Furthermore, it had not struck me the first time I read the poem
quickly that there was anything odd about a bird being named "Isadore."
People who keep pet grilches frequently name them after famous Reed
players and Isadore is a common name.
On the other hand, it _was_ my Uncle's name. And the word "Dodo" didn't
rhyme as it should.
I got out a magnifying glass to examine the ancient print. Sure enough,
it had been tampered with. The print looked so odd to me, anyway, I
hadn't noticed the part that had been changed. But it was obvious under
the glass that "Dodo" had been substituted for a word of almost equal
length. The same with "Isadore."
I went over the whole poem now, carefully, to see which words had been
changed. There weren't many. "White" in a couple of places. "Dodo" and
"Isadore" wherever they occurred. An "o" in the line "Perfume from an
unseen cens_o_r." "S" in the line "'Wretch,' I cried, 'Isadore hath
_s_ent thee....'"
* * * * *
Sitting back, I thought about what I had read. It made no sense at all.
Was I to look for a white bird, "grim, ungainly, ghastly"? And what if
I found him? Why was he like a raven? What was this perfume from an
unseen censor? I could picture the ghost of Uncle Isadore, knowing
his financial imagination, as the "unseen censor" because he always
criticized me. Was I to look for perfume? Did he have a fortune in
perfume stowed somewhere? It seemed to me it would take an awful lot of
even the most expensive perfume to comprise a fortune.
I decided to start with the bird. I went outside Rene's ship and looked
around. No birds.
"Rene!" I called. He was still looking through Uncle Izzy's ship. "Have
you seen an ungainly white bird around?"
"What!" he snapped, sticking an indignant face out of the door.
"I guess you haven't. Can your woodsy lore tell if there _are_ birds on
this planet?"
"Obviously," Rene said. "I don't know why you can't find your own
spoor. I noticed the droppings immediately."
"Where are the birds?"
"How the hell would I know?" But he couldn't contain his special
knowledge. "They're probably night birds," he said.
"Oh, yes." It checked. "Wandering from the Night's Plutonian shore."
He looked at me suspiciously. "You ever had a nervous breakdown?"
"I have _not_. I test 10:9 on job adjustment and 10:8 on life
adjustment."
"Some people crack on alien planets," he said. "I have a padded room in
my ship. You'd be surprised how often I have to use it."
I told him about the poem I found in Uncle Izzy's book. "We look for a
white bird," I said. "Or perfume."
"You're nuts," he pointed out with some justice, because he hadn't
known Uncle Isadore. "How do you know these changes weren't made by
somebody else a long time ago? Maybe this ancient printer printed it
wrong and had to change it afterward."
"I don't think they were that primitive back then."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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