Seventh Men's Custom for Dealing with Infants Unable to Fly

The Seventh Men's Custom for Dealing with Infants Unable to Fly was a population practice shaped by the species' dependence on flight: infants unable to fly were normally destroyed, but rising deformity eventually prompted the community to spare selected children for scientific work. The change preserved lives while unsettling the aerial society's assumptions about which forms of life belonged within it, and ultimately helped produce the group that displaced the fliers from power.

The Flight Test and the Original Custom

Flight was not simply an accomplishment for the Seventh Men; it was the foundation of their communal life. A normal infant could fly early in its second year. If an accident prevented that first flight, the child invariably declined and died before reaching three. Some deformed infants, however, reflected a partial reversion to a pedestrian nature and could survive indefinitely without flight. The society's established response was to destroy these children, a practice the account characterizes as merciful within its own assumptions about their condition.

That response treated inability to fly as more than a physical difference: it marked a life incompatible with the community's central way of being. Yet the account distinguishes the children who would die after failing to fly from those who could live on as pedestrians. The latter made the custom a social decision as well as a response to infant mortality: their continued existence was possible, but the community had not made a place for it.

Biological Pressure and Policy Reversal

For ages, the number of malformed infants varied with circumstances. The balance changed as a marine salt essential to the Seventh Men's highly strung constitution was gradually exhausted. Deformities became more frequent, and the population fell until organized aerial life could no longer be maintained according to its long-established aesthetic principles. The crisis was therefore not presented as a sudden rejection of flight, but as a deterioration the society could not explain or prevent with its existing knowledge.

Many came to believe that greater biological understanding might avert the decline. The community adopted a new policy: instead of destroying every infant unable to fly, it would spare a carefully selected proportion, choosing those thought likely to develop high intelligence. The hoped-for result was a specialized research group, free from what the fliers regarded as the intoxicating pull of flight and able to investigate the biological causes of the species' decay.

The Researchers and the Consequences

The spared children grew into brilliant but flightless adults. Deprived of the experience around which their fellows organized life, they viewed the aerial community from outside its central values. They envied the happiness they knew only through others' accounts, while judging the fliers' devotion to physical exercise, love, nature, and social elegance as intellectually narrow. Though treated fairly and shown compassion, they experienced that kindness as no remedy for their exclusion and turned toward research and scientific control as alternative sources of purpose.

Within a few centuries, the researchers had restored intellectual life and used the power of knowledge to become masters of the world. The fliers were surprised and distressed when they recognized that the pedestrians intended to build a new order without a place for natural flight. The policy designed to preserve the Seventh Men's population thus altered its political future: selection for research created a group whose capacities and ideals challenged the very culture that had first defined flightlessness as a condition to be eliminated.

Significance

The custom's history turns on a reversal in the meaning of survival. At first, survival without flight was treated as a fate from which infants should be spared; under demographic pressure, some of those same lives became a resource for biological inquiry. The new policy addressed a real population crisis, but it also established a lasting division between those who embodied the society's defining experience and those who could not share it.

The resulting conflict was not simply between health and disability, or between flight and research. By making selected flightless children instruments of a scientific solution, the community gave them a route to knowledge and authority without reconciling them to its ideals. The custom therefore marks both an adaptation to biological decline and the beginning of a social transformation that ultimately threatened the aerial order it was meant to protect.