"Practical questions that bore directly on the village
and subsistence-level quality of life, such as for instance,
where it was the best place to find a certain kind of cassava
root, and why were the migrations of the certain
species of elk or dik-dik--
a species which the village depended for its very life
on hunting effectively-- more predictable in the rainy season
than in the dry season, and why were certain types of igneous
rock better for fashioning sharp edges
or striking together to produce fire
than other types of igneous rock and so on.
And then, of course, subsequently,
in a rather predictable trial-and-error heuristic
evolution, it emerges in the action of the protasis that
the child's preternatural brilliance in fact extends even
to those questions that are considered by the village
supremely important, in other words,
almost religious-grade questions, questions which--
inserting my friend's own terminology
for that of the analytical younger
man on the United flight--
involved not just celebration or raw IQ, but actual sagacity
or virtue or wisdom or, as Coleridge would have
had it, esemplasy.
And soon the child is being called upon
to adjudicate very complex and multifaceted conflicts,
such as if to gathering-caste villagers
both happened on the same breadfruit tree
at precisely the same time, and both claim the breadfruit,
who should get the breadfruit?
Or for example, if a wife failed to conceive
within a certain specified number of solar cycles,
did the husband have the right to banish her altogether?
Or did his rights extend only to no longer sharing
food with her, and so on and so forth.
Evidently, the passenger up ahead
provided any number of exemplary questions, some of which
were very involved and difficult for either my friend
or his acquaintance to reconstruct.
The point, however, is that the exceptional child's answers
to these sorts of questions were, without fail,
so ingeniously apposite and simple and comprehensive and
fair, that all sides felt justly treated
and often the litigants could not
understand why they had not thought of such an obviously
equitable solution themselves.
And in short order, a great many long standing conflicts
are settled and perennial social conundrums resolved.
And by this time, the entire village
had come to revere the child and had collectively decided
that the child must, in fact, be a special emissary, or legate,
or even incarnation of the primitive dark spirits
on which their pantheistic religions primarily based.
And some of the village's shaman and midwife castes--
members of what would later become
the new social structure's professional consultant caste--
claim that the child had, in fact,
come spontaneously into incarnated form,
deep in the circumambient rainforest,
and have been suckled and protected
by divinely mollified Jaguars.
And that the child's putative mother and father had,
in fact, simply stumbled onto the child while
out gathering cassava roots, and were
lying about it having been conceived and born
in the usual protomammalian way.
And were therefore, of course also by extension
lying about their own legal paternity.
And after a great deal of discussion and debate
the village exarchs vote to remove the child
from the parents' custody, and to make it an,
as it were, ward or dependent ex officio of the entire village.
And to invest the child with some sort
of unique, unprecedented, legal status
that was neither minor nor adult, nor member of any caste,
nor a village exarch nor a thane, nor a shaman per se,
but something entirely else.
And with the biological "parents"
granted certain special rights and privileges
to compensate them for their supplantation
by the village in loco--
the exarchs, apparently having come in secret to none
other than the child itself to help them
structure this whole delicate compromise.
And they construct for the child a special sort of raised wicker
dais or platform in the precise geometric center
of the village.
And they designate certain extremely rigid and precise
intervals and arrangements, whereby once every lunar cycle,
the villagers can all come to the village's center
to line up before the dais, according
to certain arcane hierarchies of caste and familial status,
and to one by one come before the seated child with questions
and disputes for him to resolve by an ethical fatwa,
and are in return to compensate the child for its services
with an offering of a plantain or dik-dik haunch,
or some item of recognized value.
Which offering was what the primitive the complex legal
arrangement provided for the child
to live on and support himself instead
of being his alleged parents quote
"dependent," close quote."