The World Idiot by Rhys Hughes Page A

workings, dust had interfered with the function of its circuits and now it no longer switched channels on a missing television but dematerialised a house and reassembled it on another world.
    He went back to the bedroom and found the device. He pressed more buttons and his head span. He sank to the floor and gripped a cushion for safety: he could feel himself rushing into the vacuum of the cosmos, passing through clouds of stardust. When the nausea passed he knew he would not write a single line today. The occasion was too momentous. His only desire was to learn what new planet he had reached. It was a bittersweet irony that he could see and hear nothing of what existed outside. Only through the sense of taste might he be made aware of his latest destination.
    He waited anxiously near the chute.
    The meal came when he had almost given up hope of being fed. It was more peculiar than his previous feast, consisting of complex geometrical shapes mixed together, each of the same rubbery consistency and glowing with a deep red light that had substance and flowed in response to the jabbing of his spoon. He finished the meal and licked the plate clean. Then he returned to bed and considered the clues he had been given.
    He allowed his imagination to summon up a landscape of shallow seas sprinkled with atolls and tiny islands, the opposite of the desert world, and he convinced himself this vision was a product of a true dream rather than his conscious mind. There were no temples on this planet, but enormous canoes bore idols of twisted coral between the islands. The blood in his head resembled the beating of drums. He slept and digested his new status as an interstellar emissary.
    When he awoke he jabbed more buttons.
    He found it impossible to do anything other than wait for his meals. It was all that mattered: he was experiencing one of the most extreme adventures any human had ever attempted. To write or read would be an insult to the gravity of the process.
    His third meal was a collection of roughly spherical objects with fibrous husks under which palpitated a creamy yellow lava. He pictured a young world of active volcanoes with basalt cities lurking beneath showers of ash and sparks. The inhabitants rarely ventured out but took shelter beneath roofs of thick stone. Even their clothes were made from minerals. He did not linger long on this planet.
    Every day he voyaged to a different world, exploring its geography, history and culture through taste alone. He was amazed and relieved that the inhabitants were never hostile but always willing to leave offerings for him, depositing the finest examples of their unutterably bizarre cuisine through his chute. Possibly they regarded him as a deity of some kind or it might be that simple generosity was a universal constant. To judge alien civilisations by the standards of those on Earth was surely a mistake. He accepted each act of charity with good grace.
    He was dimly aware that the planets and cultures he encountered were not really so original in concept after all. They tended to be exaggerations and distortions of what already existed on his home world, as if he had taken one element of a particular climate or country and wrapped a whole globe in it. Planets of ice or mountain ranges or swamps or grasslands. And the beings who dwelled on the surfaces were fairly bland creations, minor variations of each other, based on his own ideas of what noble savages should be like.
    Only once did he manage to imagine a truly unique world, a planet with static weather patterns but pliable continents: the tectonic plates flowed and altered under the unmoving winds and rains and heatwaves so that the people who lived on the surface experienced changing weather as they were carried back and forth by the shifting ground beneath them. It was a nice conceit and he was proud to deduce the existence of such a place from taste alone.
    But he slowly began to feel a despairing kind of homesickness and this