The World Menders

—“seventeen children; that would date this carving at a hundred and sixty-two or a hundred and sixty-three years ago. I’d have to check my records to say which. Those are Branoff IV years.”

“How do you know?” Farrari exclaimed.

Clough beamed at him. “I’m a genealogist. I know the kruz as far back as we’ve found records. These carvings are as exact as photographs.”

“That’s wonderful!”

“Not quite as wonderful as it might be,” Clough said gloomily. “Take a close look at the children.”

“They all look like their father.”

“They all are their father. It’s some confounded artist’s tradition. A child, of either sex, is always wearing a miniature of its father’s face. Then when the children leave their father’s home and become adults in their own right, it’s all but impossible to figure out who they are. It makes a pretty problem for a genealogist—a pretty problem.” He shrugged and added cheerfully. “But I know all the kruz. If you need some kind of temporal guide for classifying art styles, you couldn’t find a better one than that. If you have any questions about them, just ask me.”

The walls of Clough’s own workroom were covered with charts, which had, unfortunately, a great many blank spaces. His cherubic countenance would go wide-eyed with fascination over the discovery of a new genealogical detail, however minor.

Branoff IV’s aristocracy was a relatively small, tightly-knit group, and IPR had been unable to work agents into it, or even close to it. In Clough’s most critical area of study, the potential heirs to the throne, he was stymied because no one knew for certain whom they might be. The old kru’s reign antedated IPR on the planet, and the field team had not yet had an opportunity to observe a succession. Clough was delighted when Farrari proved, with bits of a literary epic, that the throne did indeed descend to one of the kru’s sons.

“I assumed as much,” he chortled. “Oh, yes indeed, I assumed it. It’s so common that one always assumes it. But one of the first things one learns in IPR is that assumptions do not go into reports. One records them in a workbook until there are sufficient facts to support them. Now suppose you tell me who the present kru’s sons are and which of them is the most likely heir apparent.”

Farrari failed on both points, but he was able to fill in several of Clough’s blank spaces from the results of his careful study of the amazingly graphic temple bas-relick. He also succeeded in identifying an elder brother of the kru, thus proving that the throne did not inevitably go to the oldest son, and that discovery forced Clough to dejectedly rip a page of assumptions from his workbook.

But the old man was tremendously pleased, and he often brought his lunch to Farrari’s workroom so that the two of them could study Branoff IV art while they ate and attempted to establish blood relationships through physiognomical similarities.

Adjoining Farrari’s two rooms was the huge laboratory of Thorald Dallum, a young botanist. Branoff IV plants flourished there under a blaze of artificial sunlight. Farrari, unaccustomed to confinement. found the vast dimensions and gardenlike atmosphere a welcome relief from the relentlessly impinging walls of rooms and corridors, and he quickly seized upon the excuse of identifying trees and plants portrayed in Branoff IV art and began to visit the place daily.

Dallum offered a weekly luncheon at which he served dishes he had concocted from Branoff IV plants. He was attempting to discover new sources of food, and many of his concoctions were derived from plants that the natives did not recognize as nutritious. Unfortunately, neither did the base personnel who came to eat them. They cautiously accepted small servings and sampled them in the manner of a person who had been ordered to discover by oral ingestion the lethal dose of a known poison, while Dallum hovered nearby scrutinizing their faces anxiously. His luncheons were not well attended. His own special favorite among these exotic dishes was zrilmberry tea, and he enthusiastically recited the long list of nutrients that it contained. Farrari was not surprised to learn that no native had ever been known to eat a zrilmberry. And the tea tasted dreadful.

Dallum had scarcely been aware that Branoff IV possessed an art. He was eager to assist Farrari, and in time he began to confide his own problems.

“The main trouble,” he said despondently, “is that the agriculture can’t support the population. Branoff IV grains and tubers are the most miserable excuses for food plants that I’ve ever encountered. The olz live out their lives on the verge of starvation, and very short lives they are. If only I could develop some strains that produce more food…”

“Olz?”

“Slaves.”

Farrari found for him the teloid of an ancient carving of a kru inspecting a grain field, and Dallum gazed at the projection dumfounded. “There are five times too many ears!” he exclaimed. “It must be artistic license!”

“That’s possible,” Farrari said, “but in everything I’ve been able to check, the realism is superb.” “How old is it?”

“Roughly a thousand years.” Dallum moved the projection closer to his specimen plants. “At least five times too many. I’ve never heard of a situation where the inherent productivity of a food plant deteriorated so drastically. The soil, yes, but a people will learn to use fertilizers, or rotate their crops, and very early they learn that the seeds of a healthy, high-yielding plant produce more food than the seeds of a low yield, deformed plant.”

“Does the present kru inspect many grain fields?” Farrari asked.

Dallum thought for a moment. “I’ve never heard of him inspecting anything.”

“The historians believe that long ago the aristocracy was much more concerned with practical affairs. The art and literature that survives supports that conclusion. Down through the centuries the aristocrats gradually lost interest in everything except their own pleasures.”

“I see,” Dallum mused. “And one couldn’t expect intelligent agricultural management from a starving ol. He’d be too much in a hurry to eat to pay any attention to plant heredity. If for centuries these people have been eating the best grain and saving the worst for seed, it may take much longer than I’d thought to breed plants with a decent productive capacity.”

“Why don’t you import some?” Fla! Read your IPR field man-lately?”

“I don’t have a field manual.” “You’re the lucky one,” Dallum said with a grin.

The other inhabitant of Farrari’s corridor was Semar Kantz, a military scientist and a devoted student of the kru’s army and its tactics. Kantz had a vast collection of teloids of art works depicting weapons and soldiers and battles. Working together, the two of them arranged these in chronological order, Farrari classifying according to art styles and techniques and Kantz according to weapon types and shapes and tactical formations. Both were startled and delighted at the ease with which their respective specialities dovetailed.

Farrari was enjoying himself and keeping furiously occupied, but as the months slipped by uneventfully he became increasingly concerned that he was somehow failing to fulfill his assignment.

“How do you study an IPR problem from the Cultural Survey point-of-view?” he asked Heber Clough.

Clough regarded him with astonishment.

“That’s what my orders say I’m to do.” Farrari explained, “and I don’t know how to go about it.”

“What do you think you’ve been doing?” Clough demanded. “You’ve been looking at all of our problems, and if it hasn’t been from the Cultural Survey point-of-view I don’t know what you’d call it. Didn’t your academy give you any suggestions?”

Farrari laughed bitterly. “At the academy no one had the vaguest notion as to what IPR wanted with us. There’s this deadly tradition that every cadet must have a personal interview with the commandant on promotion day. You walk in and salute, and the commandant says, ‘Congratulations, Cadet Blank. Your work this past year has been excellent.’ Or ‘good’ or ‘satisfactory’—if the work hadn’t been satisfactory the cadet would have been informed earlier, in an entirely different kind of interview. ‘You are promoted one grade and for the coming year you are ordered to this academy to continue your studies. Are there any questions, Cadet Blank? Dismissed! ’ ”

Clough laughed heartily. “It sounds hauntingly familiar, except that at the IPR Academy we also had to listen