But we soon came to see that there were other things going on! This was the time that Wilderness people brought their most promising children to Atalantaya to be educated, seeking acceptance in Amel’s many multileveled schools. This was the time when brilliant young women and men from the villages offered their skills to the merchants and chefs of Atalantaya, or sought to sell bright and detailed paintings they had made on woven fabrics or the bark of trees. This was the time when Wilderness musicians who had made their own reed flutes, or skin-top drums or other instruments, sought to sell the instruments and themselves as skilled musicians who might work throughout Atalantaya. This was the premier time of exchange between the two worlds of Earth as they existed at this moment in history. Village healers, tellers of tales, collectors of village histories, these also came to offer services and themselves for hiring.

In all, it was a most exciting and exhilarating and inspiring time. But after the Festival was over, we were told, there would be Wilderness people not wanting to leave, who had to be rounded up and forcibly ejected from Atalantaya, and it did turn out that there was one murder or so everyone said. Amel would pronounce on the murderer, we were informed, and people did not seem eager to talk about this, or to explain anything about it, or to know anything further about it. It seemed they did not want to talk about such a distasteful and exceptional subject, and they gave us to know that murder was still common in the Wilderness lands, but not here. That surprised me. I hadn’t seen murder in the Wilderness lands.

Now I want to explain one other revelation that came to us during the Festival of Meats. It concerned a small riot that broke out when one band of musicians sought to replace another band by force outside of our home building. A crowd gathered, with Atalantayans taking sides, and soon there was pushing and shoving and the verbal exchanges became furious.

At the moment when it seemed one of the musicians, the head of the usurping band, might well be harmed, certain people came out of nowhere who enforced the peace. And I noticed that these people were all distinguished by a tiny flashing light somewhere on their persons, either on their collars, or on a wristband, or even in their hair, and that they were working in overwhelming numbers to quell the riot.

It was then that I learned how law and order really worked in Atalantaya. The entire “police force,” to use our words today, was in fact composed of people going about their lives in other ways, who could be called up in an instant, to turn on their tiny flashing lights and carry out their duties as needed. These people had in fact been specially trained for this, trained on different levels, and I later found the school where they were trained. Indeed, it trained men and women to fulfill a multitude of public tasks, being what we would call today police, guardians of the peace, even civil servants. I came to see that those who broke up small fights, or took into custody the disorderly, had not been mere passersby as I had earlier thought, but members of this ever-ready police force.