The World Menders

VIII

The broad sides of the Life Temple served as national annals and art gallery. The oldest reliefs, dating back more than a thousand years, were at ground level, and successive carvings followed row on row until the contemporary scenes were placed four-fifths of the way to the roof. Farrari knew every carving and had longed for an opportunity to see them in person. Now he passed them by with a fleeting glance and scarcely a thought. They entered the temple at the rear, with the mounted priest clomping up the ramp after them. Inside the vast portal he turned his gril over to an attendant and accompanied them on foot, and Farrari wryly meditated the fact that commoners were forbidden entrance to the Life Temple but a priest’s gril was not.

Commoners were forbidden… He asked himself, “Then what am I doing here?”

They had swept almost to the end of the long corridor when he thought to blame the cake for his plight. The priest had sighted the wrapping and crests, which explained how he was able to pick Farrari out of the crowd but not why he had wanted him. Commoners invariably presented their gifts at the kru’s palace.

Several boys were gathered before the massive doors at the end of the corridor, avidly peeking into the room beyond. They were apprentice priests of various specialities; their robes differed, but all had the broad black stripe of the priesthood at the bottom. They leaped aside, two adult priests hauled on the doors, and Farrari and his escort passed through into an enormous hall.

The black base of the Tower-of-a-Thousand-Eyes protruded at one end of the room. Around it was a high marble dais upon which the kru was seated on an ornate triple throne with a high priest at a lower level on either side of him. In a niche above the throne, standing upright in an elaborately engraved, gold coffin, was the body of the old kru, already elevated above his successor on the first stage of his journey to his crypt somewhere in the upper reaches of the tower.

The massed nobility and much of the priesthood of Scorvif filled the hall. The coronation ceremonies were already completed; the kru wore the hand-painted robe and the short golden cape of divine office. He was middle-aged and flabby, with eyes deeply sunken above sagging jowls, and he did not seem an auspicious ruler for a worn-out civilization. Farrari studied him as long as he dared before he respectfully lowered his eyes.

He had already sensed that all other eyes in that vast assemblage were on him, or soon would be. They marched forward, and before the dais his escort turned aside. He stood alone at the foot of the ramp stairs that led up to the high throne and wished that he knew something of Rasczian psychology. A young apprentice newly arrived from the south would certainly hesitate, so Farrari hesitated, turned uncertainly, and did not move until one of his escorts hurried back to whisper an unintelligible instruction. Then, eyes averted and carrying the kru’s cake, he mounted the ramp.

There could be only one possible explanation: they wanted him to present the cake, and thanks to IPR thoroughness, he knew exactly how to do it. Gayne and Inez had rehearsed the presentation scene carefully so that Farrari would not misbehave while Gayne was presenting the cake. Now all he had to do was take the role Gayne had portrayed.

Eyes still averted, gift extended in front of him, he reached the dais, gauged his distance cautiously, edged forward two more steps, and then sank slowly to his knees. His muscles, still sore from Gayne’s prolonged rehearsal, protested achingly, but with set teeth he maintained his slow descent, and when his knees touched he leaned forward, straining to keep his balance, and continued the slow, settling movement until at the precise moment that his forehead touched the marble dais he laid the gift at the kru’s feet. From behind him a murmur arose—of appreciation, Farrari hoped, and he felt that he’d earned it. Reversing the movement was much harder, but he managed it smoothly, gained his feet, and slowly backed down the ramp—one did not turn his back on the kru.

“And now,” he thought, “let’s get out of here—fast!”

His escort stepped to his side but made no motion to leave. On the dais an attendant was removing the soggy wrapping from the kru’s cake. Farrari risked an oblique glance as the cloth fell away: the kru leaned forward, staring both high priests leaped to their feet; from the audience came gasps and muted exclamations, followed by an upwelling of talk.

A high priest’s outstretched hand imposed silence. He spoke with the kru, spoke with the other high priest, raised his arm in signal. From somewhere in the rear came the sounds of a flurry of movement that swept past Farrari and rushed up the ramp. A fluttering group of attendants, handed objects to the two high priests: a table with a polished wood top—Farrari, risking another oblique glance, thought it entirely too much like a chopping block—two superbly polished, mottled stones, large and obviously very heavy, and an ancient sword. The high priests placed the table near the throne, set the two stones upon it, and stood the gift cake upright between the stones.

Then, with one of them carrying the sword, they descended the ramp to Farrari. His panic was under control when they reached him. The doors were too far away and guarded, there was no way out, and he could only obey and keep himself alert for any opportunity.

They led him to the top of the ramp, and he imitated them when they sank into the ceremonial bow. The one with the sword laid it at the kru’s feet. Then they rose, the priests gently coaching Farrari with gestures, and the kru handed the sword to Farrari, blade foremost.

He was much too astonished to accept it, but a priest spoke softly to him, and he took the sword and transferred the handle to his hand. It was a massive thing, with broad blade and a very simple handle, and Farrari, because of his work with Semar Kantz, fancied that he knew rather more of its lineage than did the priests.

He gripped the sword and waited. It crossed his mind that a simple lunge would change this planet’s history, but only momentarily—there would be another kru as soon as a new relief could be carved, another titular owner of the olz, and things would proceed as before.

What did they expect him to do with the sword—slice the cake? Sword, table and stones were obviously very old, and the tabletop was immaculate. Nothing had ever been sliced there. The priest spoke again, and Farrari desperately focused on two vaguely familiar words. One meant hit or strike—or stab? If he stabbed the cake, he might knock it off the table, and he doubted that they’d be telling him to make a stabbing motion in the direction of the kru. Strike, then. He’d thought the other was the word for bread, but perhaps it also meant cake. Strike the cake?

He tested the sword’s edge with his left thumb and mentally indulged in several non-Rasczian curses. It was a ceremonial sword; probably it hadn’t been sharpened since it was cast and it had been dull to start with. Not even an expert like Gayne could have made a respectable cut with such a blade. No wonder the tabletop was unmarked!

They were asking him to split the cake lengthwise, or try. He hoped that was what they were asking, because he couldn’t delay longer and that was what he was going to do. The priest spoke again and gently pushed him toward the table. All eyes in the vast hall were on the cake. The kru was staring at it fixedly, the priests were staring at it…

Farrari stared at it. Strike… cake. And with a dull sword. He raised the sword with both hands and brought it down on the cake with all of his strength.

The sword hit the tabletop with a loud clunk. Farrari stared aghast at it—it had passed through the cake almost without resistance and left a deep mark in the polished wood. He stepped back, leaving the sword on the table. “When they see that, they’ll want to try it on my neck,” he told himself.

For the long eternity of a moment, everyone continued to stare at the cake. Then one of the priests removed the sword and pushed a stone aside, and the other priest caught the two halves of the cake as they fell. From behind Farrari came an eruption of excited babbling voices. As he waited tensely with eyes lowered, a movement caught his attention. The kru had leaped to his feet and was gawking at the bisected cake.

The priests made no move to quiet the uproar. They conferred with each other, one of them spoke with the kru, and then they led Farrari down the ramp. With a word of command they turned Farrari over to priests of less exalted rank, who led him through a pressing throng of nobility that gaped rudely at Farrari and attempted to touch him as he passed. The doors swung open for them, and they left the hall, marched briskly along a branch corridor, climbed a ramp, and entered a long, narrow room.

“What d’ya know!” Farrari breathed. “The art school!”

Circular openings in the wall looked down onto the assembly Farrari had just left, and at each of them several artists, all clothed in a form of priestly dress, were sketching—some with chalk on smooth slabs of stone, some on polished wood, some on cloth.

Attendants brought in the table, the stones and the sword, and Farrari found himself posed with the sword upraised while the artists circled him and studied his features. Either he was about to become immortalized on a new tapestry or relief for the temple, or what passed for a constabulary in Scorv wanted his portrait for its files. He could not decide which he would resent most.

Finally a very young priest came for Farrari and led him back to the lower floor. Another young priest greeted him with a smile, opened a door for him, placed folded garments in his hands, and withdrew with another smile and a half-bow.

The door closed. Farrari tossed the garments aside and hurried to the wide window slit. There were a few passersby in the square and several ranks of foot and cavalry soldiers positioned near the temple. The drop to the ground would be an easy one, but he had the uncomfortable feeling that to be seen climbing out of a window of the Life Temple must excite comment if not action—and the soldiers looked disconcertingly ready for action. He turned away reluctantly and examined the room.

It was furnished with a rough table with a bench, and a pallet on a stone slab. An empty niche in the wall probably had contained the old kru’s portrait and would contain that of the new kru when the artists caught up with the demand. On the table was an oil lamp complete with floating wick. The room would be bitter cold in winter—it had an unusually large window slit and no source of heat.

Obviously it was a priest’s living quarters, and whether or not the priesthood believed in their dogma, they were not luxuriating in it. “I suppose it’s the honor of the thing,” Farrari mused.

Then he examined the garments and found to his consternation that at some point during the day’s ceremonies he’d joined the priesthood himself. The robes were different from any he’d seen, but they contained the black borders that appeared on every priest’s costume.

He dropped them onto the pallet and returned to the window slit, and a short time later he had the good fortune to see, from an unfavorable angle, the exit of the kru and the nobility. He also noted that the soldiers accompanied the kru, which interested him much more.

The day waned, dusk came, and finally darkness. Farrari waited tensely, alert for the sound of his door opening, and the moment it seemed dark enough he went out of the window. He moved quickly to the side of the square and then edged along the square’s high stone wall to the exit; but the exit was not guarded. The buildings were already shuttered, and the streets were deserted. He forced himself to walk with measured pace, retracing their route of the morning, and he did not feel secure until he had made his way down the encircling road from the hilltop. He approached the bakery from the rear, opened the door, and entered.

All of them were there: Borgley and his wife, Gayne and his wife, the apprentices, two men Farrari had not met. They were working furiously. Farrari looked at the baskets already filled and realized with a twitch of conscience that they’d started early so they could have the night to do something about rescuing him.

All of them stared, except Borgley. He glanced at Farrari, turned to an apprentice, and snapped, “Get a cloak for him. Take him to the rendezvous point. Fast.”

The apprentice darted away. Borgley said to Farrari, “How’d you get away?”

“Through a window,” Farrari said.

“You weren’t guarded?”

Farrari shook his head.

“Why’d they grab you?”

“Because of the cake. It’s a long story and I don’t understand it myself, but—”

“All right. Tell it at headquarters. The important thing right now is to get you away from Scary.”

The apprentice returned with two cloaks, draped one about Farrari, and donned the other himself. Borgley said, “Get going. I’ll have a platform sent if one is available. Otherwise I’ll send Haral after you with grilz, and you’ll have to take him to the mill.”

They walked a short distance along the crumbling road, struck off across a sandy waste, and abruptly skidded down the side of a shallow depression. After what seemed an interminable wait a plat form settled beside them with Jorrul himself at the controls. Farrari clambered aboard, whispered his thanks to the apprentice’, and they took off. Jorrul said nothing at all until they reached the underground room at the mill. Coordinator Paul was there, and several of the base specialists, but Jorrul gave Farrari no time for amenities.

“Tell us what happened,” he said. “Everything.”

They listened, they questioned him, they sent off urgent messages to base and to various agents, and through it all Peter Jorrul sat silently, a deepening anger twisting his face.

Finally he thumped the table and said bitterly, “A once-in-a-millennium opportunity. Wasted—like that.” He thumped the table again.

Coordinator Paul remarked mildly, “I’d say, rather, that Farrari came through a sticky situation in very good shape. He was lucky, but he helped himself considerably. Many of our own trainees would have been scared witless. Farrari—do CS trainees by chance study dramatics?”

Farrari grinned. “Not by chance. By deliberate, malicious intent! The only way to understand the art of the drama is by acting, or seeing it acted. I took part in at least one performance a week for four years.”

“That must be the explanation; 178—that’s our krolc who got into the temple for the ceremonies—says your performance was magnificent, and he hadn’t the slightest notion you were IPR until the flap about your disappearance shook the Life Temple to its ample foundations. In retrospect he thinks you were a little too good. A bungling baker’s apprentice should have been nervous.”

“I was nervous!” Farrari protested.

“It didn’t show. No one thought about it at the time, including 178, but every priest in Scory is thinking about it now. That, and the fact that you never spoke to anyone.”

“I didn’t dare try,” Farrari said. “Anyway, I didn’t have to. They repeated everything they said to me, and eventually I could make out a word or two and guess the rest. But I still don’t understand that silly ceremony with the cake and why they suddenly decided to make a priest of me.”

“The kru’s priest,” Jorrul said, his bitterness still intense. “Think of the potentialities! And it had to happen to Farrari. Any other agent—”

“No.” The coordinator shook his head firmly. “It wouldn’t have happened to any other agent, and it shouldn’t have happened to him.” He turned to Farrari. “Even in such a marvelously efficient organization as IPR there are occasional goofs. Or had you noticed?” Farrari thought it best not to answer. “Borgley took you to Scorv,” the coordinator went on, “and about the time you arrived there Borgley was called back. He told his assistant to look after you, but, in his rush to put things in order so he could leave, he neglected to tell him why you needed looking after. All Gayne Prolynn knew about you was that you were some kind of super expert on Scorvif: you knew the kru was dead before anyone else did, you knew the relief had been removed from the Life Temple, and when you asked to speak with the coordinator everyone jumped. He naturally assumed that you could handle a simple role like that of the baker’s apprentice with a little coaching, and by taking you with him he was able to leave an experienced person at the bakery. He hadn’t an inkling that you’d had no IPR training and weren’t even fluent in Rasczian.”

“It was still a wasted opportunity,” Jorrul growled.

“One of the critical things you didn’t know,” the coordinator went on, “is that an IPR agent never allows himself to be trapped in a crowd. That’s why you lost Gayne. As soon as he saw what was happening he worked his way sideways and managed to stay near the entrance to the square—where he could be one of the first to leave. By the time he noticed that you weren’t following him, you’d disappeared.” He turned to Jorrul. “There’s no point in speculating what might have happened with someone else. A trained agent would have been on his way home before the priests moved into the crowd. A trained agent would have quietly removed the gift wrapping when the crowd’s attention was on the priest. No, this opportunity could only come to someone who wasn’t prepared to accept it. I think Farrari did well.”

Farrari said dryly, “I’d still like to know what it was that I did.”

“We had fourteen people in the crowd, not counting you,” the coordinator said. “We had one inside the temple, and we shot long-distance teloids from three different locations. When the teloids are processed and all of the reports coordinated there won’t be much that we won’t know about the succession of a kru, but we already know a lot more than we did this morning. One of the things we know is that as soon as the kru and the nobility enter the temple for the coronation ceremonies, delegations of priests are sent into the streets to do two things: to find a commoner to present a gift to the new kru, a very important ceremony that probably dates from some remote time when the commoners had a role in the selection of the kru and affirmed their choice with a gift; and also to bring loaves of fresh bread from the city’s bakers. The first person to appear with a gift was to be taken directly to the temple, the only time, apparently, when a commoner is admitted there. Others were to be taken to the palace to present their gifts in the usual manner at a special audience. And you, Farrari, you dislocated their program. The delegations went forth to cry, ‘Gifts for the kru,’ through all the streets of Scorv, and one of them found a commoner with a gift waiting almost at the temple door. Since he couldn’t possibly have known about the ceremony in advance, it was considered an extremely auspicious sign.”

“Not by me,” Farrari growled.

“But it was. So they rushed you to the kru, and the gift turned out to be—bread!”

“Cake,” Farrari protested.

“Bread,” the coordinator said firmly. “Not even Borgley knows why that cake is baked the same shape and size as bread, but that’s the tradition. One of the kru’s ancestors was fond of it, the bakery reserved the recipe for him, and it became known as the kru’s cake—but probably no kru since then has ever tasted it. Because of its appearance it would be mistaken for bread, and few food gifts to the kru are actually eaten. The kru couldn’t eat all of them, and it’d be sacrilege if anyone else did. Anyway, the cake looked like bread, the priests and everyone else were thinking of the bread the delegations were to bring, and they immediately concluded that the cake was bread. And because it was an especially fine-grained cake, it virtually fell apart when you hit it with the sword.”

“At which moment they should have known it wasn’t bread,” Farrari observed.

“What does it matter what it was after the ceremony? If the Holy Ancestors by some miracle changed the bread to something else to bring about the prophecy they desired, that was no more than to be expected on a day of miracles. First, a citizen was waiting with a gift. Second, the gift was bread. Listen. A group of carefully selected young priests had been practicing, since the day of the kru’s death, to develop skill at cutting a loaf of bread with a sword. According to tradition, each would have an opportunity, and the one who produced the longest, cleanest cut would be made the kru’s priest—a special position and potentially one with great power and influence.”

Jorrul muttered something.

“So the first gift was bread. Through some obscure tradition or maybe a whim—remember, it’s our first succession—it was decided that the humble young donor should have the honor of wielding the sword of prediction first, on his own bread. That was done. Only it wasn’t bread and you cut the thing completely in two, which is impossible. Not even a skilled baker could bisect a loaf endwise with a sharp knife.” He paused and then said resentfully, “You still don’t understand what you did? Listen, you young idiot—by slicing that loaf neatly from top to bottom you guaranteed the new kru a reign of unending glorious achievement—and eternal life! No wonder they canceled the performance by the other candidates and immediately made you kru’s priest! Who could have improved upon that?”

“I could have botched it,” Farrari said regretfully. “But I sort of had to guess what they wanted, and since I hadn’t any previous experience I was just as surprised as they were.”

“Never mind. The final miracle was your disappearance, which set them thinking, and one of the things they thought was that all the time you were there you didn’t utter a sound. Now they’ve concluded that you yourself were the divine omen. They may trace you to Borgley, in which case he’ll have a lovely story ready, but I think they’ll be well satisfied with what they have and therefore won’t want to look too deeply into this miracle. Of course you had to escape—you couldn’t possibly have survived as the kru’s priest. A mysterious omen who promptly disappears can remain mute, but an ordinary mortal priest, even if the kru’s, has to master large quantities of dogma and incantations. You did well. But come with me I want to show you something.”

He led him to the roof of the mill and raised a tarpaulin. His handlight traced out the synthetic bas-relief that Isa Graan had made. The olz, twice as large as life-size, peered forlornly out of the slab of plastic. Five men, leaning on the sticks with which they scratched the soil, conveyed an impression of apprehension, as though momentarily expecting a durrl’s whip to terminate their stolen leisure. Three crouching women were sorting tubers; a fourth stood at one side, her arms outstretched to an ol child who seemed dubious that this uncouth creature was his mother.

“Magnificent!” Farrari exclaimed.

“Isa liked it,” the coordinator said. “So much so that he made a smaller one for his office, and now everyone at base is culling favorite teloids to pick out something that would make a good relief casting.”

“We couldn’t have used it anyway,” Farrari said. “You knew that?”

“Yes. We’d have to make the substitution before the ceremony begins, rather than at the proper place, and that would be tampering with a religious ceremony. It’s an ingenious idea, though. I marked my statement of intent for maxiinum circulation, and there may be other worlds where it can be used immediately. It’s in good hands; it won’t be wasted.”

They returned to the basement room. Rani Holt intercepted Farrari and asked, “What did you do with the robes they gave you?”

“Left them there,” Farrari said. “I thought I’d be much less conspicuous going out the window in this clothing, and if I’d walked through the streets as a priest someone might have asked me for a blessing, or something.”

“Too bad you didn’t bring them,” she said. “It’s difficult to duplicate a garment when you don’t have a model, and someday we might want to dress an agent as the kru’s priest.”

“The next time they make me a priest, I’ll bring the robes,” Farrari promised.

The following night they returned to base in a special highspeed passenger platform, and the coordinator found a message waiting for him: he was flatly forbidden to substitute a synthetic relief for one intended for a religious ceremony.

Accompanying the order was a new regulation that forbade tampering with technography.