Phylogenesis - Alan Dean Foster [9]
Oh, there were occasional bursts of rhetorical brilliance, but they were as scattered as the quereequi puff-lions in the trees. They manifested themselves just often enough to keep him from being kicked out of the master classes. In many ways he was the despair of the senior instructors, who saw in him a promising, even singular talent that never quite managed to rise above an all-consuming and very unthranx-like preoccupation with morbid hopelessness. Still, he flashed just enough ability just often enough to keep him in the program.
Even those instructors bored with his disgraceful outbursts were reluctant to dismiss him, knowing as they did his family history. He was the last of the Ven save two, the progenitors and inheritors of his family having been wiped out in the first AAnn attack on Paszex more than eighty years earlier. This harsh hereditary baggage had traveled with him all the way north to Yeyll. Unlike the wrong word or an inept stanza, it was something he would never be able to redraft.
“Ven, Ven? I don’t know that family,” acquaintances would murmur. “Does it hail from near Hokanuck?”
“No, it hails from the afterlife,” Desvendapur would muse miserably. It would have been better for him if he had come from offworld. At least then it would have been easier to keep his family history private. On Willow-Wane, where everyone knew the tragic history of Paszex, he could indulge in no such covertness.
Wuuzelansem did not appear upset by his comments. It was not the first time his most obstreperous student had expressed such sentiments. “You condemn, you criticize, you castigate, but what do you offer in return? Crude, angry platitudes of your own. Specious sensitivity, false fury, biased frenzy. ‘The jarzarel soars and glides, dips to kiss the ground, and stumbles, perspiring passion: contact in a vacuum.’”
Softly modulated clicks of approval rose from the assembled at this typically florid display of words and whistles from the master. Desvendapur stood his physical and intellectual ground. Wuuzelansem made it seem so easy, the right words and sounds spilling prolifically from his jaws, the precisely correct movements of his hands and body accompanying and emphasizing them where others had to struggle for hours, days, weeks just to compose an original stanza or two. The war was particularly acute within Des, who never seemed quite able to find the terminology to frame the emotions that welled up from deep inside him. A simmering volcano, he emitted much steam and heat, without ever really erupting creatively. Artistically, something vital was missing. Aesthetically, there was a void.
He accepted the lyrical rebuke stolidly, but the way in which his antennae curled reflexively back over his head revealed how deeply he had been stung. It wasn’t the first time, and he did not expect it to be the last. In this he was correct. Poetry could be a savage business, and the master’s reputation did not extend to coddling his students.
Looking back, Des was not surprised that he had survived the rigors of the curriculum. But despite being utterly convinced of his own brilliance, he was nonetheless surprised when he was graduated. He had expected dismissal with less than full ordination. Instead, he found himself armed with private blessings and official certification. Graduation had led to a boring but just barely tolerable position with a private company in the wholesale food distribution business, where he spent much time composing attractive jingles lauding the beauty and healthfulness of the concern’s produce and products. While it provided for the maintenance of his physical upkeep (he certainly ate well), his emotional and artistic wellbeing languished. Day after day of waxing lyrical about the multifarious glories of fruits and vegetables left him feeling like he was ready to explode. He never did,