The olz worshiped their masters, who starved and murdered them.
The olz made no effort to escape, no effort to defend themselves, no effort to secure a scrap of food more than what they were given even when starving.
They wanted to die, but their religion forbade suicide as well as violence and the taking of each others’ lives. Since they were forbidden to kill themselves or each other, could it be that they worshiped their masters because they starved and murdered them?
“A death cult!” Farrari exclaimed. “A people whose lives are dedicated to one thing and one thing only: dying!”
But why did they want to die? The end of all life was death, and anyone who meditated excessively upon that fact could in time develop a morbid philosophy. Even among a peaceful, prosperous people there would be diseases, accidents, frustrations, tragedies, and if their religion taught that death was a welcome release from life, that it brought instant translation to paradise, Elysium, eternal bliss, a people could come to prefer death to life. And if the people were conditioned to this preference from infancy.
He leaped to his feet excitedly. His first contact with the olz had come by way of a teloid cube that projected an ol woman being beaten to death. In the background several olz stood looking on, and Farrari had pondered the expressions on their faces.
He remembered them vividly: two men, a woman and a child watching a murder, and their faces expressed—ecstasy! Ecstasy and envy! They wanted to die, they envied those who died, they worshiped their conquerors who brought death to them with such lavish generosity.
The rascz had exploited this aberration cunningly, even working women of their own race into the ol religion to encourage the ol obsession with death. A people intent on dying would be very unlikely to revolt, and the olz never had.
Farrari sank back into the grass, made himself comfortable again, and asked himself a crucial question: Why had the IPR Bureau learned so little about the ol religion?
The olz had recognized the IPR agents! Not as aliens from outer space, they could not have comprehended such a concept, but they had recognized them as outsiders, and while they seemed to accept them and behave normally toward them, they kept to themselves matters that concerned only themselves.
Such as the ol religion.
Even Bran, as complete an ol as IPR had produced, knew nothing about the ol religion.
Now that Farrari did, or thought he did, he faced the problem of what to do with his knowledge. If he returned to base with it he would be a hero of sorts, in spite of his violation of regulations, and his information would be the subject of innumerable reports and would produce no result whatsoever. Farrari was laboring for the benefit of the olz, not the IPR files, so he would not return to base.
What he would do he did not know, but while he was deciding, and regaining his strength, he determined to learn the ol language—not the IPR version, but the genuine ol language, which Bran seemed to have glimpsed and Liano possibly knew something of, but which no other IPR agent knew existed.
He began at once. At night he visited neighboring ol villages openly, seeking news of Liano. He returned surreptitiously to eavesdrop, to listen for hours to the grunted speech around the nightfires when the olz did not know an outsider was present. He hid in the cave and listened to the death rites.
And he detected no differences, none whatsoever. Spoken privately, ol was the same threadbare remnant of a language that he had known from the beginning.
XVI
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 Manuaclass="underline" 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.