starvation of spring that in the year of the half crop would inexorably take half their lives, but they were, at this moment in time, a tranquil people. That they seemed totally incapable of contemplating the future could have been the basis for their survival.
Liano fascinated him more than the olz.
The Branoff IV social structure was so commonplace that the more cynical IPR specialists referred to it as “trite.” It contained only two incongruities, two elements of uniqueness. One was the fact that only the kru owned slaves. The other was the yilesc.
In the world’s rigidly stratified society, the yilesc, her kewl, and her apprentice—if she had one—were the only individuals who existed outside the established order. Oddly enough, the yilescz were members of the master race, which scorned them. Words for yilesc and kewl did not occur in the ol language, and what the olz thought of them was not yet fully understood. Certain it was that the yilescz fulfilled some unknown function, either spiritual, physical, or social; that every ol village had a hut reserved for them; and that while there was doubt as to which needs of the olz were served by the yilescz, there was no doubt whatsoever that the olz had no one else to serve them.
Not even the aristocrats possessed the freedom of movement of a yilesc. It was assumed that some ancient kru had honored the yilescz with his patronage, and a few vestiges of that royal favor had survived the centuries. The apprentice was apparently optional, a girl of the yilesc’s own race who was bought, borrowed or stolen from the most lowly of city commoners. The yilesc invariably traveled with a male ol servant, making her kind the only private slaveholders in Scorvif. She possessed by right a narmpf and a cart. When her narmpf died, or her cart wore out, any durrl was traditionally bound to furnish a replacement. In the blunt realism of Branoff IV existence, few durrlz paid any attention to a tradition that involved only the well-being of the despised yilescz and by extension the scorned olz. The yilesc who lost her transportation was likely to walk until some durrl suffered an unaccountable twitch of generosity or perhaps thought to buy her influence to improve the work quota of his olz.
The roles of yilesc and kewl were made to order for a team of IPR agents. Not only could they travel freely, but as long as they stayed away from the cities and avoided the kru’s soldiers they had what was, for that violent world, an unusual degree of safety. IPR specialists quickly discovered whom the yilescz were, but after years of study and the successful placement of a number of yilesc agents, they had no notion at all as to what they were.
If they were priestesses they had no discernible religious function. If they were witches they practiced magic to no apparent purpose. If they were seeresses they did not prophesy. And if they were peregrinating medicine women, Dr. Garnt would observe sourly, they did not heal. They simply were, and the mysterious uniqueness of their existence had made the specialists speculate as to whether they might occupy a pivotal position in the Branoff IV social structure. Supreme Headquarters had been asked for an agent with special qualifications for the role of yilesc, and Supreme Headquarters sent Liano Kurne.
She had been instantly and tremendously successful, and both Jorrul and the coordinator had thought that the solution to the mystery was within her grasp. Then tragedy struck. Liano recovered; her mind did not. She still had no recollection of what had happened. Probably she did not want to recall.
And she could not or would not tell what she had learned.
As the night deepened, the ol women and children withdrew from the fire and gathered in the outer shadows in a mystic communion that defied Farrari’s understanding. Only then would Liano leave her hut and join them. Her work was with the women and children, and when she cared for a sick male it was, except in times of epidemics, because a woman requested it. The children loved her, and she played tirelessly with them, performing sleight of hand tricks with a shining pebble or a twig. She brewed mysterious drafts for them, performing incomprehensible incantations over clay bowls of steaming liquid and at the same time surreptitiously lacing the drinks with vitamins.
Unlike the men, the women babbled incessantly. Undoubtedly it was they who kept their language viable, but Farrari had no inkling of what they talked about. When he asked Liano she smiled mysteriously and did not answer.
Farrari huddled in darkness far from the warmth of the fire, watching Liano, tensed to leap to her side when she beckoned. As a kewl he was lowest of the lowly, perhaps because he served a woman, and all of the olz ignored him, even the children. They made room for him at the fire only when he approached it on an errand for Liano. As there was little for him to do, he watched, and listened, and meditated.
He had not thought it possible that a society could be so utterly barren of culture. The lifeless phonetic symbols of the IPR Bureau were the only written form of the ol language, but even a people without writing should have had an oral tradition of myth or history. The olz had none. They had no storytellers or minstrels, and for all of the incessant woman talk, Farrari never heard a woman croon a lullaby. With their crude sticks they scratched the soil for twice-a-year plantings, but it had never occurred to them that those same scratches might be utilized to communicate or represent.
How does one raise a cultural level, Farrari demanded of himself, when there is no culture to start with?
But the IPR base, and the talk of oh-ohing the planet and a twothousand-year hiatus were remote almost beyond memory as Farrari watched the male olz around the oily, reeking nightfire. There was no laughter among them—not even the children laughed—and Farrari vainly searched the taciturn ol faces for one fleeting glimmer of an illusive, inward-turning smile. In this, the most favored season of the year, they seemed neither happy nor unhappy. If there was joy in their lives they concealed it well; in another season they probably concealed their misery.
The olz existed; why they existed seemed no concern of theirs.
Farrari had expected to find a grim, barren land. Instead they moved through pleasantly shaded, fragrant lanes, for even the deadly zrilm shrubs put forth large blossoms that hid their vicious needles under exquisite splashes of color.
There were thick zrilm hedges, taller than a durrl mounted on a gril, that completely enclosed the fields and could be passed only with portable stiles. These ramshackle constructions of pegged boards had a platform at the top from which a durrl, or his assistant, could view the work in several adjoining fields. Every harvested tuber, or basket of grain, had to be laboriously carried over one or several zrilm hedges to the waiting wagons, and at night the durrl carried away the stiles. A system of gates would have greatly lessened the ors toils, but gates would have been much more difficult to guard. The zrilm, the symbol of the ors bondage, was also the symbol of his hunger. No starving ol had ever been known to force his way through a zrilm hedge; starvation was the easier death.
Farrari saw durrlz rarely and then only at a distance, for they almost never visited an ol village. The olz, even the youngest children, went to the fields at dawn and returned at dusk. Farrari had a leisurely, tedious day, followed by a few hours of excruciating alertness at the nightfire when he prepared Liano’s food, ran errands at her bidding, restrained a feverish child while she performed a rite of health over it, looked after the narmpf, and finally, when the olz retired to their huts, he would send his daily report to field team headquarters.
After two or three nights in a village they moved on, departing in the morning without a leave-taking because the olz were already at work, and, before they left, returning to the village stores the pathetic offering of tubers and grain that had been ceremoniously presented to Liano the night of their arrival. They would reach their next stopping place by late afternoon, Farrari would clean out the hut reserved for any visiting yilesc and prepare a sleeping place for himself in the open, and they would await the
