Читать книгу The World Menders - Lloyd Biggle jr. - Страница 6

CHAPTER 3

Ingar Paul, a large, untidy man with a brilliantly tidy mind, greeted Farrari cordially, placed a chair for him, lit up a monstrous, hand-carved pipe—both artifact and habit were souvenirs of a primitive society he had once worked with—and sat back to compose himself for whatever problems the Cultural Survey trainee proposed to aim at him.

Farrari allowed his gaze to linger briefly on the framed motto that hung on the wall just above the coordinator’s head. DEMOCRACY IMPOSED FROM WITHOUT IS THE SEVEREST FORM OF TYRANNY.

Paul exhaled gently. “Well, Farrari?”

“I have a confession to make, sir—though it probably won’t be news to you.”

Paul smiled. “Confession is said to be healthful. I’m no authority on that, because to tell the truth I don’t often get to hear one. What do you want to confess?”

“I can’t figure out what it is I’m supposed to be doing.”

Paul’s smile broadened.

“My orders say I’m supposed to study IPR problems from the CS point-of-view,” Farrari went on.

“I know.”

“What the devil does that mean?” Farrari demanded, momentarily forgetting his lowly AT/I rank.

Coordinator Paul took no offense. “I have no idea what an IPR problem would look like from the CS point-of-view.”

“I don’t know what an IPR problem looks like, period,” Farrari said. “I’ve listened carefully to everything that goes on at the conferences, and talked with your specialists as much as I could, and it doesn’t seem to me that you have any problems. Unanswered questions, yes, but not problems. You’re just collecting information, and organizing it and studying it, and I suppose when you’ve finished someone will give this planet a classification number and that will be the end of it. Any problems you had were solved long before I came here.”

“Yes,” Paul murmured. “Yes—and no.” He continued to puff thoughtfully on his pipe. The silence lasted so long that Farrari became uneasy. “Yes—and no,” Paul said again. “I’d say that you’ve made yourself very useful here, Farrari. You’ve relieved the classification team of the necessity of writing reports on cultural matters— which has always been a headache. IPR men lack the training and interest. Your analysis of art by historical epochs was of tremendous assistance to the history section and to several other projects. Likewise your correlations of myths and literature with historical events. Several specialists are downright lyrical in their praise of the help you’ve given them. You’ve shown us that culture is a sort of common denominator to a great many areas of study, and in doing so you’ve made some highly valuable contributions.”

Farrari modestly murmured his thanks.

“I polled the entire classification team a month ago,” Paul said. “No one disapproved of your presence here, everyone thought the assignment of a CS man to an IPR team a good idea, and many were enthusiastic. You’ve done a job for us, you haven’t got in anyone’s way, and you’ve worked harmoniously whenever the interests of another specialist touched upon yours. I’ve said some nice things about you in my reports, and I expect to say more before you’re recalled. In short your worries, if you have any, are entirely without foundation.”

“Even so,” Farrari persisted, “I have the feeling that someone expects me to do something—something—”

“Significant?” Paul suggested. “Or maybe even dramatic?” He chuckled. “Ever hear of a world named Gurnil?”

“No, sir.”

“I’m surprised. Where IPR is concerned there is always a problem—THE problem. On Gurnil it went on for four hundred years. Then someone had a brainstorm and brought in a CS officer. Prior to that we’d always kept CS out until we’d certified a world non-hostile, meaning until it was eligible for Federation membership. The CS officer solved the Gurnil problem with a brilliant stroke that the Bureau doesn’t understand yet and probably never will. Immediately the Bureau requested CS men for all of its classification and direction teams. There weren’t enough to go around, which is why your class was jerked out of the academy before it finished its training. Bureau higherups are hopeful that Gurnil-type miracles will pop out all along the frontier. They won’t. The CS officer who solved the Gurnil problem was undoubtedly a veteran and the most brilliant man available. You youngsters aren’t about to pull off anything like that, but you can learn, you can acquire valuable experience, and you can help out with routine tasks that touch on your specialized knowledge. If once in a century or once in a millennium we get another Gurnil, that’s just an unexpected bonus. My advice: carry on as you have. You’re doing fine.”

“Thank you, sir. But what is THE problem?”

Paul’s fingers drummed thoughtfully on his desk. “Didn’t they issue you an IPR manual?”

“No, sir.”

“They should have.” He scribbled a memo and handed it to Farrari. “Take that to Graan. If he doesn’t have a manual in stock I’ll be shocked, and tell him he’s to loan you his personal copy until he gets one for you.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“One moment, Farrari. Manual 1048-K is a mountain of fine print and capitalized nuggets of what the Bureau chooses to consider wisdom. I’m not giving you one with the idea that you’ll read it, because you won’t. At least, I hope you won’t. The contents are highly technical, and it takes a Bureau man several years to work his way through it. A little browsing in it won’t injure you—not much, anyway—but while you’re browsing never forget one thing: the entire manual concerns the Bureau’s dealings with people— with intelligent beings. That’s all, Farrari.”

Dazedly Farrari saluted and made his exit.

In Isa Graan’s office he exchanged his memo for a copy of IPR Field Manual 1048-K. It was a thick, oblong volume of some three thousand pages, zipbound in tough, reinforced covers.

“So you think you’re ready for the Holy Word,” Graan drawled. “Sign here. Better read this first—you’re agreeing not to remove the manual from this base without the coordinator’s permission, or divulge its contents or any part thereof to any unauthorized person or persons.”

“What’s the penalty?”

“No idea. As far as I know it’s never happened.”

Farrari scrawled his signature. “I’m not sure that I’m ready for quite this much of the Holy Word,” he said ruefully. “I suppose you people have to memorize it.”

“It only seems that way,” Graan said.

Farrari opened the cover. On the first inside page he read, “DEMOCRACY IMPOSED FROM WITHOUT IS THE SEVEREST FORM OF TYRANNY.” He glanced at the wall behind Graan, where the same motto hung. “It just occurred to me,” he said. “That thing is on display in every room in the base except the two assigned to me.”

“Regulations say every room,” Graan said. “It kind of seemed that we were turning your rooms over to the Cultural Survey, and we didn’t know but what CS had a motto of its own, so we took ours down.”

“I see.” Farrari turned a handful of pages and peered dubiously at the fine print. He flipped another page and saw a framed block of large, black capital letters. DEMOCRACY IS NOT A FORM OF GOVERNMENT. IT IS A STATE OF MIND. PEOPLE CANNOT ARBITRARILY BE PLACED IN A STATE OF MIND.

“I don’t suppose there’s an abridged version,” Farrari said wistfully. He turned another handful of pages. ONE MEASURE OF THE URGENCY OF REVOLUTION IS THE FREEDOM THE PEOPLE HAVE, COMPARED WITH THE FREEDOM THEY WANT.

“It’s very carefully organized,” Graan said. “Here—the table of contents is at the back. History of the Bureau, Basic Principles, Classification Data, Specimen Cases—that’s half the manual, includes all the classic cases and representative examples of every classification. Then Procedures, and so on.”

“Where would I find instructions for classifying this planet?’’

Graan patted the manual. “Actually, this is classroom stuff. I doubt that any IPR team has to calculate a classification ratio these days. We send all of our data to headquarters, it’s fed into a special computer, and someone reads off the classification. The ticklish problem is in compiling the data—not to overlook anything. In simple terms, the classification is political factors over technological factors. It reads like a fraction. The smaller the fraction, the healthier the situation—what we call a low-high condition—and with proper evolution the technological factor ascends and the political factor descends. One over one hundred would mean pure democracy and the highest technological level. The computer rarely gives us whole numbers, though. 1.3785 over 99.7481 would round off at 1/100 for convenient reference.”

“What about Branoff IV?”

“It’ll be the opposite—a nasty variant of a high-low condition. The God-Emperor, a small class of intermarrying nobility, military establishment mainly aimed at keeping the population in check, and the majority of the emperor’s subjects in a state of slavery. Politically somewhere in the high eighties. Considering the level of culture the technology is surprisingly weak. Not even ten on the revised scale. Say 87/8. The Bureau is certain to oh-oh the planet.”

“What does that mean?”

“Observation only. It’ll be at least a couple of millennia before we can really go to work here.”

“And what is the Bureau’s problem—THE problem?”

“Our mission,” Graan said slowly, “is to raise the technological level, and to reduce the political factor to a point where all of the population can benefit from the technological advances. Ultimately, to achieve a minimal level ten democracy, which would make the planet eligible for Federation membership. THE problem, from which all of our other problems derive, is that this must be achieved by the people themselves. History has recorded many instances where outside forces have artificially raised a level of technology and imposed a democracy on a population. The result is inevitably catastrophic. Democracy imposed from without—”

Farrari groaned.

“Something similar could be said for technology imposed from without,” Graan went on. “THE problem is to somehow move the people toward the achievement of these things by themselves, without any apparent outside intervention. This means that the Bureau has to work with the local population completely unaware of its existence. If its presence is so much as suspected it must withdraw for years, maybe centuries, and then make a fresh start. Needless to say, the Bureau proceeds cautiously in even its small endeavors. THE problem is never exactly the same twice, because intelligent beings are so damned inventive. That’s why the manual is so thick—why there are so many specimen cases. What works wonderfully well on one world may not work at all on another where conditions seem to be similar. The first thing an IPR man has to learn is that he’s dealing with people, and people can be confidently relied upon not to conform to any preconceived pattern.”

“Coordinator Paul just told me something like that.”

“Then that makes it official,” Graan said with a grin. “You’ll also find it mentioned once or twice in the manual.”

Farrari carried the manual to his quarters and flopped down on his bed to read. The contents seemed either distressingly boring or appallingly technical, and the fine print quickly gave him a headache. For a time he amused himself by flipping the pages rapidly and reading the succinct messages that flashed at him in capitals.

THE BUREAU DOES NOT CREATE REVOLUTION. IT CREATES THE NECESSITY FOR REVOLUTION. GIVEN THAT NECESSITY, THE NATIVE POPULATIONS ARE PERFECTLY CAPABLE OF HANDLING THE REVOLUTION.

FUNDAMENTAL TO ANY DEMOCRACY IS THE PEOPLE’S RIGHT TO BE WRONG. NO DEMOCRACY HAS EVER SURVIVED THE ABOLISHMENT OF THAT PRINCIPLE.

DEMOCRACY HAS BEEN TOUTED AS A SYSTEM UNDER WHICH ANY MAN CAN BE KING. SUCH A SYSTEM WOULD NOT BE DEMOCRATIC, BUT ANARCHIC. IN A DEMOCRACY, NO MAN CAN BE KING.

…OF THE PEOPLE, BY THE PEOPLE, AND FOR THE PEOPLE…

Farrari zipped the covers and pushed the manual aside.

PEOPLE. All of these words concerned intelligent beings who were born, attained maturity, loved or through some related process reproduced their kind, tasted joy and sorrow, health and sickness, and died, thus advancing their civilizations a fractional point up the technological scale and down the political scale. Or perhaps, in one of the retrogressions that must occur, sending it stumbling in the wrong direction.

PEOPLE.

In Farrari’s intensive studies at the Cultural Survey Academy he had learned to analyze and evaluate and classify any work of art set before him. He had plodded wearily but efficiently through kiloreams of prose and poetry, and kilohours of music and kilometers of art and architecture with no more than a passing thought to the minstrels and writers and poets and musicians and painters and sculptors and architects who created those things.

He had given no thought at all to the people for whom those works of art were intended. It was occurring to him for the first time that the art of the universe had not been called into being solely for the study and diversion of the Cultural Survey. The aspiration and sense of beauty of living beings—of people—were the generative impulse behind each word, each note, each stroke of the brush or chisel.

Just as human sweat and blood throbbed behind each casual statement of the word revolution in IPR Manual 1048-K.

This world of Branoff IV. Farrari had seen one class of its inhabitants every day since his arrival. He had seen the Emperor, or kru, and his little coterie of nobility portrayed in bas-relief sculpture of a surprising strength and maturity. He had seen the valiant deeds of the kru’s warriors—who were not so much an army as an elite palace guard—depicted in sculpture and painting, celebrated in legend, praised in song.

What of the people?

He searched his memory. He had hundreds of teloid cubes in his workroom files, neatly catalogued and instantly available to project a three-dimensional time image with natural color and sound. Every palace and temple had been meticulously photographed in all of its rich detail: its masterful bas-reliefs, its wall paintings (which were stylistic monstrosities because the paints were of poor quality and the paintings had been continuously restored and touched up by successive generations of artists), its lovely tile friezes, its tapestries, its bungled attempts at full sculpture (which continued to puzzle him because the relief carving was so excellent). He had teloids of carved and etched weapons, of ceramics, of jewelry and ornaments, of illuminated scrolls, even a teloid of one of the hand-painted robes that were ceremoniously burned after the kru had worn them once. He had more than a hundred teloids of the exterior details of the kru’s Life Temple and its astonishing Tower-of-a-Thousand-Eyes that he had unhesitatingly classified as unique, to the undisguised amusement of Jan Prochnow, the expert in comparative theology (“It’s only a minor variant, my boy, and a rather naive one at that”). He had teloid cubes of every kind of art, ornamental or practical, and as many specimens as the IPR Field Team had been able to surreptitiously ferret out for him, and. he’d been studying them for months, and he had not even been aware of the existence of a people, of the masses of intelligent beings that those thousand eyes of the kru’s tower staged out upon. Did they pass by quickly, with lowered gaze, or did they pause and boldly stare back?

Suddenly he wanted to know.

He sprang from his bed and hurried to the records section. “I’d like to take a few teloids,” he announced.

Ganoff Strunk hauled himself from behind his desk, an expression of wounded dignity on his lined face. “Did we miss something? I thought we gave you everything.”

“You did,” Farrari assured him. “I’d just like to take a few teloids of the slaves.”

“The olz. Yes. What do you mean—you’d like to take a few teloids?”

“Well—”

Strunk clutched his ample belly and laughed convulsively. “You think all you have to do is walk up to an ol, point your camera, and say, ‘Smile’? See here, my boy. As far as the ol is concerned, you are a thing, from the nether regions, and don’t you ever forget it! Before you can approach a native you have to be a native—in dress, mannerisms, speech, and character. What role would you take? Slave, overseer, soldier, artisan, merchant, priest, nobleman—why, you couldn’t walk along a city street without getting yourself stoned as a degenerate! You don’t even know which finger the well-bred ol uses to pick his nose. The first time you sneezed in the presence of a durrl, a slave overseer, you’d be executed for insubordination. Nobody—and I do mean nobody—gets close to a native until he’s been exhaustively trained and strenuously examined. Even so, we lose agents. Especially on planets such as this one we lose agents, because life is held in such low esteem that a soldier will likely as not run a spear through the first ol he meets of a morning just for practice or the general hell of it. We lose them, but we certainly don’t throw them away.”

Farrari said protestingly, “There has to be a first time for everyone. Who trained the first IPR agents?”

“They trained themselves, my boy, and a damnably touchy business it is for those making an initial contact. They photographed and recorded and observed endlessly, and stole garments and tools when they could get away with it, and they studied—intensive study such as you never dreamed of at your snug academy. Their lives depended on it. Usually it’s a year, at least, before an IPR agent even allows a native to see him from a distance—if he can help it. And you want to take a few teloids! Look here. You want teloids of the olz? Just tell me how many thousand you need. We have them.”

“Oh, I don’t need that many.”

“Just enough to give you a glimpse of life on Branoff IV? Here are some duplicates we’ve made up for the Bureau Archives. They’re yours until the next supply contact.”

“Thanks. They’ll do nicely.”

“I’ll warn you, though. It isn’t a pleasant life. You won’t like it.” Farrari hurried back to his workroom, snapped the first tube of teloid cubes into the projector, threw the switch—and recoiled in horror.

The three-dimensional projection filled the room in front of him. A slave woman lay on her back, her arms and legs threshing in a convulsion of agony, while a durrl calmly lashed at her with an unpruned branch. The whistle of the whip, the solid whup of its landing, the woman’s screams of torment, the durrl’s grunts blended in a terrifying melange of sounds. White-faced, wincing at every flick of the whip, Farrari was sickened into immobility. The blows struck with ruthless precision—now on the swollen abdomen, now on the already unrecognizable face, now on the churning limbs. Each downward stroke pealed away gruesome ribbons of flesh; each upswing flecked bright globules of blood into the cheerful sunlight.

The cube ran its five-minute course; at the very end the woman’s body heaved in a final, wracking paroxysm of pain, and she gave birth.

Farrari waited helplessly for the next cube, but the projector was set to repeat. It clicked, and the abhorrent scene ran its course again. And again. Despite his numbing nausea, his overwhelming urge to turn away, to shut off the projector, to flee the room, he watched hypnotically and began to pick out small details. The woman had been working on the harvest. A pile of dirt-encrusted tubers stood near her battered head. One lay in the foreground, almost at Farrari’s feet, its bulging diameter neatly incised with teeth marks. The emaciated arms and legs completed the story: the woman was starving; she had stolen a bite of food.

The cube was on its fourth repetition when Farrari abruptly became aware that the central characters in the violent drama were not alone. Two naked men, a woman wearing a loincloth, and a naked child watched with apparent indifference, as though they had seen it all before and it was anyway of no concern of theirs. Yet their eyes, flashing beneath low, protruding brows, transfixed Farrari. Where the faces were utterly devoid of emotion, the eyes were alive—with the tragic accumulation of generations of loathing and terror? He did not know, but he knew that he would never forget those dead faces and their pathetically alive, staring eyes.

Coordinator Paul’s booming voice cut through the screams. “Fine way to spend an afternoon,” he remarked.

He moved a pile of books from a chair and sat down, and Farrari finally stirred himself and turned off the projector.

“The whip is a common denominator among slave worlds,” the coordinator said, speaking as if the viewing of such horrors was a tiresome duty. “Sometimes it seems as if the ruling classes squander their creative energy on whips. They’re always limited by the materials at hand, but they never overlook anything capable of inflicting torment. I remember an instance where the wool of a native animal had a toxic effect. One lash of a whip made of that wool would send a slave into shock, and he was a long, painful time coming out of it. If he did come out of it. The whip you just saw is as fiendish as any I’ve encountered. It’s a branch of a common shrub, called the zrilm—you’ve heard of it? Of course. Its leaves have barb-like protuberances that not only tear the flesh, but also secrete a poison that’s more than mildly caustic. It’s sheer torment merely to brush against a zrilm bush. A beating like the one you saw—well, you don’t need a doctor to tell you that the woman didn’t recover. Try the next cube and see what happened to the newborn baby.”

“I’d rather not.”

“The other olz got a Branoff IV dozen of lashes apiece—which is fifteen—just for being there. Including the child. She didn’t recover, either. The whole affair was such a commonplace incident that if the durrl had to make out a daily report chances are he wouldn’t have mentioned it. Life is cheap, there are more olz than can be fed anyway, and one or two less is a mark on the credit side of the ledger. How are you going to fit this into your cultural studies?”

Farrari shook his head. “Can’t anything be done about it?”

“Not now. In a couple of thousand years—perhaps. The olz don’t even seem to be aware of how badly off they are. Once they find out, it’ll still be centuries before it occurs to them that something can be done about it. An invasion by the nomadic tribes might speed things up, but the few mountain passes are easily defended and the nomads have learned not to approach too closely. Whenever they do they’re beaten soundly. And this is the only stable civilization, the only capable military power, on this planet.”

“Couldn’t we arrange for a durrl to drop dead whenever he starts to whip an ol?”

The coordinator winced. “Certainly not! You should see the report forms I have to fill out when we so much as accidentally cause the death or injury of a native!”

“Two thousand years,” Farrari muttered. Forced labor, starvation, and torment. Probably the woman was better off dead.

“Do have a look at that next cube,” Paul said, getting to his feet. “Have a look at all of them. And Farrari—”

Farrari looked up expectantly.

“Don’t feel badly because we can’t do anything about it. One of the first things an IPR man has to learn is that a drastic change requires extensive preparation. The greater the change, the more preparation is needed. And the more time.”

He left, and Farrari returned the tube of teloid cubes to its box and meekly carried the box back to Ganoff Strunk. Then he fed his projector a tube of innocuous cultural cubes and began to dictate an analysis of the friezes on one of the kru’s summer palaces.

He paused frequently, because each click of the projector made him wince, even though it did not remotely resemble the whup of a zrilm whip striking human flesh.