“That’s what I thought, but I wanted your opinion.”
“You have it.” E-Wusk heaved a sigh. “Do you suppose there really is a pazul?”
“Undoubtedly there’s something strange there, and it took the agents by surprise. And we know how the loss of nine agents would affect Rok Wllon. He’d feel personally responsible. He came to that council meeting intending to ask our advice, and we ridiculed him.”
“He should have known better than to sing a song to the council,” E-Wusk said.
“He thought we would see the same sinister meaning in those words that he did. Either that, or he hoped we’d convince him it wasn’t there.”
“But this is terrible!” E-Wusk exclaimed. “A member of the Council of Supreme! Missing on an Uncertified World! We can’t permit that!”
“It’s already happened.”
E-Wusk subsided into his tangle of limbs. “Are you going to call a special meeting of the council?”
“No. This isn’t a matter to be settled by debate, and I agree with Rok Wllon that the word pazul shouldn’t be mentioned where Supreme is likely to overhear it. Not unless someone can figure out for certain how Supreme would handle that Mandate.”
“Is there anything else I can do for you?”
“One of Rok Wllon’s major character defects is that he doesn’t tell anyone what he’s doing,” Darzek said. “I’m telling you. I’m going to Kamm. I’m going to try to find Rok Wllon. I’m going to try to find out what happened to those nine missing agents. I’m going to see exactly what this wood, non-electrical device is that the Department of Uncertified Worlds calls a pazul. While I’m doing all that, I’ll send back reports—for your eyes only. They aren’t to be discussed with anyone, not even the other councilors, except in this room and under a pledge of secrecy. I don’t want Supreme suddenly deciding to destroy Kamm while I’m there working to solve this thing.”
He got to his feet. “You’re First Councilor in my absence. I have this advice for you. The best way to run an efficient council—especially a Council of Supreme—is to hold meetings as infrequently as possible.”
E-Wusk said emotionally, “If nine agents are missing, and now Rok Wllon is missing—take care, Gul Darr!”
“I always do,” Darzek said, “except when it interferes with my work. Now I have to turn myself over to the Department of Uncertified Worlds, and I hate to think what it’s going to do to me.”
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 bre
ak 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.
Silence is Deadly Page 4
