Lloyd Biggle Jr. - The World Menders

“I don’t know,” Bran said soberly.

“We can’t run off and leave them.”

“No. We’ll have to stay and see them through.”

“Shall we send for the durrl’s assistants?” Farrari asked.

“I think we’d best let the olz handle it now.”

The olz drew nearer, their eyes on the durrl. A woman raised a sobbing cry, another joined her, and another, and their wails became a choked chorus of weird laments. An ol wandered off aimlessly and returned with a large rock. He flung it to the ground in the open space near the fire pit. Others brought more rocks. A hut was torn apart and its sticks and chunks of hard Clay added to the pile. Finally the durrl’s body was gently carried there and propped into a sitting position.

“An altar,” Farrari muttered. Bran said nothing.

The olz prostrated themselves before the dead durrl, lying motionless with their faces in the dust. They remained there, Bran and Farrari with them, while the sun rose high in the sky and the temperature became stifling. It was nearly midday when one of the durrl’s assistants came lloking for him and found the strange taoleau: the durrl dead and the entire village performing obeisance to his body.

He jerked an ol to his feet and angrily shouted a question. The ol grunted an answer: gril fell, rider fell. The gril still stood nearby, its coat clotted with blood and dust. The assistant examined it, examined the durrl, and asked no more questions.

He returned with another assistant and removed the durrl’s body in a wagon. The olz remained prostrate. Night came, but they did not light a fire. They remained there through the night and all of the next day, raising sporadic laments, and when night came again they finally stirred themselves—and moved. They divided up their scant stores and scattered to neighboring villages. Bran and Farrari waited another day, but none of the olz returned.

That night they returned to the platform and flew back to Bran’s valley.

“So much for their self-respect,” Farrari remarked bitterly.

Bran was merely incredulous. “They worshiped him!” he blurted. Farrari nodded. “I knew it wouldn’t be simple, but I never expected anything like this. How do you organize a revolt against the gods?”

As soon as Farrari awoke he crossed the valley for another look at the ol carvings, and the mute figures displayed there were as bafflingly uncommunicative as before. It seemed to Farrari that every discovery concerning the olz merely intensified their enigma. Evidently the rascz had followed the olz in making the Tower-of-a-Thousand-Eyes the center of their religion. Was it only the tower that they adopted? No amount of pondering enabled Far-rani to comprehend a turn of events by which the conquerors took the religion of the conquered and the conquered made gods of the conquerors.

Bran was still in bed when Farrari returned—wide awake, but lying motionless, muffled in robes, a dark, brooding expression on his scarred face. He answered surlily when Farrari spoke to him. The ol actions that perplexed Farrari had crushed Bran.

Finally he bestirred himself and slouched down to the stream, where he scooped a handful of water and in the same motion tilted back his head and tossed the water into his mouth. Then he pivoted slowly and slouched back to the cave.

Farrari had never been able to drink ol fashion without splashing his face or losing most of the water. He had to drink in secret, because any ol, even a child, could perform that exacting operation with precision. Bran had not wasted a drop except what he absently shook from his hand afterward.

Bran was the complete ol. The things Farrari, by dint of intense concentration and effort, did half well and hoped that no one would notice, Bran did instinctively and perfectly. Years of playing the part to its minutest detail had made the role of ol more natural to him than his own identity. Bran was…

He was too perfect. Farrari had observed the olz far more intently than they ever observed each other, and he also had observed IPR agents acting as olz, and suddenly it seemed to him that there were differences. The experienced IPR agent aimed at anonymity, at portraying the average ol, because he could not risk the slightest irregularity that might call attention to himself. He acted as most olz would have acted in any given circumstance.

But there was no such thing as an average ol. All were individuals, all had idiosyncrasies. The ol who was average in everything stood out as distinctively as if he’d been radically eccentric. It seemed odd that the IPR Bureau had never perceived this, and odder that the olz had not detected the synthetically average olz that IPR sent among them. Or had they?

Bran seated himself on a slab of rock, ripped open a rations package, and began chomping on biscuits while directing a blank ol stare across the valley. Farrari sat down beside him.

“What is the ol religion?” he asked.

“You saw it,” Bran growled. “They worship their durrlz.”

“It can’t be that simple. What’s the background of myth, or superstition, that made them accept their conquerors as gods?”

Bran shook his head. “That stuff is for the specialists at base.”

“What do the yilescz have to do with it?”

Bran shrugged and shook his head again.

In Farrari’s training religion had not been mentioned. In all of his field experience he had encountered nothing that remotely suggested it, but it did not seem possible that an intelligent race could be so devoid of religious thought, traditions, practices or superstitions. “The question is,” Farrari mused, “haven’t the olz got any, or are they just extraordinarily successful in keeping it a secret?”

“If they had any, I would have found out about it,” Bran growled. “You can’t live with a people for years, be one of them for years, without knowing whether they have religion.”

“Did you know that they worshiped their durrlz?”

“No…”

“The specialists at base don’t know it, which means that no other agent knows it. What do the olz do with their dead?”

“Nothing special. They have a burial cave if they can find one. Otherwise I suppose they dig graves, or cremate them.”

“Is there a ceremony?”

“I dunno. I helped carry a lot of dead to burial caves, but I never hung around to find out if there was a ceremony.”

“Why not?” Farrari demanded. “The other olz from my village didn’t wait, so I didn’t wait.”

He lurched to his feet and slouched away, still munching biscuits. Farrari went back across the valley for another look at the carvings.

He could think of no explanation of the Tower-of-a-Thousand-Eyes except as a religious edifice. The ancient olz must have possessed a highly evolved religion, with a priesthood, dogma and elaborate public ceremonies. What had happened to it?

In the days that followed he repeatedly questioned Bran, but Bran did not know and refused to speculate. Farrari wanted to make plans, to try other experiments. Bran responded with a tirade against the olz, and morosely slouched away, and Farrari, shaken by this unexpected attack, left off his attempts to understand the olz until he could better understand Bran.

Obviously Bran scorned the olz, but he hated the rascz, and that hatred had festered and swollen from the moment years before when he dragged his bloody body away to die. For years he had savored the revenge that would come when the olz turned on their masters. The savoring, the anticipation, were almost enough to satisfy him.