The Still, Small Voice of Trumpets. Lloyd Biggle jr.
The message didn’t say what the rank was or what the service was to be, but I’m certain that it can’t have anything to do with a cultural survey. You’re no longer a CS man, you’re IPR or you wouldn’t be here. It’s odd that you don’t have orders, though.”
“It’s odder that my orders haven’t arrived.”
“Not really. We’re due for a supply contact, and no doubt they’ll be in the regular mail. You got here ahead of them because you came by cruiser. Normally the IPR Bureau furnishes a copy of orders for presentation when reporting for duty, but in your case, since you’re transferring from another service, I suppose there was a mixup.” He turned away and absently spoke to the far wall. “Whatever your assignment is, you’ll need briefing.”
“No,” Forzon said, speaking with considerably more calmness than he felt, “but you will. Do IPR officers customarily regard their superiors as a pack of ignoramuses? No one but an idiot would handpick a man who is a highly trained specialist in one small area of a complicated field of knowledge and then assign him to doing something else. Your superiors aren’t, and they haven’t. Surely the IPR Bureau wouldn’t be requisitioning a Cultural Survey officer if it didn’t have a job that only a man with his training could handle.”
“I’m sure that when your orders come—”
“I don’t need orders to tell me what my job is.” Forzon seated himself familiarly on a corner of the coordinator’s desk and pointed a finger. “You have a number of native paintings in your reception room. They’re splendid works of art, and some nincompoop has attached them to the wall with cellex, which for all practical purposes makes them part of the building. If I find out who did it I may murder him. One of the paintings is a portrait of a musician. Do you know which one I mean?”
“I seem to recall—”
“Good. The musical instrument is a plucked chordophone, which for the want of a better term I’m calling a harp—though it’s totally unlike any harp I’ve even seen or heard of. It has a beautifully carved frame, and the strings are stretched from the perimeter of a globular sounding medium to converge in a sort of dragon’s head that ornaments the top of the instrument.” He paused. The coordinator was gaping at him wide-eyed. “What I want to know is this: what musical scale does that instrument employ?”
“I’m—” The coordinator’s throat bulged as he tried to swallow. “I’m afraid I don’t know.”
“I was afraid you wouldn’t. Would you send a selection of recordings up to my quarters, along with the equipment to play them?”
“Recordings?”
“Of the instrument’s music. You do have some, don’t you?”
“I’m—I’m afraid not.”
“I see. Then I’ll make my own. Can you round up the equipment and a few musicians to play for me, or do I have to do that myself?”
“But that’s—” The coordinator’s voice cracked.
“Nothing,” Forzon announced with deadly calm, “is impossible. These paintings interest me. I want the chemical analysis of the paint and a few of the colors to experiment with.”
The coordinator had lapsed into speechlessness. “No chemical analysis?” Forzon asked resignedly.
“Not that I know of.”
“It shouldn’t be difficult to make one. You do maintain a laboratory here, don’t you? Give me a little of the paint, and I’ll analyze it myself.”
“I’m afraid—”
“No laboratory?”
“No paint.”
“That shouldn’t be much of a problem. Get some. Better-invite a few artists in. I’d like to see them work.”
“But that’s impossible! You see—”
“I see why someone has seen fit to send you a Cultural Survey officer.”
The coordinator’s face had reddened; his rising blood pressure seemed on collision course with his plunging self-control, but when finally he spoke his tone was that of a man with a grievance. “You don’t see at all. There isn’t much we can do until your orders arrive, but I’ll tell my assistant to brief you. Are your quarters satisfactory? Well, then—good morning, Forzon. Supervisor Forzon, I should say.”
He scrambled to his feet and snapped off a salute. Forzon returned it dumbfoundedly and withdrew from the office with the disconcerting feeling that he’d been routed.
He made his way back to the reception room and seated himself to have another look at the paintings. He had to have an analysis of that paint. He had to make some recordings. The mere sight of that strange instrument evoked dazzling phantasms of rippling sound.
The receptionist was regarding him with hostility, as though she suspected him of harboring one of the more loathsome species of native vermin. He said conversationally, “I don’t suppose you know what sort of a musical scale that instrument employs.”
Her hostility vanished. For a distressing moment what had been a rather attractive face became suffused with a thoroughly unattractive, blank astonishment. She did not answer, and Forzon, who found unattractive things repulsive, turned away.
Beauty he loved for its own sake; ugliness, which more often than not was a form of inverted beauty, fascinated him. Life offered far too little of either, and far too much appalling mediocrity, which he thought hideous.
But this world of Gurnil possessed a cultural complex of well-nigh unbelievable richness. The paintings contained tantalizing evidence of other arts that might equal or surpass them: the musical instrument; its masterfully sculpted frame that proclaimed a high level of craftsmanship in the plastic arts; the striking architecture, houses with walls that flared outward from a narrow base, and with their humped roofs and splendid colors looked like brilliant, rectangular mushrooms. If what followed was anything on the order of this dazzling introduction, the planet Gurnil had to be the kind of world every Cultural Survey officer dreamed about but almost never encountered.
Forzon’s elation was tempered by a strong sense of foreboding. The IPR Bureau could have contracted as much cultural survey as it needed without transferring a high-ranking CS official to the Bureau in rank; and having requisitioned such an officer, it would not send his orders by slow freighter.
The receptionist continued to regard him with hostility. He looked 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