Slowly his strength returned. He became aware that several olz were in constant attendance on Liano, and he meant to ask her how a yilesc could have so many kewlz but forgot; and then when he remembered he had deduced the answer himself: there was, had to be, a supreme yilesc, or several of them if there were several burial caves where the olz disposed of their dead. IPR’s synthetic yilescz would not be aware of them, but Liano’s clairvoyancy had penetrated to that knowledge and beyond. She had become a supreme yilesc.
Finally Farrari consented to being moved outside, and Liano fed him IPR rations and he began to recover his strength rapidly. He missed Bran—missed having someone to talk with. The olz did what he asked and otherwise cautiously kept their distance from the ol who had returned from the dead—and it was anyway impossible to converse in ol, a language that even simple communication sometimes taxed to the utmost. Liano conscientiously dressed his wounds and fed him but hardly exchanged a word with him.
He dreamed of a carefree world where they could run hand in hand, laughing, through verdant mountain meadows. He had never seen her laugh; he had never dared to touch her hand. He remained the lowly kewl, and she was elevated to the loftiest of yilescz.
On an impulse he said to her, one day when she brought his food, “You foresaw this, didn’t you?”
She turned a startled, wide-eyed gaze upon him.
“You foresaw that I’d be wounded?”
“I… yes—”
“Was that the real reason you took another kewl? To keep me at base?”
“I saw you lying in the road,” she said slowly. “And the spears, two of them. And the kru’s cavalry riding past. I thought you were dead. So I told Peter you’d never learn to think like an ol.”
“Since I’ve survived that, after a fashion, what’ll my next catastrophe be?”
She stared at him.
“What do you see in my future?” he persisted.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing at all?”
“Nothing.”
The next morning she was gone.
Farrari made a frantic search for her and finally found his way down the steep slope to the valley below, where he had seen an ol village. There he met the olz who had been taking care of him, but he did not know what they called Liano, and when he mentioned yilesc, a Rasczian word, they did not seem to understand. Probably she had fled with a kewl and a narmpf and cart, but he was much too weak to try to follow her. He could not even negotiate the path back to the cave, so he remained in the village.
The olz who lived there were the strangest he’d seen. They had ample rations and lavish supplies of quarm, and yet they did no work and no durrl harassed them. They started their nightfire at dawn and most of them slept through the day.
They were caretakers of the dead. At night some went forth and returned with dead olz, whom they carried to the burial cave. Others performed nightly obsequies in the cave. After Farrari became stronger, he went several times to the cave and remained in the background to observe. He saw the same shuffling ceremony he remembered, but without their supreme yilesc the olz performed it silently and committed the dead to the abyss without a spoken blessing. There was another peculiar difference: At intervals an ol would loudly grunt a word and all would collapse in silent prostration. Farrari puzzled long over the word, which meant speak, or talk, or answer. He could not decide whether they were importuning the absent yilesc or the silent dead; but the yilesc remained absent and the dead never spoke.
One morning Farrari climbed to a place of privacy a short distance above the village, found a comfortable clump of grass to sit on, and sternly told himself that if he were too weak for action he at least had no excuse for not thinking. He knew more about the olz than any non-ol on Branoff IV except Liano, who kept what she knew to herself, and he should be able to put that knowledge to use.
He suspected that the cave with the ol carvings in Bran’s valley had been a burial cave, which meant that the olz had not changed their method of disposing of their dead since those remote times when they were masters of Scorvif. The fact that the rascz not only tolerated this, but encouraged it by supporting the village of caretakers, meant that they somehow found it to their own advantage.
When an ol died, the olz of successive villages passed his body along until it reached a collecting point, from which the caretakers took it to a burial cave. There were probably several of these, each with its village of caretakers—one in each of the finger valleys, others around the perimeter of the lilorr. As for what the olz did with the piles of dead that accumulated during the winter or during epidemics, he hesitated to speculate. He felt certain that the distances some dead olz were carried would tax the credulity of an outsider.
What else did he know? That the olz wanted to die. Bran had grasped that, though for the wrong reasons. What, then, were the right reasons?
The olz wanted to die, but they never committed suicide.
The olz worshiped their masters, who starved and murdered them.
The olz made no effort to escape, no effort to defend themselves, no effort to secure a scrap of food more than what they were given even when starving.
They wanted to die, but their religion forbade suicide as well as violence and the taking of each others’ lives. Since they were forbidden to kill themselves or each other, could it be that they worshiped their masters because they starved and murdered them?
“A death cult!” Farrari exclaimed. “A people whose lives are dedicated to one thing and one thing only: dying!”
But why did they want to die? The end of all life was death, and anyone who meditated excessively upon that fact could in time develop a morbid philosophy. Even among a peaceful, prosperous people there would be diseases, accidents, frustrations, tragedies, and if their religion taught that death was a welcome release from life, that it brought instant translation to paradise, Elysium, eternal bliss, a people could come to prefer death to life. And if the people were conditioned to this preference from infancy.
He leaped to his feet excitedly. His first contact with the olz had come by way of a teloid cube that projected an ol woman being beaten to death. In the background several olz stood looking on, and Farrari had pondered the expressions on their faces.
He remembered them vividly: two men, a woman and a child watching a murder, and their faces expressed —ecstasy! Ecstasy and envy! They wanted to die, they envied those who died, they worshiped their conquerors who brought death to them with such lavish generosity.
The rascz had exploited this aberration cunningly, even working women of their own race into the ol religion to encourage the ol obsession with death. A people intent on dying would be very unlikely to revolt, and the olz never had.
Farrari sank back into the grass, made himself comfortable again, and asked himself a crucial question: Why had the IPR Bureau learned so little about the ol religion?
The olz had recognized the IPR agents! Not as aliens from outer space, they could not have comprehended such a concept, but they had recognized them as outsiders, and while they seemed to accept them and behave normally toward them, they kept to themselves matters that
