Word: crete
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Knautschke, a resident of the Berlin Zoo, is a fine, broad-backed figure of a hippo, but he was lonely until his helpers discovered a mate for him: a female hippo in the Leipzig Zoo, named Crete. There was one hitch: Leipzig is in Germany's Russian zone...
Discreet East-West negotiations were begun. The Russian zone authorities found it in their hearts to let Crete go to Berlin. For 383 hours, Knautschke and Crete were kept in adjoining cages, permitted only to engage in some sedate nose-rubbing. Then they were allowed to meet at closer quarters. When Crete goes back to Leipzig, the Russian zone will get her baby, but another Leipzig female may be coming up for Knautschke...
...women of New Crete have a wonderful time choosing husbands, but sex, for the elite, is only for breeding purposes; the rest of the time, explains a poet, "we lie side by side, or foot to foot, without bodily contact, and our spirits float upward and drift in a waving motion around the room." Homosexuals and other biological misfits, such as hens that cannot lay eggs, are treated to euthanasia. (The same goes for those who violate "custom" and are repudiated by their class.) Otherwise, all violence, even impoliteness, is tabu-though occasionally New Cretan males are allowed...
Goodbye to the Dam. In fact, everything is so cream-smooth in New Crete that Poet Venn-Thomas wonders 1) if the magicians, who are vegetarians, wouldn't be better off with a few chunks of red roast beef and 2) why the Goddess ever brought him there...
...soon finds out, when the Goddess herself appears in the form of an unscrupulous female named Erica-a "triple-faced, ash-blonde bitch" with whom Poet Venn-Thomas had had a gruesome love affair in the Late Christian Epoch. What Erica does to overcivilized New Crete is something awful. She plants some 20th Century cigarettes in the closet of a cute little nymph named Sapphire; she fouls up the witches, hexes the horses, mortifies the magicians. By the time she's through, New Crete is on the verge of collapse-at which point Poet Venn-Thomas sensibly decides...