Section 11. Concerning our Priests
It’s high time that I move on from these explanations of the things of Flatland and get to the main event of this book, which is my introduction to the mysteries of Space. That is my subject; everything that has come before now is simply the preface.
This is why I cannot take the time to explain to you all the things I assume you are extremely interested in, if I may flatter myself.
For example, I will not be going into detail about how we move around despite our lack of feet, or how we construct our buildings of wood, stone, or brick in place despite our lack of hands and our inability to lay foundations as you in Space do, and the fact that we cannot use gravity the way you can.
I also can’t take the time to explain to you how exactly the rain begins in the spaces between our various zones, so that the northern areas don’t stop moisture from falling to the south.
I do not have time to tell you about the nature of our hills and mines, our trees and vegetables, or our Alphabet and method of writing which has been adapted to fit our linear tablets, or books.
These and a hundred other details of our lives I must skip past, and the only reason I mention them at all now is to make it clear to my Readers that I have not forgotten that these things exist, it’s just that I don’t want to waste your valuable time explaining them all.
But before I can really move on to the true subject of this book, I have no doubt my Readers will be demanding some final knowledge about the pillars that uphold the Constitution of Flatland, the controllers of our conduct and the shapers of our destiny, the objects of universal respect and even worship...Do I need to specify that I mean our Circles, or Priests?
When I call them Priests, I want to make sure you understand that the word for us means more for us than you would define it.
To us, Priests are Administrators of all Business, Art, and Science. They are the Directors of Trade, Commerce, Generalship, Architecture, Engineering, Education, Statesmanship, Legislature, Morality, Theology, and many more. They do no work themselves, but ensure that all work that is done is worth doing.
Although the common idea is that everyone who is called a Circle is a Circle, the better educated Classes know that no Circle is really a Circle, he is just a Polygon with a very large number of very small sides.
As the number of sides increases, a Polygon begins to approximate a Circle, and, when the number of sides becomes high enough -- say for example, three or four hundred – then it becomes extremely difficult for even the most delicate touch to feel any polygonal angles, and they are declared a Circle.
Well, I should really say that it would be difficult, because as I’ve said earlier, Recognition by Feeling is unheard of in the highest classes of society, and to attempt Feel a Circle would be considered the most outrageous of insults.
Refusing to allow himself to be Felt enables a Circle to easily maintain the veil of mystery which he wraps himself in from his earliest childhood, preventing others from knowing the exact measure of his Perimeter or Circumference.
But we can still do our own calculations: With three feet being the average Perimeter for an adult, the math shows that, in a Polygon of three hundred sides, each side will be less than a hundredth of a foot, or just barely a tenth of an inch. In a Polygon of six or seven hundred sides, the sides are hardly larger than the diameter of the head on one of your pins.
For the sake of courtesy, it is always assumed that the current Chief Circle has ten thousand sides.
The rise in social status of Male Children of the Circles is not restricted by the same Law of Nature that limits the lower classes to an increase of on side per generation. If it were, the number of sides in a Circle would simply be a question of family pedigree and basic math.
We would easily know that the 497th descendant of an Equilateral Triangle would be a Polygon with five hundred sides, but this is not the case.
Nature’s Law lays down two new and opposing Laws that apply to the Male Children of Circles:
1.As the number of sides of a Circular father increase, his sons’ numbers of sides will increase drastically.
2. As the number of sides quickly increases, the ability to produce male children decreases just as quickly.
In the home of a Polygon of four of five hundred sides, it is rare to find a son, and that child will never have any brothers. But at the same time, that single son may be born with fifty, or even a hundred more sides than his father has.
Art also steps in alongside Nature to help this process of higher Evolution. Our highest doctors have discovered that the small and still tender sides of a newborn Polygon of the higher classes can be fractured, and his whole frame re-built, with such skill that a Polygon born with two or three hundred sides can sometimes – (but not always, because this surgery comes with serious risk) – can sometimes leap ahead what would have taken two or three hundred generations, and, all at once, double the status of himself and his own future sons.
Many promising infants have been sacrificed in this way. Hardly one out of ten survives. But the parental ambition is so strong among those Polygons who live on the fringe of the Circular class that it is very rare to find a Nobleman who has not placed his first-born son into the Circular Neo-Theraputic Gymnasium before he has reached the age of one month.
One year’s treatment determines success or failure. By that time, the child has, in all probability, added one more tombstone to the fields that crowd the Neo-Theraputic Cemetery. But, on rare occasions, a joyful parade escorts the little one back to his exultant parents, no longer a Polygon, but a Circle, at least as much as anyone can be a Circle.
It only takes a single positive result to convince untold numbers of Polygonal parents to perform their own domestic sacrifices, which almost always end, not in the rare Circular child, but the much more common freshly marked gravestone.
