The World Menders

X

It was the year of the half crop, the year of hunger.

And the spring of starvation.

The disklike hooves of the great narmpf made explosive smacks as they were wrenched from the sticky green clay. The slanting rain struck the ground with a mysterious, drumming sound. Farrari, floundering along beside the cart, head bent, naked shoulders hunched against the cutting wind, could not remember the last time he’d been warm.

Liano sat crosslegged in the bed of the cart, gazing hypnotically at fluttering fingers that wove the rain into soundless incantations. Her tattered, yellowing robes bore the faded red smudges of occult symbols and oily traces of the heavy, penetrating smoke of night fires. The rain had washed the smear of quarm ash from her face and plastered the looping mass of her hair tightly against her head. Each morning the chill, drenching rains performed this miracle of rebirth and transformed her into a girl-woman not remotely unlike the Liano Kurne whom Farrari had known at base; yet this Liano was more of a stranger to him than the distant, ash-smeared seeress to whom he slavishly ministered around the nightfires.

Her eyes were bright and searching, her color exquisite, her manner calm and confident. He could not resist sending a long, admiring glance in her direction, for she was lovely.

She met his eyes. Her fingers continued to flutter; her frowning lips formed an admonition.

Stay in character.

Obediently he turned his eyes to the ground and concentrated on shaking globs of sticky clay from his bare feet. Liano raised her voice in a tremulous, high-pitched chant.

Stay in character. Both of their lives depended on it.

Liano trained him. The coordinator looked in briefly from time to time; Peter Jorrul, who was seldom at base, came when he could and stayed much longer. Once he observed them for an entire day, but he seemed to have little interest in Farrari’s progress. He watched Liano.

At first she faltered. Her moods were kaleidoscopic—from the stern taskmaster, the tireless perfectionist, she underwent abrupt and bewildering metamorphoses, becoming in an instant the exuberant child pleased and enthused with everything he did, or the enigmatic seeress whose chilling smile made him cringe. She could lapse for hours into a starkly staring, comatose state in which her face became alarmingly pale, her muscles twitched spasmodically, and her dark eyes gazed fixedly, unblinkingly at the nothingness of some remote dimension or—and this was the most disturbing—at Farrari. He wondered if she were divining his future and not liking what she found there.

Days passed before he progressed beyond the first lesson. With body slouched, knees slightly bent, feet pointed outward, every step a slow, deliberative action, he circled the room attempting to emulate the walk of an ol and puzzling as to how he should react to her swiftly changing moods. One moment she would be coaching him patiently; then would come an abrupt silence, and when, with aching muscles, Farrari turned to her after a tenth or thirtieth circuit of the room to learn if he was finally doing it right he would find her staring mindlessly. He asked Dr. Garnt what could be done at such times, and the doctor answered wearily, “Nothing. Just pretend it doesn’t happen—if you can.”

The ol language confounded Farrari. At first he thought it one of Liano’s childish pranks; this conglomeration of grunts, chirps, clicks, moans and hisses a language? He decided that the olz were the most primitive people he had ever heard of, with less power of communication than many intelligent animals.

As he learned, he became less certain. To the olz, a few sounds could mean a great deal, and the many pitches upon which those crude articulations could be, uttered were fraught with significance. Pitch variation could, in bewildering fact, make of a single grunt a vast vocabulary. He sought out the base’s philologist and discovered that worthy individual to be as mystified by the ol language as Farrari was. “If you stumble onto any answers,” the philologist said cheerfully, “let me know.”

For weeks Farrari was occupied in learning to move and talk like an ol, and when finally he achieved a measure of proficiency he found to his dismay that he also had to learn to live like one and, ultimately, to think like one—or at least to behave as though he thought like one. The scene of his training shifted to an isolated, inaccessible valley, and there he and Liano lived for days. Farrari learned to manage an ugly narmpf, and though he came to admire its enormous, powerful body, he could foster very little affection for the slobbering beast. Its tiny head surrounded a large, toothless mouth that was lined with a hornlike material. Incongruously, it ate only zrilm leaves, and Farrari’s first attempt to gather the poisonous, barb-protected leaves left him with puffed and bleeding hands. They treked from one end of the valley to the other, Liano riding in the cart and Farrari slouching beside it, turning the narmpf as she directed and hunching forward each time she reprimanded him for walking upright.

At night, while Liano submerged herself in the incantations she was struggling to recall, Farrari built two ol huts for them, of woven branches plastered with clay, kindled an ol fire by jerking a length of hemp back and forth in a tightly-held sleeve of bark, shaped a crude pot of clay, and cooked an ol meal: a boiled tuber with a handful of grain that puffed enormously in the boiling water and then seemed to shrink disgustingly the instant it reached the stomach. He lost weight rapidly and was always hungry, but that was part of his training: he was far too healthy-looking to pass as an ol.

In the darkness, while Liano sat staring at the fire, her face heat-flushed beneath its smear of ash, her hands performing a mysterious ritual for an imaginary ol audience, her dark, constricted irises opening onto depths no medical science could plumb, Farrari crept away to the cart and made his daily report on a concealed transmitter.

Coordinator Paul came regularly and watched them from a distance. Several times Jan Prochnow joined them at their night fire, wistfully watching Liano. Once he tried to question her, and each successive query dropped into a pool of deepening silence and disappeared without a ripple. His embarrassment became acute and his withdrawal a controlled flight. Farrari quickly learned that Liano would sit gazing hypnotically into the fire as long as it burned, so when he thought the time had come for her to sleep he let the fire go out.

But she was improving. Her periods of staring silence were less frequent, she became more exacting, the pace of his training intensified. Peter Jorrul brought an ol agent, and the two accompanied them for a day and a night, the agent studying Farrari’s every move and, before he left, taking Farrari aside for a briefing on the horrors he was likely to encounter in an ol village. To Farrari, the real horror was that nothing could be done about it. The agents were not even permitted to try.

“Your main problem,” the agent said, “is that you aren’t relaxed enough. The olz are always relaxed. Sometimes their bodies don’t even tense when they’re whipped. You’re having trouble with the language, too—you don’t always say what you mean—but that’s minor. The olz don’t always say what they mean, either. The reason ol is so difficult is because it’s so simple. I’ll ask Graan to send you a tube of ol language cubes.”

Farrari said to Jorrul, “Do you think I might—”

And Jorrul smiled and said, “We’ll see.”

The two of them left, and Farrari and Liano started another circuit of the valley, Farrari concentrating on relaxation. The next day Graan sent the language cubes. Liano played them for him while they traveled, and Farrari relaxed and listened to such good effect that when the agent came again he had no comment. Jorrul did; he told Farrari to stop eating. “By ol standards,” he said caustically, “you’re fat, and there is no such thing as a fat ol.”

Farrari obediently starved off more weight. A week later the coordinator returned them to base, where Farrari had the contour of his forehead and the shape of his nose altered by surgery and sufficient body hair implanted so that he would not look like an abnormally bare-skinned ol. Another week in the field, and Jorrul returned to spend an entire day watching Farrari. At the end of it he grudgingly conceded that Far-rani might.

“But only for a day or two,” he cautioned. “We’ll put you down in an outlying district where there’s no one around but olz and a few durrlz and see what happens. And we’ll keep a sharp watch on you.”

The day or two became ten, and then twenty, and it suddenly dawned upon Farrari that they were on their own.

The olz fascinated him.

Even in fine harvest weather they huddled closely about the nightfire as soon as it was lit; as though wistfully attempting to soak up heat against the terrible ordeal of winter. The men seldom spoke, and when they did it was with a single grunt, a click, a gesture—threadbare remnants of the fantastically complex language Farrari had studied at base. He had to remind himself that the elements of ol speech as known to IPR had been painstakingly compiled over many years and from thousands of contacts. The whole was infinitely greater than any of its parts, for no single ol seemed to know much of his language. The probable destination of a spark flung on high was the ultimate limit of his abstract speculation; who had brought the last log to the fire and who would bring the next were the only social problems that interested him. If the language had words for injustice, for rights, for slavery, for revolution., IPR had never encountered them.

With the new harvest at hand, the olz had a full daily ration of food. While the weather remained mild, they would be warm. The cold and hunger of winter loomed ahead of them, and the starvation of spring that in the year of the half crop would inexorably take half their lives, but they were, at this moment in time, a tranquil people. That they seemed totally incapable of contemplating the future could have been the basis for their survival.

Liano fascinated him more than the olz.

The Branoff IV social structure was so commonplace that the more cynical IPR specialists referred to it as “trite.” It contained only two incongruities, two elements of uniqueness. One was the fact that only the kru owned slaves. The other was the yilesc.

In the world’s rigidly stratified society, the yilesc, her kewl, and her apprentice—if she had one—were the only individuals who existed outside the established order. Oddly enough, the yilescz were members of the master race, which scorned them. Words for yilesc and kewl did not occur in the ol language, and what the olz thought of them was not yet fully understood. Certain it was that the yilescz fulfilled some unknown function, either spiritual, physical, or social; that every ol village had a hut reserved for them; and that while there was doubt as to which needs of the olz were served by the yilescz, there was no doubt whatsoever that the olz had no one else to serve them.

Not even the aristocrats possessed the freedom of movement of a yilesc. It was assumed that some ancient kru had honored the yilescz with his patronage, and a few vestiges of that royal favor had survived the centuries. The apprentice was apparently optional, a girl of the yilesc’s own race who was bought, borrowed or stolen from the most lowly of city commoners. The yilesc invariably traveled with a male ol servant, making her kind the only private slaveholders in Scorvif. She possessed by right a narmpf and a cart. When her narmpf died, or her cart wore out, any durrl was traditionally bound to furnish a replacement. In the blunt realism of Branoff IV existence, few durrlz paid any attention to a tradition that involved only the well-being of the despised yilescz and by extension the scorned olz. The yilesc who lost her transportation was likely to walk until some durrl suffered an unaccountable twitch of generosity or perhaps thought to buy her influence to improve the work quota of his olz.

The roles of yilesc and kewl were made to order for a team of IPR agents. Not only could they travel freely, but as long as they stayed away from the cities and avoided the kru’s soldiers they had what was, for that violent world, an unusual degree of safety. IPR specialists quickly discovered whom the yilescz were, but after years of study and the successful placement of a number of yilesc agents, they had no notion at all as to what they were.

If they were priestesses they had no discernible religious function. If they were witches they practiced magic to no apparent purpose. If they were seeresses they did not prophesy. And if they were peregrinating medicine women, Dr. Garnt would observe sourly, they did not heal. They simply were, and the mysterious uniqueness of their existence had made the specialists speculate as to whether they might occupy a pivotal position in the Branoff IV social structure. Supreme Headquarters had been asked for an agent with special qualifications for the role of yilesc, and Supreme Headquarters sent Liano Kurne.

She had been instantly and tremendously successful, and both Jorrul and the coordinator had thought that the solution to the mystery was within her grasp. Then tragedy struck. Liano recovered; her mind did not. She still had no recollection of what had happened. Probably she did not want to recall.

And she could not or would not tell what she had learned.

As the night deepened, the ol women and children withdrew from the fire and gathered in the outer shadows in a mystic communion that defied Farrari’s understanding. Only then would Liano leave her hut and join them. Her work was with the women and children, and when she cared for a sick male it was, except in times of epidemics, because a woman requested it. The children loved her, and she played tirelessly with them, performing sleight of hand tricks with a shining pebble or a twig. She brewed mysterious drafts for them, performing incomprehensible incantations over clay bowls of steaming liquid and at the same time surreptitiously lacing the drinks with vitamins.

Unlike the men, the women babbled incessantly. Undoubtedly it was they who kept their language viable, but Farrari had no inkling of what they talked about. When he asked Liano she smiled mysteriously and did not answer.

Farrari huddled in darkness far from the warmth of the fire, watching Liano, tensed to leap to her side when she beckoned. As a kewl he was lowest of the lowly, perhaps because he served a woman, and all of the olz ignored him, even the children. They made room for him at the fire only when he approached it on an errand for Liano. As there was little for him to do, he watched, and listened, and meditated.

He had not thought it possible that a society could be so utterly barren of culture. The lifeless phonetic symbols of the IPR Bureau were the only written form of the ol language, but even a people without writing should have had an oral tradition of myth or history. The olz had none. They had no storytellers or minstrels, and for all of the incessant woman talk, Farrari never heard a woman croon a lullaby. With their crude sticks they scratched the soil for twice-a-year plantings, but it had never occurred to them that those same scratches might be utilized to communicate or represent.

How does one raise a cultural level, Farrari demanded of himself, when there is no culture to start with?

But the IPR base, and the talk of oh-ohing the planet and a twothousand-year hiatus were remote almost beyond memory as Farrari watched the male olz around the oily, reeking nightfire. There was no laughter among them—not even the children laughed—and Farrari vainly searched the taciturn ol faces for one fleeting glimmer of an illusive, inward-turning smile. In this, the most favored season of the year, they seemed neither happy nor unhappy. If there was joy in their lives they concealed it well; in another season they probably concealed their misery.

The olz existed; why they existed seemed no concern of theirs.

Farrari had expected to find a grim, barren land. Instead they moved through pleasantly shaded, fragrant lanes, for even the deadly zrilm shrubs put forth large blossoms that hid their vicious needles under exquisite splashes of color.

There were thick zrilm hedges, taller than a durrl mounted on a gril, that completely enclosed the fields and could be passed only with portable stiles. These ramshackle constructions of pegged boards had a platform at the top from which a durrl, or his assistant, could view the work in several adjoining fields. Every harvested tuber, or basket of grain, had to be laboriously carried over one or several zrilm hedges to the waiting wagons, and at night the durrl carried away the stiles. A system of gates would have greatly lessened the ors toils, but gates would have been much more difficult to guard. The zrilm, the symbol of the ors bondage, was also the symbol of his hunger. No starving ol had ever been known to force his way through a zrilm hedge; starvation was the easier death.

Farrari saw durrlz rarely and then only at a distance, for they almost never visited an ol village. The olz, even the youngest children, went to the fields at dawn and returned at dusk. Farrari had a leisurely, tedious day, followed by a few hours of excruciating alertness at the nightfire when he prepared Liano’s food, ran errands at her bidding, restrained a feverish child while she performed a rite of health over it, looked after the narmpf, and finally, when the olz retired to their huts, he would send his daily report to field team headquarters.

After two or three nights in a village they moved on, departing in the morning without a leave-taking because the olz were already at work, and, before they left, returning to the village stores the pathetic offering of tubers and grain that had been ceremoniously presented to Liano the night of their arrival. They would reach their next stopping place by late afternoon, Farrari would clean out the hut reserved for any visiting yilesc and prepare a sleeping place for himself in the open, and they would await the return of the olz.

The nights lengthened and became colder. The last of the harvest was gathered, and the day came when most of the olz remained in the village. Jorrul thought that Farrari was not sufficiently experienced to undergo the strain of maintaining his ol identity continuously, so he ordered them out. They left the next morning and that night base sent a platform to pick them up.

“You’ve done well,” Jorrul told Farrari. “You’ve learned to act like an ol. Now we’ll have to teach you to think like one.” He added softly, “Liano seems to have done well, too. Did you find out anything?”

Farrari shook his head. They had asked him to be alert for any clue concerning the mystery of the yilescz, and since they could give him no notion of what to look for, he doubted that they seriously expected him to find it.

“Would it be all right to ask Liano to marry me?” he asked.

Jorrul frowned. “She wouldn’t. Not after what happened. Her husband was literally torn to pieces before her eyes. I’m certain she’d never take to the field again with a fellow agent who was anything more than that. It would impair your relationship if she even suspected that you wanted to marry her, so don’t mention it. You can help her most by keeping your work on a strictly impersonal basis.”

“Then tell me one thing,” Farrari said angrily. “If she has no personal interest in me, why did she choose me?”

“We’ve wondered about that,” Jorrul said. “We’re still wondering, but with things going well we’re not about to upset them by asking questions.” He changed the subject with a shrug. “I take it that you didn’t encounter any difficulties.”

“Once my muscles got resigned to my moving like an ol, I spent most of the time feeling bored.”

“That’s because you weren’t thinking like an ol.”

“How can you tell how an ol thinks?” Farrari demanded.

“We can’t,” Jorrul admitted. “The most we can do is reason from our observations. We know how an ol ought to be thinking. He has so little leisure time during the agricultural season that if he thinks at all he must envy you yours. Maybe that’s why a yilesc is never without a kewl. If she loses one she can replace him at any village, probably with the first ol she asks.”

“After what I’d been led to expect, it was almost a letdown,” Farrari said. “I saw no beatings, no starvation, and very little illness. I rarely saw a durrl, and if there was any danger I certainly didn’t notice it.”

“On your first field assignment we wouldn’t put you where there was much danger. In the outlying districts the durrlz are more humane, probably because they aren’t likely to be ambitious or they wouldn’t be there. Also, fall is the healthiest time of the year. The weather is mild, and the olz always eat well during the fall harvest. The sickly are already dead and the well will probably remain well until winter sets in. When you go back you won’t have it so easy. This is the year of the half crop, and that means… you’ll find out what it means.”