The World Menders

return of the olz.

The nights lengthened and became colder. The last of the harvest was gathered, and the day came when most of the olz remained in the village. Jorrul thought that Farrari was not sufficiently experienced to undergo the strain of maintaining his ol identity continuously, so he ordered them out. They left the next morning and that night base sent a platform to pick them up.

“You’ve done well,” Jorrul told Farrari. “You’ve learned to act like an ol. Now we’ll have to teach you to think like one.” He added softly, “Liano seems to have done well, too. Did you find out anything?”

Farrari shook his head. They had asked him to be alert for any clue concerning the mystery of the yilescz, and since they could give him no notion of what to look for, he doubted that they seriously expected him to find it.

“Would it be all right to ask Liano to marry me?” he asked.

Jorrul frowned. “She wouldn’t. Not after what happened. Her husband was literally torn to pieces before her eyes. I’m certain she’d never take to the field again with a fellow agent who was anything more than that. It would impair your relationship if she even suspected that you wanted to marry her, so don’t mention it. You can help her most by keeping your work on a strictly impersonal basis.”

“Then tell me one thing,” Farrari said angrily. “If she has no personal interest in me, why did she choose me?”

“We’ve wondered about that,” Jorrul said. “We’re still wondering, but with things going well we’re not about to upset them by asking questions.” He changed the subject with a shrug. “I take it that you didn’t encounter any difficulties.”

“Once my muscles got resigned to my moving like an ol, I spent most of the time feeling bored.”

“That’s because you weren’t thinking like an ol.”

“How can you tell how an ol thinks?” Farrari demanded.

“We can’t,” Jorrul admitted. “The most we can do is reason from our observations. We know how an ol ought to be thinking. He has so little leisure time during the agricultural season that if he thinks at all he must envy you yours. Maybe that’s why a yilesc is never without a kewl. If she loses one she can replace him at any village, probably with the first ol she asks.”

“After what I’d been led to expect, it was almost a letdown,” Farrari said. “I saw no beatings, no starvation, and very little illness. I rarely saw a durrl, and if there was any danger I certainly didn’t notice it.”

“On your first field assignment we wouldn’t put you where there was much danger. In the outlying districts the durrlz are more humane, probably because they aren’t likely to be ambitious or they wouldn’t be there. Also, fall is the healthiest time of the year. The weather is mild, and the olz always eat well during the fall harvest. The sickly are already dead and the well will probably remain well until winter sets in. When you go back you won’t have it so easy. This is the year of the half crop, and that means… you’ll find out what it means.”

XI

It meant the spring of starvation.

In the year of the half crop, half of the arable land lay fallow. A full harvest followed, and then came another half crop while the remainder of the land was rested. It was a crude and fiendishly cruel method of preserving the land’s productiveness. Regardless of the size of the harvest, the master race took what it wanted, kept its emergency store houses filled, and enjoyed full rations. And in the year of the half crop the starving olz died by the thousand.

Farrari and Liano were scheduled to spend the winter in advanced training and return to the field at the beginning of spring; but the cold weather lingered, the rains were heavy and unrelenting, and Dr. Garnt glumly posted reports of death and sickness from IPR’s scattered ol agents and pronounced the weather the worst of any spring on record.

The coordinator sent for Farrari. He and Peter Jorrul had been reviewing the doctor’s reports, and they looked as though they were about to invite Farrari to his own funeral.

“All of this information,” Jorrul said gravely, “comes from places where our agents have been secretly fortifying the ol diet all winter. And if those natives are dying at this rate, we hate to think what’s happening elsewhere.”

“We hate to think,” Coordinator Paul added, “but we’d like to know. We’ve got to know, and we’ve got to do everything we can to help them. I’d planned to keep you here until the weather breaks, but—”

“I understand, sir,” Farrari said. “If it’s all right with Liano, I am ready to leave whenever you can arrange it.”

“Batting about in an ol loin cloth in this weather won’t be pleasant,” the coordinator said. “What are you grinning about?”

“When I started this,” Farrari said, “I had that silly notion about bringing culture to the olz.”

They had the crushing sensation of walking in the footsteps of Death. Outwardly life seemed to continue as usual. The olz who were able gathered around the nightfire, but these were transformed olz, with blanched flesh stretched tautly over sharp bones and so weak were they that four of them struggled to lift a log onto the fire. They huddled in the shallow circle of warmth for hours without uttering a sound. Now even the women were silent.

The olz were unable to maneuver the pathetically light bodies of the dead through the narrow doorways, so dead and dying lay together in huts foul beyond belief with the accumulated filth of winter. Farrari and Liano carried the dead to the death huts, cleaned and cared for the sick, and secretely added powdered nutrients to the watery soup compounded of the last of the village’s stock of rotting tubers. They had no hope at all that this would give the living the stamina they so desperately needed to survive until the weather improved, but in one day they could do no more. At dawn they were on their way to the next village.

And again Death had come before them.

Each day brought another village, another pile of dead, another cluster of pathetic, starving olz about a nightfire. Farrari lost track of time. They were both near exhaustion when they haltingly made their way across a finger of the vast clay wasteland that remote centuries of careless agriculture had devastated. When finally they neared the other side and pointed their way toward a fertile valley, the narmpf sighted zrilm hedges that promised dry leaves for it to munch and increased its floundering pace with an impatient snort.

Suddenly Liano cried out. Farrari halted the narmpf with a slap of his hand and turned. An of stag,gered toward them. His taut skin had the unhealthy, pasty pallor that all of the olz had taken on during the winter months, but with an ominous difference: even at a distance Farrari could detect an ugly flush of fever. The of stumbled and fell as he approached them and lay motionless.

Farrari ran to his side, and Liano leaped from the cart and followed him. The narmpf snorted again, this time in alarm, and shifted its feet nervously.

The ol was dead. They carried his frail body to the cart, and Liano gently touched a puffed ridge of flesh that ran the length of his spine. “I’ve never seen anything like that,” she whispered.

Farrari turned the narmpf aside, and they retraced the ors steps, skidding down a last, steep slope Farrari wondered awesomely how the dying ol had managed to climb it—and turning into a narrow lane lined with tall zrilm hedges. A short distance farther on they came upon the village, with its circle of low clay huts about the fire-blackened hollow where the clay cooking pot stood, and, nearby, the clumsily-dug well and