So the Glass Master story is real?" "Oh, yes, my dear. The story is real. When you must lie, my dear, lie as little as possible. That way you'll have… - Sheri S. Tepper

Such plagues are known to arise spontaneously on overcrowded planets, Jory commented. "When any environment exceeds its carrying capacity, plagues begin to manifest themselves, though humans are always surprised when it happens."

Mother, though of Gamesman caste, seemed to have no Talent of any kind. She was so beautiful she did not need to be anything else.

It's exactly the way we thought and acted. Men didn't have to be better! At least, not in terms of western thought, he didn't. He strutted and crowed and told himself just as he was, he was made in the image of God! It was easier to depend on heaven than be responsible on earth, but humans were divinely created so why worry."
"And you don't believe he was? Human?"
"He wasn't what I thought of as sapiens. In my opinion, very few of us were sapiens. Maybe none of us were. Maybe we'd had a chance of becoming sapiens, but we threw it away."
"When did mankind do that?"
"In Nela's time, I think. It was then that pitiful people who saw no reality and knew no science declared the holiness of reproduction. And while the liberals were preserving the right to beget, the reactionaries were preserving the faults in our gene pool. We could corrupt and destroy all the rest of creation, but our own germ plasm was sacred. It didn't matter that there were billions of us, but anything sapiens about us was far more threatened by our numbers than by any change we might make in ourselves.…"