The World Menders cs-2

by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.

  Twice troops of the kru’s cavalry passed them, headed for Scorv. Short, colorful capes flapping, bundles of spears strapped to their saddles, they pranced along single file on their grill, graceful, high-stepping horned steeds. Traffic in the opposite direction was not heavy, but it was continuous: wagons headed for the mill or perhaps for a remote grainery, a kru’s messenger keeping his gril at a desperate,, lunging run with high-pitched shouts and veering recklessly around the slower traffic, occasional solitary riders lumbering along on narmpfz—wagoneers, Borgley said, who lived in one of the up-country towns and made their living by building wagons and selling them in Scory with a load of quarm wood.

  The river looped toward them, and as they reached its floodplain they began to encounter tremendous washouts. When possible the road bypassed them, but though the detours now ran over hard ground, in wet weather the heavy wagons would churn them into morasses.

  The country was wearing out.

  In the full heat of midafternoon they approached the city of Scorv. The road merged with another coming in from the west, then with one from the south that within sight of the intersection merged with another from the southwest, then with one from the east that led downstream to a ford that only grilz could negotiate; wagons had to journey far north of the mill to find even a low-water crossing.

  Farrari muttered, “Why don’t you invent a bridge and get rich?” Borgley did not answer. Technology imposed from without…

  The road pointed upward, encircling the hill to reach the city that crowded its broad summit. They turned aside when they reached the cluster of buildings at the foot of the hill, entered a stonewalled enclosure, and came to a stop amid rows of stacked quarm wood and empty flour crocks behind a double-storied, stone building from which emanated the rich, tantalizing odors of baked bread and pastry.

  “Home,” Borgley announced, using the Rasczian word.

  Two apprentices, both young 1PR agents, hurried out to unload the wagon. Farrari offered to help and did not feel offended when they laughingly waved him aside. Borgley led him into the bakery, a long room with a row of stone ovens at one side and huge vats already bulging with rising dough for the night’s baking, and up one of the ramplike stairways to his living quarters. He introduced his wife Nissa, 228, and a few moments later Farrari sat relaxed in front of an open slit in the wall that constituted a Rasczian window and looked down on the master race of Scorvif while sipping a cool, pungent drink and munching a hard, chewy, excessively sweet cake.

  He stared disbelievingly: he had come to think of them as monsters, these rascz, and they were obviously a happy albeit serious people, decent looking, decent behaving, with high regard for family, for work, for an orderly society, humbly worshipful before their kru.

  As cooling shadows of late afternoon enveloped the narrow street, the merchants and craftsmen emerged with their families, the women wound in strips of exquisitely-colored cloth—from those same vivid, long-lasting dyes Farrari had admired on the kru’s tapestry—the men bare-armed with embroidered vests and the short, legless garment Peter Jorrul had worn, the children charming miniature replicas of their parents. They greeted friends with a polite hut obviously affectionate formality. Some began the long climb to the city to greet friends there, and a short time later a few city fami lies arrived to greet friends in this foot-of-the-hill suburb.

  They were not monsters.

  “Where are the olz?” Farrari demanded suddenly.

  Nissa Borgley smiled. She was younger than Rani Holt, slender, quietly attractive, and with a subdued personality that puzzled Farrari until he remembered that these agents, in their adopted environment, actually were natives. Rani Holt, wife of a miller, was a hostess: because of its remoteness the mill also served as an inn, with an endless procession of overnight guests to entertain. She played her role to perfection. Nissa Borgley was the wife of a city tradesman: she would walk with her husband, of an afternoon, and greet friends quietly but affectionately, and in her own home she would be the typical Rasczian housewife and speak when spoken to. She, also, played her role to perfection.

  “I’ve never seen an ol,” she said. “There aren’t any in Scorv—or in any other city or town. You see the olz belong to the kru.”

  Farrari repeated slowly, “The olz belong to the—”

  “So does the land. All of the agriculture and forestry and animal husbandry and mining are royal monopolies. So there are no taxes—the kru derives his income from his own properties.”

  “No wonder the rascz look like a happy people!”

  “Actually, there is one tax,” she went on. “A child tax. There’s an annual tax on each child after the second, and it rises steeply. The realm of Scorvif is circumscribed by mountains, and there is no place for a surplus population. In the remote past some astute kru, or minister, discerned that if the population ever increased beyond the capacity of the land to support it, the rascz would be in deep trouble. Hence the tax. It’s possible to have more than two children without penalty if someone who has less than two will, in effect, sponsor them. It’s an oblique form of adoption. Anan and I have two sons. They are legally ours, but they live with their natural parents who are, of course, our grateful friends. It’s very useful for IPR agents to have natives who are grateful friends. The tax keeps the population stable. Otherwise, the kru’s revenues come from the royal monopolies, and he is immensely wealthy.”

  “No private citizen owns an ol?”

  She shook her head. “Nor any nobleman. Like agriculture and forestry and the rest, the olz are a royal monopoly. Except for those citizens who work in the kru’s service, and those few whose work requires them to travel, I doubt if very many of the rascz see even one ol in an entire lifetime. I’ve lived here for ten years—ten Branoff IV years—and I’ve never seen an ol except in teloids.”

  “I didn’t know anything about that,” Farrari said. “I’ve been studying the wrong things. All this time I’ve been thinking that everyone forgets the olz, and the fact is that no one knows that they exist.” Borgley came in. His wife looked at his face and suddenly burst into laughter. “You have to go back,” she said.

  Borgley nodded. “You, too. And Haral. Peter is calling in everyone who can get away. The coordinator is coming out with a couple of loads of specialists.” He gestured wearily and said to Farrari, “They’ll spend a day and a night telling us everything they want to find out about the old kru’s funeral and the coronation of the new kru. And then we’ll come back and carry on just as we have been, which is the only thing we can do. I’m a baker. I can’t play spy until the next day’s bread and cake is out of the oven and ready to sell. Every day. Otherwise I’m not acting like a baker, and the moment I stop acting like a baker I’d better get out of Scorv—fast.” He hurried away.

  Nissa Borgley got to her feet to follow him. “We’ll leave as soon as it’s dark,” she said. “Gayne will be in charge until we get back. If you want anything, ask him, or Inez.”

  She left, and Farrari turned his attention to the window.

  The rascz. They were a happy, prosperous people, and few of them were aware that their happiness and prosperity were fashioned of ol blood. He wondered if it would have made any difference if they knew.

  The dusk deepened: masters and craftsmen walked their families hack to their homes, where apprentices and helpers were already hanging shutters and lugging out crocks of water to wash the street as soon as the daily walks ended. Quarin oil maps with floating wicks began to flicker feebly in the upper stories, brooms scraped the wet street and sent the water chasing along the gutters, and heavy slab doors slammed.

  Inez Prolynn, 314, brought a food tray and lit a lamp for him. She was a younger model of Nissa Borgley, gracious but subdued, a journeyman baker’s wife who would someday be a highly proper baker’s wife. Farrari had not eaten since morning, but his appetite was not sharpened by the pungent odor of spiced meat. He munched absently on a thin slice of hard bread and watched the street below
slide quietly into darkness.

  Finally one of the apprentices came to close the shutters. Farrari asked, “Did you ever see an ol?”

  “Nope. I’ve wondered why they don’t use them for servants and laborers in the temples and palaces. Maybe the olz can’t do anything but tend crops and cut trees and things he that, but you’d think they could learn. No, I never saw one.”

  “How would I go about talking with the coordinator?” Farrari asked.

  The apprentice stared at him. “You ask permission of your immediate superior, and he passes the request to his superior if he has one, otherwise directly to Peter Jorrul, and Peter asks the coordinator if he’d like to talk with you. Unless someone along the way decides you’re being silly, which is likely.”

  “I haven’t time for that bureaucratic nonsense,” Farrari said. “I want to talk with the coordinator tonight. How do I go about it?”

  “You’re CS,” the apprentice said thoughtfully. “Maybe the regulations don’t apply. I’ll ask Gayne.” He returned a short time later and said, “I guess the regulations don’t apply. Gayne talked with Enis Holt. You met him?” Farrari nodded. “Enis says if you want to talk with the coordinator we’d best let you talk with the coordinator, only he thinks Peter Jorrul will want to listen in. The coordinator is on his way to field team headquarters. Enis will call back when he gets there.”

  “Thank you,” Farrari said. “Do you have anything for me to do?”

  “Do?”

  “To help out. Just because I’m CS doesn’t mean I’m used to sitting around with nothing to do.”

  “There’s plenty to do,” the apprentice said fervently. “Anan and Nissa and Haral will be gone until tomorrow night, at least, and we have to make like a bakery. Come and ask Gayne.”

  VII

  Large, circular, dried leaves of a choking pungency were stirred slowly into boiling water. They gave off a gummy pale green scum that rose to the top in unseemly globules. When a measure of the scum had been skimmed off, combined with half a measure of melted animal fat, and beaten in a grain crock until the entire crock was filled with an iridescent, bubbly froth, the Rasczian baker had an ingredient better than the finest levening agent for bread and cake.

  Unfortunately, his flour was deplorable—coarse, uneven, ineptly ground from a miserable food grain. Despite this, the magic of the froth produced an amazingly light bread.

  “And if we had a decent flour,” Gayne said, “we could make the finest bread in the galaxy. If this world ever qualifies for Federation membership, guess what’ll be the first export?”

  “IPR agents,” Farrari muttered.

  He’d been assigned the job of beating the scum into a froth. He wielded the wood paddle furiously but ineptly; long before the froth neared the top another crock would be ready for his attention with the apprentice who measured out the ingredients standing by.

  The massive fire chambers were deep, rectangular openings, each with its own chimney. The ovens, which looked like elongated flour crocks lying on their sides, were set in the openings on stone supports. The fires of oily quarm wood bathed the cylindrical ovens with heat, and into them were placed the enormous loaves for baking. The dough was arranged on long strips of perforated metal that slid into grooves in the ovens. When the baked loaves were removed they were three meters long and more than a fourth of a meter in diameter.

  From the oven the loaves were taken to a long cutting table where each was carefully aligned with marks indicating a Rasczian unit of measurement, sliced into sections for marketing, and packed into woven baskets. The end pieces were tossed into a bin near the door, and at intervals during the night wagons arrived from various military garrisons situated near Scory and the accumulated loaf ends were weighed out and paid for. Gayne’s bread slicing attained the level of an art: with one graceful stroke he drew the long, heavy knife through the loaf, exerting downward pressure and a slicing motion simultaneously. The apprentices, when they took over the job temporarily, produced clean and accurate cuts, but they had to use a sawing motion to do it.

  Farrari contemplated a career as an IPR baker’s apprentice with horror. These people had time for little more than fulfilling their native roles. They’d joined the exotic IPR Bureau, invested years of their lives in the most exacting training the Bureau could devise, achieved agent status, and their reward was unending drudgery.

  He wondered aloud why IPR hadn’t devised labor-saving machinery for them as it had for the mill: a mixer, for example, to beat the scum into a froth; a bread slicer; a power oven that wouldn’t require constant stoking with quarm wood.

  Gayne shook his head. “We’ve tried it. A beater produces a beautiful froth in an instant—and the bread won’t rise. A mechanical slicer is too perfect—no two slices made by hand are identical, they look different, so we decided not to take the risk. Quarm wood is a royal monopoly, and if we suddenly stopped using it, or began to use less, some high official of the kru would become curious. And a power oven would take just as long to bake the bread. If it didn’t, the bread would be different. No, there isn’t any other way. Besides, there’s a long-standing custom that wagoners calling for bread have to come into the bakery after it and load it themselves. We can’t change the custom, and what they see while they’re in here has got to look like a Rasczian bakery.”

  Farrari flexed an aching arm, set his teeth, and attacked another crock of scum.

  Finally Inez Prolynn came for him, led him to a storage room at the remote corner of the house, through two concealed doors, and into an underground communications room. On the screen were two faces: an imperturbable Coordinator Paul and a scowling Peter Jorrul.

  “Here’s your interview,” Inez said. “If you’d like it to be private—” She turned away.

  “Stay if you like,” Farrari said. “I don’t deal in secrets, I just keep the authorities busy turning down my suggestions.”

  Jorrul’s scowl deepened: the coordinator grinned and said, Well, Farrari, what do you have for me to turn down now?”

  Farrari seated himself in front of the screen. “This morning—or maybe it was yesterday morning—I had an idea about that relief carving on the Life Temple.”

  “Peter told me about it,” the coordinator said. “A very interesting idea it was. Unfortunately—”

  “Now I have another idea. What would happen if we substituted a carving of some olz for the new kru’s portrait?”

  “It wouldn’t work,” Jorrul said. “No one would know which ol the Holy Ancestors were choosing. Even the rascz who work with them can’t tell one ol from another. We can’t, either, except for a few of our agents who live with them.”

  Farrari said patiently, “Not one ol. A group of them. Olz in the abstract. A reminder to the rascz, a permanent reminder, that the olz are still with them. I understand that the general population is only vaguely aware of that—that very few of the rascz have ever seen an ol. It’s time that the Holy Ancestors brought the olz to their attention.”

  Jorrul was staring at him; the coordinator stroked his chin thoughtfully.

  “It’s another interesting idea,” Jorrul said. “Unfortunately—”

  “You suggested that we enlarge a three-dimensional fix and cast it in plastic metal,” the coordinator said. “Graan thinks it could be done, but he has no idea of how long it would take, or how many castings he might have to make before he gets a satisfactory one. I’ll tell him to select a teloid of some olz and have a try at it.”

  “Tell him to use a teloid from a remote village,” Farrari said, “and to touch it up so there’ll be no possibility of identification. Maybe the rascz can’t tell one ol from another, but once an ol gets his portrait on the Life Temple his features will become memorable.”

  “If we were to do this now, we’d spoil the impact the switch might have at a later date when it might be really useful,” Jorrul objected.

  “We’ll consider that,” the coor dinator said. “At the moment we have Farrari’s idea a
nd a couple of critically important if’s: if an acceptable casting can be made, and—since time is running out on us—if it can be made in time, then we have the option of whether or not to use it. Frankly, I have some doubt about the value this notion will have later on. Imaginative as Farrari undoubtedly is, he’s certainly not unique, and we have to remember that there are now several hundred Cultural Survey officers and trainees at work at IPR bases. Sooner or later one of them will come up with an idea similar to this, there’ll be a full review of the situation, and when a review takes place a new rule is never far behind. There wouldn’t be any point in saving Farrari’s idea for a more favorable occasion if by that time we’ll be forbidden to use it.”

  “How can you use it without having it reviewed first?” Farrari asked.

  “We can’t, except when time is a critical factor—as very fortunately it is. The procedure is always the same: I have to file a statement of intent with the sector supervisor, and if he doesn’t reject it out of hand it moves up the chain of command until someone disapproves. In the meantime, since the opportunity would be lost if we didn’t act at once, I can use my own judgment until I receive specific orders. With luck we could have your phony carving on display before we were told that we mustn’t do it.”