He was a large man, almost as tall as Brenda and much heftier.  His hair was long, green, and unkept for a very good reason:  it wasn't hair, but a bioengineered species of grass bred to be parasitic on human skin.  I don't know the details of its cultivation.  I'd have had more interest in the mating habits of toads.  It involved a thickening of the scalp, and soil was involved-when he scratched his head, dirt showered down.  But I don't know how the soil was attached, whether in pockets or layered on the skin, and I don't know anything about the blood-to-root system, and I'd just as soon not, thank you.  I remember as a child wondering if, when he got up in the morning, he had to work compost into his agri-tonsorial splendor.

He had two huge breasts-almost all Earthists, male and female, sported them-and more plants grew on their upper slopes.  Many of these bore tiny flowers or fruits.  I wondered if he had to practice contour plowing to prevent erosion on those fertile hillsides.  He saw me looking at them, plucked an apple no bigger than a grape from the tangled mass, and popped it in his mouth.

What can one say about the rest of him?  His back and arms and legs were covered with hair.  Not human hair, but actual pelts, resembling in various patches jaguar, tiger, bison, zebra, and polar bear, among others, in a crazy patchwork.  The genetic re-structuring required to support all that must have been a cut-and-paste collage beyond imagining.  It was ironic, I thought, that the roots of the Earthists were in the anti-fur activists, but of course no animals had been harmed to produce his pelt.  Just little bits of their genes snipped out and shoehorned into his.  He had claws like a bear on his fingertips, and instead of feet he walked around on the hooves of a moose, like some large economy-size faun.  All Earthists had animal attributes, it was their badge and ensign.  But their founder had gone further than any of his followers.  Which, one suspects, is what makes followers and leaders.

But, incredible as it may seem having gone through the catalog of his offenses to the eye, it must be said that the first thing one noticed about David Earth upon having the misfortune to encounter him was his smell.

I'm sure he bathed.  Perhaps the right way of putting it was that he watered himself regularly.  David Earth during a drought would have been a walking fire hazard.  But he used no soap (animal by-product) or any other cleaning preparation (chemical pollution of the David-sphere).  All of which would simply have resulted in a smell of sour sweat, which I don't care for but can tolerate.  No, it was his passengers that lifted his signature aroma from the merely objectionable to the realm of the unimaginable.