Grimus by Salman Rushdie Page A

dress, he joked; Virgil Jones didn’t smile.
    —Let’s go, he said.
    The rocking-chair sat upon the beach, with its back to the sea. Beside it, on the greysilver sands, Dolores O’Toole sat and sang her songs of mourning and requition.
    —O, Virgil, she said. I’m so, so happy.
    Waiting in the forests on the slopes of Calf Mountain, silent, invisible, as the fat, stumbling man and his tallish feathered companion, feather bobbing beside bowler, made their progress up the overgrown paths, watching over them and waiting, was a Gorf.

XVIII
    T HE GORFIC PLANET is sometimes called Thera. It winds its way around the star Nus in the Yawy Klim galaxy of the Gorfic Nirveesu. This area is the major component of the zone sometimes termed the Gorfic Endimions. The Gorfic obsession with anagram-making ranges from simple rearrangement of word-forms to the exalted level of the Divine Game of Order. The Game extends far beyond mere letter-puzzling; the vast mental powers of the Gorfs make it possible for them anagrammatically to alter their very environment and indeed their own physical make-up—in the latter case within the severe limits imposed by their somewhat grotesque given material. The Rules of the Game are known as Anagrammar; and to hold the title of Magister Anagrammari is the highest desire of any living Gorf.
    “Living” is a troublesome term, for Gorfs are not life-forms as we know them. They need no food, no water, no atmosphere, and possess only one intangible sensory tool which serves for sight, sound, touch, taste, smell and quite a lot besides: a sort of aura or emanation surrounding their huge, hard, useless bodies.
    To be explicit: the Gorfs look like nothing so much as enormous sightless frogs, with one important peculiarity. They are made entirely out of rock.
    Their origins are lost in mystery; some radiation, perhaps, blasting their now-barren planet, formed the rock into these masterpieces of intelligence and at the same time trapped them in the tragic irony of near-immobility and total isolation. For this is the tragedy of the Gorfs: not only Thera itself, but the entire Endimions, is totally devoid of any other life-form. No animals bound, no plants wave, nor is there any breeze to wave them.
    This irony prevented the Gorfs, for several millennia, from being able to determine how advanced a culture they actually were, having no standards of measurement. The result was a certain philosophical paranoia. The supreme Master of the Game, Dota himself, asked in the celebrated Questions of Dota: And are we actually to be the least intelligent race in our Endimions? —a philosophy of despair: he who is unique is both largest and smallest. Our own Gorf, the one now eagerly overseeing the progress of Flapping Eagle and Mr Virgil Jones, took especial pride in his Ordering of this last and most famous of the Questions. He had altered it to make quite a different question, thus: Determine how catalytic an elite is; use our talent and learning-lobe . This is a perfect use of Anagrammar; for not only does it contain all the letters of the Chiefest Question and only those letters, but moreover, it enriches the Question itself, adding to it the concept of elitism and its desirability, the concept of catalysis and its origins, and instructions about how the question is to be answered. “Talent” to the Gorfs means only one thing: skill at Ordering. Thus the very skill that caused the Chiefest Question to be asked must be used in its solution, with the aid of the “Learning-lobe”, that inexhaustible memory-vault locked within each Gorf, giving the species absolute recall of anything that has ever befallen any Gorf.
    The title of Magister Anagrammari, and the modest acclaim that resulted, (the Gorfs not being an excitable race) now came the way of our Gorf, and may fairly be said to have turned his head (though properly speaking, he had none).
    It should be pointed out that the Gorfs had developed no orthodox