Lloyd Biggle Jr.: The World Menders

Backtracking, Farrari took several turnings and was about to give himself up as lost when he abruptly happened onto a main corridor again. Passing through the rotunda a second time, he paused to look at the posted notices.

Some were questions. Some were lists of native words, the strange glyphs followed by a rendition in the common alphabet and a question mark. Some were cryptic comments.

“Yilesc? See me. Prochnow.”

“Every member of a family of olz in the village coordinates 101.7/34.9 has seven fingers on each hand. Brudg.”

“This week’s luncheon menu: forn cakes, narmpf stew, jellied zrilmberries, zrilmberry tea. Dallum.”

“Where did the pink marble in the kru’s summer palace in the narru come from? Wedgor.”

At the top of a long sheet of paper: “List any comparatives you’ve encountered in of and rase languages.” The remainder of the sheet was blank.

“Wanted: tri-bladed dagger, any condition. Kantz.”

“Anyone seen a red lupf growing south of Scorv? Dallum.”

A voice said tremulously, “I was a yilesc.”

Farrari whirled and gaped at the speaker. The young woman—girl, really—was of slight build, with a small, childlike face and large black eyes that fixed gravely upon his face and saw something in a remote dimension. Her small form was clothed in a work smock and trousers, both of them much too large. Farrari wondered if she were a child and the base had no clothing that would fit her.

“That’s very interesting,” he said, looking at the notice again. Her searching eyes disturbed him. “What’s a yilesc?”

She laughed softly. “They don’t know. Not even the yilescz know. And I won’t tell them!” She continued to gaze unblinkingly at his face. “I haven’t seen you. You’re new.”

“I arrived last night,” Farrari said. “I’m from Cultural Survey.”

“You made a statue. And cut yourself.”

“How did you know that?”

She laughed again.

Farrari was frankly looking for an excuse to escape when Ganoff Strunk hurried by. “Liano!” he called. “Did you find the coordinator?”

“Oh,” she said dully. “The coordinator.” She darted away.

“Out for a walk?” Strunk asked Farrari.

He nodded. “What a strange person!”

“Yes. Getting familiar with the base, are you?”

“That was the idea, but I keep losing myself.”

“Come over to the office and I’ll give you a floor plan. The notices? They’re so someone won’t spend weeks tracking down a fact that someone else already knows. The words are mostly posted by the lexicographer. That is, if anyone has a question about a word he goes to see her, and if she can’t answer it the problem is automatically hers.”

“That girl… Liano, is that her name? She said she was a yilesc. Is she IPR?”

Strunk nodded.

“How could she be a yilesc when you don’t know what a yilesc is?”

“We know,” Strunk said. “We’ve had several yilesc field agents. What we don’t know is how the yilescz got to be what they are, or why. Jan Prochnow is our expert in comparative theology, and because the yilesc is a kind of female shaman he’d naturally like to know the how and the why. It only goes to show that knowing the definition of a word sometimes poses more problems than it solves. That notice has been posted for a long time.”

They walked toward Strunk’s office, Strunk talking about various research and study projects and Farrari only half listening. As Strunk handed him the copy of the base floor plan he ventured to put his mystification into words. “This… Liano—”

“Liano Kurne,” Strunk said.

“Is she some kind of seeress, or clairvoyant?”

Strunk had started toward his desk. He turned on Farrari and de manded, “ Why do you ask that?”

“Something she said to me—”

Strunk gripped his arm. “ What did she say?”

“She described something that happened to me a couple of years aso,” Ferrari answered lamely. “I’ve never been much good at cillpitire, and one day in class my chi.el slipped and gave me a nasty cut. She said, ‘You made a statue. And cut yourself.’ There’s no possible way she could have known that, but she did.”

Strunk released Farrari, backed slowly toward his chair, and seated himself with exaggerated deliberation. “I see. That’s very interesting. Peter Jorrul will be glad to hear it. We’ve been worried about Liano. A year ago she and her husband were working as a team down south, and her husband was killed. She’s never recovered.”

“She looks so young.”

“She is young. Her husband was young.” He added defensively, “But that’s when we have to place them, if they’re to survive in a completely alien environment. It’s the young agents who are the most adaptable.”

“Does the IPR Bureau Academy accept children?”

“In special cases, yes.”

Farrari returned to his workroom and began sorting art objects and arranging them on shelves. Some time later he glanced up and saw Liano Kurne watching him from the corridor. She darted away, and though after that he frequently encountered her in the corridors, she never seemed to recognize him.

Farrari studied Branoff IV’s arts and crafts, pondered its rudimentary literature, listened to its music. He created classifications and wrote reports. The staff gave him everything he asked for, some things he would not have dared ask for, and a few things he did not want.

To his astonishment he found himself treated, not merely as an equal, but as an important equal. His entire professional existence had been devoted to routinely polishing the cultural boots of his instructors. Suddenly he was translated into a situation where his casual whim was everyone’s command, where his opinions were energetically sought after, and where, at conferences that touched on cultural matters, his colleagues could be surprised watching him curiously, as though in hope of catching him practicing a parlor trick.

It was all very unsettling, because the base staff obviously was as mystified about the presence of a Cultural Survey trainee as Farrari was to be there. On the infrequent occasions when he managed to wrench himself away from his work, he paced the plastic-lined corridors of the comfortable aerie that the IPR Bureau had bored into the mountaintop, wondering just what it was that he was supposed to be doing.

He made friends. Anyone would have made friends at this base, where the doorless workrooms invited a constant influx of visitors who familiarly looked over one’s shoulder, examined work projects with interest, and asked questions. When he walked through the corridors he was likely to be hailed at any door, asked what he thought of something or other, and invited to share a ration package.

His most constant visitor was old Heber Clough, whose workroom was across the corridor from Farrari’s. An elderly wisp of a man with a mischievous, cherubic face ringed with thinning red hair and the faint red fuzz of a sparse beard, he came stumbling into Farrari’s workroom on that first afternoon, when Farrari was despondently studying a teloid projection and wondering how he should begin.

“Getting organized?” Clough asked.

“Ha! I should start classifying this stuff, but I don’t have a single reference base.” Farrari fed another cube into the projector. “These bas-reliefs are excellent, but I don’t know whether they were produced yesterday, or a thousand years ago.”

“Oh, well,” Clough said. “If that’s all that’s bothering you this one is a carving of the kru, Feyvt, and his family. He was the grand father of the present kru, and here he has”—Clough pointed a stubby finger into the projection and counted—“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.”