Where life at base had once been irritatingly placid, Farrari now found it utterly stagnant. He attempted to concentrate on the teloids of the interior of the Life Temple, and several times a day he administered a vicious kick to his teloid projector.
When next he saw Liano, he asked her to marry him. She gave him a shy, startled look, edged away fearsomely, and blurted, “Oh, no!”
And fled.
A few days later he heard that she’d returned to the field.
With another kewl.
She had loved him, he thought, from the depths of her sickness, and his love for her had grown steadily; but as she became well, had her love also undergone a cure?
If it had, Farrari blamed the roles they had enacted. They played their parts only too well—she the remote seeress, he the groveling slave. In all the countless hours they had been alone together in the field, he had never emboldened himself to so much as touch her hand. A kewl would not dare to touch the hand of his yilesc.
A yilesc would not—could not—marry a kewl. The work that should have united them had separated them irreconcilably.
He attempted to submerge himself in work, and he began to summarize his impressions of the olz and to use them to test various theories, his own and those of other specialists; but his impressions were discouragingly sketchy and none of the of theories seemed to have any connection with the sick of in a filthy hut, or the pile of snow-covered dead outside.
On Peter Jorrul’s next visit to base, Farrari sought him out and said, “The olz have very little communication between villages. Have any local differences developed?”
“What sort of differences?” Jorrul asked.
“Dialects, customs…”
Jorrul shook his head.
“The coordinator once told me that it would take years for an idea to spread from one end of the country to the other among the olz.”
“Assuming that the olz ever have an idea that they’d want to spread, that would probably be true. I doubt that they do.”
“In that case, why haven’t local differences evolved?”
“I don’t know.” He strode to the wall and scowled at a map of Scorvif. Scattered markers designated IPR field agents. Liano was working in the yomaf, the most remote finger valley. The markers for the twenty of agents looked very lonely indeed. “The question,” Jorrul said, “is whether our agents are placed where they would encounter differences if there are any. We need more people south of Scary.”
“That isn’t the question at all,” Farrari said. “The question is whether any of these agents have enough knowledge of the whole country to recognize a local difference if they were to see one. If you keep them pretty much in one location…”
“I see what you mean,” Jorrul said. “We’ll think about it. Are you looking for something in particular?”
Farrari shook his head. He had only an unfocused realization that something was very wrong with IPR policy, that his work was crippled by a slavish adherence to regulations that were conceived with no thought of the needs of Branoff IV. He had no idea what should be done about it, but he did know that his days in the sterile confines of the base were numbered. He had tasted life, the life of the olz, and dedicated himself to doing something about it. If he could not return to the field, he thought he should ask for a transfer.
Days passed.
Peter Jorrul came to his workroom, seated himself, and announced gloomily, “Liano has disappeared.”
Farrari was startled to find that he was not surprised. He said, “What happened?”
Jorrul gestured forlornly. “She must have run off. The agent acting as her kewl saw her to her hut and turned in himself. In the morning she was gone. It’s as safe a region as exists anywhere—not rascz about except the durrl and his establishment, and there’s no reason why he’d interfere with a yilesc at this time of year. Certainly the olz didn’t abduct her. The question is whether she had a relapse and wandered off, or whether she did it deliberately.”
“Even if she had a relapse,” Farrari said thoughtfully, “she still could have done it deliberately.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Just what I said. What are you doing about it?”
“Nothing, except to pass word to all of our agents to be on the lookout for her. An effective search would require more people than we’d dare to use anywhere except in Scorv. Did you notice anything that suggested that she might do something like this?”
“Not at the time, but in retrospect—yes. You should have been able to predict it.”
Jorrul stared at him.
“What’s a yilesc?” Farrari asked. “No one seems to know for certain, but everyone agrees that there’s something out of the ordinary about her. Witch, female shaman, seeress, and sorceress are a few of the terms the specialists use. Has it occurred to anyone that the genuine native yilesc—who may have many native imitators who are nothing of the sort—might be some kind of clairvoyant?”
Jorrul continued to stare.
“And,” Farrari went on, “when you send an IPR clairvoyant to play the role of yilesc, who is a native clairvoyant, there’s a grave danger that she might actually become one.”
XII
At irregular intervals one of the base’s supply platforms took off at dusk to fly a leg of the ESC, the Emergency Supply Circuit. Since IPR agents lived as natives they had little need for supplies, but Jorrul had scattered secret emergency caches about the country, and Graan’s men visited these occasionally, checked the inventories, and replaced what had been used. On the wall of Graan’s office was a chart showing which leg of the circuit had been flown last, which leg would be flown next, and when.
It was a simple matter for Farrari to duck into the hangar when no one was about, squeeze between crates, and pull a tarp over himself. It was almost dark when the platform took off, and the thick blackness of the Branoff IV midnight enveloped its first landing. While Graan’s infra-goggled assistants worked to open the hidden entrance of the cave where supplies were cached, Farrari went over the opposite side of the platform and vanished into the night.
He wore only the ol loincloth; he took nothing with him except a small knife. He covered ground as rapidly as he dared, cautiously feeling ahead of him with a staff cut from a young quarm tree to avoid walking into zrilm bushes, and when dawn broke he was moving along a zrilm-lined lane near an of village. He needed a place of refuge—when he was missed someone might think of the supply mission, and he wanted to be as far from the emergency cache as possible before he permitted even an ol to see him. Thoughtfully he contemplated the deadly curtain of zrilm foliage. He parted it with his staff, slipped under it, and let it drop behind him.
He found himself in a delightfully snug and roomy hiding place, and the discovery confounded him. The supposedly impenetrable zrilm barrier could be breached by any ol with a stick and the intelligence to use it. Why, then, he asked himself bewideredly, didn’t the olz raid the fields on harvest nights and conceal a food reserve against the annual season of starvation?