The unseasonably cold, damp weather passed, finally, and one of the durrl’s assistants brought a generous ration of food to each village. Farrari was touched by this humanitarian gesture until Liano explained that every durrl held back a reserve of food for spring, just in case the olz needed it to give them sufficient strength for the spring planting.
“Just in case they need it!” Farrari exclaimed.
“This year they’ll have more to eat than usual,” Liano observed soberly. “There are so few…”
The sick olz soaked up sunshine, ate, became stronger. The crisis had passed, but in the villages afflicted by the disease, only one ol in six survived.
Farrari and Liano left, as usual, without a murmur of farewell. That night a platform met them in the wasteland and whisked them and their narmpf and cart to base for a rest.
Coordinator Paul greeted them, shook their hands warmly, and said, “Well, Farrari, what progress in disseminating culture?”
“Culture?” Farrari echoed bitterly. “We couldn’t even keep them alive!”
The coordinator nodded. “Very well put. Before the olz can concern themselves with things like democracy and culture, they have to achieve survival.”
Later Peter Jorrul came to Farrari’s workroom and greeted him with such evident embarrassment that Farrari opened the conversation by saying resignedly, “I suppose my career as an ol is finished.”
Jorrul nodded. “No one regrets that more than I do. You did well enough to astonish a lot of people, including myself, and for a time we thought we’d found a natural agent in the most unlikely place imaginable. But—” he smiled tiredly—“you have a fatal weakness.”
“I can’t think like an ol.”
“Right. I’m extremely glad that you can’t, since no harm was done. You saved Liano and quite probably yourself, and you enabled us to learn something. In this business one survives by learning—if one learns quickly enough to survive.”
“What did you learn? That CS men can’t think like olz?”
Jorrul said ruefully, “At least we could have been excused for not knowing that. ‘Learned’ isn’t the right word—you brought to our attention something we should have observed years ago: the yilescz vanish at the end of the harvest season and have nothing to do with the olz until spring planting. Why this is so we have no idea. We possibly would have deduced this earlier if Liano had been able to tell us what happened when her husband was killed. We should have figured it out anyway, but we didn’t.”
“That happened at the same time of year?”
Jorrul nodded. “A spring of starvation. A durrl found her and her husband in an ol village looking after the sick and dying, and he used a zrilm whip on them.” He paused. “If it’s any consolation to you, we think Liano’s husband also had difficulty in thinking like an ol. He probably interfered, as you did, when the durrl attacked Liano. Then he submitted to a beating and was killed, and because that satisfied the durrl’s anger somewhat, Liano survived.”
“Do the durrlz want the olz to die?” Farrari demanded.
“The contrary. The only conceivable explanation is that the durrl thought you were killing olz, not keeping them alive. The science of medicine doesn’t exist on this planet, and neither the olz nor the rascz have any concept of the healing process. From spring planting through the fall harvest the durrlz don’t seem to care what the yilescz do, perhaps because not many olz die during those months. But in the spring following a half-crop year the death rate is horrible, and this is one time the durrlz must worry about their olz. They’re harassed individuals with an impossible task to accomplish. They have the responsibility of maintaining the food supply, and they have to do it with unbelievably primitive agricultural methods, exhausted soils and degenerate strains of food plants. When they fail to meet their quotas the penalty is usually catastrophic. So if a durrl, never mind how or why, gets the idea that a yilesc is killing his olz to a point where there won’t be enough left for the spring planting, his reaction will be instantaneous and furious.”
“Which it was,” Farrari agreed. Jorrul nodded. “There are so few yilescz, and they operate so illusively, that we simply never noticed that there is a season when they don’t operate at all.”
“After I’d demonstrated that I couldn’t think like an ol, why did you leave me there?”
“You were needed,” Jorrul said. “We had to keep that sickness from burgeoning into a full-scale epidemic, and to do that we had to make use of everyone who had any competence at all. Any more questions?”
“How is Liano?”
“Excellent. Eager to go back. We owe you more than thanks and congratulations, Farrari. The coordinator has recommended a second promotion for you, which is against regulations because the one he recommended after your Scory adventure hasn’t come through yet. I hope you enjoy the full satisfaction of having done an excellent piece of work for us, because you deserve it. You’ve also acquired experience that few CS men will ever have, and you got what you wanted—a chance to study the olz. Did you find out what you wanted to know?”
“I didn’t know what I wanted to know,” Farrari said gravely. “I still don’t.”
“Dr. Garnt says if you’ll stop by this afternoon he’ll remove your ol profile.”
Farrari rubbed his forehead. “There’s no hurry. For a long time I couldn’t believe it was I, but now I’m used to it. Pehaps it would be a good idea to have an ol—someone who looks like an ol—here at base. The base staff is as much in need of a reminder that olz exist as the rascz are. Maybe I’ll make that my next project.”
Jorrul chuckled. “All right. You can keep your profile and remind the staff that olz exist. Your Scory adventure had another result. The priests have decided to treat your temporary presence in the Life Temple as a supernatural visitation. Your’ relief portrait has been mounted near the kru’s throne in the Life Temple and the palace, and they aren’t going to appoint another kru’s priest. What do you think of that?”
“I won’t know whether it’s a compliment or an insult until I see the carvings. Did you get teloids of them?”
“No, but we’ll try,” Jorrul promised. He must have been in one of his rare good moods, because he departed laughing.
Farrari slept for a day and a night, awoke to find that a stomach conditioned to ol food had no appetite for an IPR breakfast, and slept again. His exhaustion left him, to be immediately replaced by boredom. There had been few changes at base. Heber Clough was grappling with a weighty geneological problem: the old kru’s fourteenth son had inherited the throne; the new kru had only three sons. As Farrari walked past his door Clough waved and wailed after him, “What happens when a kru dies before he has fourteen sons?” Thorald Dallum excitedly beckoned him in to see a plant mutation. To Farrari it looked like a sprig with a couple of withered leaves. Semar Kantz, the military scientist, had completed his studies and been transferred. Jan Prochnow’s faded notice, “Yilesc?” was still posted.