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CHAPTER 4

The question had been debated before: Did the potential reward from illegal trade justify the risk? Both the law and economics said no. Darzek refused to believe that an entire galaxy of superior intelligences would not produce an occasional crafty individual who could glimpse an illegal fast buck invisible to others and devise a safe way to grab it.

He had arranged a simple precautionary check of his own by having automatic space monitors set throughout the galaxy. Their usefulness in tracing malfunctioning space ships more than justified the expense. Now Darzek could settle the question of illegal trade with Kamm by asking a patrol to tap the monitors in that sector, and he did so.

Then he placed himself at the mercy of the Department of Uncertified Worlds, and twenty minutes after his arrival he was furiously angry at Kom Rmmon, the department, and the world of Kamm. Not even the anesthesia that accompanied his surgery completely quieted him.

Kom Rmmon had waxed enthusiastically over the alleged similarities between Kammians and humans. Darzek received the distinct impression that he could switch species by changing his clothes.

Now he discovered that a few unsubtle differences required drastic modifications in his appearance, and that no one could perform as a Synthesis agent anywhere without extensive training. He entered surgery in an exceedingly angry mood, and he was still angry when he came out of it.

He glared at his bandaged hands and feet, and then he examined his bandaged head in a mirror. “If you don’t take good care of my ears,” he told the surgeon, “when I return, I’ll make you eat them.”

The surgeon, a multistalked Padulupe who consumed only liquids, blanched.

There were two methods by which an agent of the Galactic Synthesis was enabled to pass as a native on an Uncertified World. One involved an elaborate disguise—a synthetic epidermis made to duplicate the external characteristics of the native life form and at the same time accommodate the alien agent within it. The other method was to take an agent whose physical appearance was similar to that of the native life form and to erase or modify any conflicting features with surgery.

The Kammians were startlingly human in appearance, but they had no ears, and they did have six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot. They also had genital organs entirely different in appearance, function, and position from those of humans, but Darzek insisted on his inalienable right to draw the line somewhere.

His ears were removed and placed in deep freeze to await his return. Flesh was drawn smoothly over the aural openings, but his inner ears were not tampered with. He retained enough hearing ability to have the advantage of an extra sense on a world where the natives were deaf; but not so much that he would give himself away by reacting to sounds a native would ignore.

His hands and feet were widened to accommodate an additional finger or toe, and control of these was contrived for him through a process of nerve splitting that seemed miraculous to Darzek but was considered commonplace by his surgeon.

And there were other changes. The surgeon, working from projections of Kammian natives, made numerous minor alterations the way a portrait painter might make final finishing touches: a slight elongation of the eyes, a minute widening of the nostrils, the corners of the mouth turned up, the blond, naturally curly hair darkened and straightened, the color of his irises altered from blue to brown, all mammalian traces excised from his chest. Darzek had to learn to chew with a slight sideways motion, to spit out of the side of his mouth, and to control his tongue. Since the Kammians had no speech, their tongues were much less mobile than those of humans. Sticking out one’s tongue on Kamm was more than a breach of propriety; it was a violation of the physiologically impossible.

Darzek knew that Kamm was called the Silent Planet, but he had not contemplated the implications of life on a world where no life form could hear. He was completely unprepared when Kom Rmmon showed him projections of Kammian natives fluttering their twelve fingers with unbelievable rapidity. When finally he had been convinced that the finger movements actually constituted speech, he considered calling the project off.

“Any sensible life form would have learned to read lips,” he complained.

Kom Rmmon pointed out that reading the lips of an alien life form speaking an utterly alien language was likely to be as difficult as learning to read a finger language, and Darzek sat back resignedly and watched the projection. His crash educational program was just beginning.

“But keep it to the absolute essentials,” he warned Kom Rmmon sternly. “I haven’t time for a graduate degree in Kammian culture.”

Long before his training was completed, he had a report from the space monitors that ringed the sector in which Kamm was located. These recorded a spectrum of information about every ship that passed within light-years, and this information had been compared with logs of ships known to have been in the sector. There were no unknowns. Every ship entering that sector of space was in fact a governmental ship on a governmental mission. No alien civilization had brought a pazul to Kamm.

Darzek read the report twice. “So,” he mused, “the Kammians did it themselves. The problem now is to find out what it is.”

* * * *

The Department of Uncertified Worlds maintained an underground base on the largest of Kamm’s five diminutive moons. The base provided storage and laboratory facilities for the use of Kammian agents. Jan Darzek saw it only briefly. He stepped through a transmitter frame on the Department of Uncertified Worlds supply ship and stepped out of a receiver frame in the moon base. Then he skipped aside; a moment later, supply cartons cascaded after him, and an automatic conveyor moved them away.

Darzek wandered about the base and was not surprised to find it deserted. Agents would visit it only on brief errands. Their work had to be done on the planet, and there never were enough of them to do it properly.

He decided not to wait for chance to provide him with an escort. The moon surface transmitter had a dozen destination settings, but only six were listed as bases on the island of Storoz, the center of activity for Synthesis agents. One of those had been crossed off. Darzek punched the setting for Storoz Base I, the acceptance light flashed, and he asked himself what he had to lose and stepped through to the world of Kamm.

He emerged in a musty-smelling, totally dark room. He shouted; there was no response. He took two steps, and his hands encountered a damp dirt wall. Again a shout brought no response. He turned and fumbled in the opposite direction, and there his hands found a crude stairway fashioned of board steps with dirt packed under them. He climbed them and eventually figured out the trap door at the top. It was double, consisting of a sliding lower door and an upper door that was hinged and opened upward. He stepped through into a dim stone cellar. The transmitter room, a hole dug under it, constituted a secret subbasement.

He found another flight of stairs, this time solidly built of stone. He climbed them and opened the door at the top. He was in a dark hallway, but at the end of it, through a half-open door, he saw a glimmer of light.

Kamm’s multiple moons provided just enough illumination for Darzek to glimpse a magnificent sitting room, exquisitely paneled and ornamented with a coffered ceiling. Some of the furnishings were familiar to him from projections he had studied—the mushroom-like stools, the elaborately carved chests of drawers, the half-circle sofa of which the other half was perpendicular and formed the back. He felt his way from object to object, scrutinizing them in the dim light. Some were strange, but he quickly identified one as a sort of loom and guessed that another functioned as a spinning wheel. The thick, marvelously resilient hand-woven carpet, if made available in quantity, would have ruined Earth’s oriental rug business.

Darzek called out again and got no answer. He continued to fumble about. Finally he chanced onto what seemed to be a candle holder complete with candle, but he had nothing to light it with.

Windows of the other rooms did not catch the moonlight, and they were, all of them, dark. Darzek seated himself on the half-circle sofa and wondered what he should do. Obviously the agents who operated from this base were out. There was little that he could accomplish before morning, so he decided to go to bed. He didn’t feel tired, but the sooner he got his time cycle co-ordinated with that of Kamm, the better.

He fumbled his way up the narrow stairway to the upper story. The moonlight touched one bedroom sufficiently to delineate the bed—a monstrosity that looked somewhat like a giant mushroom with an oversized stem and a flattened top. Darzek thought it symbolic of the problem of Kamm, which thus far he had seen neither head nor tail of. He went to bed and slept restlessly.

* * * *

On his first morning on the world of Kamm, Darzek was awakened by an execution that took place immediately below his window. The shrieks of torment brought him to the window in a bound. He opened the sash, folded the shutter aside, and looked out.

Dawn was only the faintest figment of the new day’s imagination, and all of the moons had set. Looking down on the dim street, which Kammians called a lane, Darzek saw a solitary cart passing, and each of its two wheels was uttering screams of anguish.

Darzek closed shutter and sash and returned to his bed, and before his eyes closed another cart passed by. And another. By the time dawn touched his window, a seemingly endless procession of carts was passing, with one following on the tailgate of another, and Darzek had managed to deduce that this Synthesis headquarters was located on one of the principal lanes, which the Kammians called surlanes, leading to the market place, and that this same excruciating cacophony would take place every market day.

He also had grasped the fact that deafness is synonymous with silence only for the deaf. This world of Kamm, this infamous Silent Planet, was in fact the most revoltingly noisy place he had ever experienced. No New York City traffic jam, even in the days when New York City had traffic, could rival a convoy of Kammian carts on the way to market. The Kammian squeaking wheel never got the grease, because no one heard the squeaking; and the incredibly tough, ridiculously named sponge wood seemed to last forever without lubrication. Every cart and wagon on the entire world of Kamm continuously uttered the pathetic shrieks of a wracked body being dragged to perpetual damnation. The world’s ugly beasts of burden, the nabrula, snorted and hissed and moaned and bleated, splendidly oblivious to the fact that neither they, nor their fellow nabrula, nor any other creature native to the planet, could hear them. The Kammians themselves, for all their disconcertingly human appearance, did the same. They hummed and hacked and bellowed and wheezed constantly. Their very digestive noises provided a running counterpoint to every Kammian encounter. There could be no social constraint about noises—any kind of noises—when no one was able to hear them.

When it seemed pointless to remain in bed longer, Darzek began a daylight exploration of the house. He found no signs of recent occupancy. In the kitchen, an unvented stove that looked like a charcoal burner had not been used since being cleaned. In the pantry were bins of native foods and vegetables, none of which looked edible to him; but some of the bins were empty. The perishables had been removed.

He finally found a loaf of stale bread, and when he’d hacked the petrified crust away with a wood knife of surprising sharpness, the interior was quite fresh. It wafted a potent, perfume-like scent, and its taste was spicy and somewhat bitter. He dipped chunks of it into a highly scented, honey-like syrup and washed them down with a delightfully potent cider.

Then he returned to the vantage point of his bedroom window. He watched the passing traffic, and scrutinized the drivers and the occasional pedestrian, until the squinting windows and unbalanced facade of the imposing house across the lane began to irritate him.

He was becoming increasingly disgusted. There was a job to be done, time was critically important, and he couldn’t make a move until one of the resident agents returned and showed him what to do. He didn’t even know where he was.

Finally he said to himself, “You’ve got to learn to function on this world. Maybe the most effective way to learn is to walk out of the house and do it.”

Major professions and occupations on Kamm had their own distinctive clothing, and Darzek already had noted that the house’s occupant was a perfumer, a maker and vendor of perfumes—not only from the clothing, but from the jars and bottles and flasks of liquid scent that cluttered table and bureau tops in every room.

“So I’ll be a perfumer,” Darzek told himself agreeably. The clothing fit him approximately well, which on the world of Kamm was well enough. He donned a one-piece undersuit with long legs and arms—the climate of Storoz was uniformly cool throughout the year. Leg and foot wrappings served as stockings. There were wide-legged trousers that came to a flapping end just below the knees, cloth-topped high boots with jointed wood soles, a waist-length tunic, a long apron that gave him the feeling of wearing a dress, and, finally, the perfumer’s trade-marks: the black and white striped cape and the imposing tall black and white striped hat.

Darzek scrutinized himself in one of the ornately framed mirrors that adorned each bedroom and pronounced the effect adequate. In a drawer he found a ceramic box with an ingeniously hinged lid—a money box. It was half filled with triangular coins of various alloys, each minted with peculiar glyph marks and the image of Kamm’s hideous death symbol, the Winged Beast. Darzek helped himself liberally, distributing coins through the several pockets of his cape, his apron, and his trousers. He felt uncomfortable without some suggestion of a weapon, so he picked up a small wood knife in the kitchen. It was as sharp as a razor, and when he tested the blade, he found he could not break it.

He went to the front door, hesitated, decided to investigate the back yard first. Some thirty meters behind the house stood a square building of colored stone resembling that of the house. A narrow walk connected the two; on either side, filling the yard and flowing into neighboring yards, were unbroken waves of flowers.

In the outbuilding Darzek found a perfume factory. Strong-smelling leaves and roots and berries and flowers were hung up or spread out to dry. There were enormous ceramic kettles and crocks, some of them covered and filled with pungent liquids. There was elaborate distilling apparatus and a row of unvented stone fireplaces.

A few perfunctory glances satisfied Darzek. Beyond the perfume factory was a low, flat-topped building that his nose told him must be a stable, even though it had not been used recently. It was empty. A ramp leading up to the roof puzzled him until he looked next door and saw a pair of nabrula, the ugly Kammian beasts of burden, looking down at him. They got their air and exercise on their stable roof and thus avoided tramping their owner’s flower-filled yard.

Darzek returned to the house. Again he paused at the front door, and then he stepped through it and turned for a careful look at the front facade of the building. A moment later, walking in the same direction as the now thinning line of vehicles, he set off for the mart.

But he felt alertly cautious, rather than bold. He was accustomed to wandering about on strange worlds, but those worlds were accustomed to the presence of gawking, blundering aliens, of strange aspect, customs, and mannerisms. The world of Kamm did not know of the existence of aliens. If he gawked and blundered, he would be considered a gawking and blundering native and treated as such. Perhaps gawking and blundering had contributed to the loss of those nine or ten Synthesis agents.

He reminded himself not to gawk, and to keep his wits about him so he wouldn’t blunder.

But even a seasoned traveler like Darzek found it difficult not to gape about him on his first glimpse of a spectacularly beautiful world. It was hideously noisy; in direct compensation, as though the deaf Kammians had deliberately set about developing their remaining senses, it was vividly, dramatically, extraordinarily colorful.

And it was just as vividly, dramatically, and extraordinarily scented.

The very cobblestones underfoot had been selected for their colors, and they had been laid out by an artist. The varying shades of pink had been sorted and matched and arranged in a fabric of color that formed a magnificent mosaic, a textured pattern that was unending, that caught the eye and carried it as far as any winding section of the lane permitted, with striking visual motifs that received endlessly varied repetitions.

And where each narrow sublane appeared on either side—the city was not laid out in squares, and the lanes came and went haphazardly—colors flowed into colors, for each lane had its own individual shades and hues and patterns.

The stone dwellings were constructed in equally vivid patterns. They were two or three stories tall, set close on the lane with narrow yards at the sides and a vast expanse of yard in the rear—inevitably terminated by a low, flat-roofed nabrula stable.

The yards were filled with flowers, and floral ornaments and displays were seen everywhere. Vines with strikingly colored leaves entwined over lintels, providing splashes of contrast against the softer shades of the stones. Flowers filled windows and lined balconies. The yards were flower gardens without apparent formal planning; but colors shaded into colors and blossoms into strikingly hued foliage.

And on the fronts of the dwellings, placed with artful care, were baskets and ceramic containers of growing and cut flowers.

Kamm, the Silent Planet: World of color and of scent.

Each flower garden wafted such potent blendings of perfume that Darzek thought the owners arranged the plants as much for their scents as for their colors. And in the entranceway of each house, an alcove in which the door was set, hung a large ceramic beehive of a contraption, fashioned with artist’s care and fired with splendid multicolored glazes. It was an incense burner. Each poured out its own highly individual scent: pungent, spicy, sweet, or bitter; or it burned a blended, delicate orchestration of scents. Did each householder have his own aromatic insignia? Or was the scent perhaps a greeting or a signal to the passer-by: welcome, stop in any time. Or—busy today, come back tomorrow. Darzek pondered the labyrinthine twists and turns of the alien mentality and was awed.

There was a scattering of pedestrians in sight, all of them headed in the same direction as Darzek. For a time Darzek observed the couple walking in front of him, probably a husband and wife. In the fashion of Kammian females, each plait of the wife’s enormously long hair had been dyed a different color. These were piled into a towering headdress, where they were woven into vividly contrasting patterns. This edifice was a suitable companion piece for the tall, patterned hat of her husband; the two structures attained approximately the same altitude.

The female wore a tunic and flopping trousers matching those of her husband, but hers were in variegated color patterns where his were the solid colors of his profession. Her trousers were longer, extending to her ankles, and she seemed to be wearing low-topped shoes instead of boots. Her attire looked more masculine than her husband’s because she wore no artisan’s apron.

Darzek assiduously studied the male for a time—his gait; his mannerisms; the way he carried his hands when he walked; his chivalrous posture in politely bending over his wife’s flickering fingers when she spoke to him, as though every syllable had monumental importance to him and he wanted her to know it.

The lane veered again, and its rows of residences ended at a broad boulevard. It continued on the opposite side as a lane of artisan’s shops. He could see the mart beyond, with its makeshift avenues of tents, booths, wagons, carts. Darzek turned and strolled along the boulevard. Here the buildings were enormous—office warehouses, he speculated, for shipping and importing companies; through the mingled aromas that impinged on him from all sides, he had caught the tang of sea air.

He crossed to the stretch of park that lay in the middle of the boulevard. Stone paths crisscrossed it; rocks of striking shape or color were piled up in seemingly haphazard fashion, but these were used as seats by resting pedestrians. Around them grew lush plants and shrubs of such peculiar form and coloration that Darzek guessed them to be exotic imports. Vendors were selling food and beverages.

Darzek found himself a seat on a large rock and watched the passers-by. Almost at once he made an important discovery. When two males of the same craft or profession met, they exchanged signals that varied with the occupation and sometimes were extremely complicated. For one purple-patterned pair, an uplifted palm. For a pair with green and black, a hand gripping the wrist. For one with pink and white, a bent elbow. The only exception occurred when one male was carrying something. Then both exchanged shrugs.

Darzek continued to watch. Eventually he saw two perfumers exchange their own mystic salute: Index finger of right hand held against the nose. Darzek got to his feet and walked on.

A moment later he was confidently exchanging the finger-against-nose signal with a fellow perfumer. He crossed to the far side of the boulevard and strolled down one of the narrow lanes of artisan shops, marveling at the variety and quality of workmanship—carvings, furniture, jewelry, knickknacks, every kind of item he could think of and not a few whose function he could not imagine, all fashioned exquisitely out of wood. There were lovely ceramics in dazzling colors, masterfully woven rugs and cloths, varieties of baskets and containers that looked like wickerwork. Occasionally he saw a representation of the hideous Winged Beast, the mythical symbol of Kamm’s death religion, in plaques, ornaments, or jewelry. He was surprised to see it so seldom. It seemed to play a much more minor part in Kammian thought than Rok Wllon had believed.

He had seen both men and women carrying thin sided ceramic pots with gaping mouths, a sort of shopping bag into which they stuffed their purchases. He also had observed that the Kammian with his hands occupied was excused from the amenities of greetings or casual conversation.

“When in doubt,” he told himself, “keep your hands shut.”

He stopped at a ceramics shop and bought a pot. He found it astonishingly light. As he moved on down the street he added a few casual purchases that he thought he couldn’t go wrong on—a bundle of scented candles, a chunk of exquisitely scented soap, a pie-shaped loaf of bread that seemed as strongly perfumed as the soap and was handed to him wrapped in a thin, crinkly substance he was unable to identify. With these credentials as a shopper and householder, and relieved of any obligation to make conversation, he blithely strolled on.

Now he was able to study the Kammians at close range. They were a sturdy race. The females, once he became accustomed to their outlandish hairdos, were handsome with a well-built rustic appeal. The flowing garments hinted at sensational Earth-type figures, which of course was an impossibility. The Kammians gave birth to live, dependent young, but they were not mammals. The males were stocky and robust.

Then he made a shattering discovery.

The Kammians were as fascinated with him as he was with them. Each person he passed turned and looked after him perplexedly.

Dumfoundedly he walked on, staring straight ahead of him in frozen bewilderment. He was dressed flawlessly, he was acting his role perfectly, he looked and behaved like the complete Kammian. And in this mundane little lane, with its throngs of coming and going shoppers, he stood out like an alien thumb.

Silence is Deadly

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