The World Menders

VII

Large, circular, dried leaves of a choking pungency were stirred slowly into boiling water. They gave off a gummy pale green scum that rose to the top in unseemly globules. When a measure of the scum had been skimmed off, combined with half a measure of melted animal fat, and beaten in a grain crock until the entire crock was filled with an iridescent, bubbly froth, the Rasczian baker had an ingredient better than the finest levening agent for bread and cake.

Unfortunately, his flour was deplorable—coarse, uneven, ineptly ground from a miserable food grain. Despite this, the magic of the froth produced an amazingly light bread.

“And if we had a decent flour,” Gayne said, “we could make the finest bread in the galaxy. If this world ever qualifies for Federation membership, guess what’ll be the first export?”

“IPR agents,” Farrari muttered.

He’d been assigned the job of beating the scum into a froth. He wielded the wood paddle furiously but ineptly; long before the froth neared the top another crock would be ready for his attention with the apprentice who measured out the ingredients standing by.

The massive fire chambers were deep, rectangular openings, each with its own chimney. The ovens, which looked like elongated flour crocks lying on their sides, were set in the openings on stone supports. The fires of oily quarm wood bathed the cylindrical ovens with heat, and into them were placed the enormous loaves for baking. The dough was arranged on long strips of perforated metal that slid into grooves in the ovens. When the baked loaves were removed they were three meters long and more than a fourth of a meter in diameter.

From the oven the loaves were taken to a long cutting table where each was carefully aligned with marks indicating a Rasczian unit of measurement, sliced into sections for marketing, and packed into woven baskets. The end pieces were tossed into a bin near the door, and at intervals during the night wagons arrived from various military garrisons situated near Scory and the accumulated loaf ends were weighed out and paid for. Gayne’s bread slicing attained the level of an art: with one graceful stroke he drew the long, heavy knife through the loaf, exerting downward pressure and a slicing motion simultaneously. The apprentices, when they took over the job temporarily, produced clean and accurate cuts, but they had to use a sawing motion to do it.

Farrari contemplated a career as an IPR baker’s apprentice with horror. These people had time for little more than fulfilling their native roles. They’d joined the exotic IPR Bureau, invested years of their lives in the most exacting training the Bureau could devise, achieved agent status, and their reward was unending drudgery.

He wondered aloud why IPR hadn’t devised labor-saving machinery for them as it had for the mill: a mixer, for example, to beat the scum into a froth; a bread slicer; a power oven that wouldn’t require constant stoking with quarm wood.

Gayne shook his head. “We’ve tried it. A beater produces a beautiful froth in an instant—and the bread won’t rise. A mechanical slicer is too perfect—no two slices made by hand are identical, they look different, so we decided not to take the risk. Quarm wood is a royal monopoly, and if we suddenly stopped using it, or began to use less, some high official of the kru would become curious. And a power oven would take just as long to bake the bread. If it didn’t, the bread would be different. No, there isn’t any other way. Besides, there’s a long-standing custom that wagoners calling for bread have to come into the bakery after it and load it themselves. We can’t change the custom, and what they see while they’re in here has got to look like a Rasczian bakery.”

Farrari flexed an aching arm, set his teeth, and attacked another crock of scum.

Finally Inez Prolynn came for him, led him to a storage room at the remote corner of the house, through two concealed doors, and into an underground communications room. On the screen were two faces: an imperturbable Coordinator Paul and a scowling Peter Jorrul.

“Here’s your interview,” Inez said. “If you’d like it to be private—” She turned away.

“Stay if you like,” Farrari said. “I don’t deal in secrets, I just keep the authorities busy turning down my suggestions.”

Jorrul’s scowl deepened: the coordinator grinned and said, Well, Farrari, what do you have for me to turn down now?”

Farrari seated himself in front of the screen. “This morning—or maybe it was yesterday morning—I had an idea about that relief carving on the Life Temple.”

“Peter told me about it,” the coordinator said. “A very interesting idea it was. Unfortunately—”

“Now I have another idea. What would happen if we substituted a carving of some olz for the new kru’s portrait?”

“It wouldn’t work,” Jorrul said. “No one would know which ol the Holy Ancestors were choosing. Even the rascz who work with them can’t tell one ol from another. We can’t, either, except for a few of our agents who live with them.”

Farrari said patiently, “Not one ol. A group of them. Olz in the abstract. A reminder to the rascz, a permanent reminder, that the olz are still with them. I understand that the general population is only vaguely aware of that—that very few of the rascz have ever seen an ol. It’s time that the Holy Ancestors brought the olz to their attention.”

Jorrul was staring at him; the coordinator stroked his chin thoughtfully.

“It’s another interesting idea,” Jorrul said. “Unfortunately—”

“You suggested that we enlarge a three-dimensional fix and cast it in plastic metal,” the coordinator said. “Graan thinks it could be done, but he has no idea of how long it would take, or how many castings he might have to make before he gets a satisfactory one. I’ll tell him to select a teloid of some olz and have a try at it.”

“Tell him to use a teloid from a remote village,” Farrari said, “and to touch it up so there’ll be no possibility of identification. Maybe the rascz can’t tell one ol from another, but once an ol gets his portrait on the Life Temple his features will become memorable.”

“If we were to do this now, we’d spoil the impact the switch might have at a later date when it might be really useful,” Jorrul objected.

“We’ll consider that,” the coor dinator said. “At the moment we have Farrari’s idea and a couple of critically important if’s: if an acceptable casting can be made, and—since time is running out on us—if it can be made in time, then we have the option of whether or not to use it. Frankly, I have some doubt about the value this notion will have later on. Imaginative as Farrari undoubtedly is, he’s certainly not unique, and we have to remember that there are now several hundred Cultural Survey officers and trainees at work at IPR bases. Sooner or later one of them will come up with an idea similar to this, there’ll be a full review of the situation, and when a review takes place a new rule is never far behind. There wouldn’t be any point in saving Farrari’s idea for a more favorable occasion if by that time we’ll be forbidden to use it.”

“How can you use it without having it reviewed first?” Farrari asked.

“We can’t, except when time is a critical factor—as very fortunately it is. The procedure is always the same: I have to file a statement of intent with the sector supervisor, and if he doesn’t reject it out of hand it moves up the chain of command until someone disapproves. In the meantime, since the opportunity would be lost if we didn’t act at once, I can use my own judgment until I receive specific orders. With luck we could have your phony carving on display before we were told that we mustn’t do it.”

Jorrul said sourly, “The only reason there isn’t a regulation about technography is because no one has thought of using it.”

“I wouldn’t consider it now if it were merely a question of substituting another aristrocrat’s portrait,” the coordinator said. “At best that could only forment dissension among the aristocracy and the winner might be sufficiently angry, or frightened, to destroy the little progress that’s been made. But a portrait of the olz—” He paused. “Now that has potentialities. I don’t know what they are, but I’ll put all the teams to work looking for them, and I’ll get Graan started on that casting. Then we’ll see. Anything else, Farrari?”

“No, sir.”

“Peter?”

Jorrul looked at Farrari for a moment, started to speak, and then shrugged and shook his head.

“All right, Farrari. I’ll let you know how we make nut.”

The screen went blank. Farrari thanked Inez and returned to his crock of scum.

“Does this go on all night?” he asked Gayne.

“It’ll seem that way,” Gayne said grimly.

“Isn’t there another job that I can do?”

“No.”

Farrari renewed his assault on the scum and at the same time began to examine critically the tasks the others were performing. Measuring out the ingredients? The apprentice had no recipe to follow, he had to know. Mixing the dough? It had to be stirred vigorously until it was ready—whatever that meant. Shaping it into loaves? All the baked loaves had to have approximately the same diameter. A thick loaf was wasteful; a thin one was cheating and would bring the kru’s justice down on them. Stoking the fires? The heat had to be precise and even; Farrari would probably burn the place down. He did not even consider slicing the bread.

The only job that required neither skill nor knowledge was beating the scum.

Inez called Gayne to the communications room; Jorrul wished to speak with him. She took his place while he was gone and cut the bread just as expertly. He returned looking glum and spoke into an apprehensive silence.

“They want us to bake a ceremonial cake for the kru.”

The apprentices groaned; Inez looked sympathetic. “And—present it?” she asked.

Gayne nodded. “Take it to the palace in the morning. As if getting the bread out shorthanded wasn’t enough.”

“You could take Farrari,” Inez suggested.

“So I could. All right—I’ll take Farrari.”

“Take me where?” Farrari demanded.

“To the palace. To present a cake to the kru. When you’ve finished with that stuff Inez will give you a haircut. She’s on watch, she’s got nothing better to do anyway. Then she’ll give you a lesson in how an apprentice behaves while his master presents a cake to the kru. If you can learn to walk and to bow in one lesson—especially to bow—I’ll take you with me.”

Farrari said bewilderedly, “A ceremonial cake—”

“It’s something every good rasc does from time to time,” Gayne said. “It’s a kind of voluntary, token tribute. When the kru is in Scorv he has a daily audience at which he permits his subjects to honor him with gifts.”

“The kru is dead!”

Gayne grinned. “That’s why they’re sending me. It should be a very interesting audience.”

Farrari walked dutifully at Gayne’s heels and performed the short, gliding steps he’d practiced for an hour the night before. Cradled in his arms he carried the kru’s ceremonial cake, a pastry baked to a secret recipe that some time in the remote past had pleased a kru and that owners of Borgley’s bakery had guarded and reserved for kruz forever after. It looked nothing at all like the other cakes the bakery had turned out early that morning. It looked, in fact, like a segment of bread, round, of the standard diameter, and trimmed to the Rasczian unit of measurement.

But it was a highly special cake. Using a small hand mill Inez had reground the flour over and over and the resultant pastry was usually fine-grained. It was also cloyingly sweet. It was wrapped in a white cloth on which Inez had drawn meticulously several black crests of the kru, and Farrari was ordered to carry it just so, and to walk thusly, and to bow properly and remain bowed while Gayne presented the cake.

As he followed Gayne he should have been mentally rehearsing the presentation scene, but instead he thought about architecture.

He postulated an old, old city, built by master builders who laid down the massive paving stones and erected the tallest buildings, ponderous structures fashioned of enormous blocks of stone, each surrounded by its own spacious, poetically landscaped grounds. They built both high and low: the Tower-of-a-Thousand-Eyes but not the Life Temple that surrounded it—and the bubbling conduits through which the city’s wastes were washed to the river. At intervals along the main thoroughfares stood water houses, each with a lumbering narmpf turning the wheel that pulled the scoops of water from a deep well shaft. These emptied into a stone trough, from which women filled their crocks. The overflow poured into the underground conduit system. It was a clean city, and those master builders had built for the ages.

Under the pressure of a growing population, the later builders added another type of structure. Smaller builders of a gracefully decadent style crowded all of the old city’s vacant land. The spacious gardens vanished, the wide avenues were reduced to cramped streets laced by narrow alleys. The original, massive structures stood like the lonely surviving giants of a decimated primeval forest, crowded by inferior second-growth trees.

A troop of cavalry passed them, the second since they started the climb to the hilltop. The soldiers rode in their parade formation staring haughtily straight ahead, each with one bare, muscular arm poised with a spear from the bundle on his saddle. They swept past, the spirited grilz prancing and braying and tossing their horns.

Gayne slowed his pace. “Things are building up,” he muttered. “That’s ten troops in less than two days. Perhaps this isn’t a good time to visit the inner city. On the other hand, if we don’t go now, we won’t know how they handle gifts to a dead kru until the next one dies. And it was an order.”

Farrari paid no attention to him. Ahead of them stretched the one majestic old thoroughfare that had survived. The huge paving slabs were badly worn, but the street ran straight to the center of the city, where the Tower-of-a-Thousand-Eyes loomed starkly above the huddled mass of the Life Temple.

Gayne muttered, “Come on. Stop gawking like a tourist.”

Which was unfair. Farrari was a new baker’s apprentice from Baft, the town that stood at the edge of the lilorr where the river plunged into its canyon, and any young man newly arrived in Scory would be expected to gawk. He had been told that.

They moved on, and for a time Farrari obediently kept his eyes at street level.

A wagon loaded with the cloth-covered bread baskets that now were sickeningly familiar to Farrari passed them on its way to one of Borgley’s retail connections. Bakers were the only craftsmen who distributed their products wholesale, this because the bakeries were concentrated in the suburb at the foot of the hill—which meant that the tons of quarm wood, flour and other ingredients that they consumed did not have to he hauled up to the city. The bread did, but bread was light.

Apprentices saluted Gayne with averted eyes. Other journeymen greeted him politely, and he conducted himself humbly when he met a master craftsman, whatever his trade. None of them paid any attention to Farrari, though he noticed that apprentices greeted each other with animation when not inhibited by^-the presence of a journeyman or master. Women, shopping for the day’s viands, stepped aside for them, as did the daughters, or servants, who followed them with crocks and baskets.

At an intersection Gayne slowed his pace again. “I haven’t seen a nobleman this morning,” he muttered. “The servants aren’t out, either, which is stranger. But we can’t stop now—too many people have seen us.”

They overtook a string of narmpfz being led to a butcher’s establishment; the gate to the courtyard stood open and the lead narmpf was being coaxed past it with a handful of leaves. These were range animals, unaccustomed either to people or to cities, and the-powerful bodies were tensed, the small heads wagging in terror as though they sensed their fate.

Farrari assimilated a bewildering melange of impressions: a master and his wife in deep meditation over a silver ornament that a smith displayed in a cushioned box; an apprentice standing in a sidestreet wistfully gazing at an upstairs window where a girl’s head jerked from sight as Gayne and Farrari approached; a potter gleefully giving his infant son, or grandson, a lesson at the wheel. Farrari’s thought of the previous evening returned to him, and he whispered, “They aren’t monsters!”

They were approaching the square of the Life Temple and the Tower-of-a-Thousand-Eyes. The temple’s creamy marble glowed dazzlingly under the high late-morning sun, and even the foreboding black of the tower glistened resplendently all the way to its blunt dome where the once-burnished metal had long-since weathered and corroded. Farrari stared at the distant tapestry, trying to make out scenes, until Gayne’s scowl told him that he was gawking again.

Where the street debouched into the enormous square the way was barred; a line of the kru’s soldiers stood slouched at attention while behind them a troop of cavalry tried to hold its grilz in formation. They had to detour widely in order to reach the kru’s palace, and they made their turning, reached a narrow cross street, and turned again. Then the trumpets sounded.

No clarion calls these, but deep, nasal, sputtering honks. Gayne came to an abrupt halt and looked about wildly, muttering involved Rasczian profanities. People poured—erupted—exploded from the buildings. Farrari blankly looked at Gayne, looked about him, looked at Gayne again, and the street was filled. The rascz dropped what they were doing, whatever they were doing, and rushed to the street. Here a mother carried a half-dressed child hastily wrapped in a blanket, there a servant absently held a long stirring paddle on which liquid glistened. A cobbler carried a shoe, a metal smith an unfinished goblet, a tailor a long, threaded needle.

It was a silent crowd. Farrari had no difficulty in hearing Gayne’s whisper. “We’re in for it. Whatever happens, stay close to me.”

The trumpets continued to sound, and from remote parts of the city came sputtering replies. With the surging crowd Farrari and Gayne moved back to the street they had just left and into the temple square. The guard had retired; as far as Farrari could see in my direction the streets were filled with silent, purposeful citizens, all moving toward the Life Temple. Farrari shifted the cake to a vertical position, where he could better protect it from the crush of the crowd, and concentrated on following Gayne.

Then he noticed the temple.

Before the entrance was a broad, elevated terrace, and on the terrace were the massed ranks of Rasczian nobility, their garments a dazzling white with vivid splashes of color. The old kru’s tapestry still hung over the facade. The odd, protruding stone facings of the tower that had long puzzled him he suddenly identified as balconies, and on one of them, high above the tapestry, stood the imposing figure of a priest flanked by trumpeters.

Engrossed by the glittering pag eantry into which he had been plummeted, Farrari kept his eyes on the temple and drifted with the crowd. He stared only for a moment, he thought, and when he wrenched his gaze away Gayne had disappeared. He stood on tiptoe, searching for a glimpse of Gayne’s journeyman’s hat, but journeyman’s hats were everywhere. He tried to force his way back toward the entrance to the square and abandoned the idea after one frantic attempt.

He was alone among the massed, silent population of the city of Scorv, and to his surprise he felt no alarm. The crush of the multitude was its own guarantee of safety. The soldiers massed at the sides of the square were as comfortably remote as the priest on the balcony, and on this day no one had eyes for an humble apprentice.

He continued to drift with the crowd. Small eddies set up in it, as though the citizens were jockeying for position and at the same time pressing to get as close to the temple as possible before they collided with those entering the square from the opposite side. Farrari suddenly became aware that his neighbors were exerting themselves to make room for him. The cake, with the kru’s flamboyant crests, had caught their attention. His impulse was to drop it the moment something happened to catch the crowd’s attention, but he did not dare.

The trumpeters on the balcony lowered their instruments; those in the distance played on, sounding like faint, long drawn out multiple echoes, but finally one by one they went silent. The hushed suspense, the mutely swelling expectation, became so tense that Farrari feared to breathe. Then the priest on the balcony leaned forward, arms upraised, and began to speak. His first words were a subdued murmur; suddenly he screamed a rhythmic chant, let his voice sink to a murmur, screamed again. Farrari strained to recognize an occasional word and understood none.

The harangue ceased; the tapestry was lowered and folded reverently. An unadorned white cloth was drawn over the blank facade. At this point, according to Prochnow, the ceremony should have, been adjourned to give the Holy Ancestors time to deliberate, but the priest, in a dramatic change of delivery, raised a bellowing supplication. During his frequent pauses the crowd occasionally muttered a half-remembered response but more often it seemed to miss its cues, and the priest’s bellowing took on overtones of anger.

The cloth was lowered and raised again; the facade was still blank. The priest resumed his bellowing. Five times this happened, and after the fifth time the cloth bulged and rippled as priests struggled behind it with the heavy carving.

The sun had become insufferably hot. Farrari’s body was soaked with perspiration under his leather jacket, perspiration ran down his face from the tight-fitting cap, and there were widening damp patches where his hands clutched the kru’s cake. He began to feel faint, and he marveled that the rascz seemed so unaffected by the heat.

The priest’s final supplication terminated in a reverberating shriek. The cloth was lowered, the Holy Ancestors had spoken, the portrait of the new kru stood unveiled to his worshipful subjects. The crowd’s response was the up-welling of a thunderous murmur—more an expression of relief that the long ordeal had at last ended, Farrari thought, than of homage to the new ruler. The nobility and the priests surged toward the temple, and in the crowd people turned away and there were faint stirrings indicating that somewhere far to the rear the movement of dispersal had begun.

Farrari had lost interest. The sudden realization that his splendid idea had not only come too late but wouldn’t have worked anyway had completely deflated him. There was no way to install the fraudulent relief so that it would be unveiled at the proper time. “So much for Cultural Survey ingenuity,” he thought bitterly.

He followed the still-silent crow and began to look for Gayne.

IPR agent would be aware that Farrari’s safety would diminish rapidly as the crowd thinned, and he would probably wait for him at the entrance to the square. If not, Farrari would wait there for him. As an apprentice accompanying a journeyman he had been ignored, but if he were to retrace their route alone he might attract a disastrous amount of attention to himself.

Just ahead of him the crowd’s movement halted and faces turned. A short distance to his left Farrari saw a priest mounted on a glistening black gril. He was forcing his way through the crowd, and he was looking directly at Farrari.

Farrari averted his eyes and sternly told himself not to panic. Novice he might be, but not even a novice could make himself so conspicuous that a priest would pick him out of a crowd with one glance.

But the priest had. He turned his gril toward Farrari, blocked his way, and leaned over to shout at him. Farrari did not understand the words, but there was no mistaking the tone of voice. It was a command.

He did not see the priests following on foot until they surrounded him. They led him toward the temple with the mounted priest riding ahead a them. He had no notion as to what could have gone wrong. He only knew that he was on his way to an inquisition in a language that he understood only slightly and did not dare try to speak.

He felt very much alone.