Читать книгу The Still, Small Voice of Trumpets - Lloyd Biggle jr. - Страница 5

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 young men in work dress were already eating. He was received in silence; the other diners avoided his eyes and responded in mumbled monosyllables when he attempted to start a conversation. One by one they departed, and long before Forzon finished eating he was alone.

He returned to his quarters, where he found a lavish luncheon laid out on his work table. Disgustedly he emptied the congealed food into the disposal. He was dourly contemplating the blighted view from his windows when a knock sounded.

He measured his caller with one swift glance. This, he thought, has got to be the assistant coordinator.

The man snapped to attention and saluted. “Assistant-Coordinator Wheeler reporting.”

Forzon told him to skip it and come in and sit down. And when he answered, “Yes, sir,” Forzon told him to skip that, too. “The name is Jef. Do you have a first name?”

“Blagdon.” Wheeler grinned foolishly. “My friends call me Blag.”

“Good enough. I’d wear myself out saying Assistant-Coordinator Wheeler.”

Wheeler grinned again, handed Forzon a thick book, and arranged himself comfortably on a chair. Forzon grinned back at him. Having met Coordinator Rastadt, he could have predicted his assistant. A big, easygoing, pleasant-looking man, his principal function on this base would be the soothing of feelings rumpled by his brusque superior.

Then Wheeler’s grin faded, and Forzon realized with a start that the man had two faces, tragic and comic, and probably did not know himself whether he was a weeping clown or a laughing tragedian.

Forzon hefted the book. “What’s this?”

“Field Manual 1048K. The basic IPR manual. It tells you everything, which is probably a lot more than you’ll want to know.”

Forzon pushed it aside. “You’re supposed to brief me.”

“Yes,” Wheeler agreed. “But first—we’ve found your orders.”

“You’ve found them?”

Wheeler nodded unhappily. Even at his glummest his round, congenial face seemed about to break into laughter. Forzon regarded him sympathetically. Whatever abilities the man had, he was doomed to pass through life as someone’s assistant. At every crisis in his career the clown in his character would rear its leering head and convince his superiors that this was not a man to be taken seriously.

“One of the communications men goofed,” Wheeler said. “Not his fault, really. The orders were for someone he’d never heard of. He knew there was no Jef Forzon on Gurnil and no supervisor of any kind within light-years of here. Naturally he figured that the orders had been mistakenly coded for Gurnil, and he filed them and asked for confirmation. A lot of things can happen to an interspatial relay, and the confirmation never arrived—and your orders stayed filed. Anyway, there’s no harm done. You’re here, and your orders are here. I’m having copies made now. You’re to take command of Team B.”

Forzon stared at him. “A Cultural Survey officer in charge of an Interplanetary Relations Bureau field team? You’d better refile those orders and send another request for confirmation.”

“I already have,” Wheeler said. “I’ve asked for confirmation, I mean, but that’s routine. I don’t think there’s any chance of an error.”

“Then someone in IPR Bureau Supreme Headquarters is crazy.”

For once Wheeler’s smile was merely wistful. “I’ve been contending that for years, but regardless of the mental condition of the person issuing them, orders are inevitably orders. Team B is yours.”

“To do what?”

“Mmm—yes. Some Gurnil history might be helpful to you.”

“Anything would be helpful.”

“To be sure. I was forgetting that you don’t—that you’re not—” He grinned mournfully and paused for a moment’s thought. “As you no doubt know, the Interplanetary Relations Bureau functions chiefly outside the boundaries of the Federation of Independent Worlds. As the Federation grows, IPR moves ahead and prepares the way for it. It charts space and explores and surveys the planets. If it discovers intelligent life a coordinator is appointed, and he establishes an IPR base, conducts a classification study, and sets up the field teams he needs to guide the planet toward membership in the Federation. If there is no intelligent life then various other things happen, none of which need concern us because Gurnil had two flourishing human-type civilizations when it was first surveyed four hundred years ago. Do you know anything about IPR procedures?”

Forzon shook his head. “How could I? You don’t let CS in until you certify a planet non-hostile, and you don’t do that until your work is finished and the planet has actually applied for Federation membership.”

“We can’t take a chance on having our work messed up,” Wheeler observed.

“Thanks,” Forzon said dryly. “In the meantime, you mess up our work.”

Wheeler flashed his tragic grin. “We have one or two-things to think about other than culture. This guiding a planet toward Federation membership can be a touchy thing. There must be a planet-wide democratic government, set up by the people themselves without apparent outside interference. We have to work in a terrible complex of regulations.”

“Democracy imposed from without—” Forzon murmured.

“The Bureau’s first law. We rarely find even a planet-wide government, let alone a democracy. So we guide smaller political units toward democratic government, and then we guide them toward combining into larger units, and eventually we have our planet-wide democracy. And of course it all has to be done without the people knowing we’re around. Sometimes it takes centuries.”

“Which is why the cultures are tainted by the time you let us in.”

“We can’t help that.”

“So what am I doing on Gurnil now?”

“I don’t know,” Wheeler said frankly. “I’m just trying to tell you what IPR is doing here. Gurnil is bicontinental, and at first contact both continents were political entities controlled by absolute monarchies. The Bureau’s classification team estimated our job here at fifty years.”

“That was four hundred years ago?”

Wheeler nodded. “Team A, here in Larnor, was immediately successful. Within a dozen years the monarchy had been replaced by a flourishing democracy. It’s still flourishing. It’s practically a model of its kind. Team B, over in Kurr, had no success at all. After four hundred years Kurr is no closer to democratization than it was when the planet was discovered. The contrary —the situation keeps getting worse. Each succeeding monarch consolidates his power a bit further. And that’s where matters stand now.”

“So I’m to take command of Team B, and my mission is to convert Kurr to a democracy.”

“Without apparent outside interference,” Wheeler added with a grin. “You’ll want to take a look at the Team B file. You should know something about what’s been tried before you start making plans of your own.”

“You said the problem has been going on for four hundred years.”

“Yes-”

“A lot of things can be tried in four hundred years.”

“The Team B file fills a room,” Wheeler said cheerfully.

“Further, since IPR must find the problem of Kurr irritating if not downright embarrassing, over the years it will have assigned some of its best men there, and they’ll have applied every trick and device and maneuver they could think of. All of them failed, so now IPR is giving the job to a Cultural Survey officer. If we rule out insanity it still seems like a rather desperate measure.”

“Supreme Headquarters is desperate,” Wheeler agreed. “The Federation boundary can’t be drawn in loops and curlicues. Neither can there be a forbidden hunk of space inside the boundary. A world like Gurnil can hold up the admission of a whole sector of worlds and bring Federation expansion to a dead stop.”

“If Kurr is so tough, how does it happen that Larnor was a pushover?”

“Larnor is a poor continent, and it had an immensely stupid king. Its resources had been neglected. The people lived in dire poverty, and it didn’t take much to incite them to revolt. The king was encouraged to impose more and more taxes, and the people were encouraged to do something about them.”

“All without outside interference, of course.”

“Without apparent outside interference. It’s not quite the same thing.”

“What about Kurr?”

“An immensely wealthy continent, and its rulers have been nothing short of brilliant. They’re tyrants, with the usual evil vices of tyrants, but they’ve known to a hair just how far they can go without ruffling their subjects. Some refined instinct seems to keep a check on their natural greed, and they can acquire as much wealth as they think they need without oppressive taxation because their realm is so wealthy. They’re even shrewd enough to temper their acts of cruelty. The king may summarily seize a girl who takes his fancy, but he always rewards her father or husband, and when he tires of her he rewards the girl. What should be an intolerable act of oppression becomes a highly profitable honor. If a subject offends him the king may have his left arm severed at the elbow—a favorite practice of the present King Rovva—but the victim will be pensioned off, and it’s usually a court hanger-on about whom the people aren’t likely to be concerned anyway. And naturally the people have had respect for the monarch bred into them for generations.”

“What about relations between Kurr and Larnor?”

“There haven’t been any formal relations since the Larnorian revolt. The kings of Kurr were shrewd enough to see that Larnorian ideas were dangerous. Informally, the Larnorians used to send out missionaries to spread both their religion and democracy, but they always disappeared without a trace. Probably they ended up in the king’s one-hand villages. Both continents are at technological level twenty, and ocean travel is brutally primitive. It wasn’t difficult for Kurr to cut off virtually all contact.”

“You said that IPR works in a terrible complex of regulations. What are they?”

Wheeler gestured at IPR Field Manual 1048K.

Forzon pulled it toward him and flipped the pages. Emblazoned on the frontispiece and at the head of every chapter was the Bureau’s first law: DEMOCRACY IMPOSED FROM WITHOUT IS THE SEVEREST FORM OF TYRANNY. Capsules of what the Bureau obviously considered distilled wisdom leaped out in bold, black capitals as Forzon turned the pages. 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. DEMOCRACY IS NOT A FORM OF GOVERNMENT; IT IS A STATE OF MIND. PEOPLE CANNOT BE ARBITRARILY PLACED IN A STATE OF MIND. THE RULE OF ONE WAS A MASTERFUL CONCESSION BECAUSE IT CONCEDED NOTHING. INCOMPETENT FIELD WORKERS AGITATED FOR THE SUBSTITUTION OF TECHNOLOGY FOR INTELLIGENCE. THEY WERE GIVEN TECHNOLOGY—IN A WAY THAT LEFT THEM ABSOLUTELY DEPENDENT UPON INTELLIGENCE. ONE MEASURE OF THE URGENCY OF REVOLUTION IS THE FREEDOM THE PEOPLE HAVE, COMPARED WITH THE FREEDOM THEY WANT.

Forzon snapped the book shut. “Catch,” he said, arid lofted it to Wheeler, who clutched it awkwardly, his face contorted with bewilderment. He was the tragedian whose most telling pathos had inexplicably drawn a laugh. “What—what are you going to do?”

“How long does it take a Bureau man to work his way through that morass of fine print?”

“Three years.”

“Surely it wasn’t the intention of your superiors that I spend three years mastering Field Manual 1048K.” He got to his feet and strode to a window. Each time he saw it the blighted base area irritated him more. He wondered if the IPR personnel never looked beyond the conditioned confines of their building, never noticed this corrosion of the crater’s grandeur. A Cultural Survey base would have been surrounded by as much beauty as devoted hands and obedient machines could coax from the environment.

He turned. “Those paintings in the reception room. Are they from Kurr?”

Wheeler hesitated. “I’m sure most of them are. I never thought to inquire.”

Forzon said caustically, “If some of them are, then all of them are. Widely separated continents with few contacts don’t develop identical artistic styles and techniques.”

He hadn’t needed to ask. The girl with the torru was from Team B, meaning that she was from Kurr, and the torru was a miniature version of the elaborate instrument in the painting. “And the natives don’t know you’re here,” Forzon mused. “No wonder the coordinator flipped when I told him to bring in some musicians and artists. But how can you guide the people toward democracy if you have no contact with them?”

“But we do!” Wheeler protested indignantly. “Every agent of a field team has a native role. You’ll have to have one, too, before you can assume your command.”

“I see. Some kind of disguise, in other words.”

“Not a disguise. An identity.”

“If that’s what you want to call it. I’m beginning to see a glimmer of light. The Bureau has a long-standing problem in Kurr. Kurr obviously has a fantastic level of cultural achievement. After four hundred years someone in the Bureau has finally noticed this and got to wondering if perhaps a Cultural Survey officer might be of some assistance. Very well. I’ve been placed in command of Team B. I’ll go to Kurr, and I’ll use Team B to set up a cultural survey.”

“Cultural—” Wheeler took a deep breath and finished on a falsetto, “—survey?”

“That’s what I’m trained to do. It’d be silly for me to begin with the IPR Field Manual. The only potential I’d have there is that in three years I might become as competent as a newly graduated IPR cadet—if I study diligently. In the absence of specific orders to the contrary, I can only assume that IPR wishes to fill in those gaps in its knowledge that occur in my area of specialization, and that I was requisitioned to perform this task. Have you a better explanation for my assignment?”

Wheeler did not answer.

“I’ll need a blitz language course,” Forzon said.

“Certainly. I’ll send up the equipment. I’ll also check into the matter of an identity for you.”

“I’d like to meet some of the members of Team B,” Forzon said, thinking of the girl with the torru.

Wheeler frowned. “If you like. It’d be a little awkward, though. They’re all established in Kurr, and they can’t always break away at a moment’s notice. They have to maintain their positions, or a lot of good work is wasted. We could bring back one or two at a time, but it would take forever for you to meet very many of them. It’d be much better if you saw them in Kurr.”

“Aren’t there any Team B personnel here at base?”

“No,” 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.