Word: enu
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...certain disgruntled writer, Orlando, and half a dozen other tourists find themselves shipwrecked on the island of the Enu, a very odd little South Pacific island. The men wear nests in their hair, where clever birds roost-"feathered superegos" who do the thinking for the hominoids when problems get knotty. On the head of King IT the 42nd perches the imperial vulture. His Majesty, built like a sumo wrestler, rides in a mobile throne on the back of a 300-year-old sea turtle, painted every color of the rainbow, which carries him at a 1-m.p.h. crawl...
...Enu it is an express. There is no place to go, no work to do. Physical labor is a status symbol that an Enu pays to perform. An Enu need not raise a sweat even for food. The natives and their inadvertent guests eat excrement processed to look like conventional food. Ambrosia comes from the sewers. Guano is refined to an elixir of life...
Death has no sting. It is the custom for an Enu to go out of sight to die-conveniently underground. From sheer boredom the inhabitants invent their wars, like board games. They do not even care if they win. Winning can be a problem. "Win a war and you have to make the enemy do your will," the Enu Defense Minister complains. "What will? We have no will. We even lack a will to live. We no longer need...
...Enu entropy is contagious. After a while Orlando is confessing his own slavish wish for a nesting birdbrain to take over: "I experience this vacuum just a few inches above my head. This empty space of unknowing...
...unforgivable sin in any Lind world is logic. Are the Enu a race of mutants-survivors of a nuclear bomb experiment? Or are they the missing link-a throwback to the age of reptiles? Is the island paradise or purgatory? At different times, Lind has it both ways. Consistency, as he sees it, is the hobgoblin of those without other hobgoblins...