The World Menders cs-2

by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.

  He rode away, and Farrari and Liano walked back toward the village.

  “I thought there weren’t any agents among the aristocrats,” Farrari protested.

  “There aren’t,” Liano said, “but there are a few aristocrat agents. They can get away with it as long as they stay away from the real aristocrats. Sometimes they can be very useful.”

  “Obviously. Could you understand what he said to the durrl?”

  “He said enough to frighten him badly. He reminded him that a yilesc has the protection of the kru and threatened to hold him responsible for the sickness if we were interfered with.”

  “I see.”

  “He would have whipped me,” Liano said softly.

  “He certainly gave every indication of it. Why, by the way?”

  “He’d already started. He would have whipped me.”

  Abruptly she lapsed into a mood he had not seen for months; her manner was subdued; her gaze directed absently at nothing on the horizon. And when they returned to work she performed her tasks mechanically and spoke not at all. Farrari did not disturb her. His leg was still bleeding and he could not bandage it—no ol would wear a bandage. It throbbed painfully, but he knew that it was not even a sample of what a real beating would be like.

  And Liano, he feared, had her own vivid memories of that.

  He worked at her side, wondering bitterly if a sick ol was any more susceptible to culture than a well one, because on this, his last day in the field, the only olz available for him to work on were dying.

  But when Dr. Garnt came that night Farrari’s recall was not even mentioned.

  There was sickness in the next village. And the next. For days they labored, moving from village to village, covering as much territory as they could but not nearly enough, fanning the feeble sparks of life that they found in the foul, damp coldness of the huts. Base, in a frantic attempt to halt the spread of the strange virus, sent all of its ol agents into the area and everyone else who could by any stretch of the imagination pass as an ol. The latter were less than adequately trained, but the durrl never reappeared and the olz were too sick to care whether their nurses walked properly.

  In every village the piles of dead grew daily. Soon there were more dead olz than there were live olz being cared for. When Farrari suggested that they dig graves, Liano solemnly shook her head. A village’s dead were its own business.

  “Come warm weather, these villages aren’t going to be pleasant places,” Farrari objected.

  “And what if there’s no one alive in the village to take care of them?”

  “Then the neighboring villages will do it.”

  Farrari grumbled for days before abandoning the argument.

  The unseasonably cold, damp weather passed, finally, and one of the durrl’s assistants brought a generous ration of food to each village. Farrari was touched by this humanitarian gesture until Liano explained that every durrl held back a reserve of food for spring, just in case the olz needed it to give them sufficient strength for the spring planting.

  “Just in case they need it!” Farrari exclaimed.

  “This year they’ll have more to eat than usual,” Liano observed soberly. “There are so few…”

  The sick olz soaked up sunshine, ate, became stronger. The crisis had passed, but in the villages afflicted by the disease, only one ol in six survived.

  Farrari and Liano left, as usual, without a murmur of farewell. That night a platform met them in the wasteland and whisked them and their narmpf and cart to base for a rest.

  Coordinator Paul greeted them, shook their hands warmly, and said, “Well, Farrari, what progress in disseminating culture?”

  “Culture?” Farrari echoed bitterly. “We couldn’t even keep them alive!”

  The coordinator nodded. “Very well put. Before the olz can concern themselves with things like democracy and culture, they have to achieve survival.”

  Later Peter Jorrul came to Farrari’s workroom and greeted him with such evident embarrassment that Farrari opened the conversation by saying resignedly, “I suppose my career as an ol is finished.”

  Jorrul nodded. “No one regrets that more than I do. You did well enough to astonish a lot of people, including myself, and for a time we thought we’d found a natural agent in the most unlikely place imaginable. But—” he smiled tiredly—“you have a fatal weakness.”

  “I can’t think like an ol.”

  “Right. I’m extremely glad that you can’t, since no harm was done. You saved Liano and quite probably yourself, and you enabled us to learn something. In this business one survives by learning—if one learns quickly enough to survive.”

  “What did you learn? That CS men can’t think like olz?”

  Jorrul said ruefully, “At least we could have been excused for not knowing that. ‘Learned’ isn’t the right word—you brought to our attention something we should have observed years ago: the yilescz vanish at the end of the harvest season and have nothing to do with the olz until spring planting. Why this is so we have no idea. We possibly would have deduced this earlier if Liano had been able to tell us what happened when her husband was killed. We should have figured it out anyway, but we didn’t.”

  “That happened at the same time of year?”

  Jorrul nodded. “A spring of starvation. A durrl found her and her husband in an ol village looking after the sick and dying, and he used a zrilm whip on them.” He paused. “If it’s any consolation to you, we think Liano’s husband also had difficulty in thinking like an ol. He probably interfered, as you did, when the durrl attacked Liano. Then he submitted to a beating and was killed, and because that satisfied the durrl’s anger somewhat, Liano survived.”

  “Do the durrlz want the olz to die?” Farrari demanded.

  “The contrary. The only conceivable explanation is that the durrl thought you were killing olz, not keeping them alive. The science of medicine doesn’t exist on this planet, and neither the olz nor the rascz have any concept of the healing process. From spring planting through the fall harvest the durrlz don’t seem to care what the yilescz do, perhaps because not many olz die during those months. But in the spring following a half-crop year the death rate is horrible, and this is one time the durrlz must worry about their olz. They’re harassed individuals with an impossible task to accomplish. They have the responsibility of maintaining the food supply, and they have to do it with unbelievably primitive agricultural methods, exhausted soils and degenerate strains of food plants. When they fail to meet their quotas the penalty is usually catastrophic. So if a durrl, never mind how or why, gets the idea that a yilesc is killing his olz to a point where there won’t be enough left for the spring planting, his reaction will be instantaneous and furious.”

  “Which it was,” Farrari agreed. Jorrul nodded. “There are so few yilescz, and they operate so illusively, that we simply never noticed that there is a season when they don’t operate at all.”

  “After I’d demonstrated that I couldn’t think like an ol, why did you leave me there?”

  “You were needed,” Jorrul said. “We had to keep that sickness from burgeoning into a full-scale epidemic, and to do that we had to make use of everyone who had any competence at all. Any more questions?”

  “How is Liano?”

  “Excellent. Eager to go back. We owe you more than thanks and congratulations, Farrari. The coordinator has recommended a second promotion for you, which is against regulations because the one he recommended after your Scory adventure hasn’t come through yet. I hope you enjoy the full satisfaction of having done an excellent piece of work for us, because you deserve it. You’ve also acquired experience that few CS men will ever have, and you got what you wanted—a chance to study the olz. Did you find out what you wanted to know?”

  “I didn’t know what I wanted to know,” Farrari said gravely. “I still don’t.”

  “Dr. Garnt says if you’ll stop by this afternoon he’ll remove your ol profile.”

  Farrar
i rubbed his forehead. “There’s no hurry. For a long time I couldn’t believe it was I, but now I’m used to it. Pehaps it would be a good idea to have an ol—someone who looks like an ol—here at base. The base staff is as much in need of a reminder that olz exist as the rascz are. Maybe I’ll make that my next project.”

  Jorrul chuckled. “All right. You can keep your profile and remind the staff that olz exist. Your Scory adventure had another result. The priests have decided to treat your temporary presence in the Life Temple as a supernatural visitation. Your’ relief portrait has been mounted near the kru’s throne in the Life Temple and the palace, and they aren’t going to appoint another kru’s priest. What do you think of that?”

  “I won’t know whether it’s a compliment or an insult until I see the carvings. Did you get teloids of them?”

  “No, but we’ll try,” Jorrul promised. He must have been in one of his rare good moods, because he departed laughing.

  Farrari slept for a day and a night, awoke to find that a stomach conditioned to ol food had no appetite for an IPR breakfast, and slept again. His exhaustion left him, to be immediately replaced by boredom. There had been few changes at base. Heber Clough was grappling with a weighty geneological problem: the old kru’s fourteenth son had inherited the throne; the new kru had only three sons. As Farrari walked past his door Clough waved and wailed after him, “What happens when a kru dies before he has fourteen sons?” Thorald Dallum excitedly beckoned him in to see a plant mutation. To Farrari it looked like a sprig with a couple of withered leaves. Semar Kantz, the military scientist, had completed his studies and been transferred. Jan Prochnow’s faded notice, “Yilesc?” was still posted.

  Where life at base had once been irritatingly placid, Farrari now found it utterly stagnant. He attempted to concentrate on the teloids of the interior of the Life Temple, and several times a day he administered a vicious kick to his teloid projector.

  When next he saw Liano, he asked her to marry him. She gave him a shy, startled look, edged away fearsomely, and blurted, “Oh, no!”

  And fled.

  A few days later he heard that she’d returned to the field.

  With another kewl.

  She had loved him, he thought, from the depths of her sickness, and his love for her had grown steadily; but as she became well, had her love also undergone a cure?

  If it had, Farrari blamed the roles they had enacted. They played their parts only too well—she the remote seeress, he the groveling slave. In all the countless hours they had been alone together in the field, he had never emboldened himself to so much as touch her hand. A kewl would not dare to touch the hand of his yilesc.

  A yilesc would not—could not—marry a kewl. The work that should have united them had separated them irreconcilably.

  He attempted to submerge himself in work, and he began to summarize his impressions of the olz and to use them to test various theories, his own and those of other specialists; but his impressions were discouragingly sketchy and none of the of theories seemed to have any connection with the sick of in a filthy hut, or the pile of snow-covered dead outside.

  On Peter Jorrul’s next visit to base, Farrari sought him out and said, “The olz have very little communication between villages. Have any local differences developed?”

  “What sort of differences?” Jorrul asked.

  “Dialects, customs…”

  Jorrul shook his head.

  “The coordinator once told me that it would take years for an idea to spread from one end of the country to the other among the olz.”

  “Assuming that the olz ever have an idea that they’d want to spread, that would probably be true. I doubt that they do.”

  “In that case, why haven’t local differences evolved?”

  “I don’t know.” He strode to the wall and scowled at a map of Scorvif. Scattered markers designated IPR field agents. Liano was working in the yomaf, the most remote finger valley. The markers for the twenty of agents looked very lonely indeed. “The question,” Jorrul said, “is whether our agents are placed where they would encounter differences if there are any. We need more people south of Scary.”

  “That isn’t the question at all,” Farrari said. “The question is whether any of these agents have enough knowledge of the whole country to recognize a local difference if they were to see one. If you keep them pretty much in one location…”

  “I see what you mean,” Jorrul said. “We’ll think about it. Are you looking for something in particular?”

  Farrari shook his head. He had only an unfocused realization that something was very wrong with IPR policy, that his work was crippled by a slavish adherence to regulations that were conceived with no thought of the needs of Branoff IV. He had no idea what should be done about it, but he did know that his days in the sterile confines of the base were numbered. He had tasted life, the life of the olz, and dedicated himself to doing something about it. If he could not return to the field, he thought he should ask for a transfer.

  Days passed.

  Peter Jorrul came to his workroom, seated himself, and announced gloomily, “Liano has disappeared.”

  Farrari was startled to find that he was not surprised. He said, “What happened?”

  Jorrul gestured forlornly. “She must have run off. The agent acting as her kewl saw her to her hut and turned in himself. In the morning she was gone. It’s as safe a region as exists anywhere—not rascz about except the durrl and his establishment, and there’s no reason why he’d interfere with a yilesc at this time of year. Certainly the olz didn’t abduct her. The question is whether she had a relapse and wandered off, or whether she did it deliberately.”

  “Even if she had a relapse,” Farrari said thoughtfully, “she still could have done it deliberately.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Just what I said. What are you doing about it?”

  “Nothing, except to pass word to all of our agents to be on the lookout for her. An effective search would require more people than we’d dare to use anywhere except in Scorv. Did you notice anything that suggested that she might do something like this?”

  “Not at the time, but in retrospect—yes. You should have been able to predict it.”

  Jorrul stared at him.

  “What’s a yilesc?” Farrari asked. “No one seems to know for certain, but everyone agrees that there’s something out of the ordinary about her. Witch, female shaman, seeress, and sorceress are a few of the terms the specialists use. Has it occurred to anyone that the genuine native yilesc—who may have many native imitators who are nothing of the sort—might be some kind of clairvoyant?”

  Jorrul continued to stare.

  “And,” Farrari went on, “when you send an IPR clairvoyant to play the role of yilesc, who is a native clairvoyant, there’s a grave danger that she might actually become one.”

  XII

  At irregular intervals one of the base’s supply platforms took off at dusk to fly a leg of the ESC, the Emergency Supply Circuit. Since IPR agents lived as natives they had little need for supplies, but Jorrul had scattered secret emergency caches about the country, and Graan’s men visited these occasionally, checked the inventories, and replaced what had been used. On the wall of Graan’s office was a chart showing which leg of the circuit had been flown last, which leg would be flown next, and when.

  It was a simple matter for Farrari to duck into the hangar when no one was about, squeeze between crates, and pull a tarp over himself. It was almost dark when the platform took off, and the thick blackness of the Branoff IV midnight enveloped its first landing. While Graan’s infra-goggled assistants worked to open the hidden entrance of the cave where supplies were cached, Farrari went over the opposite side of the platform and vanished into the night.

  He wore only the ol loincloth; he took nothing with him except a small knife. He covered ground as rapidly as he dared, cautiously feeling ahead of him with a staff cut from a young quarm tree to avoid walki
ng into zrilm bushes, and when dawn broke he was moving along a zrilm-lined lane near an of village. He needed a place of refuge—when he was missed someone might think of the supply mission, and he wanted to be as far from the emergency cache as possible before he permitted even an ol to see him. Thoughtfully he contemplated the deadly curtain of zrilm foliage. He parted it with his staff, slipped under it, and let it drop behind him.

  He found himself in a delightfully snug and roomy hiding place, and the discovery confounded him. The supposedly impenetrable zrilm barrier could be breached by any ol with a stick and the intelligence to use it. Why, then, he asked himself bewideredly, didn’t the olz raid the fields on harvest nights and conceal a food reserve against the annual season of starvation?

  Unanswerable questions no longer perplexed him as they had in the beginning, because there had been so many of them. He composed himself on the damp, musty soil and concentrated on his own plans.

  Liano’s disappearance had prompted his own. Since Jorrul had made no search for her, he would make, none for Farrari; and if, contrary to reason, he did make an active search, he would assume that Farrari had gone to look for Liano, and he would concentrate on the yomaf, where she had disappeared.

  The yomaf was the one place Farrari would not go. He would head up the hiingol, the finger valley on the opposite side of the Scorvif hand. Precisely what he would do there he had not decided, except that if he did formulate a plan, he had promised himself not to check it against the IPR field manual before putting it into effect.

  He slept through the day, moved on at nightfall, and sheltered himself in another zrilm hedge at dawn. He slipped past villages in the darkness, cautiously making a wide circuit of the nightfires and drinking at village wells only after the olz had retired. In five nights of steady walking he put the lilorr behind him and began to make his way up the hilngol.

  His conditioning as an ol had inured him to hunger, but the time came when he had to eat. He approached a nightfire hesitantly squatted there, cupped his hand to scoop watery soup from the cooking pot. No one paid any attention to him. He eased his hunger as well” as an ol’s hunger could be eased at that time of year, and when the olz began to drift off to their huts to sleep he quietly made his departure. After similar experiences at a dozen nightfires, he became sufficiently emboldened to find an empty hut for himself and remain at a village overnight. In the morning he accompanied the olz to the fields and spent the day cultivating the tender young tuber plants by hand. The durrl appeared at midday, watched for a time from the stile platform, and then departed. Farrari moved on that night, spent a few days in another village, moved again.