“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,
