Lloyd Biggle Jr. - The World Menders

It was day, and he lay in the shadow of a zrilm hedge. Insects had found his clotted wounds, and their furious buzzing throbbed thunderously. He willed himself to brush them away, but his hand did not move. He was alive, and he had dreamed the night sky and the singing, but he could not remember how he came there.

It was night. Again he was carried but now the haze had swallowed the stars. Strangely enough, he could hear clearly. The singing at which had marveled sounded loud and close at hand, and he discovered it to be the unsyllabic, unintelligible grunts of olz at work. He had a sensation of falling until he realized that his head was lower than his feet. On and on he was carried, down a down, louder and louder sound the grunts of the laboring olz as every sound echoed and magnified and suddenly light bloomed to flash and sparkle above him.

He was in a cave, and tiny stalactites formed a lacy fairy mist on irregular ceiling. Then the ceiling veered beyond reach of the flickering torches and a blast of cold struck him.

Lowered to the ground, he rolled helplessly down a slight incline and came to rest on his side, and with a shuddering finality he knew that he was dead. Directly before him rose a vast pile of the pathetic, inert bodies of olz, and even as he was comprehending what it was hands lifted him and placed him upon it. He was one with the dead olz, and the living olz had brought him here for burial.

He was alone with the dead. Water, dripping from somewhere far above, sounded random drum taps on the piled bodies. The flush of fever had faded. He felt cold, drained of life, and his only thought was that eternity, in such a place, would be very dull indeed.

He slept, and when he awoke he found himself able to turn his head slightly, wiggle a finger, lift a hand a centimeter or two. He was alive, but paralyzed by weakness, and the olz had interred him with their dead.

The olz returned. Farrari watched the flickering shadows thrown by their torches and listened to the padding of their bare feet. Their shuffling footsteps receded into the depths of the cave, returned, encircled the mounds of dead. Abruptly a voice was raised in a strange, rhythmic chant of ol speech sounds intertwined with guttural nonsense. The chant performed an endless dialogue with its own echoes, the footsteps receded and returned, and finally Farrari became aware that there was a pattern, a cycle to what the olz were doing. From a whispered beginning the chant crescendoed to a shout followed by abrupt, motionless silence. This was repeated several times, the procession receded into the distance and returned, and a new cycle began.

Hands removed a body from the pile upon which Farrari lay. He tilted and began to roll, and the hands eased him to the ground almost as gently, he thought, as though he’d been alive. With an exhausting effort he managed to turn his head, and he could now witness the dancing, chanted death rites of the olz.

They gathered around the body, and a priest in fluttering robes performed a contorted, leaping dance. The priest—priestess, Farrari decided, or young priest—began the whispered chant, his dance became wilder, his voice louder, and he leaped through the flaming torches and returned again and again to the dead ol whom the living encircled, embracing the fire of life in a dance of death, and the chant took on melody and lilt and began its remorseless crescendo. Then four olz sprang forward, seized the dead ol, and flung him into the air.

The chant ceased abruptly; the body disappeared. Although Farrari could not see it, he surmised that there was a chasm or crevass, a bottomless abyss, so deep that bodies vanished into it soundlessly, and here the olz disposed of their dead.

The specialists at base would have been fascinated, but this priceless discovery seemed likely to die with its discoverer. The olz padded back from the depths of the cave, and the next body they took was Farrari’s.

He lay on his back at the center of the circle of mourners. The priestess began her dance, began the chilling, whispered preface to her chanted lament. The ceiling arched far above the shallow circles of light thrown off by the torches, and Farrari, looking upward, could see nothing at all. Occasionally the priestess brushed past him; once she fluttered her hands before his staring eyes. Her chant became louder, her dance more agitated. Suddenly she appeared above him, her weirdly dilated eyes fixed on his face, her features contorted, her lips shaping shrieking incantations, her face—

He screamed, “Liano!” but the cry, if he forced one past his parched lips, was drowned in her chant. Her voice reached its shrill climax, and the olz leaped forward to seize him.

He had strength for one feeble effort. He moved his hands; his head lolled to one side and then straightened.

It was enough: the dead had come to life in the sanctuary of death. The chant stopped abruptly, the four olz backed slowly away, and Liano halted in midstride. Shocked out of her trance, she came closer and suddenly recognized him.

She screamed.

The olz fled, Liano with them, and Farrari was alone with the dead and the sputtering torches.

He was carried again. Remembering the abyss of the dead he attempted to struggle and his weakened muscles made no response. He thought the direction was upward, but he could not be certain until they emerged under a graying night sky. The olz carried him a short distance to another cave and gently placed him on a pile of straw.

They patiently fed him water and gruel, a drop or a grain at a time, and Liano bathed his wounds and dressed them with rags of coarse ol cloth. There followed an agonizing hiatus during which his fever returned and his mind wandered, and he called repeatedly for Liano and she did not respond.

Then she was with him again, and the unlighted cave seemed less dark when he knew that she was close by. She replaced his coarse bandages with real ones, applied medicine to his wounds, and gave him capsules to swallow, and he dimly perceived that she had visited one of the IPR supply caches. His fever broke, but he remained pathetically weak. He lay on the straw in the dark cave, listless except when they attempted to move him outside. This he resisted fiercely. In the darkness he had formed an inexplicable fear of daylight. Liano sat by his side for hours at a time trying to coax him to eat.

Slowly his strength returned. He became aware that several olz were in constant attendance on Liano, and he meant to ask her how a yilesc could have so many kewlz but forgot; and then when he remembered he had deduced the answer himself: there was, had to be, a supreme yilesc, or several of them if there were several burial caves where the olz disposed of their dead. IPR’s synthetic yilescz would not be aware of them, but Liano’s clairvoyancy had penetrated to that knowledge and beyond. She had become a supreme yilesc.

Finally Farrari consented to being moved outside, and Liano fed him IPR rations and he began to recover his strength rapidly. He missed Bran—missed having someone to talk with. The olz did what he asked and otherwise cautiously kept their distance from the ol who had returned from the dead—and it was anyway impossible to converse in ol, a language that even simple communication sometimes taxed to the utmost. Liano conscientiously dressed his wounds and fed him but hardly exchanged a word with him.

He dreamed of a carefree world where they could run hand in hand, laughing, through verdant mountain meadows. He had never seen her laugh; he had never dared to touch her hand. He remained the lowly kewl, and she was elevated to the loftiest of yilescz.