7. THE FARMER'S LESSON

A shocking truth about alien farming...

Teacher Zoz ambled into his classroom carrying an armful of instruments and a great smile on his perfectoid face. Cun sighed because she’d been in this class only last year, and this promised to be very much a repetition of the most uninteresting day of her life thus far. It was normal for students, once they were approaching the age when their education was over, to repeat a year that was considered to be a particularly important part of their education.

“You may scowl, young Cun,” grinned Zoz, teasingly, “but this is what’s on the curriculum. Maybe you could tell your classmates what joys are in store for them today.

“Farming,” she said, simply, “we’re off to study farming.”

“And what is farming?” asked Zoz, pretending that he didn’t know.

“Growing things,” put in Els.

“We will discuss the history of Farmer’s Ted’s empire on our way to the farm,” explained Zoz, “it is little more than a mile away and the exercise will be good for you. It will make your playtimes more invigorating when you come to ruminate on your lessons!”

“We never ruminate on lessons,” muttered Din, “playtime’s too much fun without spoiling it by ruminating on ancient pre-history or mathematics!”

“Possibly so, though being a perfectoid with all elements of lust bisected from my character I can’t possibly understand what you mean,” replied the teacher.

“Playtime is fun,” Cun assured him, blushing, “it involves all sorts of games, the sort people play at Michaelmas, but with contraception so nothing goes wrong.”

“I know the technical facts,” growled Zoz, “but come along. It is, as I said, but a short walk, and you will pay attention as we mooch along.”

“Get on with it, then,” mumbled Pul.

“Before the Great Chaos,” began Zoz,” farmers were employed to produce food. They produced all sorts of food, from the flesh of beasts to grains of grasses.”

“Urgh!” choked Els, “flesh! Did people eat flesh?”

“There were only two types of nourishment available,” confirmed Zoz, “what was called meat and what was called vegetables and fruit. But the Great Chaos, being the result of the Trumpster’s insistence on a complete collapse of the environment of the home planet, saw the end to that! When our forefathers arrived on Terraful, this bountiful world whereon we laugh and you play and everyone is happy, it was to find that none of the seeds brought with them from Earth would grow and, worse than that, every growing thing on this planet was toxic to our systems. There was no food! Nothing for the farmers who had come along as essential beings to grow. There were micro-organisms, though, that were health-giving but nowhere near as plentiful as they needed to be.”

“Then why are there still farmers?” asked Din, “it would seem to be a redundant profession, at best.”

“It was judged by those mightier of brain than you or I that the time might well come when our systems adapted to what they find toxic at the moment, or in the hope that a strain of either Earthly or Terraful plantlife might eventually be adapted to thrive on this charming blue-grass savannah of a world,” said Zoz, seriously, “but that hasn’t happened yet, and it may never happen. Yet in the event that it does it was also judged that there should be a class of Perfectoids, though it was initially men, of course, trained and able to farm the land and produce the new crops. So that is why Farmer Ted has his farm, and works throughout the season producing toxic crops that no man could eat without dying. Fortunately, he has a little side-line which is for more advanced studies than yours...”

“It seems to be a great waste of time and effort,” muttered Din, frowning.

“Maybe, but if our food supplies have to revert to crops from the land you won’t think of the long years that Farmer Ted has tilled his land as any kind of the waste of time,” replied Zoz drily.

“If he is growing unwanted crops, what does he do with them when he harvests them?” asked Cun. “In pre-history the crops were taken, according to our lessons that is, to the market where peasants bought them and...” here she shuddered, “...ate them!”

“Whereas now you eat sweetmeats from the factories,” agreed Zoz. “There are sufficient farm-factories to produce nourishment for our population. Now look here. Here we are: this is the farm. I told you it was but a short walk! And here to greet us is Farmer Ted.”

Farmer Ted was a truly ancient Perfectoid. He had been produced during the first years of creation when the ways and means of using living flesh as a substitute for mechanical flesh was being developed, and consequently there were elements of his body that were still made of metal, and by the look of it, mostly rusty metal.

“Why hello there, my hearties!” he bawled, and Cun thought there must be something wrong with his voice system, “you’ll have to bear with me while I see to a delivery from the Priests!”

“Why do the Priests have to deliver anything to a farmer who doesn’t produce anything worth having?” asked Din.

“Maybe everything I produce ain’t unwanted?” grinned Farmer Ted. “Maybe without my toil and my aching back the likes of you youngster homoperps wouldn’t be nourished at all, eh?”

“Zoz said it was all toxic, the stuff that grows on the planet,” protested Din obstinately.

“Oh, young fella, it is. It most assuredly is,” grinned the farmer, “but there’s micro-stuff that does its bit in the production of your victuals that isn’t toxic! And without that micro-stuff we’d all be deader than, what was it, Zoz, that was mighty dead?”

“The dodo,” murmured Zoz.

“That’s right: the dodo, whatever that might have been. But you has your victuals, don’t you? And where might that come from, don’t you wonder?”

Din shrugged his shoulders. He’d not really given it much thought and even now wasn’t all that bothered. After all, he had his three meals a day, didn’t he, and he was strong and healthy and even, according to Cun, wonderfully virile.

“What do you teach ‘em these days?” asked Farmer Ted sarcastically of Zoz.

“Some things can be delicate...” murmured Zoz.

“Well, matey, when I got back to my institution for learning I’d take out my dictionary, if I were you, Zoz old mate, and tell them about cannibalism,” grinned the farmer.

Zoz shuddered and Els piped up, “what’s cannibalism then, teacher Zoz?”

© Peter Rogerson 17.04.19