The Fresco

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “We are sure you have all heard of the disappearance of Jerusalem and the change in appearance of the women of Afghanistan. A military man who met with us last Wednesday demanded proof that we could do what we said we could. While in our society such a challenge would be very impolite, we took no offense. We selected two proofs that would harm no one and have some positive value, while still being illustrative of our abilities. The more freedom given the women of Afghanistan, the prettier they will become. The more they are kept in seclusion, the uglier they will get and the worse they will smell, and lest anyone vent anger by attacking a woman or women, anyone doing so will bear the pain himself. During the past week, several attempts to stone women to death have resulted in the severe mashing and bone-breaking of the stone-throwers. They are not dead—we do not believe in causing deaths—but they will take a long painful time to heal.

  “Also, the greater the peace prevailing among Israelis and Palestinians, the more likelihood that Jerusalem will be returned. A continuance of violence might lead to the expansion of the hole we have already made, or even to the removal of other sacred sites or what we call suspensions. Suspensions cause selective groups to fall into a comatose state. It is a most effective tool for peace when a whole nation is suspended for a week or a month or even a year or longer, while life goes on around them. Certain countries in your world seem intent upon interfering with others or harboring what you call terrorists. These countries are candidates for suspension, all or in part. The parents among you probably make fighting children take a time out. It is a good way to combat violence. If we had been here when Serbia began to behave so badly, we would have suspended all its people for a year, at least, and we would have found the leaders responsible for the bad behavior and shown them their errors.

  “You should know that we do not require persons to agree with us. You have freedom of speech in this country, and it is valuable both to you and to us. We have no interest in hampering it. You may insult us if you wish. You may call us ugly names. We take no offense. Insults and names will not change the situation before you, which admits of only two alternatives. To be a neighbor, Earth must be a world in which children are born to peace and a place of their own, in which all are educated, in which personal freedoms and community civilities are well balanced, in which the environment is respected and unnatural conflict is restrained. Either we will be successful in helping your world achieve this, or we will leave it as it is, building a fence around it so that your people may not leave it. Many of your politicians may hope we do exactly that. Their horizons are narrow and they do not seek to widen them. Others, however, would regret the confinement. In order to do what is best, we need to know what you want.

  “We thank you for your time and attention, and we return you to your usual programming.”

  The two disappeared, the screen blinked and became the X-Files. Benita reflected that the X-Files might find it necessary to do some retaping. The truth was no longer out there; it was right here, staring her in the face.

  EARTH VISITED BY EXTRATERRESTRIALS ALIENS

  APPEAR ON TELEVISION

  REPUBLICANS ATTACK PRESIDENT

  MORSE CLAIMS PRESIDENT WITHHELD INFORMATION

  WHITE HOUSE ADMITS DELAY, FEARED HOAX

  PRESIDENT DIDN’T WANT TO PANIC PUBLIC

  MYSTERIOUS KILLING IN FLORIDA

  BONES OF MEN FOUND TRAMPLED INTO EARTH

  ACLU DECRIES ATTEMPT TO QUESTION AMERICAN PUBLIC

  QUESTIONNAIRES COULD THREATEN CIVIL LIBERTIES

  ALIENS ARE INSECTS, SAYS SCIENTIST

  OTHERS SAY TOO MANY LEGS

  AMERICAN PSYCHIATRIC ASSOCIATION CLAIMS

  ETS ARE PSYCHOLOGICALLY HUMAN

  NO VIOLENCE IN MIDEAST IN PAST THREE DAYS

  25

  from chiddy’s journal

  Dearest Benita, I think you may be interested in learning more of how our people deal with various difficulties, and in that regard I remember vividly the Pistach colony planet of Assurdo. Newly colonized planets seldom conform exactly to Pistach propriety. The usual pattern is one of imbalance: too few people trying to do too many things; too many undifferentiated ones selected as breeders when their dreams lie elsewhere; selectors who are, themselves, inexperienced—though at least a few experienced selectors are always provided to new colonies. After a decade or so, things flatten out, and by the time the oldest settlers are being retired, the colony has achieved good order.

  On Assurdo, however, the situation was a great deal worse than mere imbalance! In the sixth year of settlement, an inceptor had gone rogue and killed several selectors, including all the experienced ones. Ke had been immediately captured and put in a sleep locker, of course, but no one had had the presence of mind to send to Pistach-home for athyci.

  Too much later, arriving for what was supposed to be a routine visit, Vess and I found the settlement in chaos. When we confronted the settlement manager, ke told us about the killings and showed us the sleep locker in which Chom, the assailant, was confined. When we reviewed the selector records, it was apparent to us that Chom should have been selected as a campes, a te. Everything about Chom screamed campes: the muscularity, the energy level, the preoccupation with present satisfactions coupled with limited ability to foresee consequences or connections, the obsessive attention to habit and routine, the suspicion of novelty.

  One of the less experienced selectors, however, had selected Chom as an inceptor on the grounds of certain self-gratifying behaviors which a more experienced selector would have recognized as infantile survivals. In addition to bad selection, training for inceptorhood had been so abbreviated that none of Chom’s natural territoriality had been fully suppressed.

  Campesi are obsessive about their own space and their own habits. Chom had become obsessed with one particular receptor. Campesi are suspicious of novelty, which meant that Chom could not be easily diverted to other receptors. Campesi need routine and immediate satisfactions, and Chom had enjoyed the routines and satisfactions of that particular receptor and continued to plague ker even when the receptor was brooding and not in condition to receive an inceptor’s attentions.

  To state it simply: Chom had gone breeding-mad, and when the receptor had repulsed ter, te had invaded a meeting of the entire selectorial body at their annual Fresco Meditation breakfast, killed over half of them and then attempted to kill self.

  Though the receptor in question subsequently delivered a fine egg to the nootch, ke had been gravely traumatized by the incident and requested immediate reselection as a field campes, working on one of the outlying farms. All this, and still no one had sent for athyci! The remaining selectors were required by the rules of settlement to do so, but they did not.

  We recognize a reluctance on the part of inexperienced persons to get athyci involved in their troubles. Inexperienced persons are often ingenuous. They have a sweet naivete about them, an innocent faith that if they can only talk long enough about problems, they will come up with solutions that will not hurt anyone. They have a penchant for committees and group discussions, for bumbling along, never wishing to offend but unable to avoid offense; always caring but never courageous; always pitying but never resolute; always doubting but stubbornly avoiding decision.

  So they had done on Assurdo. In the absence of experienced mentors, the inexperienced selectors had continued doing their well-intentioned worst. There was no malice in them, though there was a good deal of mis-hoping. Mistake compounds mistake, and by the time we arrived, conditions had deteriorated into near anarchy. I reminded myself of panel four of the Fresco, Peaceful Work, in which the Jaupati are shown working usefully under the watchful eyes of Pistach mentors, though in the preceding panel three, Uniting the Tribes, the Jaupati are shown in total chaos and disarray. The situation could be fixed. It was not impossible. I told myself this, over and over.

  The selectors, being young and proud and unwilling to offend, had fallen into the trap of choosing far too many specialized castes. Wh
en a selector is too sympathetic, le may overvalue the least passing interest expressed by an undifferentiated one, assuming this transitory regard is a sign of talent or affinity. If the selector is also impatient and/or overworked, the selector may neglect to observe the candidate’s actual performance during the selection process, thus allowing the first impression to prevail. Commit this same error over and over for a period of several decades and anarchy results! The colony was awash in artists who did no art, sculptors who sculpted nothing, musicians who were pitch deaf, doctors who couldn’t distinguish healthy persons from sick ones, much less treat the diseases. When I remember it, dear Benita, I think of your spouse and son. There were a great many Berts and Carloses in that settlement! There were even a few contempli sitting about, looking at the walls. One can’t train contempli in a new colony! Contempli need advanced mentoring of very specialized types! How does one come up with the design of new nanobots or spaciotemporal diffusers by looking at walls! Oh, mathematical contempli do a lot of staring into space, I grant you—though they would rather scribble abstruse formulae on the walls than stare at them—but one cannot come up with microchem experts or morph-beam engineers in a new colony!

  All these specialists were, of course, drawing their rations, keeping cozy and warm, accomplishing nothing, while the colony was desperate for ditch diggers to install the sewage system, plumbers to hook up the drains, technicians to install the hydroelectric plant which had been shipped with the settlers, and so on. Pistach systems are carefully engineered to afford gainful, useful employment for all members, even the inevitable supply of glusi (except under conditions of glusi glut, as previously mentioned) but in the colony of Assurdo, the balance had been lost and there were misassignment glusi everywhere!

  What was wrong was apparent and needed no investigation, though the stench around the villages and the extent of the disorder overwhelmed us. As an immediate alleviation, Vess and I took over the work of the selectors on the grounds they had failed in their duty by not summoning us sooner. Due to the extremity of the situation, we decided to use the machines we carried on our ship. Philosophically, the Pistach are opposed to the use of machines on settlement worlds, preferring a lengthy, slow evolution of community, with its own history and culture. In this case, however, gefissit moltplat gom, as we say: emergencies make their own rules. You would say, any port in a storm. Inasmuch as the community was up to its tonal detectors in sewage, the machines were necessary to speed the drainage and alleviate the smell!

  While the machines worked at that, we put the selectors through our memory drain, using a standard NB primary association identifier (Type 9Zwok) to strain childhood memories into a Tressor-Hines multibank synaptic synthesizer where they were stored while we went on to wipe all later memories clean, leaving their minds utterly blank. We then used the newest Bertrani omni-feed to restore only the childhood memories, stripped of all later associations. The former selectors were thus stopped at age twelve, when they had been undifferentiated. Then, we reselected them, most of them as campesi. Though many lacked the musculature of true campesi, with proper hormonal treatment they bulked up to a satisfactory level, and as soon as the accelerated process was complete, we set all of them to continuing the sewage system, though we pulled out any who showed managerial talent to receive further education in waste management or hydropower systems.

  We then examined the records of all those misselected proffi and contempli, all those artists, sculptors, doctors and what have you, applying the Fynor-Noot allied skill analysis system. Failed sculptors, those who had actually liked stone, became masons, foundation layers, aqueduct builders. Failed artists, those who enjoyed color, became painters of rooms, houses and barns. Those who had fancied themselves doctors because of a desire to help and care for others were assigned as crèche managers, animal tenders, and the like. Most of these people did not need regression. Doing work they could succeed at would in time erase any longing for a time when things were otherwise. In very short order virtually all of them were doing well and taking pleasure in their work. Those few who fancied specialized caste for reasons of power or prestige and who might, therefore, harbor resentments and unfulfilled ambitions were treated as the selectors had been: memory removal and regression to age twelve.

  This was a long, tiring process. There were fewer than a hundred to be regressed each period, but they scream so when the memories are drained, and they must be conscious for it to be done correctly, leaving their psyches intact. Both Vess and I became weary and depressed, for there was no relief in the settlement, nothing attractive on which one could rest one’s eyes, nothing amusing, nothing soothing. Everything and everyone was at war with everything and everyone else. When we began, only a tiny fraction of the persons were doing work they were suited for, and even they were constantly frustrated by interdependent workers who did not function properly. Still, day by day, we pulled a bit farther out of the morass. Day by day we saw people doing work they liked and doing it well, even the regressed ones who had been reselected.

  One morning, leaving the ship, I came across a small garden tended by a child who was singing a hymn to Mengantowhai as te pulled weeds from among the flowers and fed them to a nearby flock of flosti who gabbled and stretched their long mouthparts to receive a share while the flost-herd stood contentedly by with his noose. It was so…right! So interdependently lovely. As I gazed at child/garden/flosti, my vocal sac filled with fluid and I turned away, gargling, deeply moved. Vess patted ton’er on an appendage and uttered comfort words, I suppose the Pistach equivalent of your Earthian, “there, there.” (Which, by the way, confuses us greatly. What is there? And why two of them?) This little garden was the first functionality, the first real sign of emerging order, the signal to bring new selectors into the mix.

  By that time, as we had been on Assurdo for well over a year, a number of undifferentiated ones awaited selection. In our role as athyci, Vess and I prayed for Mengantowhai’s intercession in granting us a small miracle, which was, wondrously, granted. At least a ten of the undifferentiated ones had the proper tendencies to become selectors. We double-checked ourselves during the selection process and spent more time than usual in training. At the end of another year, Assurdo was, so to speak, on its feet. The new selectors had been shown the ugliness and disfunctionality caused by the errors of their predecessors, and they had been supervised through selection after selection, learning that they must never, never select someone for a more specialized life simply because that person wants to try it or envies the prestige of those who do it or think it might be interesting.

  “Num g’klum, num b’flum, humnum te des ai,” we said. “Where there is no affinity and no skill, you cannot make an ai out of a te.” Your people, dear Benita, have the same saying, about the ears of swine, or pearls before pigs, or silk billfolds, or something of the kind.

  All that was left for us to do was clean up the loose ends. As I’ve mentioned, of the people we had simply reselected without regression, virtually all had worked out well and were contented in their tasks. A few, however, who at first had seemed to be doing well had in fact had been spoiled by the earlier selection, and their moods and angers affected their work-mates adversely. By the time this was known, both Vess and I were fatigued. We did not wish to take the time for memory wipe, regression, and reselection, so we told the unhappy ones to choose between going to a long-established colony where they might return to specialized caste if they chose, or returning to Pistach-home for regression, conditioning and reselection.

  Two chose the colony, so on the way home we made a detour to our detention settlement on Quirk, which was then celebrating its tricentennial. Quirk was designed to serve as a settlement for those of our people who cannot find satisfactory roles in the normal Pistach way. Dissatisfaction happens from time to time, and we take no pleasure in the pain and frustration of those who cannot fit in. Therefore, Quirk: a subtropical planet with a dozen or so towns sprawling across pleasant valleys nea
r the sea. There is food for the picking, water for the drinking, no power needed for warmth, and the sanitation systems are self-repairing. The towns are not particularly pleasing in an aesthetic sense, as they have neither order nor discernable functionality, but Pistach-home provides ample equipment and supplies for its free-spirited population. Naturally, there are no functioning inceptors or receptors among the inhabitants—any of these castes who are sent there are sterilized though not otherwise altered. Larvabots and childbots are provided for nootchi. Except for actual reproduction, persons on Quirk may play any roles they like.

  One of the persons we set ashore on Quirk was a former proffe, T’Fees, a handsome person, stalwart and strong, who had been reselected as a seemingly perfect campes, but was unhappy in that role. He had been selected originally as an artist, though te had no real talent. Though te could not create art, te had well-formed opinions concerning it and insights that I found remarkably fine. Perhaps if te had been selected to teach art, he would have been content, but his ambitions did not reach in that direction. Or, if we Pistach allowed the role of critic, T’fees would have fulfilled that role. We do not critique the works of others for public edification, however. To question the value of others’ works publicly would be to denigrate them in our society.

  I think of T’Fees often when I learn of Earth people who fail at their chosen lives, or those like your Van Gogh, who become a success only after they are dead. On Pistach, we do not change our opinions of former persons. What good does it do an unhappy man to become a genius after his death? Or a living person to be a failure at his dreams? Among Pistach, all except glusi are successful, and even glusi are encouraged to believe they are. All must believe in their success; otherwise meager aptitudes breed great rancor.