Unanswerable questions no longer perplexed him as they had in the beginning, because there had been so many of them. He composed himself on the damp, musty soil and concentrated on his own plans.
Liano’s disappearance had prompted his own. Since Jorrul had made no search for her, he would make, none for Farrari; and if, contrary to reason, he did make an active search, he would assume that Farrari had gone to look for Liano, and he would concentrate on the yomaf, where she had disappeared.
The yomaf was the one place Farrari would not go. He would head up the hiingol, the finger valley on the opposite side of the Scorvif hand. Precisely what he would do there he had not decided, except that if he did formulate a plan, he had promised himself not to check it against the IPR field manual before putting it into effect.
He slept through the day, moved on at nightfall, and sheltered himself in another zrilm hedge at dawn. He slipped past villages in the darkness, cautiously making a wide circuit of the nightfires and drinking at village wells only after the olz had retired. In five nights of steady walking he put the lilorr behind him and began to make his way up the hilngol.
His conditioning as an ol had inured him to hunger, but the time came when he had to eat. He approached a nightfire hesitantly squatted there, cupped his hand to scoop watery soup from the cooking pot. No one paid any attention to him. He eased his hunger as well” as an ol’s hunger could be eased at that time of year, and when the olz began to drift off to their huts to sleep he quietly made his departure. After similar experiences at a dozen nightfires, he became sufficiently emboldened to find an empty hut for himself and remain at a village overnight. In the morning he accompanied the olz to the fields and spent the day cultivating the tender young tuber plants by hand. The durrl appeared at midday, watched for a time from the stile platform, and then departed. Farrari moved on that night, spent a few days in another village, moved again.
He had another perplexing question to meditate: if an ol could move about so easily, why did the olz complacently remain where they were until disease, starvation or a beating killed them? Venturesome olz, moving alone or in small groups, should have been able to escape through the mountain passes to freedom. Why did they remain?
In one village he encountered a yilesc. His momentary thrill of recognition was instantly dampened when she turned a plump, cruel-looking face toward him. All evening he surreptitiously watched her and her kewl, and when finally he retired he was in a thoughtful mood. Her behavior was nothing like Liano’s. She did nothing at all, remained aloof to men, women and children, and her kewl cringed in terror whenever she snarled a request for food or drink.
Another village. From his place by the fire, Farrari looked across at the women and children and watched the light flicker on the somber, young-old face of an ol child. Picking up a twig, he absently began to sketch her face in the packed soil. A grunt with an unusual inflection caused him to look up; several olz were watching his twig strokes intently. He quickly altered the scratches into an unrecognizable jumble and then rubbed them out. The olz lost interest and moved away, but Farrari, though he could not have said why, felt shaken. Could the olz, who possessed no art at all, instantly recognize the mere beginnings of a three-dimensional figure depicted on a flat surface? And why had he destroyed the drawing when they seemed to do so, since he considered it his mission to bring culture to them? He sensed a missed opportunity, and began to sketch again, but the olz were already drifting off to their huts.
A few nights later, in another village, an ol carrying a log to the fire stumbled and went head first into the huge cooking pot. The pot contained only water and did not break; the fire had not been. lit. The ol came up sputtering bewilderedly but otherwise unharmed, and long minutes afterward he was still sending searching glances at the ground about the fire hollow, as though trying to identify the evil spirit that had tripped him. The olz who saw what happened seemed not to notice.
Seated by the fire that evening, Farrari, on an impulse, felt about for a twig and drew an ol carrying a quarm log. He made a simple stick figure, with an oval for a head, carrying a crudely three-dimensional log. Then he added a circle for the yawning opening of the pot and surrounded it with the logs of an unlit fire. Were any of the olz watching? He feared that they were and that they weren’t; he did not dare to look.
He edged to one side and commenced again: the log flying, the stick figure, head down in the pot with feet in the air. Now he heard a chorus of grunts. He moved away, and the olz crowded in to see what he had made. They looked, but he could not guess what they saw, and he detected nothing in grunt, facial expression, or gesture that revealed what they thought.
Their interest waned quickly. As they drifted away, Farrari returned to the sketches and with a few quick strokes transformed the crude figures. Now they wore the serrate-topped boots and fringed cloak of a durrl. The men came for another look, and then the women and children shyly edged forward. For the remainder of the night, until they sought their huts and sleep, the olz kept returning to look at these strange scratches in the soil, and when they walked past them they made a wide circuit to avoid stepping on them. Finally Farrari was left alone at the fire, and after some deliberation he rubbed them out.
Farrari felt certain that he had accomplished something, but he had no idea what it was and no certainty that he would ever know. So engrossed was he as he slowly moved toward his own hut that when an ol stepped from the shadows and walked beside him Farrari did not notice him until he spoke.
“What are you after?” he whispered.
He spoke Galactic.
He whispered again, “We’d better have a talk,” and Farrari nodded resignedly. Jorrul’s map had shown no agent in this area, but he knew that ol agents sometimes moved about. The prospect of meeting one hadn’t worried him, and he wasn’t worried now. IPR would not attempt to abduct him from the vicinity of an ol village, and this particular agent seemed to pose no threat of any kind. He was obviously elderly, and his body and face were laced with scars that bespoke some horrible encounter with a zrilm whip in the remote past. He also had an incipient paunch, which meant that he’d been eating much too well for an ol. And he tottered. Even when standing still he tottered. Farrari did not remember seeing him at the fire.
They walked slowly away from the village, and by the time they reached the shelter of a zrilm-lined lane the agent was panting and leaning heavily on Farrari’s shoulder.
He sank to the ground and asked softly, “You’re Farrari, aren’t you?”
Farrari did not answer.
“Heard you were missing. I listen to the blah from base every night. And the olz said there was a strange ol wandering from village to village, acting peculiarly, so I figured it was you. You’re the CS chap, aren’t you? What are you after?”