The World Menders

yilescz do, perhaps because not many olz die during those months. But in the spring following a half-crop year the death rate is horrible, and this is one time the durrlz must worry about their olz. They’re harassed individuals with an impossible task to accomplish. They have the responsibility of maintaining the food supply, and they have to do it with unbelievably primitive agricultural methods, exhausted soils and degenerate strains of food plants. When they fail to meet their quotas the penalty is usually catastrophic. So if a durrl, never mind how or why, gets the idea that a yilesc is killing his olz to a point where there won’t be enough left for the spring planting, his reaction will be instantaneous and furious.”

“Which it was,” Farrari agreed. Jorrul nodded. “There are so few yilescz, and they operate so illusively, that we simply never noticed that there is a season when they don’t operate at all.”

“After I’d demonstrated that I couldn’t think like an ol, why did you leave me there?”

“You were needed,” Jorrul said. “We had to keep that sickness from burgeoning into a full-scale epidemic, and to do that we had to make use of everyone who had any competence at all. Any more questions?”

“How is Liano?”

“Excellent. Eager to go back. We owe you more than thanks and congratulations, Farrari. The coordinator has recommended a second promotion for you, which is against regulations because the one he recommended after your Scory adventure hasn’t come through yet. I hope you enjoy the full satisfaction of having done an excellent piece of work for us, because you deserve it. You’ve also acquired experience that few CS men will ever have, and you got what you wanted—a chance to study the olz. Did you find out what you wanted to know?”

“I didn’t know what I wanted to know,” Farrari said gravely. “I still don’t.”

“Dr. Garnt says if you’ll stop by this afternoon he’ll remove your ol profile.”

Farrari rubbed his forehead. “There’s no hurry. For a long time I couldn’t believe it was I, but now I’m used to it. Pehaps it would be a good idea to have an ol—someone who looks like an ol—here at base. The base staff is as much in need of a reminder that olz exist as the rascz are. Maybe I’ll make that my next project.”

Jorrul chuckled. “All right. You can keep your profile and remind the staff that olz exist. Your Scory adventure had another result. The priests have decided to treat your temporary presence in the Life Temple as a supernatural visitation. Your’ relief portrait has been mounted near the kru’s throne in the Life Temple and the palace, and they aren’t going to appoint another kru’s priest. What do you think of that?”

“I won’t know whether it’s a compliment or an insult until I see the carvings. Did you get teloids of them?”

“No, but we’ll try,” Jorrul promised. He must have been in one of his rare good moods, because he departed laughing.

Farrari slept for a day and a night, awoke to find that a stomach conditioned to ol food had no appetite for an IPR breakfast, and slept again. His exhaustion left him, to be immediately replaced by boredom. There had been few changes at base. Heber Clough was grappling with a weighty geneological problem: the old kru’s fourteenth son had inherited the throne; the new kru had only three sons. As Farrari walked past his door Clough waved and wailed after him, “What happens when a kru dies before he has fourteen sons?” Thorald Dallum excitedly beckoned him in to see a plant mutation. To Farrari it looked like a sprig with a couple of withered leaves. Semar Kantz, the military scientist, had completed his studies and been transferred. Jan Prochnow’s faded notice, “Yilesc?” was still posted.

Where life at base had once been irritatingly placid, Farrari now found it utterly stagnant. He attempted to concentrate on the teloids of the interior of the Life Temple, and several times a day he administered a vicious kick to his teloid projector.

When next he saw Liano, he asked her to marry him. She gave him a shy, startled look, edged away fearsomely, and blurted, “Oh, no!”

And fled.

A few days later he heard that she’d returned to the field.

With another kewl.

She had loved him, he thought, from the depths of her sickness, and his love for her had grown steadily; but as she became well, had her love also undergone a cure?

If it had, Farrari blamed the roles they had enacted. They played their parts only too well—she the remote seeress, he the groveling slave. In all the countless hours they had been alone together in the field, he had never emboldened himself to so much as touch her hand. A kewl would not dare to touch the hand of his yilesc.

A yilesc would not—could not—marry a kewl. The work that should have united them had separated them irreconcilably.

He attempted to submerge himself in work, and he began to summarize his impressions of the olz and to use them to test various theories, his own and those of other specialists; but his impressions were discouragingly sketchy and none of the of theories seemed to have any connection with the sick of in a filthy hut, or the pile of snow-covered dead outside.

On Peter Jorrul’s next visit to base, Farrari sought him out and said, “The olz have very little communication between villages. Have any local differences developed?”

“What sort of differences?” Jorrul asked.

“Dialects, customs…”

Jorrul shook his head.

“The coordinator once told me that it would take years for an idea to spread from one end of the country to the other among the olz.”

“Assuming that the olz ever have an idea that they’d want to spread, that would probably be true. I doubt that they do.”

“In that case, why haven’t local differences evolved?”

“I don’t know.” He strode to the wall and scowled at a map of Scorvif. Scattered markers designated IPR field agents. Liano was working in the yomaf, the most remote finger valley. The markers for the twenty of agents looked very lonely indeed. “The question,” Jorrul said, “is whether our agents are placed where they would encounter differences if there are any. We need more people south of Scary.”

“That isn’t the question at all,” Farrari said. “The question is whether any of these agents have enough knowledge of the whole country to recognize a local difference if they were to see one. If you keep them pretty much in one location…”

“I see what you mean,” Jorrul said. “We’ll think about it. Are you looking for something in particular?”

Farrari shook his head. He had only an unfocused realization that something was very wrong with IPR policy, that his work was crippled by a slavish adherence to regulations that were conceived with no thought of the needs of Branoff IV. He had no idea what should be done about it, but he did know that his days in the sterile confines of the base were numbered. He had tasted life, the life of the olz, and dedicated himself to doing something about it. If he could not return to the field, he thought he should ask for a transfer.

Days passed.

Peter Jorrul came to his workroom, seated himself, and announced gloomily, “Liano has disappeared.”

Farrari was startled to find that he was not surprised. He said, “What happened?”

Jorrul gestured forlornly. “She must have run off. The agent acting as her kewl saw her to her hut and turned in himself. In the morning she was gone. It’s as safe a region as exists anywhere—not rascz about except the durrl and his establishment, and there’s no reason why he’d interfere with a yilesc at this time of year. Certainly the olz didn’t