Lloyd Biggle Jr. - The World Menders

For the fourteenth time—Farrari was counting them—an ol mouthed the word, speak, and the olz fell prostrate.

Farrari watched from his usual place of concealment. He entered the cave before the olz arrived arid left after they did, and he had explored the enormous room as thoroughly as its gaping chasm permitted and selected his observation post with care. He had witnessed this identical scene from fifteen to forty times on each of six successive nights, and suddenly it occurred to him to ponder—if the olz were indeed pleading with the Dead—what the Dead might answer. He was tempted to speak himself, as an experiment, but he feared that the effect would be somewhat marred if the Dead spoke from the wrong direction.

He waited until the olz departed, and then he lit a torch and made a painstaking examination of the edge of the chasm. At one point tenuous footholds led down to a narrow ledge. Spending a night there would be acutely uncomfortable if not exceedingly dangerous, and he was willing to suffer both in a good cause.

His problem was to think of a good cause.

In his mind he began to sketch out a plan for a new chapter in the IPR Field Manual: RULES TO BE OBSERVED WHEN THE DEAD SPEAK.

Plan message carefully.

Aim at conciseness (lest the Dead appear to be unnaturally longwinded).

Make message portentous (if the Dead stir the dust of silent centuries to discuss the weather, it will seem anticlimatic).

Strive for credibility (as though anyone could know what an ol would consider credible in the way of a message from the Dead).

And what could the Dead possibly say that would in any way alleviate the suffering of the olz? “They might suggest that the afterlife isn’t all that the ol faith implies,” Farrari mused. “Enjoy life while you can; Eternal Contentment is a colossal bore.”

But it was much too late for that. The olz had long since forgotten how to enjoy anything—so much so that the ol language, or what Farrari knew of it, had no word for pleasure.

He climbed the mountain to a point far out of earshot of the village so he could practice making sepulchral sounds, and he quickly satisfied himself that he was in fine voice for forwarding a message from the Dead. But what to say?

Looking out over the valley, he saw the local durrl riding along a lane. His assistants occasionally brought supplies, but he never came near the caretakers’ village himself. Farrari glared after him for a moment and then croaked good-naturedly in Rasczian, “Bring… me… his… head!”

This thought moved him to add one more rule to his list: Make message reinforce belief not contradict it. If the Dead were to preach hatred of the durrlz and demand revenge on them, the olz would be confused and horrified. To conform with the ol religion, the Dead must not order punishment for the durrlz, but a reward.

“And under the ol religion, what is the greatest reward that one can give?” Farrari asked himself.

Death!

The cry, “Speak,” and then silence.

Crouched on his ledge, Farrari spoke one ol word, a generic sound that indicated any of the Rasczian race. Only the quick, shallow breathing of the olz ruffled a silence that seemed interminable. The ceremonies resumed, and at each subsequent invocation of the Dead Farrani patiently inserted his word—and the olz ignored him.

At dawn he crept to his hiding place for a badly needed rest, and then he descended to the village. A few olz were grouped about the fires, others were asleep, and if any thought it worth remarking on that the Dead had at last broken their long silence, they spoke out of Farrari’s hearing. For three more nights he played the role of the Dead; for another three days he prowled the village straining to overhear some reference to it. He heard nothing.

“Very well,” he told himself grimly. “When they arrive at the cave tomorrow night they’ll find a rasc corpse ready for burial and the Dead howling for it, and let’s see if they can ignore that.”

At dusk he set out for the durrl’s headquarters. He’d had a distant view of it from the mountain side—a large dwelling, several smaller ones for assistants and servants, and a ring of stone outbuildings of various sizes encircling them. In the darkness he glided wraithlike among the buildings and came, finally, to one of the smaller dwellings. Looking through a window slit, he saw a touching domestic scene: father and mother at play with two charming children. Shaken, Farrari crept away slowly and fumbled his way back to the zrilm-lined lane.

“Killing a soldier who—given half a chance—will kill me first is one thing,” he muttered. “But killing in the dark just to provide a corpse is murder. And even if I did provide the corpse, what would the olz do with it?”

They would worship it, no matter how loudly the Dead howled. He had been that route before, with Bran. Perhaps the olz wanted to die, perhaps their religion was centered on the worship of death, but the place to study its effects was not among the caretakers, the most extraordinary of all olz. He should do his experimenting at the normal villages. He also should get out of the hilngol and see how the olz lived and behaved elsewhere.

And he could start at once. He had no reason for returning to the caretakers’ village.

A gril brayed. Farrari straightened up thoughtfully. “Riding,” he told himself, “has several obvious advantages over walking, especially when one wants to cover ground quickly. The question is whether a gril sees well enough at night to avoid zrilm hedges, because the results of a highspeed, encounter could range from unpleasant to fatal. There is also the question of what might happen to an ol caught riding a gril in the daytime, and that’s likely to be much more fatal.”

He balanced his urge to be underway against the much better time he could make riding and decided to investigate the problems encountered in gril thievery. He sought the shelter of a zrilm hedge and went to sleep, and shortly before dawn he took up a position behind a gap in the foliage to see what he could learn.

Two of the durrl’s assistants appeared, dim figures in the wasting pre-dawn darkness, and a short time later they were off with narmpfz and a wagon load of the rickety wood stiles. At full dawn the durrl and another assistant rode away on grilz. The first assistants returned, unharnessed the narmpfz, and led them through a narrow gate in the zrilm at the opposite side of the clearing. They reappeared mounted on grilz The chimneys of the various dwellings began to send forth thick outpourings of oily quarm smoke. At midmorning the durrl and all of the assistants returned for a leisurely first meal, their stiles in place, their olz docilely at work, their narmpf rashers crisply toasted, and all right with the world.

Farrari’s thoughts were with the olz left in the fields: the rising sun in a clear sky that foretold a day of relentless heat; the crude, short-handled, stone-tipped tools; the length of a row of tubers as measured with bent knees and back.

He studied the complex of buildings with interest. The largest outbuilding would be a barn for grilz and narmpfz, though the animals obviously remained in their zrilm-en closed pasture in summer. The other outbuildings would be used for various kinds of storage. He thought it odd that he had never seen a teloid of such a scene. Undoubtedly base had some—IPR was much too thorough to overlook anything this prominent—but none of the specialists had been interested enough to point them out to Farrari. That was another oddity, because the durrl and his establishment were unique. He and his assistants were the only bilingual class in Scorvif.