The World Menders

XX

The history section appropriated all the teloid projectors not in use, set up batteries of them wherever space permitted, and operated them continuously with changing shifts of carefully briefed volunteers. As section chief Wally Hargo remarked, IPR had been on Branoff IV long enough to take a lot of teloids.

“Any progress?” Farrari asked him.

Hargo shook his head. “There’s no way to speed up a teloid projection, and we wouldn’t if we could. Whatever we’re looking for is going to be hard to find even if it’s there, which it probably won’t be.”

Peter Jorrul hobbled in using a cane and thundered, “Which one of you miscreants stole my teloid projector?”

“Hargo,” Farrari said. “But you can use it any time you like if you don’t mind looking at his teloids.”

“It isn’t enough that this place is infested with super-specialists,” Jorrul grumbled. “You two have to run a super-teloid production.”

“You’re looking fine,” Farrari told him. “All you needed was a few weeks away from base.”

“Away from the food at base. I can’t let myself be seen, no rasc walks with a cane, but at least at my headquarters I can eat. What are you two looking for?”

“Insurrections,” Farrari said. “In the plural? In Scorvif?” Farrari nodded.

“No wonder you need so many projectors. There haven’t been any.”

“But there have, only the records aren’t easy to come by because they aren’t the sort of thing the rulers of Scorvif would want commemorated. Others might get the same idea. We don’t expect to find relief carvings, for example, depicting the glorious victory of the kru Vilif over the crass insurrectionists.”

“You don’t expect to find it, but you’re looking for it anyway?”

“We’re looking for something much more subtle, but we don’t expect to find that, either.”

“What makes you so certain that whatever it is you don’t expect to find is there?”

“We’re certain that there have been insurrections,” Hargo said. “Take any absolute monarchy and mix in a nobility with no responsibilities, a powerful priesthood, a first-class army, and a closed order of civil servants, and you have four potential areas in which insurrection can develop. At intervals that combination would have to produce an uprising.”

“So why didn’t anyone notice the possibility before?”

“Until Farrari tried it himself, there was no evidence that it’d ever happened. Now we know it has, because of the way the rascz reacted.”

Jorrul turned to Farrari. “The way they reacted to the olz?”

“Yes. Anyone plotting revolution in this land would be bound to look longingly at the olz—they’re such an obvious weapon, so easily available, so numerous, so willing to do what a rasc tells them, any rasc. Once such an uprising started, every durrl in the area would have to be eliminated immediately because he and his establishment would pose a threat to the control of the olz. A word from a durrl and the olz would turn in their tracks and go home. The fact that the durrlz and everyone connected with them ran at the first hint of an ol uprising could only mean that this has happened often enough for the durrlz to develop an instinctive reaction to it. If they don’t run, they get their throats cut. And, of course, it isn’t the olz they’re running from, it’s the rascz responsible for the uprising. The same applies to the conduct of the army, which ranged all about and through the olz but made no move at all to attack them or turn them back. They know their olz, and they know the olz wouldn’t march on Scory unless someone was telling them to. That was why they ignored the olz but immediately attacked the two assistant durrlz. They were looking for the treacherous rascz who were giving the orders only the rascz.”

“They’re still looking for them,” Jorrul said.

“Of course. The reason they let the olz advance all the way to Scory was to draw their rasc leaders into a trap. When they decided that the trap had failed they simply sent a durrl to speak the word that would send the olz home. They know that no one would be foolish enough to march the olz on Scory without five divisions of rebellious rasc troops to back them up, and it’s those troops that they’re still looking for.”

“I see. And now that Hargo knows that rasc history is riddled with insurrections, he has to go through all the records again to see if there’s evidence that he overlooked when he thought there hadn’t been any.”

Hargo nodded unhappily. “Of course we don’t expect to find anything.”

“Delighted that whatever it is you don’t expect to find isn’t being found with my projector,” Jorrul said dryly. “How’s Liano?”

“Still normal,” Farrari said. “And very happy. Hargo, you have another distinguished visitor.”

Coordinator Paul scowled at them from the archway. “Farrari! The intercom has been blasting your name intermittently for the past half hour.”

“Sorry, sir. Hargo has it turned off in here because it blasts all the time and he’s trying to get some work done.”

“Hello, Peter,” the coordinator said to Jorrul. “Come and see me when you have time—if you can find me, I’ve lost my office. If you aren’t too busy, Farrari, the sector supervisor would like to speak with you. That’s the way he put it—’If Farrari isn’t too busy, I’d like to speak with him.’ ”

“How busy would I have to be to be too busy to see a sector supervisor?” Farrari wanted to know.

As they threaded their way through the crowded corridor, the coordinator muttered, “In twenty-eight years in the service, I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Farrari believed him. The regular staff resented the massive invasion by super-specialists, everyone was short-tempered because of the overcrowding, the mortality rate in sacred cows had been frightful, and several arguments had degenerated into physical combat. Earlier that day Farrari had heard a graying first-grade biologist call a balding zero-grade chemist a stupid fool, and the chemist responded by throwing a centrifuge, which fortunately missed. The only remarkable thing about it, on a day when a sector supervisor was using a world coordinator to run errands for him, was the mildness of the language.

The coordinator’s office resembled a cramped military command post, and Sector Supervisor Ware looked as though he would be much more comfortable commanding an army. He pointed a finger at Farrari.

“So you’re the one who’s responsible for this.”

“No, sir,” Farrari said firmly.

Ware’s glare included Coordinator Paul. “You aren’t the one? I told your coordinator—”

“I’m the one,” Farrari said, “and I’m not responsible. I didn’t create the olz.”

Ware turned, said icily, “Will you stop that for a moment?” to an assistant who was coaxing data from the coordinator’s stuttering desk computer, and scowled a staff conference into silence.

“No,” he agreed. “You didn’t create the olz, and it’s beginning to look very much as if the rascz did, by centuries of what amounted to controlled breeding. How did you happen onto this notion that the olz are animals?”

“Are they?” Farrari asked. “Every place I go I find five people arguing about it.”

Ware shrugged. “Might be animals, then.”

“Looking back, I can find all kinds of reasons. Olz never commit suicide; animals don’t commit suicide. The olz had no reaction at all when I arranged to have their dead speak to them; animals likewise wouldn’t comprehend a message from the dead. Certain vital words are missing from what has been alleged to be the ol language—and so on. Looking back I can see that, but I won’t pretend I saw any of it at the time. All I saw was that the olz have no culture.”

Ware said coldly, “If you’ll pardon the expression—so what? I’d like some data. Are you prepared to prove that animals never have what you consider culture and that humans always have it?”

“The Cultural Survey Reference Library on this world consists of the fifth-year textbooks I was able to bring with me.”

“Why didn’t you ask your headquarters to research the question?”

“My ‘headquarters’ are here,” Farrari said. “If you’re referring to the Cultural Survey, you have the authority to ask—I don’t—but if you ask don’t expect an answer. The job of the Cultural Survey is to study human culture, so it doesn’t go about looking for animal cultures, or even for humans who have no culture.”

“I see.”

“The conduct of your headquarters specialists isn’t one that invites cooperation from other governmental departments anyway. Yesterday one of them wanted to know how I could be so certain that the sounds the olz make aren’t a language. I asked him to define ‘language’ and he tried to hit me.”

Ware smiled. “An expert is understandably embarrassed when he finds that a ‘language’ he’s been studying for years isn’t one. These olz seem to have a stable, repetitive existence and their sounds of communication are always made the same way, under the same circumstances, with always the same result, and to further complicate this they have more sounds than any animal has ever been known to use. The specialists naturally maintain that the olz do so have a language, or they would have noticed that the language they were studying isn’t one.”

“Perhaps so,” Farrari said, “but right now a bulletin on syntax in the ol language makes rather droll reading. Either the olz are extremely intelligent animals, or they’re rather stupid humans. It isn’t my province to decide which. I merely raised the question.”

“You certainly did.”

“And just because I raised the question, these super-specialists seem to think I have some kind of obligation to answer it. I have a few questions of my own that need answers more urgently, and they won’t let me work.”

“What sort of questions?”

“For one, I wondered how the olz managed to survive, considering the treatment of them as shown in IPR records for this planet. There are hundreds of teloids showing durrlz beating olz to death and soldiers using olz for target practice, and so on, and if such scenes are as common as the teloids indicate, the olz should have become extinct long ago. Then it occurred to me that in all of my experience with the olz and as an ol, I never saw an ol mistreated. Not once. So the question is whether my experience was untypical or the records lie.”

“It deserves an answer. Have you found one?”

“Not one that I’d certify, but I think the explanation is that a durrl beating an ol to death makes a much more interesting teloid than a cube of an ol methodically cultivating tubers. Your agents don’t care to waste teloid cubes on scenes that can be had by the thousands any time anyone wants to point a camera. So they record the unusual, and in any society there’ll always be a few persons who are sadistic enough to gain pleasure from mistreating—”

“Animals? Or people?”

“Either, sir. And even a kind people may find it necessary to put their animals on a drastically reduced diet during winter.”

“What you’re saying, young man, is that IPR records of any world may present a distorted picture of that world.”

“I’d say they’re very likely to present a distorted picture, sir.”

“Headquarters won’t like that suggestion, but I agree that it should be looked into. What else?”

Two of the super-specialists burst into the room, one calling, “Farrari? Is Farrari in here?”

Farrari turned.

“Do the olz eat meat?” the specialist demanded.

“Never,” Farrari said.

“There!” the other specialist said smugly. “Clearly a case of arrested evolution. Hunting and meat-eating develop the brain, the olz never hunted, so their cortices—”

“You can’t know that until we obtain specimens for dissection. The question is whether they don’t eat meat because they won’t, or because they can’t, or because they don’t have meat to eat.”

Farrari said politely, “I doubt that the present diet of the olz is much help to either of you. They eat what the rascz give them to eat. Before the rascz came they may have eaten nothing but meat.”

“Not with those teeth!” the first specialist snapped.

“There’s no incompatibility between ol type teeth and an omnivorous diet,” the other said. “Look at your own teeth.”

“I do, frequently, and I fail to see—”

The sector supervisor said mildly, “Gentlemen—” They left, and their argument faded away down the corridor.

“You were mentioning other questions,” Ware said to Farrari.

“There are a number of them concerning the relationship of the rascz and the olz. The history section is working on them.”

“The cave carvings?”

“Those and other things. There are some baffling inconsistencies. For example, when I led an ol uprising, the rascz paid no attention to the olz. When Bran, in the guise of an ol, assassinated a few durrlz, the army turned out, slaughtered whole villages of olz, and burned their huts. Dr. Grant thinks he has the answer to that—one of those strange Branoff IV viruses causes a peculiar type of madness in laboratory animals. The most timid grass eater will run amok and attack its predators, and its bite or scratch becomes virulently infectious. Garnt thinks that on rare occasions olz acquire the disease, and that the rascz have somehow learned that when this happens the only solution is to exterminate those already exposed and burn the huts they’ve lived in. In other words, the rascz knew that there was only one circumstance under which an ol would attack a rasc: When Bran murdered those durrlz they immediately concluded that the madness had struck again, and as a public health measure they reluctantly took the action they thought urgently necessary.”

“It would seem,” Ware said slowly, “that we have humanlike animals here, and that the rascz deliberately bred them to produce the kinds of work animals they wanted. Beyond that we have a great many questions. Go and get as many answers as you can.”

The coordinator followed Farrari to the door. “Going back to your workroom?”

Farrari nodded.

“I’ll come along. Since I can’t use my own office.”

They walked side by side. Ahead of them a base specialist and a super-specialist were engaged in what was obviously a long-standing argument.

“Will you stop using that word slave? Aren’t all domestic animals slaves?”

“Listen. I’m not arguing about whether the olz are human or animal. I’m telling you the rascz think they’re human. Why else are they banned from the cities? No other animals are banned from the cities. Why else is their ownership a monopoly of the kru? All the other animals can be owned by anybody. Why else would the rascz train the olz to wear that sloppy clothing? None of the other animals wear clothing. Tell me this. Did you ever hear of a rasc eating an ol?”

Still arguing, they disappeared around a corner. The coordinator and Farrari turned toward Farrari’s workroom, and as they approached it a copy of the IPR Field Manual 1048K shot through Heber Clough’s door—the room had long since been occupied by super-specialists—struck the wall, and bounced at their feet. The coordinator halted with a scowl.

“Nothing fits!” a voice exclaimed hoarsely.

“Of course nothing fits. No society has ever existed with a deliberately-bred semi-intelligent domestic animal servant class. The Bureau’s theories and rules couldn’t possibly apply to a situation so incompatible with its previous experience.”

Farrari grinned—the second statement was an approximate quotation from a lecture he’d delivered two hours earlier—and followed the coordinator into his workroom.

They made themselves comfortable, and Farrari said, “I’m seriously thinking of going back. I can’t get any work done here—people keep interrupting me.”

“Go ahead,” the coordinator said. “You can answer questions once a day by appointment on Jorrul’s communication network.”

“Why don’t you move your office down here? I’m the only base specialist left with a workroom of his own.”

“I’ll think about it. I keep being interrupted, too, and moving my office wouldn’t help. I spent my much interrupted afternoon yesterday trying to identify Bran for you, but I couldn’t. There’s no doubt at all about his being an IPR agent?”

“No doubt at all.”

“Strunk is holding some photos for you to look at when you have time. Unfortunately, they’re regular identification photos. We’ve never bothered to keep a file of photos of our agents in their native disguises. Now I suppose we’ll have to. Is there anything new on the cave carvings?”

“The super-specialists are willing to go along with me if I’ll explain why anyone would go to so much trouble.”

“The possibility of overthrowing a government must have a certain allure to it,” the coordinator said. “On any world people are likely to go to considerable trouble and expense.”

“Someone did,” Farrari said. “Someone who maybe thought past failures with the olz were due to their not being properly motivated. Obviously the rascz do think the olz are human, or at least they did in ancient times. They tried to use something that would have worked beautifully with their own race—a cult of ol supremacy with carvings showing olz as masters of Scorvif. After the insurrection was crushed, the kru—or his priests—was sufficiently impressed to keep a censored version of the cult going as the ol religion, perhaps to make certain that the same gimmick wouldn’t be used again. The yilescz may have come into being at the same time, not to minister to the olz, but to spy on them. In some later insurrection the yilescz may have sold out to the rebels, which would account for their present ambivalent status.”

“It’s possible,” the coordinator agreed. “On this world I’m beginning to think that anything is possible.”

One of the linguists looked in, nodded at Farrari. “We make it eighty-two, but we can’t agree on the variants. There may be as few as dozen or as many as fifty.”

“It amounts to a fair-sized pseudo vocabulary,” Farrari observed.

The linguist nodded. “If they’r animals, they’re unique.”

“If they’re human, they’re unique, too,” Farrari said.

The linguist went away, and the coordinator said with a chuckle, “All of this is shaking the Bureau to its time-honored foundations. Every problem world will have to be restudied, and the Bureau doesn’t have the right kind of specialists to do the job. It doesn’t have a single expert in animal communication or sociology or anything remotely connected with such things. It’s never needed any.”

“If it’d had some, maybe they would have been needed,” Farrari said.

Jorrul hobbled in and seated himself on an unused table. “Big ruckus at the other end of the corridor,” he said. “Super-specialist claims this CS trainee Farrari states in a report that he saw the olz build a shrine to a dead durrl and worship him.”

“Wrong,” Farrari said. “I said that’s what it looked like to me. What they thought it was I have no idea.”

“Could the rascz have taught it to them?” Jorrul asked.

“It’s very likely. Just as the rascz probably taught them their religion, if you want to call it that, and taught the olz of the caretaker villages to look after the dead. Obviously the olz have a startling capacity for learned responses, and just as obviously the rascz can’t comprehend that there is no rationale whatsoever behind those responses. Or they couldn’t comprehend it at the time they set up the religion. It all happened so long ago that very few rascz today are aware that the olz are supposed to have one.”

“I’ve been asked for recommendations on future Bureau operations on Branoff IV,” Jorrul said. “No one seems to have reached any conclusions about this thing—all they do is stand around and argue about it—but they want me to make recommendations for future operations.”

“You might suggest that we try to influence the rascz to send expeditions beyond the mountains to search for new food plants,” Farrari said. “It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if they found some.”

“It’d surprise me,” Jorrul growled.

“It wouldn’t surprise me, because I’d include in the recommendation the suggestion that IPR import some that are suitable for this world and plant them so they’ll be there waiting for the expeditions.”

“You’re out of your mind!”

“This nonsense about strict adherence to principles in the face of dwindling food production that’ll eventually destroy the world’s only civilization has been carried far enough. Second, I’d recommend that IPR make a serious attempt to exploit the malsz.”

“What are the malsz?” the coordinator wanted to know.

“Neighborhood gossip clubs,” Jorrul said. “What’s there to exploit about them?”

“They elect their own officers, don’t they? And they have important responsibilities concerning sanitation and keeping the streets clean.”

“If you want to call them important.”

“Don’t you think it rather remarkable that there are flourishing democratic institutions, however small and insignificant, right under the entrenched toes of an absolute monarchy? Combine the malsz into a city-wide organization, and you have the rudimentary basis for a national democracy.”

“The rascz aren’t ready for the idea,” Jorrul said.

Farrari said disgustedly, “IPR still doesn’t understand the incredible error it’s made on this planet. It set up a two thousand year plan to democratize the olz, who need fifty or a thousand times that, and it virtually ignored the rascz, who are so ripe for democracy that they’re fumbling toward it on their own. Here’s another motto for your IPR manual: THE BEST WAY TO DETERMINE WHETHER OR NOT A PEOPLE ARE READY FOR AN IDEA IS TO SUGGEST IT TO THEM.”

“All right,” Jorrul said. “We’ll suggest it. What about the olz?” Farrari shook his head.

“Your second pilgrimage to the Life Temple bore results—did they tell you? The kru issued a stern order against mistreating an ol. The priests will also waste a lot of theology on your blunt statement that the olz are the kru’s people, but that won’t get the olz an adequate diet in winter.”

“It’ll take new food crops to do that.”

“I’ll suggest them. What’s the object of this new complex of laboratories?”

“To learn,” Farrari said.

“That sounds like an excellent suggestion, the kind Bureau Headquarters hardly ever turns down. As concerns the olz, I’ll recommend that we learn something about them, with the added information that our local ol expert already has several laboratory programs in operation.”

“As long as you don’t identify the ol expert, that’s satisfactory with me,” Farrari said. “I’m being asked too many questions as it is.”

Jorrul pushed himself to his feet and reached for his cane.

“Come and visit us?” Farrari asked.

“I will,” Jorrul promised. “The first chance I get.”

He hobbled away.

“Are you leaving right away?” the coordinator asked.

“Yes. Unless I’m ordered, I won’t be back until the mob disperses.”

“I won’t order you unless someone orders me,” The coordinator promised. “I think I will move in here. Thanks.”

“Come and visit us?”

“As soon as I can get away.”

Farrari walked slowly along the corridor, sorting out the unrelenting blast or argument that flowed from every workroom.

“Of course the olz worship the rascz. There’s hardly a populated world in existence that doesn’t have some kind of domestic pet that worships its human masters, no matter how much those masters mistreat it.”

Rascz gave the olz a religion modeled on their own. Those burial caves. Did you know about the cave under the city of Scorv? The rascz bury their dead there.”

“Look. If the olz are animals, maybe they have a highly developed sense of smell. Maybe that’s why we lost so many ol agents. The olz could tell they weren’t olz, and then—”

“What’s wrong with the condition of the olz?” Farrari paused to listen. “Give me another example of a domestic animal that has their measure of independence. I say the rascz and the olz have achieved a unique symbiosis. Neither could exist without the other. And when, eventually, the rascz achieve industrialization, the olz can be bred to perform many routine industrial tasks.”

Farrari moved on, shaking his head slowly. He came to Isa Graan’s supply section, and Graan greeted him with a smile. “Quite a madhouse, eh?”

“Quite,” Farrari agreed.

“And no one to blame but yourself,” Graan said with a chuckle. “All the visiting brass want to make the grand tour. Jorrul’s men are complaining about being nothing but a glorified escort service, and my men are doing nothing but run platforms around Scorvif. But it can’t last forever, I keep telling myself. They’ll get tired and go home, and then we can get back to normal.”

“We’ll never get back to normal,” Farrari said.

“Are those olz really animals?” “I don’t know.”

“As long as you don’t know, couldn’t you have kept it to yourself?”

Farrari grinned, and Graan grinned back at him and slapped him on the back. “I’ve been wondering,” Graan said. “Several of us have been wondering. Couldn’t this whole gambit be something you thought up to make the IPR brass do something about the olz?”

“You don’t fool a super-specialist with a gambit,” Farrari said.

They climbed aboard a small platform and a moment later they were riding the cool night air in a rapid descent to the foot of the mountain. The platform landed; Farrari got out, softly called his thanks, and watched Graan take off.

For a moment he stood looking at the valley below, where an ol night-fire flickered. Then Farrari turned, the mountain opened before him and closed after him, and he went directly to the observation room. Liano greeted him with a smile.

“You escaped!”

He kissed her. “Base defies description. I shouldn’t have gone back, but the sector supervisor…”

“… Is fully aware of what an important man my husband is,” Liano said, laughing.

“Anything new?”

She shook her head. “They look. And keep looking. But that’s all.” Taking her hand, he sat down beside her. The screen above them showed the olz gathered around their nightfire. Farrari thought it ironic that the Bureau could do nothing for the olz as long as it thought them human—DEMOCRACY IMPOSED FROM WITHOUT, and all that—but when Farrari suggested that they might be animals, IPR set in motion the infestation of superspecialists from its highest headquarters and immediately approved an elaborate system of laboratories for observation and experiment. Whole villages were transported to the quiet, isolated valleys where IPR had trained its ol agents, and luxurious observation stations were constructed. There were even IPR agents disguised as durrlz and assistants, and the stiles were erected over the zrilm hedges each morning and taken down each night. IPR scientists were working with a village of olz, making physical, physiological, psychological and mental studies that should have been done long ago.

The olz were now believed to be loyal animals who loved their masters and preferred a sadistic beating to neglect, but they were nontheless protohuman, the almost-men whose evolution had been disrupted or—when they found this lovely, fertile land millennia before the rascz arrived—benignly arrested. To the scientists, that condition made them the most mysterious, the most critically, colossally important, the rarest life form in the galaxy, one standing midway between animal and intelligent being, whose existence had been postulated and theorized everywhere intelligent life existed but never before discovered. The olz were unique, and as a source where man could learn about himself they were beyond price.

Branoff IV would become the most important laboratory world in the galaxy, and the plague of visiting scientists would swell to a massive pollution. There would be studies and observations and experiments without number, all of them faithfully reported in an unending flow of treatises and theses and scientific papers that Farrari and Liano were determined to ignore.

They were concerned with the olz, as they had known them, and their own experiment was and would remain unreported except to a few friends who shared their interest in it. Farrari had plastered clay on a slab of rock near the nightfire, and on it he had drawn a stick-figure ol. And the olz were looking at it. While the Bureau wrestled with its moral dilemma and attempted to adjust itself to a situation the authors of its capitalized mottos had never contemplated, while the scientist awesomely probed man’s origins, Farrari and Liano would be exposing the olz to culture.

One day one of two things would happen: an ol would pick up a stick and try to draw a figure of his own; or an ol would suddenly comprehend that the drawing was of himself, and he would do what it told him to do: the dawn of creative thought from the spirit of art.

Soon, Farrari hoped.

He and Liano would be waiting.