The World Menders

VI

Farrari stood behind a high parapet on the mill’s flat roof and for the first time in daylight looked directly at the land of Scorvif. Score was a smudge on the horizon, the Tower-of-a-Thousand-Eyes a dark line perpendicular to it. He activated the viewer and brought the city leaping toward him. The smudge resolved itself into a vast clutter of buildings that crowded an enormous, truncated hill and on one side spread thinly about its base. The tower, with its carved myriads of all-seeing eyes perpetually on guard, fascinated him. Through a chance gap in the city’s mass of buildings he could even make out a corner of the old kru’s tapestry.

He recognized many of the buildings, but he had known them only as solitary structures lifted from their surroundings by the magic of the teloid cube. As a group they looked strange to him, and he puzzled for a time over the spectacle of two sharply contrasting, almost conflicting, architectural styles encroaching upon each other.

He rotated the viewer slowly. The mill was also situated on high ground near the river, and he wondered if at one time the city as well as the ponderous old stone mill had been forts. Between mill and city, and beyond, the country was a vast sweep of wasteland, scarred and eroded, with here and there a few scraggly zrilm bushes standing in line like ancient, enfeebled sentinels. To the north, the horizon was lushly yellow and scarlet, and the viewer resolved it into irregularly-shaped fields marked off by the dark, velvety blue of towering zrilm hedges. The wasteland had once been like that, but the corrosive touch of the blundering rascz had exhausted it, and then the elements had devastated it, and now even the hearty zrilm could not survive there.

He took another, sweeping look at the devastated wasteland. Much of the country’s most fertile land had been ruined before the rascz grasped the simplest principles of soil management, and they still had no concept of the rudiments of plant genetics.

The distant, fertile land beyond seemed cool and restful. He rotated the viewer quickly and then with an exclamation brought it to an abrupt stop and back-tracked. At the end of a zrilm-lined lane stood a village. Low huts of woven branches plastered with clay stood in a narrow oval, their rough green surfaces glazed by the sun and here and there reflecting light from jewel-like facets. At the center of the oval was the fire pit, and, nearby, a small pile of quarm logs.

A deserted ol village, tragic reminder that the rascz devastated not only land, but people: reminder of the coming two thousand years of starvation and the whistle and thud of the zrilm whip with no potential leader in the land possessing a dram of humanitarian instinct.

Again he had forgotten the olz.

So intent was he on the crude illage that he did not notice Anan liorgley until the baker spoke to him. “Not much culture to study there,” Borgley observed dryly.

“What happened to them?” Farrari demanded.

“What happened to whom?” “The olz.”

Borgley shrugged. “Nothing happened to them. They’re at work in the fields. You can’t see them because of the hedges. Looks like a good crop this year, which is fortunate. It’s the year of the half crop.”

“What about the children and the elders? Do all of them work?”

“All of them,” Borgley said. “A baby old enough to toddle is old enough to pull weeds. The younger ones are carried by their mothers—who, of course, put in the full day’s work. As for the elders—there aren’t any. No ol lives long enough to become an elder.”

Farrari looked again at the huts. What do they do during the winter?”

“They stay in their village,” Borgley said. “And rot. I’m taking you to Scorv. They tell me you did not do well as a mill apprentice’s helper.” He chuckled. “Maybe you’ll like the bakery business better—though I’ll warn you that you’ll work harder.”

Farrari gave the viewer a final spin. “Why do they have a mill out here in the middle of nowhere?”

“It’s a very old building,” Borgley said. “When it was built it probably stood in the center of a fertile grain-growing area, and they thought flour easier to transport than grain. That’s one theory. Another is that the mills make a lot of noise when running to capacity, and some ancient kru banished them from Scory so he could sleep nights. The specialists at base probably have a dozen more theories, and we’ll never be sure as to which is correct, if any, the fact is that most of the mills in the lilorr are about the same distance from Scory as this one, in various directions, and all of them are in the middle of nowhere.”

“If your theory is correct, why didn’t they move the mills when the grainfields wore out?”

“This whole country is wearing out,” Borgley said brusquely. “Sometimes it worries me. Ready to go?”

The country was wearing out. The road was excellent—wide, solidly constructed of broad, flat stones, sloped and ditched for drainage, but it appeared to be centuries old. The passage of countless wagons had rutted the stone, and that puzzled Farrari because the ruts were much narrower than the wide wheels of the wagons. The puzzle resolved itself when they reached the first washout. There the road dipped into a deeply eroded gully. Dirt had been dumped into it and leveled, but it was crisscrossed with soft ruts and the road made a steep plunge on either side. Rather than properly repair the road, the rascz had widened their wagon wheels so that the loads wouldn’t sink so deeply into the soft dirt and transferred the problem to the powerful muscles of the narinpfz. The narmpfz strained and whimpered and tensed their massive bodies and somehow kept the wagons moving.

Twice troops of the kru’s cavalry passed them, headed for Scorv. Short, colorful capes flapping, bundles of spears strapped to their saddles, they pranced along single file on their grill, graceful, high-stepping horned steeds. Traffic in the opposite direction was not heavy, but it was continuous: wagons headed for the mill or perhaps for a remote grainery, a kru’s messenger keeping his gril at a desperate,, lunging run with high-pitched shouts and veering recklessly around the slower traffic, occasional solitary riders lumbering along on narmpfz—wagoneers, Borgley said, who lived in one of the up-country towns and made their living by building wagons and selling them in Scory with a load of quarm wood.

The river looped toward them, and as they reached its floodplain they began to encounter tremendous washouts. When possible the road bypassed them, but though the detours now ran over hard ground, in wet weather the heavy wagons would churn them into morasses.

The country was wearing out.

In the full heat of midafternoon they approached the city of Scorv. The road merged with another coming in from the west, then with one from the south that within sight of the intersection merged with another from the southwest, then with one from the east that led downstream to a ford that only grilz could negotiate; wagons had to journey far north of the mill to find even a low-water crossing.

Farrari muttered, “Why don’t you invent a bridge and get rich?” Borgley did not answer. Technology imposed from without…

The road pointed upward, encircling the hill to reach the city that crowded its broad summit. They turned aside when they reached the cluster of buildings at the foot of the hill, entered a stonewalled enclosure, and came to a stop amid rows of stacked quarm wood and empty flour crocks behind a double-storied, stone building from which emanated the rich, tantalizing odors of baked bread and pastry.

“Home,” Borgley announced, using the Rasczian word.

Two apprentices, both young 1PR agents, hurried out to unload the wagon. Farrari offered to help and did not feel offended when they laughingly waved him aside. Borgley led him into the bakery, a long room with a row of stone ovens at one side and huge vats already bulging with rising dough for the night’s baking, and up one of the ramplike stairways to his living quarters. He introduced his wife Nissa, 228, and a few moments later Farrari sat relaxed in front of an open slit in the wall that constituted a Rasczian window and looked down on the master race of Scorvif while sipping a cool, pungent drink and munching a hard, chewy, excessively sweet cake.

He stared disbelievingly: he had come to think of them as monsters, these rascz, and they were obviously a happy albeit serious people, decent looking, decent behaving, with high regard for family, for work, for an orderly society, humbly worshipful before their kru.

As cooling shadows of late afternoon enveloped the narrow street, the merchants and craftsmen emerged with their families, the women wound in strips of exquisitely-colored cloth—from those same vivid, long-lasting dyes Farrari had admired on the kru’s tapestry—the men bare-armed with embroidered vests and the short, legless garment Peter Jorrul had worn, the children charming miniature replicas of their parents. They greeted friends with a polite hut obviously affectionate formality. Some began the long climb to the city to greet friends there, and a short time later a few city fami lies arrived to greet friends in this foot-of-the-hill suburb.

They were not monsters.

“Where are the olz?” Farrari demanded suddenly.

Nissa Borgley smiled. She was younger than Rani Holt, slender, quietly attractive, and with a subdued personality that puzzled Farrari until he remembered that these agents, in their adopted environment, actually were natives. Rani Holt, wife of a miller, was a hostess: because of its remoteness the mill also served as an inn, with an endless procession of overnight guests to entertain. She played her role to perfection. Nissa Borgley was the wife of a city tradesman: she would walk with her husband, of an afternoon, and greet friends quietly but affectionately, and in her own home she would be the typical Rasczian housewife and speak when spoken to. She, also, played her role to perfection.

“I’ve never seen an ol,” she said. “There aren’t any in Scorv—or in any other city or town. You see the olz belong to the kru.”

Farrari repeated slowly, “The olz belong to the—”

“So does the land. All of the agriculture and forestry and animal husbandry and mining are royal monopolies. So there are no taxes—the kru derives his income from his own properties.”

“No wonder the rascz look like a happy people!”

“Actually, there is one tax,” she went on. “A child tax. There’s an annual tax on each child after the second, and it rises steeply. The realm of Scorvif is circumscribed by mountains, and there is no place for a surplus population. In the remote past some astute kru, or minister, discerned that if the population ever increased beyond the capacity of the land to support it, the rascz would be in deep trouble. Hence the tax. It’s possible to have more than two children without penalty if someone who has less than two will, in effect, sponsor them. It’s an oblique form of adoption. Anan and I have two sons. They are legally ours, but they live with their natural parents who are, of course, our grateful friends. It’s very useful for IPR agents to have natives who are grateful friends. The tax keeps the population stable. Otherwise, the kru’s revenues come from the royal monopolies, and he is immensely wealthy.”

“No private citizen owns an ol?”

She shook her head. “Nor any nobleman. Like agriculture and forestry and the rest, the olz are a royal monopoly. Except for those citizens who work in the kru’s service, and those few whose work requires them to travel, I doubt if very many of the rascz see even one ol in an entire lifetime. I’ve lived here for ten years—ten Branoff IV years—and I’ve never seen an ol except in teloids.”

“I didn’t know anything about that,” Farrari said. “I’ve been studying the wrong things. All this time I’ve been thinking that everyone forgets the olz, and the fact is that no one knows that they exist.” Borgley came in. His wife looked at his face and suddenly burst into laughter. “You have to go back,” she said.

Borgley nodded. “You, too. And Haral. Peter is calling in everyone who can get away. The coordinator is coming out with a couple of loads of specialists.” He gestured wearily and said to Farrari, “They’ll spend a day and a night telling us everything they want to find out about the old kru’s funeral and the coronation of the new kru. And then we’ll come back and carry on just as we have been, which is the only thing we can do. I’m a baker. I can’t play spy until the next day’s bread and cake is out of the oven and ready to sell. Every day. Otherwise I’m not acting like a baker, and the moment I stop acting like a baker I’d better get out of Scorv—fast.” He hurried away.

Nissa Borgley got to her feet to follow him. “We’ll leave as soon as it’s dark,” she said. “Gayne will be in charge until we get back. If you want anything, ask him, or Inez.”

She left, and Farrari turned his attention to the window.

The rascz. They were a happy, prosperous people, and few of them were aware that their happiness and prosperity were fashioned of ol blood. He wondered if it would have made any difference if they knew.

The dusk deepened: masters and craftsmen walked their families hack to their homes, where apprentices and helpers were already hanging shutters and lugging out crocks of water to wash the street as soon as the daily walks ended. Quarin oil maps with floating wicks began to flicker feebly in the upper stories, brooms scraped the wet street and sent the water chasing along the gutters, and heavy slab doors slammed.

Inez Prolynn, 314, brought a food tray and lit a lamp for him. She was a younger model of Nissa Borgley, gracious but subdued, a journeyman baker’s wife who would someday be a highly proper baker’s wife. Farrari had not eaten since morning, but his appetite was not sharpened by the pungent odor of spiced meat. He munched absently on a thin slice of hard bread and watched the street below slide quietly into darkness.

Finally one of the apprentices came to close the shutters. Farrari asked, “Did you ever see an ol?”

“Nope. I’ve wondered why they don’t use them for servants and laborers in the temples and palaces. Maybe the olz can’t do anything but tend crops and cut trees and things he that, but you’d think they could learn. No, I never saw one.”

“How would I go about talking with the coordinator?” Farrari asked.

The apprentice stared at him. “You ask permission of your immediate superior, and he passes the request to his superior if he has one, otherwise directly to Peter Jorrul, and Peter asks the coordinator if he’d like to talk with you. Unless someone along the way decides you’re being silly, which is likely.”

“I haven’t time for that bureaucratic nonsense,” Farrari said. “I want to talk with the coordinator tonight. How do I go about it?”

“You’re CS,” the apprentice said thoughtfully. “Maybe the regulations don’t apply. I’ll ask Gayne.” He returned a short time later and said, “I guess the regulations don’t apply. Gayne talked with Enis Holt. You met him?” Farrari nodded. “Enis says if you want to talk with the coordinator we’d best let you talk with the coordinator, only he thinks Peter Jorrul will want to listen in. The coordinator is on his way to field team headquarters. Enis will call back when he gets there.”

“Thank you,” Farrari said. “Do you have anything for me to do?”

“Do?”

“To help out. Just because I’m CS doesn’t mean I’m used to sitting around with nothing to do.”

“There’s plenty to do,” the apprentice said fervently. “Anan and Nissa and Haral will be gone until tomorrow night, at least, and we have to make like a bakery. Come and ask Gayne.”