at the first ol village he collected olz with torches and began a search. Halfway through the night and an eternity later they found Jorrul’s dead gril. Jorrul lay pinned under it, a spear through his side, a leg and an arm broken, delirious, unable to move, but alive.
Farrari administered rudimentary first aid and then dismissed the olz so he could use Jorrul’s com equipment. A short time later a platform arrived from field team headquarters at Enis Holt’s mill, and Jorrul was gently lifted aboard.
Just as the platform was taking off he opened his eyes and asked weakly, “How are the olz?”
“All right,” Farrari said.
“You mean—they won?”
“A tremendous victory,” Farrari said gravely.
“That’s wonderful! How many casualties?”
“One,” Farrari said. “You.”
The platform drifted into the night. Farrari wrapped the corn equipment in rags and carried it with him. He rested for an hour, and then he visited ol villages as a messenger to send his army to loot the tuber stocks of nearby durrl’s headquarters. At dawn, when the olz again as sembled on the highway, Farrari stood like a coward watching them march off toward Scorv.
At the same time, he wondered: since there had been no attack, perhaps the olz had won a victory.
The cavalry returned. Throughout the day the march was halted repeatedly while mounted troops crossed the highway or rode beside the column of olz. Farrari marched as an ol near the head of the column, and each time the rascz appeared he braced himself for an onslaught. Nothing happened except that he ended the day in a state of prostration. He dismissed the olz as usual and climbed under a zrilm bush for a badly needed sleep. Toward morning he awoke and contacted base; Jorrul had arrived there and would recover, and he’d asked that Farrari be thanked for taking the trouble to find him. Farrari swore bitterly and cut off.
The following day the olz headed out across the wasteland. Farrari scanned the horizon nervously, for this could have been the moment the cavalry waited for, when the olz did not have a vast complex of zrilm hedges as potential cover, but on this day the soldiers did not appear at all. It worried him much less that the olz might not have enough food to last until they reached the depot, for what were a day or two without food to an ol? Not until nightfall did he remember that they had no cooking utensils and were now far from the cooking pots of the nearest of villages. While he was wondering what to do, the olz moved to low ground near the river, dug large holes in the sticky clay, and filled them with water. Then they pushed heated stones into the holes, and the water boiled.
On the third day they reached the storage depot. Again Farrari appeared in the guise of his own messenger, and the olz spilled over the wasted landscape and settled themselves to wait for further orders. Farrari went to investigate a clamorous wailing that eminated from an outbuilding, and there he found two narmpfz left without food or water. He watered and fed them, and then he found his way to the underground communications room, where he spoke harshly to the two young agents there about allowing the unfortunate narmpfz to starve.
They shrugged; their superiors, the granary supervisor and his wife, had fled to Scory with the rascz when word came of the approaching olz. Naturally they had to do the normal thing, and if it were also normal that the animals the rascz left behind them starved, then the granary supervisor’s would have to starve, too, or people might be suspicious.
“Show me the granary,” Farrari said disgustedly.
They climbed a series of ramps to the roof, and Farrari’s first concern was not the blur on the northern horizon that was Scorv, but the opposite direction, where the kru’s army might be following closely. He saw no rascz, but that relieved his worries not at all. Whenever the soldiers tired of playing whatever game they were playing, a company or two could liquidate all of the olz in a single afternoon. The olz would stand with bowed heads allowing themselves to be slaughtered.
He said to the IPR agents, “How do you make a soldier out of someone who wants to die?”
“He should make the best kind of soldier,” one of the agents said. Farrari muttered, “Wanted: one spark.”
The agents were staring down at Farrari’s army as though realizing for the first time how many olz there were in Scorvif. “Going to storm the city?” one of them asked.
Farrari did not answer. If he led the olz to the foot of Scory and handed each a tuber—which was as effective a weapon as any in the hands of an ol—and told them, “Come!” they would follow him to the center of the city and pile their tubers at the door of the Life Temple if no one stopped them, but they wouldn’t make a threatening gesture at any rasc they met along the way.
“Going to try to starve out the city before the army returns?”
Again Farrari did not answer. For all he knew the army was less than a day away, and even if it were not the sparkless olz were incapable of keeping even one wagonload of food from reaching Scorv.
“Jorrul sent a message for you,” one of the agents said. Farrari nodded.
“He said to remind you that a revolution isn’t a plaything. He thinks maybe you’re having such a good time with this one you’ve forgotten your objective. He says to tell you that the rascz can’t survive without the olz—they wouldn’t know how to begin to raise a crop. The olz can survive without the rascz, but only as an unorganized, barbarian society of peasants, and that only until another strong nomadic race enslaves them again. If either is destroyed, you’ll doom civilization on this planet.”
“The olz,” Farrari said angrily, “had a high civilization before the rascz came here. They built the old city of Scorv—those massive old buildings and also the Tower-of-a-Thousand-Eyes. This civilization didn’t originate with the rascz, and it won’t end with them.”
The agents stared at him. “The olz… built… can you prove that?”
“Certainly.”
“Wow! Why doesn’t anyone else know about it?”
Suddenly Farrari wondered if it mattered. It had been a long time since the olz built anything more complicated than huts. How much could they remember, and how long would it take them to relearn skills their race hadn’t used for uncounted generations? And if they could remember, could relearn—would they want to?
He kept forgetting something he’d learned so long ago: the olz wanted to die.
He stepped to the north parapet and looked toward Scorv, where a serious, decent, creative, hard-working people calmly harbored their refugees and waited—for Cultural Survey AT/1 Cedd Farrari to find the spark that would destroy them? “I’ve been out of my mind, or I would have turned back,” he said softly. “I caught Bran’s disease. I wanted to annihilate the rascz because they killed me, even if I had to annihilate the olz to do it.”
An agent said bewilderedly, “How’s that?”
“They aren’t monsters,” Farrari murmured.
“The rascz? Of course not! Whoever said they were?”
Farrari turned and slowly descended the ramps to the underground communications room. “Get me the coordinator,” he said.
