The World Menders

II

He was twenty years old on the Adjusted Galactic Time Scale—a pleasant, well-mannered young man with an eminently proper upbringing, better than average intelligence, and a rich diversity of small talents. He considered it his own personal misfortune that his father was assistant custodian of the Cultural Survey Archives and his older brother a promising young officer already storming the lower reaches of CS administration. His family took it for granted that he would attend the Cultural Survey Academy; he went without protest, but only because the possible alternatives pleased him even less.

He quickly learned that in the Cultural Survey the man with many small talents possessed a marked advantage over the man with one or even several large ones. He ranked number two in his class, his family was pleased, and he began to think of the Cultural Survey as a career rather than a place to mark time while he cast about for something more important with which to occupy himself.

Abruptly the Academy’s entire fifth-year class was transferred, without warning, explanation or apology, to the Interplanetary Relations Bureau, a mysterious governmental department that few of the trainees had known existed. Their AT/1 shoulder patches crinkly new, their space bags bulging with 24.9 kilos of books and training manuals covering the subject matter of the two years of advanced training now forever lost to them, they were summarily transported far beyond the jagged frontier of the Federation of Independent Worlds and deposited on planets whose existence all the available reference books denied.

The sudden transfer shattered Farrari’s inner complacency. He entered upon his new duties with numbing uncertainty, with bewilderment, with an apprehension of starkly revealed ineptitude and its accompanying throes of exquisite embarrassment. In a word, he was terrified.

He discerned immediately that the base staff had its own strict orders concerning Cultural Survey AT/1 Cedd Farrari. On the first morning he found himself the master of a centrally-located, two-room suite just off one of the main corridors. The living quarters were comfortably furnished; the large workroom was bare, but ha Graan, the base supply officer, lined its walls with shelves and teloid files, ceremoniously presented Farrari with the latest model teloid projector, and invited him to the storage rooms to pick out any other furnishings he wanted. Ganoff Strunk, the amiable, portly, bald-headed records chief, brought him an initial allotment of five hundred teloid cubes of cultural subjects that he had culled from his files and then returned to unload an astonishing collection of artifacts: carvings in stone and wood, exquisite examples of metalcraft, jewelry, embroidery, leather work, weaving, drawings and paintings on wood and cloth, ceramics—the room took on the aspect of moving day at a museum.

When finally Farrari was left alone he slowly circled the pile of art objects, touching, scrutinizing. He was awed and delighted but also confounded. Here was a new world to explore, to study, to classify. Novice that he was, he hadn’t any idea how to begin.

Someone strolled along the corridor, and Farrari frowned resentfully at the fading footsteps. Workrooms were connected with the corridors by wide, doorless arches. Though one was entitled to as much private life as he could manage, it was obvious that his work was everyone’s business.

Thoughtfully Farrari made another circuit of the room. It would take him days just to impose a semblance of order, and once he had submerged himself in the task of sorting and classifying he would have little thought for anything else. Before he became too pre occupied to care, he should at least learn to find his way about the base.

Resolutely he turned away and stepped into the corridor.

The base was weblike, and at its center its main corridors intersected in a miniature rotunda. Opening off from it were the dining room, which also served as an assembly room on the rare occasions when the full staff met, Ganoff Strunk’s records section, and the administrative offices. Around the rotunda’s circumference was a bulletin board posted with a scattering of notices. He passed them by without a glance—they could not possibly have concerned Cultural Survey AT/1 Cedd Farrari. At the end of one corridor he could see Isa Graan’s storage rooms and the hangar where the lighter had landed. He turned in the opposite direction.

He met no one, but several staff members looked up from their work and nodded as he passed. All identifying marks were given in the abstract glyphs of a native language, and the query about his linguistic index took on an ominous significance. Obviously IPR personnel were encouraged—nay, forced—to master native languages.

The corridor ended in a row of small conference rooms, each with a single window that looked out onto formidable mountain scenery.

Backtracking, Farrari took several turnings and was about to give himself up as lost when he abruptly happened onto a main corridor again. Passing through the rotunda a second time, he paused to look at the posted notices.

Some were questions. Some were lists of native words, the strange glyphs followed by a rendition in the common alphabet and a question mark. Some were cryptic comments.

“Yilesc? See me. Prochnow.”

“Every member of a family of olz in the village coordinates 101.7/34.9 has seven fingers on each hand. Brudg.”

“This week’s luncheon menu: forn cakes, narmpf stew, jellied zrilmberries, zrilmberry tea. Dallum.”

“Where did the pink marble in the kru’s summer palace in the narru come from? Wedgor.”

At the top of a long sheet of paper: “List any comparatives you’ve encountered in of and rase languages.” The remainder of the sheet was blank.

“Wanted: tri-bladed dagger, any condition. Kantz.”

“Anyone seen a red lupf growing south of Scorv? Dallum.”

A voice said tremulously, “I was a yilesc.”

Farrari whirled and gaped at the speaker. The young woman—girl, really—was of slight build, with a small, childlike face and large black eyes that fixed gravely upon his face and saw something in a remote dimension. Her small form was clothed in a work smock and trousers, both of them much too large. Farrari wondered if she were a child and the base had no clothing that would fit her.

“That’s very interesting,” he said, looking at the notice again. Her searching eyes disturbed him. “What’s a yilesc?”

She laughed softly. “They don’t know. Not even the yilescz know. And I won’t tell them!” She continued to gaze unblinkingly at his face. “I haven’t seen you. You’re new.”

“I arrived last night,” Farrari said. “I’m from Cultural Survey.”

“You made a statue. And cut yourself.”

“How did you know that?”

She laughed again.

Farrari was frankly looking for an excuse to escape when Ganoff Strunk hurried by. “Liano!” he called. “Did you find the coordinator?”

“Oh,” she said dully. “The coordinator.” She darted away.

“Out for a walk?” Strunk asked Farrari.

He nodded. “What a strange person!”

“Yes. Getting familiar with the base, are you?”

“That was the idea, but I keep losing myself.”

“Come over to the office and I’ll give you a floor plan. The notices? They’re so someone won’t spend weeks tracking down a fact that someone else already knows. The words are mostly posted by the lexicographer. That is, if anyone has a question about a word he goes to see her, and if she can’t answer it the problem is automatically hers.”

“That girl… Liano, is that her name? She said she was a yilesc. Is she IPR?”

Strunk nodded.

“How could she be a yilesc when you don’t know what a yilesc is?”

“We know,” Strunk said. “We’ve had several yilesc field agents. What we don’t know is how the yilescz got to be what they are, or why. Jan Prochnow is our expert in comparative theology, and because the yilesc is a kind of female shaman he’d naturally like to know the how and the why. It only goes to show that knowing the definition of a word sometimes poses more problems than it solves. That notice has been posted for a long time.”

They walked toward Strunk’s office, Strunk talking about various research and study projects and Farrari only half listening. As Strunk handed him the copy of the base floor plan he ventured to put his mystification into words. “This… Liano—”

“Liano Kurne,” Strunk said.

“Is she some kind of seeress, or clairvoyant?”

Strunk had started toward his desk. He turned on Farrari and de manded, “Why do you ask that?”

“Something she said to me—”

Strunk gripped his arm. “What did she say?”

“She described something that happened to me a couple of years aso,” Ferrari answered lamely. “I’ve never been much good at cillpitire, and one day in class my chi.el slipped and gave me a nasty cut. She said, ‘You made a statue. And cut yourself.’ There’s no possible way she could have known that, but she did.”

Strunk released Farrari, backed slowly toward his chair, and seated himself with exaggerated deliberation. “I see. That’s very interesting. Peter Jorrul will be glad to hear it. We’ve been worried about Liano. A year ago she and her husband were working as a team down south, and her husband was killed. She’s never recovered.”

“She looks so young.”

“She is young. Her husband was young.” He added defensively, “But that’s when we have to place them, if they’re to survive in a completely alien environment. It’s the young agents who are the most adaptable.”

“Does the IPR Bureau Academy accept children?”

“In special cases, yes.”

Farrari returned to his workroom and began sorting art objects and arranging them on shelves. Some time later he glanced up and saw Liano Kurne watching him from the corridor. She darted away, and though after that he frequently encountered her in the corridors, she never seemed to recognize him.

Farrari studied Branoff IV’s arts and crafts, pondered its rudimentary literature, listened to its music. He created classifications and wrote reports. The staff gave him everything he asked for, some things he would not have dared ask for, and a few things he did not want.

To his astonishment he found himself treated, not merely as an equal, but as an important equal. His entire professional existence had been devoted to routinely polishing the cultural boots of his instructors. Suddenly he was translated into a situation where his casual whim was everyone’s command, where his opinions were energetically sought after, and where, at conferences that touched on cultural matters, his colleagues could be surprised watching him curiously, as though in hope of catching him practicing a parlor trick.

It was all very unsettling, because the base staff obviously was as mystified about the presence of a Cultural Survey trainee as Farrari was to be there. On the infrequent occasions when he managed to wrench himself away from his work, he paced the plastic-lined corridors of the comfortable aerie that the IPR Bureau had bored into the mountaintop, wondering just what it was that he was supposed to be doing.

He made friends. Anyone would have made friends at this base, where the doorless workrooms invited a constant influx of visitors who familiarly looked over one’s shoulder, examined work projects with interest, and asked questions. When he walked through the corridors he was likely to be hailed at any door, asked what he thought of something or other, and invited to share a ration package.

His most constant visitor was old Heber Clough, whose workroom was across the corridor from Farrari’s. An elderly wisp of a man with a mischievous, cherubic face ringed with thinning red hair and the faint red fuzz of a sparse beard, he came stumbling into Farrari’s workroom on that first afternoon, when Farrari was despondently studying a teloid projection and wondering how he should begin.

“Getting organized?” Clough asked.

“Ha! I should start classifying this stuff, but I don’t have a single reference base.” Farrari fed another cube into the projector. “These bas-reliefs are excellent, but I don’t know whether they were produced yesterday, or a thousand years ago.”

“Oh, well,” Clough said. “If that’s all that’s bothering you this one is a carving of the kru, Feyvt, and his family. He was the grand father of the present kru, and here he has”—Clough pointed a stubby finger into the projection and counted—“seventeen children; that would date this carving at a hundred and sixty-two or a hundred and sixty-three years ago. I’d have to check my records to say which. Those are Branoff IV years.”

“How do you know?” Farrari exclaimed.

Clough beamed at him. “I’m a genealogist. I know the kruz as far back as we’ve found records. These carvings are as exact as photographs.”

“That’s wonderful!”

“Not quite as wonderful as it might be,” Clough said gloomily. “Take a close look at the children.”

“They all look like their father.”

“They all are their father. It’s some confounded artist’s tradition. A child, of either sex, is always wearing a miniature of its father’s face. Then when the children leave their father’s home and become adults in their own right, it’s all but impossible to figure out who they are. It makes a pretty problem for a genealogist—a pretty problem.” He shrugged and added cheerfully. “But I know all the kruz. If you need some kind of temporal guide for classifying art styles, you couldn’t find a better one than that. If you have any questions about them, just ask me.”

The walls of Clough’s own workroom were covered with charts, which had, unfortunately, a great many blank spaces. His cherubic countenance would go wide-eyed with fascination over the discovery of a new genealogical detail, however minor.

Branoff IV’s aristocracy was a relatively small, tightly-knit group, and IPR had been unable to work agents into it, or even close to it. In Clough’s most critical area of study, the potential heirs to the throne, he was stymied because no one knew for certain whom they might be. The old kru’s reign antedated IPR on the planet, and the field team had not yet had an opportunity to observe a succession. Clough was delighted when Farrari proved, with bits of a literary epic, that the throne did indeed descend to one of the kru’s sons.

“I assumed as much,” he chortled. “Oh, yes indeed, I assumed it. It’s so common that one always assumes it. But one of the first things one learns in IPR is that assumptions do not go into reports. One records them in a workbook until there are sufficient facts to support them. Now suppose you tell me who the present kru’s sons are and which of them is the most likely heir apparent.”

Farrari failed on both points, but he was able to fill in several of Clough’s blank spaces from the results of his careful study of the amazingly graphic temple bas-relick. He also succeeded in identifying an elder brother of the kru, thus proving that the throne did not inevitably go to the oldest son, and that discovery forced Clough to dejectedly rip a page of assumptions from his workbook.

But the old man was tremendously pleased, and he often brought his lunch to Farrari’s workroom so that the two of them could study Branoff IV art while they ate and attempted to establish blood relationships through physiognomical similarities.

Adjoining Farrari’s two rooms was the huge laboratory of Thorald Dallum, a young botanist. Branoff IV plants flourished there under a blaze of artificial sunlight. Farrari, unaccustomed to confinement. found the vast dimensions and gardenlike atmosphere a welcome relief from the relentlessly impinging walls of rooms and corridors, and he quickly seized upon the excuse of identifying trees and plants portrayed in Branoff IV art and began to visit the place daily.

Dallum offered a weekly luncheon at which he served dishes he had concocted from Branoff IV plants. He was attempting to discover new sources of food, and many of his concoctions were derived from plants that the natives did not recognize as nutritious. Unfortunately, neither did the base personnel who came to eat them. They cautiously accepted small servings and sampled them in the manner of a person who had been ordered to discover by oral ingestion the lethal dose of a known poison, while Dallum hovered nearby scrutinizing their faces anxiously. His luncheons were not well attended. His own special favorite among these exotic dishes was zrilmberry tea, and he enthusiastically recited the long list of nutrients that it contained. Farrari was not surprised to learn that no native had ever been known to eat a zrilmberry. And the tea tasted dreadful.

Dallum had scarcely been aware that Branoff IV possessed an art. He was eager to assist Farrari, and in time he began to confide his own problems.

“The main trouble,” he said despondently, “is that the agriculture can’t support the population. Branoff IV grains and tubers are the most miserable excuses for food plants that I’ve ever encountered. The olz live out their lives on the verge of starvation, and very short lives they are. If only I could develop some strains that produce more food…”

“Olz?”

“Slaves.”

Farrari found for him the teloid of an ancient carving of a kru inspecting a grain field, and Dallum gazed at the projection dumfounded. “There are five times too many ears!” he exclaimed. “It must be artistic license!”

“That’s possible,” Farrari said, “but in everything I’ve been able to check, the realism is superb.” “How old is it?”

“Roughly a thousand years.” Dallum moved the projection closer to his specimen plants. “At least five times too many. I’ve never heard of a situation where the inherent productivity of a food plant deteriorated so drastically. The soil, yes, but a people will learn to use fertilizers, or rotate their crops, and very early they learn that the seeds of a healthy, high-yielding plant produce more food than the seeds of a low yield, deformed plant.”

“Does the present kru inspect many grain fields?” Farrari asked.

Dallum thought for a moment. “I’ve never heard of him inspecting anything.”

“The historians believe that long ago the aristocracy was much more concerned with practical affairs. The art and literature that survives supports that conclusion. Down through the centuries the aristocrats gradually lost interest in everything except their own pleasures.”

“I see,” Dallum mused. “And one couldn’t expect intelligent agricultural management from a starving ol. He’d be too much in a hurry to eat to pay any attention to plant heredity. If for centuries these people have been eating the best grain and saving the worst for seed, it may take much longer than I’d thought to breed plants with a decent productive capacity.”

“Why don’t you import some?” Fla! Read your IPR field man-lately?”

“I don’t have a field manual.” “You’re the lucky one,” Dallum said with a grin.

The other inhabitant of Farrari’s corridor was Semar Kantz, a military scientist and a devoted student of the kru’s army and its tactics. Kantz had a vast collection of teloids of art works depicting weapons and soldiers and battles. Working together, the two of them arranged these in chronological order, Farrari classifying according to art styles and techniques and Kantz according to weapon types and shapes and tactical formations. Both were startled and delighted at the ease with which their respective specialities dovetailed.

Farrari was enjoying himself and keeping furiously occupied, but as the months slipped by uneventfully he became increasingly concerned that he was somehow failing to fulfill his assignment.

“How do you study an IPR problem from the Cultural Survey point-of-view?” he asked Heber Clough.

Clough regarded him with astonishment.

“That’s what my orders say I’m to do.” Farrari explained, “and I don’t know how to go about it.”

“What do you think you’ve been doing?” Clough demanded. “You’ve been looking at all of our problems, and if it hasn’t been from the Cultural Survey point-of-view I don’t know what you’d call it. Didn’t your academy give you any suggestions?”

Farrari laughed bitterly. “At the academy no one had the vaguest notion as to what IPR wanted with us. There’s this deadly tradition that every cadet must have a personal interview with the commandant on promotion day. You walk in and salute, and the commandant says, ‘Congratulations, Cadet Blank. Your work this past year has been excellent.’ Or ‘good’ or ‘satisfactory’—if the work hadn’t been satisfactory the cadet would have been informed earlier, in an entirely different kind of interview. ‘You are promoted one grade and for the coming year you are ordered to this academy to continue your studies. Are there any questions, Cadet Blank? Dismissed!’ ”

Clough laughed heartily. “It sounds hauntingly familiar, except that at the IPR Academy we also had to listen to a restatement of the academy’s position on overnight passes.”

“Anyway, my class was lined up and waiting for the interviews to start, and suddenly the commandant walked out looking as if the Cultural Survey had been abolished and announced that we’d all been promoted and transferred in rank to the Interplanetary Relations Bureau for assignment as the Bureau directed. He couldn’t tell us why, or what IPR expected of us, because no one had bothered to inform him. We shipped out four hours later. Most of the four hours was spent in figuring how to include a two-year issue of texts and manuals into the fifty kilograms of luggage we were allowed, it being fairly certain that we’d be working a long way from a CS reference library. I did manage ten minutes of research because I wanted to find out what the IPR Bureau was.”

“Did you succeed?”

“No. It is alleged to have the largest annual appropriation of any governmental department—which I believe. My transfer in rank doubled my salary. Other than that, it functions only outside the organized territory of the Federation, and no one seems to know what it does there.”

“It was once the most important agency of the Federation government,” Clough said. “When relations between worlds became a matter of routine regulation instead of heroic improvisation it faded into insignificance—within the Federation. Outside Federation boundaries it runs the galaxy and maybe the universe, too, to whatever extent the universe condescends to take notice of it. Put in simplest terms, IPR is the sole link between the Federation and any world that isn’t a member, and its most important function is preparing nonmembers for membership.”

“That’s what I’d concluded. None of it helps me to figure out what I’m supposed to be doing.”

“Has the coordinator said anything to you?”

“No. I haven’t talked with him since the day I signed in.”

“Believe me, if he had any complaints you would have talked with him,” Clough said fervently. “The more Coordinator Paul leaves a man alone, the better the job he’s doing. If you have any doubts about your work, why don’t you ask him?”

“It seems like an awfully silly thing to he bothering the coordinator with,” Farrari said.

But more days passed, and finally Farrari could contain his uncertainty no longer. He humbly went to see the coordinator.