The World Menders

XV

It was night, and he was being carried. The soft breeze that rattled the dry zrilm leaves felt numbingly cold to his feverish face. Stars floated dimly beyond a swirling film of smoke and haze.

The air was pure on Branoff IV. The nights were clear or cloudy, and there was no haze.

He blinked, and the haze remained.

He became aware of a new sensation: from far away, as though through a different kind of haze, he heard singing. He thought he grasped some of the words, ol words, and he told himself, “Impossible! The olz have no culture. They can’t sing. No one has ever heard an ol sing.”

The song continued, a solemn, stirring, rhythmic exaltation; an unfettered, searing, lilting outpouring of emotion; a prolonged lament of triumph suspended above the quite irregular, thumping beat of death. His one recollection was of the second spear hurtling toward him. He started through the haze at the starry night and listened through the haze to the stirring ol song, and he decided that he was dead.

It was day, and he lay in the shadow of a zrilm hedge. Insects had found his clotted wounds, and their furious buzzing throbbed thunderously. He willed himself to brush them away, but his hand did not move. He was alive, and he had dreamed the night sky and the singing, but he could not remember how he came there.

It was night. Again he was carried but now the haze had swallowed the stars. Strangely enough, he could hear clearly. The singing at which had marveled sounded loud and close at hand, and he discovered it to be the unsyllabic, unintelligible grunts of olz at work. He had a sensation of falling until he realized that his head was lower than his feet. On and on he was carried, down a down, louder and louder sound the grunts of the laboring olz as every sound echoed and magnified and suddenly light bloomed to flash and sparkle above him.

He was in a cave, and tiny stalactites formed a lacy fairy mist on irregular ceiling. Then the ceiling veered beyond reach of the flickering torches and a blast of cold struck him.

Lowered to the ground, he rolled helplessly down a slight incline and came to rest on his side, and with a shuddering finality he knew that he was dead. Directly before him rose a vast pile of the pathetic, inert bodies of olz, and even as he was comprehending what it was hands lifted him and placed him upon it. He was one with the dead olz, and the living olz had brought him here for burial.

He was alone with the dead. Water, dripping from somewhere far above, sounded random drum taps on the piled bodies. The flush of fever had faded. He felt cold, drained of life, and his only thought was that eternity, in such a place, would be very dull indeed.

He slept, and when he awoke he found himself able to turn his head slightly, wiggle a finger, lift a hand a centimeter or two. He was alive, but paralyzed by weakness, and the olz had interred him with their dead.

The olz returned. Farrari watched the flickering shadows thrown by their torches and listened to the padding of their bare feet. Their shuffling footsteps receded into the depths of the cave, returned, encircled the mounds of dead. Abruptly a voice was raised in a strange, rhythmic chant of ol speech sounds intertwined with guttural nonsense. The chant performed an endless dialogue with its own echoes, the footsteps receded and returned, and finally Farrari became aware that there was a pattern, a cycle to what the olz were doing. From a whispered beginning the chant crescendoed to a shout followed by abrupt, motionless silence. This was repeated several times, the procession receded into the distance and returned, and a new cycle began.

Hands removed a body from the pile upon which Farrari lay. He tilted and began to roll, and the hands eased him to the ground almost as gently, he thought, as though he’d been alive. With an exhausting effort he managed to turn his head, and he could now witness the dancing, chanted death rites of the olz.

They gathered around the body, and a priest in fluttering robes performed a contorted, leaping dance. The priest—priestess, Farrari decided, or young priest—began the whispered chant, his dance became wilder, his voice louder, and he leaped through the flaming torches and returned again and again to the dead ol whom the living encircled, embracing the fire of life in a dance of death, and the chant took on melody and lilt and began its remorseless crescendo. Then four olz sprang forward, seized the dead ol, and flung him into the air.

The chant ceased abruptly; the body disappeared. Although Farrari could not see it, he surmised that there was a chasm or crevass, a bottomless abyss, so deep that bodies vanished into it soundlessly, and here the olz disposed of their dead.

The specialists at base would have been fascinated, but this priceless discovery seemed likely to die with its discoverer. The olz padded back from the depths of the cave, and the next body they took was Farrari’s.

He lay on his back at the center of the circle of mourners. The priestess began her dance, began the chilling, whispered preface to her chanted lament. The ceiling arched far above the shallow circles of light thrown off by the torches, and Farrari, looking upward, could see nothing at all. Occasionally the priestess brushed past him; once she fluttered her hands before his staring eyes. Her chant became louder, her dance more agitated. Suddenly she appeared above him, her weirdly dilated eyes fixed on his face, her features contorted, her lips shaping shrieking incantations, her face—

He screamed, “Liano!” but the cry, if he forced one past his parched lips, was drowned in her chant. Her voice reached its shrill climax, and the olz leaped forward to seize him.

He had strength for one feeble effort. He moved his hands; his head lolled to one side and then straightened.

It was enough: the dead had come to life in the sanctuary of death. The chant stopped abruptly, the four olz backed slowly away, and Liano halted in midstride. Shocked out of her trance, she came closer and suddenly recognized him.

She screamed.

The olz fled, Liano with them, and Farrari was alone with the dead and the sputtering torches.

He was carried again. Remembering the abyss of the dead he attempted to struggle and his weakened muscles made no response. He thought the direction was upward, but he could not be certain until they emerged under a graying night sky. The olz carried him a short distance to another cave and gently placed him on a pile of straw.

They patiently fed him water and gruel, a drop or a grain at a time, and Liano bathed his wounds and dressed them with rags of coarse ol cloth. There followed an agonizing hiatus during which his fever returned and his mind wandered, and he called repeatedly for Liano and she did not respond.

Then she was with him again, and the unlighted cave seemed less dark when he knew that she was close by. She replaced his coarse bandages with real ones, applied medicine to his wounds, and gave him capsules to swallow, and he dimly perceived that she had visited one of the IPR supply caches. His fever broke, but he remained pathetically weak. He lay on the straw in the dark cave, listless except when they attempted to move him outside. This he resisted fiercely. In the darkness he had formed an inexplicable fear of daylight. Liano sat by his side for hours at a time trying to coax him to eat.

Slowly his strength returned. He became aware that several olz were in constant attendance on Liano, and he meant to ask her how a yilesc could have so many kewlz but forgot; and then when he remembered he had deduced the answer himself: there was, had to be, a supreme yilesc, or several of them if there were several burial caves where the olz disposed of their dead. IPR’s synthetic yilescz would not be aware of them, but Liano’s clairvoyancy had penetrated to that knowledge and beyond. She had become a supreme yilesc.

Finally Farrari consented to being moved outside, and Liano fed him IPR rations and he began to recover his strength rapidly. He missed Bran—missed having someone to talk with. The olz did what he asked and otherwise cautiously kept their distance from the ol who had returned from the dead—and it was anyway impossible to converse in ol, a language that even simple communication sometimes taxed to the utmost. Liano conscientiously dressed his wounds and fed him but hardly exchanged a word with him.

He dreamed of a carefree world where they could run hand in hand, laughing, through verdant mountain meadows. He had never seen her laugh; he had never dared to touch her hand. He remained the lowly kewl, and she was elevated to the loftiest of yilescz.

On an impulse he said to her, one day when she brought his food, “You foresaw this, didn’t you?”

She turned a startled, wide-eyed gaze upon him.

“You foresaw that I’d be wounded?”

“I… yes—”

“Was that the real reason you took another kewl? To keep me at base?”

“I saw you lying in the road,” she said slowly. “And the spears, two of them. And the kru’s cavalry riding past. I thought you were dead. So I told Peter you’d never learn to think like an ol.”

“Since I’ve survived that, after a fashion, what’ll my next catastrophe be?”

She stared at him.

“What do you see in my future?” he persisted.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Nothing.”

The next morning she was gone.

Farrari made a frantic search for her and finally found his way down the steep slope to the valley below, where he had seen an ol village. There he met the olz who had been taking care of him, but he did not know what they called Liano, and when he mentioned yilesc, a Rasczian word, they did not seem to understand. Probably she had fled with a kewl and a narmpf and cart, but he was much too weak to try to follow her. He could not even negotiate the path back to the cave, so he remained in the village.

The olz who lived there were the strangest he’d seen. They had ample rations and lavish supplies of quarm, and yet they did no work and no durrl harassed them. They started their nightfire at dawn and most of them slept through the day.

They were caretakers of the dead. At night some went forth and returned with dead olz, whom they carried to the burial cave. Others performed nightly obsequies in the cave. After Farrari became stronger, he went several times to the cave and remained in the background to observe. He saw the same shuffling ceremony he remembered, but without their supreme yilesc the olz performed it silently and committed the dead to the abyss without a spoken blessing. There was another peculiar difference: At intervals an ol would loudly grunt a word and all would collapse in silent prostration. Farrari puzzled long over the word, which meant speak, or talk, or answer. He could not decide whether they were importuning the absent yilesc or the silent dead; but the yilesc remained absent and the dead never spoke.

One morning Farrari climbed to a place of privacy a short distance above the village, found a comfortable clump of grass to sit on, and sternly told himself that if he were too weak for action he at least had no excuse for not thinking. He knew more about the olz than any non-ol on Branoff IV except Liano, who kept what she knew to herself, and he should be able to put that knowledge to use.

He suspected that the cave with the ol carvings in Bran’s valley had been a burial cave, which meant that the olz had not changed their method of disposing of their dead since those remote times when they were masters of Scorvif. The fact that the rascz not only tolerated this, but encouraged it by supporting the village of caretakers, meant that they somehow found it to their own advantage.

When an ol died, the olz of successive villages passed his body along until it reached a collecting point, from which the caretakers took it to a burial cave. There were probably several of these, each with its village of caretakers—one in each of the finger valleys, others around the perimeter of the lilorr. As for what the olz did with the piles of dead that accumulated during the winter or during epidemics, he hesitated to speculate. He felt certain that the distances some dead olz were carried would tax the credulity of an outsider.

What else did he know? That the olz wanted to die. Bran had grasped that, though for the wrong reasons. What, then, were the right reasons?

The olz wanted to die, but they never committed suicide.

The olz worshiped their masters, who starved and murdered them.

The olz made no effort to escape, no effort to defend themselves, no effort to secure a scrap of food more than what they were given even when starving.

They wanted to die, but their religion forbade suicide as well as violence and the taking of each others’ lives. Since they were forbidden to kill themselves or each other, could it be that they worshiped their masters because they starved and murdered them?

“A death cult!” Farrari exclaimed. “A people whose lives are dedicated to one thing and one thing only: dying!”

But why did they want to die? The end of all life was death, and anyone who meditated excessively upon that fact could in time develop a morbid philosophy. Even among a peaceful, prosperous people there would be diseases, accidents, frustrations, tragedies, and if their religion taught that death was a welcome release from life, that it brought instant translation to paradise, Elysium, eternal bliss, a people could come to prefer death to life. And if the people were conditioned to this preference from infancy.

He leaped to his feet excitedly. His first contact with the olz had come by way of a teloid cube that projected an ol woman being beaten to death. In the background several olz stood looking on, and Farrari had pondered the expressions on their faces.

He remembered them vividly: two men, a woman and a child watching a murder, and their faces expressed—ecstasy! Ecstasy and envy! They wanted to die, they envied those who died, they worshiped their conquerors who brought death to them with such lavish generosity.

The rascz had exploited this aberration cunningly, even working women of their own race into the ol religion to encourage the ol obsession with death. A people intent on dying would be very unlikely to revolt, and the olz never had.

Farrari sank back into the grass, made himself comfortable again, and asked himself a crucial question: Why had the IPR Bureau learned so little about the ol religion?

The olz had recognized the IPR agents! Not as aliens from outer space, they could not have comprehended such a concept, but they had recognized them as outsiders, and while they seemed to accept them and behave normally toward them, they kept to themselves matters that concerned only themselves.

Such as the ol religion.

Even Bran, as complete an ol as IPR had produced, knew nothing about the ol religion.

Now that Farrari did, or thought he did, he faced the problem of what to do with his knowledge. If he returned to base with it he would be a hero of sorts, in spite of his violation of regulations, and his information would be the subject of innumerable reports and would produce no result whatsoever. Farrari was laboring for the benefit of the olz, not the IPR files, so he would not return to base.

What he would do he did not know, but while he was deciding, and regaining his strength, he determined to learn the ol language—not the IPR version, but the genuine ol language, which Bran seemed to have glimpsed and Liano possibly knew something of, but which no other IPR agent knew existed.

He began at once. At night he visited neighboring ol villages openly, seeking news of Liano. He returned surreptitiously to eavesdrop, to listen for hours to the grunted speech around the nightfires when the olz did not know an outsider was present. He hid in the cave and listened to the death rites.

And he detected no differences, none whatsoever. Spoken privately, ol was the same threadbare remnant of a language that he had known from the beginning.