We faced this anger resolutely. Panel number seven of the Fresco,The Adoration, is an inspiration in such times. In it, Mengantowhai, who has made massive changes in the lives of the Jaupati in order to bring them peace, is hailed by them as their savior. I always think of this when I am required to bring trouble or pain to our people. In the end, I say, they will be thankful for it.
We needed to know whether the glut of glusi was achieved out of ignorance or whether it had been deliberate. We started our inquiry with the campesi. Unbelievably, after millennia of refinement in our methods, some campesi still end up believing they have not been properly selected, some still resent having been selected at all!
Even today we may find one who croaks like a pfluggi and wants to be a singer. Or one who has all the grace of a puyox but wants to dance. Or another one, who cannot add up the same figures twice with the same answer, who wants to be a proffe, what you call an engineer! I feel gratitude that such longings are rare. Though most campesi require only slight adjusting to be content, for a few there is no soothing. We have a saying, “There is no misery like misdream-ing.” Or, as earthlings might say, “No tragedy like false ambition.”
It would be necessary, we found, to cut the village population by about a third, to reduce grazing on the lands by more than half for a lengthy period, and to undertake strenuous regeneration of the lands, which would require the labor of all campesi in Quo-Tern for some time. This meant the other categories who remained would have to do their own chores for a time, which is proper. We are taught, “An inescapable burden must fall equally upon all castes.”
As athyci, it was our job to choose who would stay and who would go. The first task was to message the need everywhere, at first to the places of that world, then, if necessary, to other settled worlds. So many inceptors, so many receptors, so many nootchi, so many undifferentiated ones, so many campesi, all to find places for. When the returns came in, we began the allocation. Receptors and associated nootchi to the same places, when possible. If not possible, then interviews with them to assess their relative willingness to separate. Some receptors, luckily, were willing to be separated, and others, who had reached or exceeded the number of young required of them, wanted to be reselected to nonreceptor caste.
Few of the nootchi and none of the inceptors wanted to be reselected. This is most often true of inceptors. Their lives are centered on gratifying their mating organ to the extent they cannot even visualize doing something else. It was at this juncture we found that several of the inceptors were closely related, that several of them shared the same cell parents, even the same nootch!
This explained everything! While organ gratification comes first with inceptors, progeny pride comes second! Inceptors who have the same lineage have been known to engage in progenycompetition, even when, as was the case here, the progeny were not of very high quality. When we noticed this, we marked all the related inceptors for retirement therapy.
We then moved on to the undifferentiated ones, those not yet twelve. Undifferentiated ones are easiest. So long as they have a good nootch, they are usually content. We identified all those procreated by the inceptors in question and tagged them in the records as non-breeder stock, even if they showed great aptitude for the task. It is an unfortunate truth that inceptors and receptors of very little brain are often very skilled with the generative organ and emit very strong mating smells. That is one of the reasons our selectors must be extremely careful in their choices. It is rather like politics or policing: those who most enjoy the work are often those who should not be doing it!
When we were finished, we had retired or allocated all but the leftover campesi, mostly old ones or glusi, the offspring of the inceptors we had already tagged. As earthlings would say, the bottom of the barrel. A few were old enough to refer to the farms for the aged, but several had to be sent to the sleep gardens. Though we do not publicize these arrangements, persons may sleep in the gardens up to one hundred years, and this is usually more than adequate time to find places even for supernumerary campesi. The settlement of new planets requires many such, and we Pistach are usually settling somewhere.