The World Menders

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 walking 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.

He had another perplexing question to meditate: if an ol could move about so easily, why did the olz complacently remain where they were until disease, starvation or a beating killed them? Venturesome olz, moving alone or in small groups, should have been able to escape through the mountain passes to freedom. Why did they remain?

In one village he encountered a yilesc. His momentary thrill of recognition was instantly dampened when she turned a plump, cruel-looking face toward him. All evening he surreptitiously watched her and her kewl, and when finally he retired he was in a thoughtful mood. Her behavior was nothing like Liano’s. She did nothing at all, remained aloof to men, women and children, and her kewl cringed in terror whenever she snarled a request for food or drink.

Another village. From his place by the fire, Farrari looked across at the women and children and watched the light flicker on the somber, young-old face of an ol child. Picking up a twig, he absently began to sketch her face in the packed soil. A grunt with an unusual inflection caused him to look up; several olz were watching his twig strokes intently. He quickly altered the scratches into an unrecognizable jumble and then rubbed them out. The olz lost interest and moved away, but Farrari, though he could not have said why, felt shaken. Could the olz, who possessed no art at all, instantly recognize the mere beginnings of a three-dimensional figure depicted on a flat surface? And why had he destroyed the drawing when they seemed to do so, since he considered it his mission to bring culture to them? He sensed a missed opportunity, and began to sketch again, but the olz were already drifting off to their huts.

A few nights later, in another village, an ol carrying a log to the fire stumbled and went head first into the huge cooking pot. The pot contained only water and did not break; the fire had not been. lit. The ol came up sputtering bewilderedly but otherwise unharmed, and long minutes afterward he was still sending searching glances at the ground about the fire hollow, as though trying to identify the evil spirit that had tripped him. The olz who saw what happened seemed not to notice.

Seated by the fire that evening, Farrari, on an impulse, felt about for a twig and drew an ol carrying a quarm log. He made a simple stick figure, with an oval for a head, carrying a crudely three-dimensional log. Then he added a circle for the yawning opening of the pot and surrounded it with the logs of an unlit fire. Were any of the olz watching? He feared that they were and that they weren’t; he did not dare to look.

He edged to one side and commenced again: the log flying, the stick figure, head down in the pot with feet in the air. Now he heard a chorus of grunts. He moved away, and the olz crowded in to see what he had made. They looked, but he could not guess what they saw, and he detected nothing in grunt, facial expression, or gesture that revealed what they thought.

Their interest waned quickly. As they drifted away, Farrari returned to the sketches and with a few quick strokes transformed the crude figures. Now they wore the serrate-topped boots and fringed cloak of a durrl. The men came for another look, and then the women and children shyly edged forward. For the remainder of the night, until they sought their huts and sleep, the olz kept returning to look at these strange scratches in the soil, and when they walked past them they made a wide circuit to avoid stepping on them. Finally Farrari was left alone at the fire, and after some deliberation he rubbed them out.

Farrari felt certain that he had accomplished something, but he had no idea what it was and no certainty that he would ever know. So engrossed was he as he slowly moved toward his own hut that when an ol stepped from the shadows and walked beside him Farrari did not notice him until he spoke.

“What are you after?” he whispered.

He spoke Galactic.

He whispered again, “We’d better have a talk,” and Farrari nodded resignedly. Jorrul’s map had shown no agent in this area, but he knew that ol agents sometimes moved about. The prospect of meeting one hadn’t worried him, and he wasn’t worried now. IPR would not attempt to abduct him from the vicinity of an ol village, and this particular agent seemed to pose no threat of any kind. He was obviously elderly, and his body and face were laced with scars that bespoke some horrible encounter with a zrilm whip in the remote past. He also had an incipient paunch, which meant that he’d been eating much too well for an ol. And he tottered. Even when standing still he tottered. Farrari did not remember seeing him at the fire.

They walked slowly away from the village, and by the time they reached the shelter of a zrilm-lined lane the agent was panting and leaning heavily on Farrari’s shoulder.

He sank to the ground and asked softly, “You’re Farrari, aren’t you?”

Farrari did not answer.

“Heard you were missing. I listen to the blah from base every night. And the olz said there was a strange ol wandering from village to village, acting peculiarly, so I figured it was you. You’re the CS chap, aren’t you? What are you after?”

“I wish I knew,” Farrari said. “Who are you?”

The other chuckled. “You wouldn’t know if I told you. They crossed me off the books years ago. They think I’m dead. Maybe I am.” He chuckled again. “You figured it out, didn’t you? I’ve been hoping someone would be sharp enough to figure it out and have the sense not to blab about it, because I need help. I can’t do it alone. I’m too old.”

“Do what?”

The agent got to his feet and slyly prodded Farrari in the ribs. “Oh, you’re the sharp one. IPR people are too stupid. I was too stupid. I wouldn’t have figured it out if I hadn’t been killed, and by then I was too old. You’re CS, you weren’t brought up with your nose in a manual. You see things. I heard the blah about you when the kru died. I wondered then if you’d figure it out, and when I heard you’d disappeared I knew. We’ve got to work fast. I’m an old man and I haven’t much time left. Look. You’re going at it the wrong way. I’m old, I can’t do it myself, but I know how. Come to my place?”

“Who are you?” Farrari asked again.

“You’re right. I should have a name. Call me—call me Bran. This is Branoff IV. Bran’s a good name, isn’t it?” “Let me get this straight, Bran. Base doesn’t know you’re alive?” Bran chuckled. “If you stay out of sight long enough, base will think you’re dead, too. Things happen to agents, especially to of agents. We can’t wait much longer, though. I’m old, and I haven’t got the time. How’d you figure it out?”

“Figure what out?”

“Come to my place,” Bran pleaded. “Plenty of time to talk there. I can show you things.”

“All right,” Farrari said resignedly. “I’ll come to your place. I’ll never know if I was accomplishing anything here, and I’d like to be shown things.”

“Come on, then. We have a long way to go. I had trouble finding you.”

They moved off into the darkness. Farrari had become accustomed to traveling rapidly at night, but Bran tottered with small, uncertain steps and had to stop frequently to rest, and they made tedious progress. At dawn they were still far from their destination. Farrari wanted to retire to the pro tection of a zrilm hedge, but Bran dismissed the suggestion scornfully. “Skudkru,” he said. “That’s the magic word. Anybody tries to stop you, or interfere, or just get snoopy, tell him skudkru. Means `kru’s messenger’. Even a soldier wanting spear practice wouldn’t dare interfere with the kru’s messenger.”

“It’s a rase word,” Farrari objected. “Couldn’t an ol get in trouble using a rasc word?”

“No, because olz can’t say rasc words. And we won’t get into trouble because when a rasc meets anyone claiming to be a skudkru he doesn’t stop to analyze his linguistic capabilities. Interfering with a real skudkru is so unthinkable that he likewise couldn’t imagine the existence of a phony skudkru. It’s always worked for me. Of course it wouldn’t work except on the road, but there it’s perfectly safe.” He sighed. “I’m too old for this sort of thing. I miss my breakfast.”

He missed his lunch more. They stopped at an ol village for water, but Bran disdained the cold dregs of the previous day’s thin soup. When finally they reached the destination he sought a young quarm thicket—they seated themselves in the shade and Bran grumbled until he fell asleep, while Farrari anxiously rehearsed an unfamiliar word: skudkru.

As he did so, he studied Bran. Small even for an ol, of slight build, with a wizened little face that might have had a sly, rodentlike quality had it not been for the mass of thick, crisscrossing scar lines, he would have been an untypical o/ even without his flabby body. But the olz accepted him, and obviously he was able to communicate with them far better than Farrari could. He’d picked up ol gossip, and Farrari hadn’t known that there was any.

Bran awoke at dusk, and as soon as darkness fell Farrari helped him to drag a small platform from the thicket. Bran broke out a crude-looking, handmade electronic device and monitored base’s signals for a time to make certain that none of base’s platforms would be in their area that night, and then he donned a pair of infra-goggles and they flew off at treetop height.

“How did you steal this without base missing it?” Farrari demanded.

“Built it myself,” Bran said proudly. “Took the parts a few at a time. The stuff that’s left at the supply caches, all of it’s expendable and nobody keeps any record. An agent needs something, he takes it, and every now and then they check the inventory and replace what’s missing. So when I need something I take it. If I need a lot I visit all the caches and take a little from each.”

The possibility of this kind of revolt in the ranks of IPR had not occurred to Farrari, and he shook his head in amazement. “You mean you can fly this thing around without base detecting it?”

Bran chuckled and performed an invisible shrug. “Base doesn’t operate any detectors. Why should it? As far as it knows, the only things flying on Branoff IV are its own platforms, and it doesn’t need to detect them. It knows where they are. I fly low anyway, just in case.”

They flew on, with the cool night air whistling past them. Occasionally the platform raked a treetop. Twice Farrari saw the glow of an ol nightfire in the distance, but obviously Bran was avoiding the villages. They were flying up the hilngol; the ground began to rise steeply and the wind became colder.

Abruptly they began a steep ascent only to drop with disconcerting suddenness and land with a staggering thump. Farrari helped Bran push the platform through a dark opening, and then Bran led him along a stone floor and up a ramp, and there was a sound like a door sliding or scraping.

“Home,” Bran said, with a sigh of satisfaction. The door closed, and he touched on a light. “Now we can eat,” he said. “And sleep. And then we’ll talk.”

Farrari awoke with a jagged pattern of sunlight lying across his face. He pushed himself to a sitting position and looked about him. He was in a cave, and a crack admitted air and light and, at this particular moment, sunlight. His bed was a pile of straw covered with handwoven robes that would have been a prize exhibit’ in any Cultural Survey collection. Bran, in a cocoon-like bundle of similar robes, lay nearby, snoring gently.

Farrari got to his feet and padded to the opening. It looked onto a sheltered valley, small but peaceful and lovely. There were several tilled fields and a gently meandering stream. Beyond the fields was lush grass flecked with flowers; high on the surrounding slopes stood a magnificent growth of quarm trees. In the distance snowcapped mountains gleamed in the morning sun. In a loop of the stream stood the huts of a small o/ village; but there were no olz in the fields, and the village looked abandoned.

When finally he turned away he found Bran watching him curiously. “How do you like it?” Bran asked.

“It’s lovely,” Farrari said. “It’s too lovely. It doesn’t belong on this world. Nature made a mistake.” Bran smiled, his hideous face suffused with delight. “It’s mine. I found it when I was looking for a place to heal after they killed me. The only way to get here on the ground is through caves. From the air it looks as though there’s a canyon connecting with the outside, where the stream flows, but there isn’t. It goes underground.”

He scrambled to his feet and took a handlight. “Look—I got storerooms. Been taking stuff for years from the caches, a little at a time.” He led Farrari back into the cave: the walls were lined with shelves, and the shelves were crammed. There seemed to be tons of rations and a little of everything that an IPR agent could conceivably find use for. Obviously Bran was supplied for life.

“All this,” Farrari murmured, “plus a whole village of olz to work for you.”

Bran shook his head. “They work for me, but they won’t stay here.”

“Why not?”

Bran stared at him. “You didn’t figure it out,” he said resentfully.

“I haven’t figured anything out,” Farrari said.

“I thought you would, you being from CS. IPR people don’t know anything that isn’t in the manual, and there’s nothing in the manual about this. Look—I find this place and I figure it’ll support quite a few olz. I don’t need the grubby food they raise, I’d rather eat IPR rations and I have plenty of that, but I figure the olz would like living where they can have plenty to eat and no durrlz to torture them, so I dress like an aristocrat and take one family from each village so they won’t be missed and bring them here. I also tap the food stocks of all the durrlz around here so these olz of mine will have plenty to eat until they can make a crop and the best seed and roots for planting. My ol build themselves a village and put in the crops and while the crops are growing they start cutting quarm up on the slopes, and they have more to eat than they ever had in their lives and because this land has never been cultivated the crops come up like no crops they’ve ever seen and they can look forward to a warm winter with enough for everyone to eat. So what happens? They run away. One morning my village is empty. They’ve all gone back to where they came from.”

“Maybe they didn’t like your mixing olz from different villages.”

“Bah. Every now and then a whole village dies out during the winter, and that’s what the durrl does—he brings in one family from each of his other villages, and they stay put. So why did they run from my village?”

Farrari shook his head.

“At harvest I bring in another bunch, and they harvest the crops and store them and I think this bunch will be smart enough to see that it has a good thing for winter, plenty of quarm to burn and all that food without the kru taking one grain or one tuber. So what happens? They run off. They don’t take a scrap of food with them, and they go back to villages where there isn’t food for half the olz already there. Now can you figure it out?”

“No,” Farrari said. “Nothing about this world makes sense to me.”

“At first I couldn’t figure it out, either. During the winter I took the food around to the villages that needed it most, and at planting time I got me more olz and tried again. Same result. That happened for three years. Now I just bring in a few olz at planting and harvest time, and a few times in between for the cultivating, and when they’ve done the work I tell them to beat it. You can’t figure it out?”

“No.”

“Plenty to eat, they get to keep all the food they grow, no durrl to whip and starve them, no soldiers to use them for spear practice, all the wood they want to burn—and they run away. There’s only one explanation. They want to be whipped and starved and murdered. They want to die. They wouldn’t stay here because I was keeping them alive.”

“That’s unbelievable,” Farrari protested.

“Sure. That’s why IPR’ll never figure it out. There’s nothing in the manual to cover it. All this blah about democracy assumes that any intelligent being would want to govern himself if he had a chance. IPR can’t cope with intelligent beings that are so intent on dying that they don’t care what happens to them while they’re alive. Even if IPR did figure it out it couldn’t do anything because of its silly rules. But I figured it out, and you aren’t IPR so you don’t care any more about the rules than I do, and together we’re going to conquer Branoff IV.”

“How?” Farrari asked.

“We’re going to make the olz want to live.”