abduct her. The question is whether she had a relapse and wandered off, or whether she did it deliberately.”
“Even if she had a relapse,” Farrari said thoughtfully, “she still could have done it deliberately.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Just what I said. What are you doing about it?”
“Nothing, except to pass word to all of our agents to be on the lookout for her. An effective search would require more people than we’d dare to use anywhere except in Scorv. Did you notice anything that suggested that she might do something like this?”
“Not at the time, but in retrospect—yes. You should have been able to predict it.”
Jorrul stared at him.
“What’s a yilesc?” Farrari asked. “No one seems to know for certain, but everyone agrees that there’s something out of the ordinary about her. Witch, female shaman, seeress, and sorceress are a few of the terms the specialists use. Has it occurred to anyone that the genuine native yilesc— who may have many native imitators who are nothing of the sort—might be some kind of clairvoyant?”
Jorrul continued to stare.
“And,” Farrari went on, “when you send an IPR clairvoyant to play the role of yilesc, who is a native clairvoyant, there’s a grave danger that she might actually become one.”
At irregular intervals one of the base’s supply platforms took off at dusk to fly a leg of the ESC, the Emergency Supply Circuit. Since IPR agents lived as natives they had little need for supplies, but Jorrul had scattered secret emergency caches about the country, and Graan’s men visited these occasionally, checked the inventories, and replaced what had been used. On the wall of Graan’s office was a chart showing which leg of the circuit had been flown last, which leg would be flown next, and when.
It was a simple matter for Farrari to duck into the hangar when no one was about, squeeze between crates, and pull a tarp over himself. It was almost dark when the platform took off, and the thick blackness of the Branoff IV midnight enveloped its first landing. While Graan’s infra-goggled assistants worked to open the hidden entrance of the cave where supplies were cached, Farrari went over the opposite side of the platform and vanished into the night.
He wore only the ol loincloth; he took nothing with him except a small knife. He covered ground as rapidly as he dared, cautiously feeling ahead of him with a staff cut from a young quarm tree to avoid walking into zrilm bushes, and when dawn broke he was moving along a zrilm-lined lane near an of village. He needed a place of refuge—when he was missed someone might think of the supply mission, and he wanted to be as far from the emergency cache as possible before he permitted even an ol to see him. Thoughtfully he contemplated the deadly curtain of zrilm foliage. He parted it with his staff, slipped under it, and let it drop behind him.
He found himself in a delightfully snug and roomy hiding place, and the discovery confounded him. The supposedly impenetrable zrilm barrier could be breached by any ol with a stick and the intelligence to use it. Why, then, he asked himself bewideredly, didn’t the olz raid the fields on harvest nights and conceal a food reserve against the annual season of starvation?
Unanswerable questions no longer perplexed him as they had in the beginning, because there had been so many of them. He composed himself on the damp, musty soil and concentrated on his own plans.
Liano’s disappearance had prompted his own. Since Jorrul had made no search for her, he would make, none for Farrari; and if, contrary to reason, he did make an active search, he would assume that Farrari had gone to look for Liano, and he would concentrate on the yomaf, where she had disappeared.
The yomaf was the one place Farrari would not go. He would head up the hiingol, the finger valley on the opposite side of the Scorvif hand. Precisely what he would do there he had not decided, except that if he did formulate a plan, he had promised himself not to check it against the IPR field manual before putting it into effect.
He slept through the day, moved on at nightfall, and sheltered himself in another zrilm hedge at dawn. He slipped past villages in the darkness, cautiously making a wide circuit of the nightfires and drinking at village wells only after the olz had retired. In five nights of steady walking he put the lilorr behind him and began to make his way up the hilngol.
His conditioning as an ol had inured him to hunger, but the time came when he had to eat. He approached a nightfire hesitantly squatted there, cupped his hand to scoop watery soup from the cooking pot. No one paid any attention to him. He eased his hunger as well” as an ol’s hunger could be eased at that time of year, and when the olz began to drift off to their huts to sleep he quietly made his departure. After similar experiences at a dozen nightfires, he became sufficiently emboldened to find an empty hut for himself and remain at a village overnight. In the morning he accompanied the olz to the fields and spent the day cultivating the tender young tuber plants by hand. The durrl appeared at midday, watched for a time from the stile platform, and then departed. Farrari moved on that night, spent a few days in another village, moved again.
He had another perplexing question to meditate: if an ol could move about so easily, why did the olz complacently remain where they were until disease, starvation or a beating killed them? Venturesome olz, moving alone or in small groups, should have been able to escape through the mountain passes to freedom. Why did they remain?
In one village he encountered a yilesc. His momentary thrill of recognition was instantly dampened when she turned a plump, cruel-looking face toward him. All evening he surreptitiously watched her and her kewl, and when finally he retired he was in a thoughtful mood. Her behavior was nothing like Liano’s. She did nothing at all, remained aloof to men, women and children, and her kewl cringed in terror whenever she snarled a request for food or drink.
Another village. From his place by the fire, Farrari looked across at the women and children and watched the light flicker on the somber, young-old face of an ol child. Picking up a twig, he absently began to sketch her face in the packed soil. A grunt with an unusual inflection caused him to look up; several olz were watching his twig strokes intently. He quickly altered the scratches into an unrecognizable jumble and then rubbed them out. The olz lost interest and moved away, but Farrari, though he could not have said why, felt shaken. Could the olz, who possessed no art at all, instantly recognize the mere beginnings of a three-dimensional figure depicted on a flat surface? And why had he destroyed the drawing when they seemed to do so, since he considered it his mission to bring culture to them? He sensed a missed opportunity, and began to sketch again, but the olz were already drifting off to their huts.
A few nights later, in another village, an ol carrying a log to the fire stumbled and went head first into the huge cooking pot. The pot contained only water and did not break; the fire had not been. lit. The ol came up sputtering bewilderedly but otherwise unharmed, and long minutes afterward he was still sending searching glances at the ground about the fire hollow, as though trying to identify the evil spirit that had tripped him. The olz who saw what happened seemed not to notice.
Seated by the fire that evening, Farrari, on an impulse, felt about for a twig and drew an ol carrying a quarm log. He made a simple stick figure, with an oval for a head, carrying a crudely three-dimensional log. Then he added a circle for the yawning opening of the pot and surrounded it with the logs of an unlit fire. Were any of the olz watching? He feared that they were and that they weren’t; he did not dare to look.
