Читать книгу The Still, Small Voice of Trumpets - Lloyd Biggle jr. - Страница 4

CHAPTER 1

Behind him a door opened and closed. Jef Forzon kept his attention on the paintings that filled one wall of the room from floor to ceiling.

Magnificent paintings.

The first thing he would do, he thought, would be to put a chemist to work on that paint. He’d never seen anything like it. The colors were superb, the texture astonishing. In the hands of the better artists, and most of those represented in the display were better artists, it produced an effect of dimension that made his head spin.

Small wonder that the Interplanetary Relations Bureau had sent a distress call for a Cultural Survey officer! Personnel who botched the simple task of lettering door signs and selected office color schemes more suitable to a darkened mausoleum were ill-equipped to cope with works of art. They didn’t even know how to hang a painting!

The room’s communicator sputtered; the receptionist said coldly, “The coordinator will see you now, sir.”

Forzon got to his feet, paused for one last, searching look at the paintings, and followed her. He loved his work, but he hated the bureaucratic formalities that had to be negotiated en route to it. He also hated shapely young ladies who wore masculine uniforms and smiled superior smiles.

This particular young lady’s smile vanished abruptly, and Forzon realized, with a twinge of conscience, that he had been glaring at her. He owed her an apology. The superior smile could have been the only one she had, and the uniform probably was not of her own choosing, or at least he hoped that it wasn’t.

“Do the base personnel ever wear native costume?” he asked.

“Sir?”

The thought so startled her that a door slipped from her fingers and slammed in Forzon’s face. She opened it again, and he followed her along a corridor reading the signs on the doors that he passed: Team A Headquarters, Team B Headquarters, and then an unlabeled room that was perhaps destined to become his own Cultural Survey Headquarters, in which case he would paint the sign himself. He had never worked under the direct control of another governmental agency, and with each step that brought him closer to the coordinator he liked the idea less.

“There’s no rule against it, is there?” he asked the girl.

“Sir?”

“Wearing native costume,” Forzon persisted, regarding her near-masculine hair styling with sturdy masculine disapproval. “There’s no rule against it, is there?”

“No, sir. But the coordinator does not approve.”

Forzon’s resentment for this particular coordinator was rapidly changing to active dislike. He couldn’t blame the man for not getting up in the middle of the night to check him in when he arrived, but there was no excuse for his keeping Forzon waiting for more than an hour the following morning—not that he had minded, with the paintings to study, but he knew that it was unnecessary.

Deliberate rudeness on the part of a planet’s ranking officer was difficult enough to cope with; rudeness combined with a proclivity for petty tyranny would be intolerable. In most headquarters the personnel delighted in wearing native costume.

But it was no business of his. He would complete the formalities as quickly as possible and get out among the natives where he belonged.

The receptionist saw him through another door, gave him a pert nod, and left him. Another young lady, equally severe in appearance, passed him along to a private office. Forzon strolled calmly into the presence of Wern Rastadt, Interplanetary Relations Bureau coordinator of the planet Gurnil.

“Forzon reporting,” he said.

The words brought no discernible pleasure to the face of Coordinator Rastadt. Flabby, deeply wrinkled with a morosely drooping mouth, it was not a face capable of expressing pleasure. The eyes, for all their blazing aliveness, were sunken in unhealthy puffs of flesh. A tonsorist had valiantly attempted to impose a stiff military cut upon the sparse white hair and succeeded only in exposing a vast expanse of pink scalp. Only the coordinator’s chin had character: it jutted firmly, like an incongruous prominence in a dreary wasteland. His plump white hands were held palm down on the desk in front of him, as though he were tensing himself to spring at Forzon.

Obviously he had grown old and fat in the service, waived voluntary retirement, and entrenched himself in a soft assignment from which, barring a colossal blunder and a special competency investigation, only death would him part. Forzon turned his gaze to the framed motto attached to the wall behind the coordinator—

DEMOCRACY IMPOSED FROM WITHOUT IS THE SEVEREST FORM OF TYRANNY

—and suppressed a smile. It was the fifth time that morning that he had encountered it.

Abruptly Rastadt’s hands folded into fists, and his words lashed at Forzon. “I don’t suppose the Cultural Survey teaches its men how to report to a superior officer!”

Forzon said easily, “Superiority is a myth. The Cultural Survey proved that long ago.”

Rastadt’s fists hit the desk. He jerked erect, his chair overturned and crashed to the floor, and he leaned across the desk and shouted, “You are now a part of my command, and by God, you’re going to conduct yourself as if you knew it. Get outside and come back in here and report properly!”

Forzon reluctantly thrust aside the temptation to have some fun with this obnoxious martinet. The man’s age and position entitled him to a certain rudimentary respect, even if his conduct did not. Forzon tossed his credentials onto the desk. The coordinator studied them silently.

When finally he spoke his voice sounded curiously subdued. “You’re a—a sector supervisor—in the Cultural Survey?”

“So I’ve been told.”

The coordinator turned, carefully righted his chair, and sat down heavily. Forzon had never seen a man so quickly and so thoroughly deflated. He gazed unblinkingly at Forzon, his flabby face suddenly tense with incredulity.

Watching him, Forzon detachedly weighed the pictorial qualities of his bloated features and found them wanting. A portrait painter who had to wrest character from that bleak visage would be driven to distraction. On the other hand, a caricaturist could have had a delightful time with it.

“You’re young,” Rastadt observed suddenly.

“That happens once to everyone.”

“May I have your orders, please.”

“I was told that my orders would be waiting for me here.”

“Here?” Rastadt’s head jerked, and the puffy flesh contracted and made suspicious slits of his eyes. “I have no orders for you.” He paused. “Then you don’t know why you’re here?”

“Why am I anywhere? To set up a cultural survey.”

“No.” The coordinator shook his head emphatically. “No. Gurnil is still classified a hostile planet. Cultural surveys are not permitted on hostile planets, as you should know.”

“My headquarters ordered me to this planet,” Forzon said slowly. “The Interplanetary Relations Bureau cleared the orders, gave me a class one priority, and even arranged to have a cruiser go a number of light years out of its way to deposit me on your doorstep. Are you trying to tell me that I’m lost?”

Rastadt pushed Forzon’s credentials toward him. “The only information I’ve received was a short message informing me that a CS man had been transferred to the Bureau in rank for service on this planet. 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.