From Chiddy’s journal
In a previous entry I have mentioned the Pistach colony on Quirk. It was only three or four years after our visit there that Pistach-home received astonishing news. The people on Quirk had rebelled against their sequestration, had seized a supply ship, no great feat as it was not armed or staffed to repel a boarding party, and subsequently had used that ship to ferry a large fraction of the planetary population to some unknown destination. What was most intriguing about the story was the name of the leader: T’Fees. More exactly, T’Fees the Tumultuous, or so those remaining on Quirk averred. Those who had chosen to remain on Quirk included the lazy, the elderly, the infirm, and the quite mad, but even the maddest among them claimed T’Fees had taken the title of Tumultuous before leaving the planet.
Pistach-home was abuzz with rumor and speculation. Where could the Quirkers have gone that was any better suited to them than Quirk? Quirk had been designed for the eccentric, the unconventional, the idiosyncratic, the bizarre. Where else could such people go and be allowed to live in acceptance and peace? We assumed they would want peace. We always assume that living, breathing, sensible creatures want peace.
The Departure from Quirk became what you on Earth would call a Nine-Day Wonder, fascinating, but not enduringly interesting. There were some songs written, some artwork done, some poems composed with the rebellion of Quirk as the theme. None of them truly captured the event to make it live in our minds. People soon quit talking about it for though it was unusual, by our standards, it was also distant and it did not affect Pistach-home. It was a happening staged by the insane on a world the sane regarded little.
Even we who had known T’Fees did not worry over it long. There were too many other duties and responsibilities that required our attention. Since Vess and I had been away on missions for some time, we were scheduled to spend the next year or so in duty at the House of the Fresco. All athyci are expected to spend time there in order to renew our spiritual balance. Teachings by the commentators over the years stress the importance of infusing oneself with the aura of the Fresco, with the awe and reverence evoked by the rites conducted there.
It was while I was on Fresco duty that the House of Cavita, my ancestral house, was honored by a request to donate genetic material for a mating among the five imperial houses. When a child is planned among them, each house gives genetic material to the mating but, also, to prevent excessive inbreeding, one outside source is required, preferably an athyco from a blameless lineage. Our family records had been audited for the past twelve generations without revealing one misjudgment by a Cavita selector, one reversed decision by a Cavita athyco, one artwork created by a Cavita proffi that was considered inferior. Our line seemed to be without stain. At the time, dear Benita, I confess that I had feelings of ebullience and self-regard over this matter. Since being here on Earth, I have become more likely to see humor in it. I have the feeling, if I told you we had twelve generations without stain, you would say to me, Oh, poor thing, how dull!
It was, in fact, worse than dull. While the request to provide genetic material is a great honor, it requires an equally great interruption in one’s life. Athyci are not physically able to reproduce. Therefore, an athyco asked to do so must undergo temporary transformation. This process is painful and lengthy, taking the better part of a year before one is restored to oneself. It was during this time that I became personally acquainted with breeding madness and clump lust and the other terrors and compulsions routinely faced by inceptors. They, so it is said, do it eagerly, without a qualm. For me, it was traumatic, not while it was going on, of course, but after it was over. As a matter of principle, I did not ask for memory deadening during the incidents. Athyci are expected to welcome all experiences as a way of learning what others experience and how they cope with events. I found the memories agonizing, however. If I had been Earthian, I would have blushed to recall them, wishing them gone, and worse: wishing dead all other individuals, the inceptors, the receptors, the nootchi, who had witnessed the events. It is a grave error to wish others gone, dead, passed over, but I committed it a hundred times during the following year on Pistach-home.