at her inquiringly; she scowled back at him. He stole another glance at the shimmering portrait of a magnificently feminine young lady of Gurnil, who wore her hair in long, luxurious tresses and whose lustrous robes and abundance of frills concealed her shapeliness without distorting it.
The shoulders of the receptionist’s uniform jacket had been padded into a rigid angularity, and any competent designer of women’s apparel should have known better than to disfigure a natural curvilinear beauty with sharp angles. The half-length trousers were, if possible, a worse mistake. Their color reminded Forzon of congealed mud, and beside it the healthy flesh of even the most shapely legs took on a corpse-like pallor.
The contrast was so stark and unsettling that Forzon abandoned the paintings forthwith and marched off to his quarters where he could pick this puzzle apart in private. He had a disquieting feeling of certitude that when he succeeded, when he finally found out what was happening on the planet Gurnil—he wouldn’t like it.
CHAPTER 2
The walls of Forzon’s two small, sparsely furnished rooms were dismal expanses of faded gray plastic, their only ornaments the black-framed IPR motto displayed in each room: DEMOCRACY IMPOSED FROM WITHOUT IS THE SEVEREST FORM OF TYRANNY.
His windows looked onto the deep, still lake of a vast volcanic crater. Beyond the crater’s rim lofty mountains reared their mist-shrouded peaks in awesome beauty. Amidst such natural loveliness the IPR Bureau had thrown up a huge, characterless building and surrounded it with a wasteland of storage sheds, landing field, hangars, and acres of unkempt grounds. Forzon regarded the neglected landscape with disgust and thought sympathetically of the legendary bird-in-space that bruised its wings against a vacuum.
The IPR base was a cultural vacuum.
Forzon contemplated its sterile hideousness and felt bruised.
Depressed by the drabness within, revolted by the view from his windows, Forzon spent some minutes in irate floor pacing and then flung himself from the room for a perfunctory tour of the building.
It had already occurred to him that for such an enormous establishment there were very few people about. The H-shaped building consisted of two two-story dormitory wings connected by a long, single-story section that housed the administrative and service rooms. Forzon passed by the reception room without a glance and prowled the full length of the lower corridor of the dormitory opposite his.
As he turned back he felt music.
Felt, rather than heard. The sound was so soft, so delicate, so indescribably fragile, that no single sense seemed to play a part in apprehending it. He stood transfixed and breathless before a door, and long after the sound had faded he imagined that he still heard it.
He waited, and when the music did not start again he knocked timidly.
The door opened and a girl stood before him—a startlingly feminine girl, her long hair a gleaming gold, her brightly colored robe a brilliant contrast to the severely furnished room behind her.
“I’m sorry,” Forzon said. “I didn’t know these were the women’s quarters. I heard the music, and I was curious.”
To his amazement she glanced furtively up and down the corridor, drew him quickly into the room, and closed the door. Then, magically, her frowning expression softened to a smile. He took the chair she offered, and not until the smile broadened did he realize that he was staring at her.
“Sorry,” he said. “All the women I’ve seen since I arrived here have been playing soldier.”
Her laughter, in some ethereal way, reminded him of the music he’d heard, but when she spoke she dropped her voice to a whisper. “They’re base personnel. They have to play soldier. I’m Team B.”
“Team B?” he echoed, matching her whisper.
“Resting up,” she went on. “I caught a virus.”
Suddenly he noticed the instrument standing on a low table near her cot. It was similar to the one he’d seen in the portrait, but only two feet high and looking more like a child’s toy than the medium for great art. Its wood frame was unadorned but richly polished.
“It’s so small!” Forzon exclaimed. “The one in the portrait was enormous!”
Her finger at her lips reminded him that he had raised his voice. “That’s a torril,” she said softly. “A man’s instrument. An instrument for public performance. The frame is elaborately carved and built precisely to the musician’s height. When the young torril player is growing up he must have a new instrument yearly. This one is a torru, a woman’s instrument. Its tone is well-suited to the boudoir but is much too delicate for concert use.”
“A marvelous, whispering tone,” Forzon said. He got to his feet and bent over the torru. The slender strings were of some tightly twisted fiber, white and—every fifth string—black. He plucked them gently, one at a time. “It’s an inflected pentatonic scale!” he exclaimed. “Primitive, and at the same time highly sophisticated. Curious.”
The girl was smiling at him again. “I’ve wondered what CS men were like. Now I know. They hear music!”
She could have been poking fun at him, but Forzon answered her seriously. “Culture is such a broad concept that the Cultural Survey has to have more areas of specialization than you’d care to hear about. My own specialty is arts and crafts, and I’m a connoisseur of the utterly unique in any of them. This instrument, now. The circular arrangement of strings. Do you know that it defies classification?”
“I never thought of classifying it. It’s a lovely instrument to play.”
“Play something,” Forzon suggested.
He watched her deft fingers and listened, absorbed and fascinated, until the last of the rippling, whispering tones had faded. “Amazing,” he breathed. “The technical facility is incredible. You have all of the strings right under your fingers, whereas with most species of harp—”
He paused. Footsteps had sounded in the corridor outside her door, and she stirred uneasily. “It must be nearly lunchtime,” he said. “Will you join me?”
She shook her head gravely. “I think it would be best if no one knows we’ve been talking. So—please don’t mention it to anyone.” She hurried him to the door, opened it cautiously, looked out. “Don’t come back here,” she whispered. “I’ll try to see you before I leave.”
Abruptly he was in the corridor again, walking away, and her door closed noiselessly behind him. He had turned the corner before he realized that she had not told him her name.
The wafting aroma of food drew him to the dining room, where he found his route to the food dispenser blocked by one of Coordinator Rastadt’s female militia. “Officers are served in their quarters,” she announced.
“That’s very kind of you,” Forzon said absently. “But I prefer to eat here.”
She flushed confusedly but held her ground with dogged determination. “The coordinator has directed—”
“Tell him,” Forzon murmured, “that the supervisor was hungry.”
He stepped around her, served himself, and carried his food to a long table where a number of young women in uniform and
