It was suggested that since the Fresco had sustained no damage, the entire Fresco or at least the entire Kasiwees panel should be cleaned, as the symbols of renewal would no doubt be found elsewhere on the panel. This was shouted down. Though the symbols might be elsewhere on the panel, possibly they might not, and no one wanted to deal with that eventuality. The Chapter felt such a discovery would undermine the entire structure of our society.
Another suggestion was that we go back and amend any of the commentaries that did not agree with the now disclosed reality. This was discussed for days, until everyone agreed we could not conform the commentaries to the disclosed reality because we did not know what the disclosed reality was! As our adage puts it,lum ek avotvl, ni lumek’aul. a tiny patch of blue is not heaven. (You would say, one swallow does not make a summer.) We would have to clean the entire Kasiwees panel, at the very least, in order to say what the tiny patch meant, and that might raise questions about other panels that had not been cleaned!
The anger and confusion finally settled into a determination to find out who had first misled the people and to cover up the patch of blue so the people would not be further confused. It was agreed that the only sensible thing to do was haze the patch with tallow smoke, that is, re-dirty it. That decision had the weight of tradition behind it, at least. Since I had dropped the cleaning cloth, I, personally, smoked the patch into illegibility, though I confess to putting every detail of it into memory as I did so.
A small committee was delegated the job of going through the archives starting with our earliest ancestors to determine who was responsible for this error, if, indeed, it had been an error. I volunteered to help and was accepted as one of the researchers. Though I had studied Pistach history prior to being accepted as an athyco, I had never actually looked at original documents. The thing I most wanted to see was the often-referred-to Compendium, the panel-by-panel drawing of the Fresco together with the notations on which our knowledge of the Fresco now depends. This Compendium was created long ago by Athyco Glumshalak who is known as “The Inceptor of Morality.” It was Glumshalak who codified our beliefs and virtues,- it was Glumshalak who taught us that the Fresco was too holy to be cleaned. Unfortunately, the Compendium was not available on Pistach-home, for it was on display in the Fresco House of one of the colony worlds. Though this was a disappointment, other documents were profuse.
I had no idea how much writingthere had been prior to widespread use of electronic communication and the development of mind-scanners. Prior to modern times, we Pistach used sheets of stuff called thizzle, a kind of starch that dries into sheets, almost like your paper, and there are bales of it in the archives. Though there seemed to be a dearth of official documents prior to Glumshalak, there were uncountable items of personal correspondence. Back then, everyone wrote to everyone else, and all of it had been saved in stasis files, to prevent its being eaten by gniffles, even letters from people who were only remotely if at all connected to the building of the Fresco House.
I was sorting through old letters when I came across one from a proffe, one Merg’alos of Sferon, to his nootch. The letter concerned Merg’alos’s visit to the Fresco, and it was dated only fifty years after the Fresco was completed. In the letter, Merg’alos, who was evidently an artist, wrote that he found the Fresco “undistinguished.” He referred to Kasiwees as “abandoned,” and to the (unnamed) figures in the sky as being, “like so many flosti, flying.” The symbol conveying the word “like” or “similar to” came at the end of a line, at the very edge of the thizzle sheet, which had been slightly nibbled. As it was the first reference to flosti that I had seen, I set the letter aside. Days later, I came across a critique written by a proffe who was also of Sferon House, dated some seventy years after the Merg’alos letter was written. The critique referred to “my ancestor’s letter” and mentioned the possible symbolism to be found in the “flock of flosti either arriving or departing.”