuring the Wild
Tribes, a set of barbaric peoples whose lives were a non-stop
drama of war, conquest, killing, fighting, looting, pillage, rape,
torture, arson and orgies.
        Guest was particularly interested in the orgies, and found
that he had much to learn. The Yarglat had a very high opinion of
themselves, and Guest had always been very proud of himself and
his people, but soon he realized that the Yarglat were a dull and
conservative people compared to the Wild Tribes. One of the Wild
Tribes was given to staging huge orgies in which ten thousand
people at a time grappled promiscuously in a gigantic vat of ripe
strawberries while cheering spectators pelted them with handfuls
of rose petals.
        Once Guest's baby-sized hand was strong enough and skilled
enough to manipulate the bedside controls which commanded the
entertainment screen, he replayed this particular orgy repeatedly,
and vowed that he would strive to match this achievement of the
Wild Tribes as soon as he had mastered the Collosnon Empire to his
will.
        Yes, Guest still hoped to be emperor.
        He hoped to defeat Khmar, to conquer Gendormargensis, to
install himself on the ruling throne of Tameran, and to establish
a dynasty that would rule the Collosnon Empire for generations.
        While the difficulties of conquering the Collosnon Empire
from a bed based in Dalar ken Halvar proved insuperable, Guest
thought he should at least be able to set about producing a
dynasty. It is said amongst the Yarglat that a warrior needs ten
sons and an emperor needs twenty; and Guest, knowing that his
planned war against Khmar might well be long and bloody, suspected
that twenty might be barely sufficient for his purposes.
        Hence he put his soul into his bedtime efforts - but his
woman never became pregnant.
        For, unbeknownst to Guest, Penelope had no plans to hatch
children, and the demon had obliged her by arranging for its
medical facilities to bury in her buttocks a pair of slow-release
contraceptive pellets which would guarantee her infertility for a
decade.
        As soon as Penelope had mastered enough of Guest's native
Eparget to her tongue for basic communication to be possible, she
learnt that he wanted sons to fight with him in his great war
against Khmar, though she was not by any means clear as to who
"Khmar" might be. But the purple-skinned Frangoni beauty was not
inclined to co-operate with this plan, for she believed it to be
sheer folly. Penelope believed that a great Flood was imminent,
and that this Flood would swamp the entire world, precipitating a
mass Evolution of humans to fishes.
        Once Guest and Penelope were united in piscatorial bliss it
would be very nice to have a pair of child-fishes to keep them
company, but there was no point in idly breeding human children to
fight in a war which would never happen. So thought Penelope - and
felt guiltless at frustrating Guest's intent.
        By the end of his second year in the minor mountain of Cap Foz
Para Lash, Guest Gulkan had arms and legs - of a sort. They were
not sufficient for his support, but they were adequate for his
propulsion. Daily, the Weaponmaster was carried from his mountain
cave to Dalar ken Halvar's river, and there he played fish the
whole morning through, strengthening his limbs for war by endless
labors of swimming. When he was not swimming, he was resting; or
was renewing his efforts to establish a dynasty; or was eating,
for he found himself possessed of a ravenous appetite.
        Before coming to Dalar ken Halvar, Guest Gulkan had known
nothing of swimming, and invariably associated water with
drowning. But, as his limbs were initially of an uncommonly light
weight, he learnt the art easily, for he found himself naturally
buoyant.
        Later, as his legs lengthened and strengthened, their weight
of ever-growing bone and muscle weighed him down, and to stay
afloat became harder. But by then he had entirely mastered the
art of swimming down to a fine, and sustained himself in the water
as if born to it.
        Two years of swimming brought Guest to the end of his fourth
year of exile in Dalar ken Halvar, by which time Sken-Pitilkin had
wrecked his seventy-seventh experimental airship - and had just
succeeded in making the seventy-eighth fly.
        And Guest was cordially invited to join Sken-Pitilkin on the
second test-flight of that amazing device.