On the Great Seal of the World State was it not written: “All Men Must Serve Somebody, But Only Garomma Is the Servant of All”?

Without him, they knew, and knew irrevocably, oceans would break through dikes and flood the land, infections would appear in men’s bodies and grow rapidly into pestilences that could decimate whole districts, essential services would break down so that an entire city could die of thirst in a week, and local officials would oppress the people and engage in lunatic wars of massacre with each other. Without him, without Garomma working day and night to keep everything running smoothly, to keep the titanic forces of nature and civilization under control. They knew, because these things happened whenever “Garomma was tired of serving.”

What were the unpleasant interludes of their lives to the implacable dreary—but, oh, so essential!—toil of his? Here, in this slight, serious-looking man bowing humbly right and left, right and left, was not only the divinity that made it possible for Man to exist comfortably on Earth, but also the crystallization of all the subraces that ever enabled an exploited people to feel that things could be worse, that relative to the societal muck beneath them, they were, in spite of their sufferings, as lords and monarchs in comparison.

No wonder they stretched their arms frantically to him, the Servant of All, the World’s Drudge, the Slavey of Civilization, and screamed their triumphant demand with one breath, their fearful plea with the next: “Serve us, Garomma! Serve us, serve us, serve us!”

Didn’t the docile sheep he had herded as a boy in the Sixth District mainland to the northwest, didn’t the sheep also feel that he was their servant as he led them, and drove them to better pastures and cooler streams, as he protected them from enemies and removed pebbles from their feet, all to the end that their smoking flesh, would taste better on his father’s table? But these so much; more useful herds of two-legged, well-brained sheep were as thoroughly domesticated. And on the simple principle they’d absorbed that government was the servant of the people and the highest power in the government was the most abysmal servant.