Lloyd Biggle Jr. - The World Menders

“I know she’s clairvoyant. When I first arrived—”

“I remember the incident. Will you help us? What I’m asking you to do is forget your theories, forget Cultural Survey, and work like the devil to acquire knowledge and skills that you’ll never have the slightest use for. To help Liano. Will you do it?”

Farrari nodded.

The coordinator gripped his arm and smiled at him. “You’re about to learn everything IPR has discovered about a kewl, who is the servant—slave, really—of a yilesc. It’ll be much more than you’ll probably want to know. The knowledge won’t do you any harm, and in some roundabout way it might even be useful to you. You’ll have to do your damndest, and work as though your life depended on it, because anything less than that might do Liano more harm than good. She’s had tragedy enough in her young life. Don’t let her down.”

“Do you mean that I can’t go into the field even if I do a good job?”

“That’s exactly what I mean. You aren’t training for the field. You’re helping a gifted girl regain her sanity. Your superior won’t be Jorrul, or anyone connected with the field team. It’ll be Dr. Garnt.” He paused. “Liano is a very special person. I wonder how she happened to become interested in you.” Farrari blushed, but the coordinator was soberly contemplating the far wall. “It might even be worth the risk if it would help Liano,” he said. He turned to Farrari again.

“First we’ll see how the indoctrination goes. And then—if Dr. Garnt feels that going into the field with you would help Liano—”

“And if Peter Jorrul approves,” Farrari added.

“If the doctor says it would help Liano, Jorrul isn’t going to stop you. He’ll ask you to do it. And when Jorrul asks someone to do something, it’s an order.”

It was the year of the half crop, the year of hunger.

And the spring of starvation.

The disklike hooves of the great narmpf made explosive smacks as they were wrenched from the sticky green clay. The slanting rain struck the ground with a mysterious, drumming sound. Farrari, floundering along beside the cart, head bent, naked shoulders hunched against the cutting wind, could not remember the last time he’d been warm.

Liano sat crosslegged in the bed of the cart, gazing hypnotically at fluttering fingers that wove the rain into soundless incantations. Her tattered, yellowing robes bore the faded red smudges of occult symbols and oily traces of the heavy, penetrating smoke of night fires. The rain had washed the smear of quarm ash from her face and plastered the looping mass of her hair tightly against her head. Each morning the chill, drenching rains performed this miracle of rebirth and transformed her into a girl-woman not remotely unlike the Liano Kurne whom Farrari had known at base; yet this Liano was more of a stranger to him than the distant, ash-smeared seeress to whom he slavishly ministered around the nightfires.

Her eyes were bright and searching, her color exquisite, her manner calm and confident. He could not resist sending a long, admiring glance in her direction, for she was lovely.

She met his eyes. Her fingers continued to flutter; her frowning lips formed an admonition.

Stay in character.

Obediently he turned his eyes to the ground and concentrated on shaking globs of sticky clay from his bare feet. Liano raised her voice in a tremulous, high-pitched chant.

Stay in character. Both of their lives depended on it.

Liano trained him. The coordinator looked in briefly from time to time; Peter Jorrul, who was seldom at base, came when he could and stayed much longer. Once he observed them for an entire day, but he seemed to have little interest in Farrari’s progress. He watched Liano.

At first she faltered. Her moods were kaleidoscopic—from the stern taskmaster, the tireless perfectionist, she underwent abrupt and bewildering metamorphoses, becoming in an instant the exuberant child pleased and enthused with everything he did, or the enigmatic seeress whose chilling smile made him cringe. She could lapse for hours into a starkly staring, comatose state in which her face became alarmingly pale, her muscles twitched spasmodically, and her dark eyes gazed fixedly, unblinkingly at the nothingness of some remote dimension or—and this was the most disturbing—at Farrari. He wondered if she were divining his future and not liking what she found there.

Days passed before he progressed beyond the first lesson. With body slouched, knees slightly bent, feet pointed outward, every step a slow, deliberative action, he circled the room attempting to emulate the walk of an ol and puzzling as to how he should react to her swiftly changing moods. One moment she would be coaching him patiently; then would come an abrupt silence, and when, with aching muscles, Farrari turned to her after a tenth or thirtieth circuit of the room to learn if he was finally doing it right he would find her staring mindlessly. He asked Dr. Garnt what could be done at such times, and the doctor answered wearily, “Nothing. Just pretend it doesn’t happen—if you can.”

The ol language confounded Farrari. At first he thought it one of Liano’s childish pranks; this conglomeration of grunts, chirps, clicks, moans and hisses a language? He decided that the olz were the most primitive people he had ever heard of, with less power of communication than many intelligent animals.

As he learned, he became less certain. To the olz , a few sounds could mean a great deal, and the many pitches upon which those crude articulations could be, uttered were fraught with significance. Pitch variation could, in bewildering fact, make of a single grunt a vast vocabulary. He sought out the base’s philologist and discovered that worthy individual to be as mystified by the ol language as Farrari was. “If you stumble onto any answers,” the philologist said cheerfully, “let me know.”

For weeks Farrari was occupied in learning to move and talk like an ol, and when finally he achieved a measure of proficiency he found to his dismay that he also had to learn to live like one and, ultimately, to think like one—or at least to behave as though he thought like one. The scene of his training shifted to an isolated, inaccessible valley, and there he and Liano lived for days. Farrari learned to manage an ugly narmpf, and though he came to admire its enormous, powerful body, he could foster very little affection for the slobbering beast. Its tiny head surrounded a large, toothless mouth that was lined with a hornlike material. Incongruously, it ate only zrilm leaves, and Farrari’s first attempt to gather the poisonous, barb-protected leaves left him with puffed and bleeding hands. They treked from one end of the valley to the other, Liano riding in the cart and Farrari slouching beside it, turning the narmpf as she directed and hunching forward each time she reprimanded him for walking upright.

At night, while Liano submerged herself in the incantations she was struggling to recall, Farrari built two ol huts for them, of woven branches plastered with clay, kindled an ol fire by jerking a length of hemp back and forth in a tightly-held sleeve of bark, shaped a crude pot of clay, and cooked an ol meal: a boiled tuber with a handful of grain that puffed enormously in the boiling water and then seemed to shrink disgustingly the instant it reached the stomach. He lost weight rapidly and was always hungry, but that was part of his training: he was far too healthy-looking to pass as an ol.

In the darkness, while Liano sat staring at the fire, her face heat-flushed beneath its smear of ash, her hands performing a mysterious ritual for an imaginary ol audience, her dark, constricted irises opening onto depths no medical science could plumb, Farrari crept away to the cart and made his daily report on a concealed transmitter.