The World Menders cs-2

by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.

  It was easier, because he no longer had the bread to carry. Again he was an object of curiosity, but there were few pedestrians about and no cavalry, and no one hindered him. He descended the hill, passed the suburb, and abruptly came upon the kru’s army, rank upon rank of mounted soldiers drawn up on either side of the highway, silently awaiting battle. He passed through it, expecting a rain of spears at any moment, but the soldiers sat with spears poised and made no movement.

  Spread out on a distant hillside were the olz. They looked like a formidable army until he approached, and then they looked like olz. A messenger, one of the IPR agents, had told them to halt, so they stood indifferently in the hot sun awaiting another order. Farrari worked his way among them to where one of the agents stood. The agent arched an eyebrow inquiringly; Farrari shrugged. Even had they been able to talk he would have had little to say. He had marched an army on Scorv, he had made a miraculous and dramatic reappearance before kru and priests and nobility, and he seemed to have accomplished nothing.

  Now he did not know what to do. He was still reluctant to turn back while there remained a possibility that the ol presence might force the rascz to think, but if he waited too long there was every likelihood that the army would charge and very effectively resolve the stalemate. He did not know what to do. The agent, too, was puzzled. He looked about perplexedly, having just worked it out for himself that nothing was happening and they couldn’t stay there forever.

  They heard the clicking beat of gril hooves. It was a durrl, final proof, Farrari thought gloomily, that his plea had failed. Immediately he brightened, of course they’d send a durrl, who else could talk with the olz?

  The durrl brought his gril to a halt. Farrari resigned himself to an interminable address in two languages because a blast of oratory concerning the kru’s redressment of just grievances would not find enough words in o/ to properly get started. He was also prepared to be amused.

  The durrl leaned forward and said something. Abruptly the olz in the front rank turned, those behind them turned, and before Farrari could quite comprehend what had happened his army had done an about face and was marching away, he along with it. The durrl wheeled and rode toward Scory without a backward glance. Farrari was sorely tempted to turn the olz toward Scory again, but he feared that rasc patience might have a breaking point.

  At dusk the IPR agents halted the march. Farrari left them in charge of his olz and continued south where a platform picked him up as soon as darkness fell. He was back at base before morning. Base already had the news, and Jorrul and the coordinator were seated in one of the conference rooms discussing it. They’d left word for Farrari to join them.

  “The rascz know something we don’t know,” Jorrul announced bluntly.

  “Or understand something we don’t?” Farrari suggested.

  Coordinator Paul nodded. “They’ve had considerable more experience with the olz than we have. You produced the illusion of a revolution, but evidently the rascz know that the olz won’t revolt. When we study the events of the past few weeks, we’d best start by trying to understand that.”

  “You study the events of the past few weeks,” Farrari said. “I’m going to revert to a Cultural Survey Advanced Trainee.”

  Jorrul snorted. “There’s no future in that. If I’ve heard you say it once, I’ve heard it a dozen times: the olz have no culture.”

  Farrari got to his feet and strode to the observation window. The first light of dawn was touching the bleak mountain landscape. The mountains wore encircling mantles of dusky yellow quarm leaves, and there were, even in midsummer, snowcaps on the highest peaks. He wondered if JPR had chosen this particular location for some obscure psychological purpose: certainly the view was no more formidable than IPR’s problem on Branoff IV.

  “The olz have no culture,” Farrari repeated slowly. “If I’ve said it that many times, I should have given some thought to what it meant.”

  “Just what do you mean by that?”

  “The olz have no culture. Neither do the grilz nor the narmpfz.”

  “So? Grilz and narmpfz are animals. You’re expecting animals to produce a culture?”

  “No,” Farrari said. “But people should.”

  XX

  The history section appropriated all the teloid projectors not in use, set up batteries of them wherever space permitted, and operated them continuously with changing shifts of carefully briefed volunteers. As section chief Wally Hargo remarked, IPR had been on Branoff IV long enough to take a lot of teloids.

  “Any progress?” Farrari asked him.

  Hargo shook his head. “There’s no way to speed up a teloid projection, and we wouldn’t if we could. Whatever we’re looking for is going to be hard to find even if it’s there, which it probably won’t be.”

  Peter Jorrul hobbled in using a cane and thundered, “Which one of you miscreants stole my teloid projector?”

  “Hargo,” Farrari said. “But you can use it any time you like if you don’t mind looking at his teloids.”

  “It isn’t enough that this place is infested with super-specialists,” Jorrul grumbled. “You two have to run a super-teloid production.”

  “You’re looking fine,” Farrari told him. “All you needed was a few weeks away from base.”

  “Away from the food at base. I can’t let myself be seen, no rasc walks with a cane, but at least at my headquarters I can eat. What are you two looking for?”

  “Insurrections,” Farrari said. “In the plural? In Scorvif?” Farrari nodded.

  “No wonder you need so many projectors. There haven’t been any.”

  “But there have, only the records aren’t easy to come by because they aren’t the sort of thing the rulers of Scorvif would want commemorated. Others might get the same idea. We don’t expect to find relief carvings, for example, depicting the glorious victory of the kru Vilif over the crass insurrectionists.”

  “You don’t expect to find it, but you’re looking for it anyway?”

  “We’re looking for something much more subtle, but we don’t expect to find that, either.”

  “What makes you so certain that whatever it is you don’t expect to find is there?”

  “We’re certain that there have been insurrections,” Hargo said. “Take any absolute monarchy and mix in a nobility with no responsibilities, a powerful priesthood, a first-class army, and a closed order of civil servants, and you have four potential areas in which insurrection can develop. At intervals that combination would have to produce an uprising.”

  “So why didn’t anyone notice the possibility before?”

  “Until Farrari tried it himself, there was no evidence that it’d ever happened. Now we know it has, because of the way the rascz reacted.”

  Jorrul turned to Farrari. “The way they reacted to the olz?”

  “Yes. Anyone plotting revolution in this land would be bound to look longingly at the olz—they’re such an obvious weapon, so easily available, so numerous, so willing to do what a rasc tells them, any rasc. Once such an uprising started, every durrl in the area would have to be eliminated immediately because he and his establishment would pose a threat to the control of the olz. A word from a durrl and the olz would turn in their tracks and go home. The fact that the durrlz and everyone connected with them ran at the first hint of an ol uprising could only mean that this has happened often enough for the durrlz to develop an instinctive reaction to it. If they don’t run, they get their throats cut. And, of course, it isn’t the olz they’re running from, it’s the rascz responsible for the uprising. The same applies to the conduct of the army, which ranged all about and through the olz but made no move at all to attack them or turn them back. They know their olz, and they know the olz wouldn’t march on Scory unless someone was telling them to. That was why they ignored the olz but immediately attacked the two assistant durrlz. They were looking for the treacherous rascz who were giving the orders only the rascz.”

  “They’re still looking for
them,” Jorrul said.

  “Of course. The reason they let the olz advance all the way to Scory was to draw their rasc leaders into a trap. When they decided that the trap had failed they simply sent a durrl to speak the word that would send the olz home. They know that no one would be foolish enough to march the olz on Scory without five divisions of rebellious rasc troops to back them up, and it’s those troops that they’re still looking for.”

  “I see. And now that Hargo knows that rasc history is riddled with insurrections, he has to go through all the records again to see if there’s evidence that he overlooked when he thought there hadn’t been any.”

  Hargo nodded unhappily. “Of course we don’t expect to find anything.”

  “Delighted that whatever it is you don’t expect to find isn’t being found with my projector,” Jorrul said dryly. “How’s Liano?”

  “Still normal,” Farrari said. “And very happy. Hargo, you have another distinguished visitor.”

  Coordinator Paul scowled at them from the archway. “Farrari! The intercom has been blasting your name intermittently for the past half hour.”

  “Sorry, sir. Hargo has it turned off in here because it blasts all the time and he’s trying to get some work done.”

  “Hello, Peter,” the coordinator said to Jorrul. “Come and see me when you have time—if you can find me, I’ve lost my office. If you aren’t too busy, Farrari, the sector supervisor would like to speak with you. That’s the way he put it—’If Farrari isn’t too busy, I’d like to speak with him.’ ”

  “How busy would I have to be to be too busy to see a sector supervisor?” Farrari wanted to know.

  As they threaded their way through the crowded corridor, the coordinator muttered, “In twenty-eight years in the service, I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  Farrari believed him. The regular staff resented the massive invasion by super-specialists, everyone was short-tempered because of the overcrowding, the mortality rate in sacred cows had been frightful, and several arguments had degenerated into physical combat. Earlier that day Farrari had heard a graying first-grade biologist call a balding zero-grade chemist a stupid fool, and the chemist responded by throwing a centrifuge, which fortunately missed. The only remarkable thing about it, on a day when a sector supervisor was using a world coordinator to run errands for him, was the mildness of the language.

  The coordinator’s office resembled a cramped military command post, and Sector Supervisor Ware looked as though he would be much more comfortable commanding an army. He pointed a finger at Farrari.

  “So you’re the one who’s responsible for this.”

  “No, sir,” Farrari said firmly.

  Ware’s glare included Coordinator Paul. “You aren’t the one? I told your coordinator—”

  “I’m the one,” Farrari said, “and I’m not responsible. I didn’t create the olz.”

  Ware turned, said icily, “Will you stop that for a moment?” to an assistant who was coaxing data from the coordinator’s stuttering desk computer, and scowled a staff conference into silence.

  “No,” he agreed. “You didn’t create the olz, and it’s beginning to look very much as if the rascz did, by centuries of what amounted to controlled breeding. How did you happen onto this notion that the olz are animals?”

  “Are they?” Farrari asked. “Every place I go I find five people arguing about it.”

  Ware shrugged. “Might be animals, then.”

  “Looking back, I can find all kinds of reasons. Olz never commit suicide; animals don’t commit suicide. The olz had no reaction at all when I arranged to have their dead speak to them; animals likewise wouldn’t comprehend a message from the dead. Certain vital words are missing from what has been alleged to be the ol language—and so on. Looking back I can see that, but I won’t pretend I saw any of it at the time. All I saw was that the olz have no culture.”

  Ware said coldly, “If you’ll pardon the expression—so what? I’d like some data. Are you prepared to prove that animals never have what you consider culture and that humans always have it?”

  “The Cultural Survey Reference Library on this world consists of the fifth-year textbooks I was able to bring with me.”

  “Why didn’t you ask your headquarters to research the question?”

  “My ‘headquarters’ are here,” Farrari said. “If you’re referring to the Cultural Survey, you have the authority to ask—I don’t—but if you ask don’t expect an answer. The job of the Cultural Survey is to study human culture, so it doesn’t go about looking for animal cultures, or even for humans who have no culture.”

  “I see.”

  “The conduct of your headquarters specialists isn’t one that invites cooperation from other governmental departments anyway. Yesterday one of them wanted to know how I could be so certain that the sounds the olz make aren’t a language. I asked him to define ‘language’ and he tried to hit me.”

  Ware smiled. “An expert is understandably embarrassed when he finds that a ‘language’ he’s been studying for years isn’t one. These olz seem to have a stable, repetitive existence and their sounds of communication are always made the same way, under the same circumstances, with always the same result, and to further complicate this they have more sounds than any animal has ever been known to use. The specialists naturally maintain that the olz do so have a language, or they would have noticed that the language they were studying isn’t one.”

  “Perhaps so,” Farrari said, “but right now a bulletin on syntax in the ol language makes rather droll reading. Either the olz are extremely intelligent animals, or they’re rather stupid humans. It isn’t my province to decide which. I merely raised the question.”

  “You certainly did.”

  “And just because I raised the question, these super-specialists seem to think I have some kind of obligation to answer it. I have a few questions of my own that need answers more urgently, and they won’t let me work.”

  “What sort of questions?”

  “For one, I wondered how the olz managed to survive, considering the treatment of them as shown in IPR records for this planet. There are hundreds of teloids showing durrlz beating olz to death and soldiers using olz for target practice, and so on, and if such scenes are as common as the teloids indicate, the olz should have become extinct long ago. Then it occurred to me that in all of my experience with the olz and as an ol, I never saw an ol mistreated. Not once. So the question is whether my experience was untypical or the records lie.”

  “It deserves an answer. Have you found one?”

  “Not one that I’d certify, but I think the explanation is that a durrl beating an ol to death makes a much more interesting teloid than a cube of an ol methodically cultivating tubers. Your agents don’t care to waste teloid cubes on scenes that can be had by the thousands any time anyone wants to point a camera. So they record the unusual, and in any society there’ll always be a few persons who are sadistic enough to gain pleasure from mistreating—”

  “Animals? Or people?”

  “Either, sir. And even a kind people may find it necessary to put their animals on a drastically reduced diet during winter.”

  “What you’re saying, young man, is that IPR records of any world may present a distorted picture of that world.”

  “I’d say they’re very likely to present a distorted picture, sir.”

  “Headquarters won’t like that suggestion, but I agree that it should be looked into. What else?”

  Two of the super-specialists burst into the room, one calling, “Farrari? Is Farrari in here?”

  Farrari turned.

  “Do the olz eat meat?” the specialist demanded.

  “Never,” Farrari said.

  “There!” the other specialist said smugly. “Clearly a case of arrested evolution. Hunting and meat-eating develop the brain, the olz never hunted, so their cortices—”

  “You can’t know that until we obtain specimens for dissection. The question is
whether they don’t eat meat because they won’t, or because they can’t, or because they don’t have meat to eat.”

  Farrari said politely, “I doubt that the present diet of the olz is much help to either of you. They eat what the rascz give them to eat. Before the rascz came they may have eaten nothing but meat.”

  “Not with those teeth!” the first specialist snapped.

  “There’s no incompatibility between ol type teeth and an omnivorous diet,” the other said. “Look at your own teeth.”

  “I do, frequently, and I fail to see—”

  The sector supervisor said mildly, “Gentlemen—” They left, and their argument faded away down the corridor.

  “You were mentioning other questions,” Ware said to Farrari.

  “There are a number of them concerning the relationship of the rascz and the olz. The history section is working on them.”

  “The cave carvings?”

  “Those and other things. There are some baffling inconsistencies. For example, when I led an ol uprising, the rascz paid no attention to the olz. When Bran, in the guise of an ol, assassinated a few durrlz, the army turned out, slaughtered whole villages of olz, and burned their huts. Dr. Grant thinks he has the answer to that—one of those strange Branoff IV viruses causes a peculiar type of madness in laboratory animals. The most timid grass eater will run amok and attack its predators, and its bite or scratch becomes virulently infectious. Garnt thinks that on rare occasions olz acquire the disease, and that the rascz have somehow learned that when this happens the only solution is to exterminate those already exposed and burn the huts they’ve lived in. In other words, the rascz knew that there was only one circumstance under which an ol would attack a rasc: When Bran murdered those durrlz they immediately concluded that the madness had struck again, and as a public health measure they reluctantly took the action they thought urgently necessary.”