Wheeler said easily. “Team B once maintained a headquarters here, but all we have now is its archives, which are serviced by base personnel. All of Team B is in Kurr. We can fly you there whenever you’re ready.”
He nodded pleasantly and left. Forzon’s first impulse was to hurry over to the women’s quarters, but a sober second thought checked him. The girl may have been concerned with proprieties when she told him not to come back to her room.
Or she may have been giving him a warning.
CHAPTER 3
On one point Forzon had gained some useful information. The Interplanetary Relations Bureau had always been run more like a secret order than a governmental department. Few people outside the Bureau knew what its function was, but anyone who worked and traveled along the space frontier quickly became aware that the Bureau’s power there was absolute. It was said that even an admiral of the space navy asked IPR permission when he wanted to maneuver across a Federation boundary.
Now Forzon understood why. The Bureau’s mission was to guide worlds to Federation membership, and to do so without those worlds being aware of it. Obviously this would be impossible if traders, explorers, scientists, various governmental surveys, and ships in distress—not to mention lost tourists—provided a rain of visitors from outer space. So the IPR Bureau policed the boundaries.
On Gurnil there was a continent, Kurr, still ruled by a monarch. The admission of neighboring, fully qualified worlds to the Federation had long been delayed; the Bureau was embarrassed. Understandably the situation called for drastic action, but someone at the Bureau’s Supreme Headquarters had tripped over a panic button.
A Cultural Survey sector supervisor in charge of the Kurr field team? It was comparable to placing an IPR officer in charge of a Cultural Survey project, and from what Forzon had seen of the way the Bureau handled art he knew what that would lead to.
Since he had no idea what was expected of him, he determined to give the Bureau the one thing he understood: a cultural survey. He prepared specimen survey forms and handed them to Rastadt’s secretary, requesting initial runs of a thousand. A day later the copy still lay untouched on the corner of her desk. Forzon spoke sharply to Wheeler, who shed cheerful tears and promised to duplicate them himself.
Forzon applied himself to the language course, studying constantly because he had nothing else to do, but his thoughts kept turning to the girl with the torru, the member of Team B who, according to Wheeler, did not exist. He wondered if he would ever see her again.
* * * *
She came at night.
Forzon, awakened from a restless sleep by a cool hand and her urgent whisper, sat up quickly and groped for a light.
“No light!” she whispered.
He heard the soft rustling of her gown, her quick breathing, caught the faint scent of an unknown perfume, but he could not see her.
“I fly back tomorrow,” she said.
“In the daytime? I thought the natives weren’t supposed to know that IPR is here.”
“It’ll be night in Kurr.”
“Of course. Did you know that I’m the new Team B commander? Perhaps I should go with you.”
“No!” she said quickly. Then she echoed, with an obvious note of incredulity, “The new—Team B commander?”
“That’s what my orders say.”
“That’s very interesting.”
He attempted to conjure her image out of the room’s thick darkness. He remembered her face perfectly—the smooth curve of her cheek and the delicate perfection of her turned-up nose as she bent in profile over the torru, frowning slightly in concentration on her nimble fingers.
“You shouldn’t go back with me,” she said. “It will be best if they don’t know that we’ve met.”
“Have we met? I don’t even know who you are.”
“Ann Cory. Officially, Gurnil B627.”
“All right, Gurnil B627. What do you do in Team B?”
“Among other things, I’m a music teacher in Kurra, which is the capital city of Kurr. I give music lessons to the talented and not-so-talented daughters of the elite.”
“How large is Team B?”
“About two hundred.”
“Two—hundred? I had no idea there were so many agents in Kurr. All of them masquerading as natives, I suppose.”
“Members of a Bureau team don’t masquerade,” she said coldly. “We are natives—when we’re in Kurr.”
“I see. Two hundred. Spread over the whole country that probably isn’t very many.”
“Didn’t the coordinator brief you?”
“Wheeler gave me a manual, which I immediately gave back to him. He told me a little about the situation. I gather that the people of Kurr are perfectly satisfied with things as they are, or IPR wouldn’t have labored in vain for four hundred years. Also that their King Rovva stubbornly refuses to take any action that would make them dissatisfied. My own ideas have a Cultural Survey bias and will probably sound treasonable to you, but it seems to me that if a people are satisfied and happy—and these Kurrians are, I can tell from the art they create—the IPR Bureau has no business contriving the overthrow of their government.”
“One of the things you must see in Kurr,” she said softly, “are the one-hand villages. There are several of them, populated exclusively by men and women who have displeased the king and had their left arm severed at the elbow. It’s a pleasant little diversion the king indulges in to amuse himself and his court. The attendant who sneezes when the king has ordained silence, or who drops a serving tray—but no one is immune, not even the king’s high ministers. There are good kings and bad kings, and we in the Bureau sometimes find ourselves working to depose a king who is a kind, benevolent monarch and whom we personally like and admire. It’s the system that’s evil. The ideal monarch may have a monster for a successor.”
“Very well. The system is evil and must be changed, but by the people themselves. Democracy imposed from without—”
He paused. Her gown rustled softly as she shifted her feet, but she remained tantalizingly invisible. “I’m working on the language,” he said. “I’ll have it down pretty well in another day, and I’ll be fluent in two. It’s an easy language—much easier than learning to walk in the dratted priest’s costume that your people picked out for me. I keep stumbling over it. I don’t care much for that ghastly artificial nose, either, but if Kurrians are cursed with monumental snouts I suppose I’d be rather conspicuous without one.”
He did not presume to say it, but the one aspect of his assignment that he most dreaded was seeing Ann Cory wearing a disfiguring Kurrian nose.
“What priest’s costume?” she asked.
Forzon sighed. “I’m to be a sort of wandering holy man. Rastadt says they’re quite common in Kurr, and it’s an absolutely safe role because
