The World Menders cs-2

by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.

  The six pairs of eyes remained fixed on Farrari. Jorrul said lightly, “We’d like to know what Cultural Survey has to say about it.”

  Farrari experienced neither anger nor resentment. They had a new toy to play with, a Cultural Survey toy, and whether he joined in their game or not, the result had been predetermined by them. Two thousand years.

  “Do the citizens know the meaning of the tapestry?” he asked.

  “A guard was posted at the entrance to the temple square before the drapery was hung,” Borgley answered. “The square has been closed off ever since, at considerable inconvenience to the population—the city’s main thoroughfare passes through it. So they must know that something has happened or is about to happen, but no one talks about it.”

  “You knew the kru was dead as soon as you saw the tapestry,” Jorrul said. “The citizens of Scorvif ought to be as perceptive as a Cultural Survey trainee concerning their own kru, but there’s been no reaction. Why?”

  “Has any kind of tapestry or cloth been hung there before?” Farrari asked.

  Borgley shook his head.

  “I knew the kru was dead because the final picture said so. Is it possible to make out the details of the tapestry from outside the square?”

  “No. It’s an extremely large square. The details wouldn’t be visible without binoculars, and the rascz don’t have any.”

  “If a tapestry is hung only when the kru dies, the citizens wouldn’t have to see the details to get the message. Do you have a teloid of it?”

  Jorrul wheeled in a projector and snapped the cube into it. Farrari studied the projection meditatively. “In my report I noted that the final scene—the one without the kru—was crudely done. I was wrong. It was hastily done.” The six pairs of eyes were now frowning into the projection. “A religious tradition,” Farrari went on. “The kru is dead. The kru’s portrait is on the facade of the Life Temple. The portrait of a dead kru on the Life Temple is sacrilege. So, in a frenzy of haste, slap the final scene onto the tapestry so it can be hung over the facade and the portrait removed.”

  “Interesting,” Jorrul remarked politely. “But why no public announcement?”

  “You’re asking the wrong question,” Farrari said. “Either the mere hanging of the tapestry is announcement enough, or it’s considered none of the public’s business. The question is—what are they waiting for? The kru is dead. If they were giving him a state funeral, they would have announced his death and at least started preparations. They haven’t, so they probably won’t. So why don’t they invest, or crown, or elevate, or whatever it is they do to the new kru, and carry on?” He thought for a moment. “Prochnow has the idea that the dead kru selects the eye through which he will watch over his subjects for all eternity, and when he dies he’s buried behind it. If true, the kru’s death means only that he’ll be watching over his people from a different residence. The really significant thing would be the elevating of the new kru. And the new kru—” He paused. “Of course. They can’t crown the new kru until his portrait is on the Life Temple. The Kemple of the kru without a portarit of a live kru to adorn it is likewise sacrilege. Right now the new kru should he sitting for his portrait, and because it’s a portrait of the kru, they won’t dare to do it hastily.”

  The others exchanged solemn glances that suddenly twisted into grins. Jorrul said, “One of our agents—that’s 178—is a krolc, a priest’s lay servant, which is the closest we’ve ever been able to place anyone to the priesthood. His master was ordered to Scorv for the ceremonies of enshrinement and coronation—canonization might be a better word, the new kru is invested as a god. Anyway, 178 got to come along. It’s the first time we’ve had an agent inside the Life Temple—legally, that is.”

  “Will he be able to take some teloids?” Farrari asked.

  “How’s that?”

  “Teloids. Of the interior of the Life Temple. I don’t have interiors of a single temple or palace.”

  Jorrul said irritably, “Of course. He’s already taken some. Anyway, he reports that every prominent artist in Scorvif is at work on reliefs of the new kru. When one of them comes up with something the kru likes—or maybe something the priests like—the ceremonies can commence. They’ll take down the old kru’s tapestry, hang a blank one, perform the necessary in cantations, and when they remove that the new kru’s portrait will be in place. The Holy Ancestors will have spoken. Prochnow thinks they’ll make a production of it and drag the ceremony out for days.”

  “When can I have them?” Farrari asked.

  “Have what?”

  “The teloids of the temple’s interior?”

  Jorrul shrugged. “When they’re processed, I suppose.”

  Farrari wrenched his mind back to the business at hand. His anger, when it finally came, was not less fierce because he’d been slow to react. They had set a trap for him, and the fact that he’d made a lucky hit did not distract him from the realization that he could just as easily have made a fool of himself. Testing, he thought, looking about the table with cold contempt, was a game two could play. They’d had their fun with their Cultural Survey toy; he was entitled to a share of amusement in return. He would hand them a problem that no IPR manual could cope with and watch them squirm.

  “That’s very interesting,” he mused. “The ceremony, I mean. Is the intent to give the impression that the Holy Ancestors selected the kru’s successor? What I mean is this: Is the mechanics of this known to everyone and, therefore, just a formality, or will the identity of the new kru he revealed only when the portrait is unveiled?”

  “We know the identity now,” Jorrul said. “The new kru is at the temple sitting for his portrait, as you put it. It’s one of the old kru’s younger sons—the fourteenth, I believe. There’s a fracas at base over the question of how he was selected. Prochnow thinks he was the kru’s favorite and, therefore, his heir; Heber Clough thinks he was the favorite because he was the heir and some obscure formula of succession is involved. We in the field weren’t aware that the kru had a favorite—son or anything else. I haven’t answered your question, have I?”

  “No,” Farrari said. “I was wondering if the priests make the selection and use this ceremonial fa-dela to announce their decision.”

  “I don’t know. It may take us centuries to unravel all the details about the succession.”

  “But do the kru’s subjects believe?” Farrari persisted. “Do they really think the Holy Ancestors place the portrait of the new kru behind the tapestry, or is it a convention that they profess to accept while cynically ignoring the bulges made by the priests working there?”

  “We don’t know,” Anan Borgley said. “This is the first succession we’ve observed, and thus far the average citizen—we work at being absolutely average—seems to know nothing about it, so we know nothing about it.”

  “Do you have a teloid of the old kru’s relief?”

  Jorrul thought he did, rummaged through an unsorted box of cubes, decided he didn’t, and finally found one. The others waited indifferently as he snapped it into the projector and the old kru’s wrinkled face formed in front of them. Farrari studied it intently, slowly shaking his head.

  “I wish it were a painting,” he said finally. “A painting I think I could manage, but I never was worth a damn at sculpture.”

  Jorrul sat down heavily. “What’s that about painting?”

  “I was thinking what a lovely joke it would be if they dropped the tapestry and found someone else’s portrait there. An older son, or a nephew, or even a total stranger. What would happen?”

  “That’s an interesting question, but, of course, we couldn’t interfere.”

  “Why not? DEMOCRACY IMPOSED FROM WITHOUT doesn’t say a thing about switching portraits.”

  “Other rules do. We can’t tamper with a religious ceremony.”

  “We wouldn’t. We’d just alter one of the props.”

  “Even if there’s no rule against it,” Jorrul said, “and there almost ce
rtainly is, and even if the coordinator were to approve it, and he almost certainly wouldn’t, the preparations would require more time than we’d have. The artists work ing on the new kru’s portrait have a long start on you, and anyway, if you’re no good at sculpture—” He dismisssd the subject with a shrug.

  Farrari ignored him. His eyes were fixed admiringly on the image of the old kru. “That’s the trouble with great art,” he observed in the confident tones of a lecturer at the CS Academy. “The more realistic it is, the more it goes beyond realism. We couldn’t begin to match the expressiveness this sculptor achieved. He’s represented a cruel, self-centered old man and made him seem like a god. The dissipation in his face takes on a hallowed aspect. I wonder if the artist really believed in what he was doing, or if he was just more skilled than any artist has a right to be. We couldn’t match this expressiveness, but absolute realism may be an adequate substitute. Care to nominate anyone for kru?”

  Jorrul left the room and returned with an armload of manuals. He began leafing through them, checking reference after reference. When finally he pushed them aside he seemed amused and at the same time perplexed.

  “There isn’t anything in the regulations to cover it,” he admitted.

  “I didn’t see how there could he,” Farrari said.

  “The instructions about tampering with a religion are explicit enough: don’t. Whether or not what you’re proposing could really be called tampering is moot, but if your substitute portrait approximated the style of art they’re accustomed to, we could consider the switch a mere act of politics. I have five volumes about tampering with technology—they can be summarized with the same word, don’t—but this notion of yours doesn’t technically concern either religion or technology.”

  “Of course not,” Farrari said. “It concerns technography.”

  Jorrul turned again to his manuals and after a few minutes announced, “I can’t find a reference to that. How long would it take you to make a portrait?”

  “A couple of hours.”

  Jorrul gaped at him.

  “I won’t have to do it by hand,” Farrari explained. “I’ll find a teloid of the candidate we want and have it enlarged into a three-dimensional fix and a relief casting made in plastic metal.”

  “Plastic—”

  “It should be possible to mix a plastic that the natives couldn’t tell from their black marble without handling it. They won’t be handling it. We’ll rig the thing with its own power supply so it’ll administer a stiff electric shock to anyone who touches it.” He grinned around a circle of blank faces. “There wouldn’t be any point in going to all this trouble if as soon as the priests notice the switch they can raise the tapestry and do a switch of their own. If the Holy Ancestors are going to speak through us, we have a solemn obligation to leave the impression that they mean what they say. I’m sure Graan could make the casting at base. Your men might even be able to do it here.”

  Jorrul shook his head. “That would be tampering.”

  “No, sir. Reinforcing. If there are any nonbelievers among the priests, they’ll be converted the instant they touch our portrait.”

  Jorrul obviously was not convinced, but he asked, “Whose portrait would you use?”

  “We can ask Heber Clough for suggestions. The royal family is his department.”

  Ned Lindor, the grainery supervisor, said dryly, “Clough isn’t the only person familiar with the royal family. Where did you think he was getting his information? But there isn’t much choice, one member is as bad as the next. If there was an outstanding candidate, I’d say—don’t use him. We wouldn’t want to lose a man who might have some long-term value to us, and anyone we’d choose would have an excellent chance of being murdered.”

  “Murdered?” Farrari exclaimed.

  “Murdered. When you tamper with the succession to a throne, you aren’t playing a child’s game. But as I said, one is as had as the next.”

  “Then we can concentrate on physiognomy,” Farrari said. “It should be someone who’ll be instantly recognized and who looks nothing like the legitimate heir.”

  “There’s a relative of the old kru,” Borgley said. “We’re not sure how he’s related—maybe a cousin, maybe a younger brother. His long nose has been something of a joke all his life. He’s an old man himself, and he’s contributed more than his fair share of evil to this world. No one would mistake his profile, and if he comes to a bad end at this late date we needn’t lose any sleep over it.”

  “Good idea,” Jorrul said. “It’d be a pleasure to see old Hook Nose get his.”

  “You mean—we can do it?” Farrari asked incredulously.

  “Certainly not. It’s an ingenious idea, and one that might be tremendously effective—at the proper time. For example, if there was a revolutionary movement flourishing, something like this could give it enough impetus to make it a success. Using it now wouldn’t accomplish a thing—old Hook Nose isn’t capable of leading a revolution and it wouldn’t change the situation in Scorvif if he did—and we’d destroy the idea’s effectiveness for later use. I wouldn’t consider using it now. It’s too good an idea to waste.”

  VI

  Farrari stood behind a high parapet on the mill’s flat roof and for the first time in daylight looked directly at the land of Scorvif. Score was a smudge on the horizon, the Tower-of-a-Thousand-Eyes a dark line perpendicular to it. He activated the viewer and brought the city leaping toward him. The smudge resolved itself into a vast clutter of buildings that crowded an enormous, truncated hill and on one side spread thinly about its base. The tower, with its carved myriads of all-seeing eyes perpetually on guard, fascinated him. Through a chance gap in the city’s mass of buildings he could even make out a corner of the old kru’s tapestry.

  He recognized many of the buildings, but he had known them only as solitary structures lifted from their surroundings by the magic of the teloid cube. As a group they looked strange to him, and he puzzled for a time over the spectacle of two sharply contrasting, almost conflicting, architectural styles encroaching upon each other.

  He rotated the viewer slowly. The mill was also situated on high ground near the river, and he wondered if at one time the city as well as the ponderous old stone mill had been forts. Between mill and city, and beyond, the country was a vast sweep of wasteland, scarred and eroded, with here and there a few scraggly zrilm bushes standing in line like ancient, enfeebled sentinels. To the north, the horizon was lushly yellow and scarlet, and the viewer resolved it into irregularly-shaped fields marked off by the dark, velvety blue of towering zrilm hedges. The wasteland had once been like that, but the corrosive touch of the blundering rascz had exhausted it, and then the elements had devastated it, and now even the hearty zrilm could not survive there.

  He took another, sweeping look at the devastated wasteland. Much of the country’s most fertile land had been ruined before the rascz grasped the simplest principles of soil management, and they still had no concept of the rudiments of plant genetics.

  The distant, fertile land beyond seemed cool and restful. He rotated the viewer quickly and then with an exclamation brought it to an abrupt stop and back-tracked. At the end of a zrilm-lined lane stood a village. Low huts of woven branches plastered with clay stood in a narrow oval, their rough green surfaces glazed by the sun and here and there reflecting light from jewel-like facets. At the center of the oval was the fire pit, and, nearby, a small pile of quarm logs.

  A deserted ol village, tragic reminder that the rascz devastated not only land, but people: reminder of the coming two thousand years of starvation and the whistle and thud of the zrilm whip with no potential leader in the land possessing a dram of humanitarian instinct.

  Again he had forgotten the olz.

  So intent was he on the crude illage that he did not notice Anan liorgley until the baker spoke to him. “Not much culture to study there,” Borgley observed dryly.

  “What happened to them?” Farrari demanded.


  “What happened to whom?” “The olz.”

  Borgley shrugged. “Nothing happened to them. They’re at work in the fields. You can’t see them because of the hedges. Looks like a good crop this year, which is fortunate. It’s the year of the half crop.”

  “What about the children and the elders? Do all of them work?”

  “All of them,” Borgley said. “A baby old enough to toddle is old enough to pull weeds. The younger ones are carried by their mothers—who, of course, put in the full day’s work. As for the elders—there aren’t any. No ol lives long enough to become an elder.”

  Farrari looked again at the huts. What do they do during the winter?”

  “They stay in their village,” Borgley said. “And rot. I’m taking you to Scorv. They tell me you did not do well as a mill apprentice’s helper.” He chuckled. “Maybe you’ll like the bakery business better—though I’ll warn you that you’ll work harder.”

  Farrari gave the viewer a final spin. “Why do they have a mill out here in the middle of nowhere?”

  “It’s a very old building,” Borgley said. “When it was built it probably stood in the center of a fertile grain-growing area, and they thought flour easier to transport than grain. That’s one theory. Another is that the mills make a lot of noise when running to capacity, and some ancient kru banished them from Scory so he could sleep nights. The specialists at base probably have a dozen more theories, and we’ll never be sure as to which is correct, if any, the fact is that most of the mills in the lilorr are about the same distance from Scory as this one, in various directions, and all of them are in the middle of nowhere.”

  “If your theory is correct, why didn’t they move the mills when the grainfields wore out?”

  “This whole country is wearing out,” Borgley said brusquely. “Sometimes it worries me. Ready to go?”

  The country was wearing out. The road was excellent—wide, solidly constructed of broad, flat stones, sloped and ditched for drainage, but it appeared to be centuries old. The passage of countless wagons had rutted the stone, and that puzzled Farrari because the ruts were much narrower than the wide wheels of the wagons. The puzzle resolved itself when they reached the first washout. There the road dipped into a deeply eroded gully. Dirt had been dumped into it and leveled, but it was crisscrossed with soft ruts and the road made a steep plunge on either side. Rather than properly repair the road, the rascz had widened their wagon wheels so that the loads wouldn’t sink so deeply into the soft dirt and transferred the problem to the powerful muscles of the narinpfz. The narmpfz strained and whimpered and tensed their massive bodies and somehow kept the wagons moving.