She met his eyes. Her fingers continued to flutter; her frowning lips formed an admonition.
Stay in character.
Obediently he turned his eyes to the ground and concentrated on shaking globs of sticky clay from his bare feet. Liano raised her voice in a tremulous, high-pitched chant.
Stay in character. Both of their lives depended on it.
Liano trained him. The coordinator looked in briefly from time to time; Peter Jorrul, who was seldom at base, came when he could and stayed much longer. Once he observed them for an entire day, but he seemed to have little interest in Farrari’s progress. He watched Liano.
At first she faltered. Her moods were kaleidoscopic—from the stern taskmaster, the tireless perfectionist, she underwent abrupt and bewildering metamorphoses, becoming in an instant the exuberant child pleased and enthused with everything he did, or the enigmatic seeress whose chilling smile made him cringe. She could lapse for hours into a starkly staring, comatose state in which her face became alarmingly pale, her muscles twitched spasmodically, and her dark eyes gazed fixedly, unblinkingly at the nothingness of some remote dimension or—and this was the most disturbing—at Farrari. He wondered if she were divining his future and not liking what she found there.
Days passed before he progressed beyond the first lesson. With body slouched, knees slightly bent, feet pointed outward, every step a slow, deliberative action, he circled the room attempting to emulate the walk of an ol and puzzling as to how he should react to her swiftly changing moods. One moment she would be coaching him patiently; then would come an abrupt silence, and when, with aching muscles, Farrari turned to her after a tenth or thirtieth circuit of the room to learn if he was finally doing it right he would find her staring mindlessly. He asked Dr. Garnt what could be done at such times, and the doctor answered wearily, “Nothing. Just pretend it doesn’t happen—if you can.”
The ol language confounded Farrari. At first he thought it one of Liano’s childish pranks; this conglomeration of grunts, chirps, clicks, moans and hisses a language? He decided that the olz were the most primitive people he had ever heard of, with less power of communication than many intelligent animals.
As he learned, he became less certain. To the olz, a few sounds could mean a great deal, and the many pitches upon which those crude articulations could be, uttered were fraught with significance. Pitch variation could, in bewildering fact, make of a single grunt a vast vocabulary. He sought out the base’s philologist and discovered that worthy individual to be as mystified by the ol language as Farrari was. “If you stumble onto any answers,” the philologist said cheerfully, “let me know.”
For weeks Farrari was occupied in learning to move and talk like an ol, and when finally he achieved a measure of proficiency he found to his dismay that he also had to learn to live like one and, ultimately, to think like one—or at least to behave as though he thought like one. The scene of his training shifted to an isolated, inaccessible valley, and there he and Liano lived for days. Farrari learned to manage an ugly narmpf, and though he came to admire its enormous, powerful body, he could foster very little affection for the slobbering beast. Its tiny head surrounded a large, toothless mouth that was lined with a hornlike material. Incongruously, it ate only zrilm leaves, and Farrari’s first attempt to gather the poisonous, barb-protected leaves left him with puffed and bleeding hands. They treked from one end of the valley to the other, Liano riding in the cart and Farrari slouching beside it, turning the narmpf as she directed and hunching forward each time she reprimanded him for walking upright.
At night, while Liano submerged herself in the incantations she was struggling to recall, Farrari built two ol huts for them, of woven branches plastered with clay, kindled an ol fire by jerking a length of hemp back and forth in a tightly-held sleeve of bark, shaped a crude pot of clay, and cooked an ol meal: a boiled tuber with a handful of grain that puffed enormously in the boiling water and then seemed to shrink disgustingly the instant it reached the stomach. He lost weight rapidly and was always hungry, but that was part of his training: he was far too healthy-looking to pass as an ol.
In the darkness, while Liano sat staring at the fire, her face heat-flushed beneath its smear of ash, her hands performing a mysterious ritual for an imaginary ol audience, her dark, constricted irises opening onto depths no medical science could plumb, Farrari crept away to the cart and made his daily report on a concealed transmitter.
Coordinator Paul came regularly and watched them from a distance. Several times Jan Prochnow joined them at their night fire, wistfully watching Liano. Once he tried to question her, and each successive query dropped into a pool of deepening silence and disappeared without a ripple. His embarrassment became acute and his withdrawal a controlled flight. Farrari quickly learned that Liano would sit gazing hypnotically into the fire as long as it burned, so when he thought the time had come for her to sleep he let the fire go out.
But she was improving. Her periods of staring silence were less frequent, she became more exacting, the pace of his training intensified. Peter Jorrul brought an ol agent, and the two accompanied them for a day and a night, the agent studying Farrari’s every move and, before he left, taking Farrari aside for a briefing on the horrors he was likely to encounter in an ol village. To Farrari, the real horror was that nothing could be done about it. The agents were not even permitted to try.
“Your main problem,” the agent said, “is that you aren’t relaxed enough. The olz are always relaxed. Sometimes their bodies don’t even tense when they’re whipped. You’re having trouble with the language, too—you don’t always say what you mean—but that’s minor. The olz don’t always say what they mean, either. The reason ol is so difficult is because it’s so simple. I’ll ask Graan to send you a tube of ol language cubes.”
Farrari said to Jorrul, “Do you think I might—”
And Jorrul smiled and said, “We’ll see.”
The two of them left, and Farrari and Liano started another circuit of the valley, Farrari concentrating on relaxation. The next day Graan sent the language cubes. Liano played them for him while they traveled, and Farrari relaxed and listened to such good effect that when the agent came again he had no comment. Jorrul did; he told Farrari to stop eating. “By ol standards,” he said caustically, “you’re fat, and there is no such thing as a fat ol.”
Farrari obediently starved off more weight. A week later the coordinator returned them to base, where Farrari had the contour of his forehead and the shape of his nose altered by surgery and sufficient body hair implanted so that he would not look like an abnormally bare-skinned ol. Another week in the field, and Jorrul returned to spend an entire day watching Farrari. At the end of it he grudgingly conceded that Far-rani might.
“But only for a day or two,” he cautioned. “We’ll put you down in an outlying district where there’s no one around but olz and a few durrlz and see what happens. And we’ll keep a sharp watch on you.”
The day or two became ten, and then twenty, and it suddenly dawned upon Farrari that they were on their own.
The olz fascinated him.
Even in fine harvest weather they huddled closely about the nightfire as soon as it was lit; as though wistfully attempting to soak up heat against the terrible ordeal of winter. The men seldom spoke, and when they did it was with a single grunt, a click, a gesture—threadbare remnants of the fantastically complex language Farrari had studied at base. He had to remind himself that the elements of ol speech as known to IPR had been painstakingly compiled over many years and from thousands of contacts. The whole was infinitely greater than any of its parts, for no single ol seemed to know much of his language. The probable destination of a spark flung on high was the ultimate limit of his abstract speculation; who had brought the last log to the fire and who would bring the next were the only social problems that interested him. If the language had words for injustice, for rights, for slavery, for revolution., IPR had never encountered them.
With the new harvest at hand, the olz had a full daily ration of food. While the weather remained mild, they would be warm. The cold and hunger of winter loomed ahead of them, and the
