“Gretana ty Iltha,” said a female voice, accurately beamed at her from an invisible source, “come to the reception chamber indicated by the marker lights.”
Twin lines of tesserae began to pulse amber and white, stipplinga pathway to one of the buildings on the perimeter of the circular plaza. She set out along it on legs which tried to buckle with each step, a tendency which was enhanced by her unfamiliarity with Terran footwear. Positive that she was being scrutinised, and wishing she could at least have had the reassurance of wearing her own best clothes, she reached the building and entered it by way of an automatic door.
The square, brightly-lit chamber within was larger than she had expected and contained more than twenty desks interspersed with machines whose functions were unguessable, but which appeared to be electronic in nature. Only a few of the desks were in use. Their occupants were bored-looking men wearing the blue overalls of the Bureau of Wardens, and none of them appeared even to notice Gretana’s arrival. It was impossible for her to decide if the place’s faint air of desolation sprang merely from the fact that it was understaffed at night, or if it had been permanently run down from a higher level of activity. Unsure of what to do next, she was glancing around in the hope of seeing the woman who had spoken to her at long range when a door slid open in the nearest interior wall.
The man who appeared in the opening was tall and strongly-built, but with a pug-nosed, large-chinned face whose proportions were so far from those of the Lucent Ideal that he would almost certainly never be able to marry. For an instant Gretana reacted as her old self—with compassion compounded by a sense of reluctant kinship—then remembered that with her present surgically-altered features it was she who was the prime object of pity. The stranger, however, seemed in no way embarrassed or perturbed by her appearance or his own. He greeted her with a smile of surprising amiability and confidence.
“Fair seasons, Gretana,” he said, coming forward to give her—as only someone in his unusual occupation would have considered doing—a Terran-style handshake. “I’m Ichmo tye Railt. your section coordinator. How do you feel?”
“I…How am I supposed to feel?”
“Isn’t this your first time off-world? Beginners often get quite severe reactions—faintness, nausea, powerful urges to skord straight back home.” The coordinator mimed a hasty and ludicrously complicated mnemo-curve.
“I’m all right.” Gretana realised, with some surprise, that her legitimate awe over treading the surface of an alien world had been displaced by curiosity about how a man so unprepossessing as Ichmo could appear so relaxed and content with himself.
“Good for you,” Ichmo said. “Your assessment gives you an A2 rating, and they seem to be getting rare these days. No doubt that’s why the Warden said you were to be taken straight to his office.”
Gretana felt a cool nervous tremor, and her hands rose of their own accord to mask her face. “Now? Am I going to see him right now?”
“Yes, but as a projection.” Ichmo opened a second door and ushered her into an area of faint purple lighting. “The Warden hasn’t been able to spend much time here in recent years. We’re under increasing pressure from some non-human sectors, particularly the Attatorians. Their sensory apparatus is totally different to our own, so they won’t accept the Warden’s electronic presence—they expect him to negotiate in person.”
“I see.” Trying to conceal her disappointment, Gretana paused at a three-dimensional star map which floated in the cavernous dimness. She was able, by drawing on newly-imprinted knowledge, to identify the central region containing the 172 planetary systems where human life was known to flourish. On all sides of it, in volumes of space that had various background tints, were the non-human empires.
“You can see the Warden’s problem,” Ichmo said, pointing at a star which was surrounded by a pulsing bubble of green light. “Here’s Sol, with Earth, less than a hundred light years from the Attatorian boundary in an area that’s always been a bit of a jumble anyway. The Attatorians and some others are claiming that—because of the unique conditions on Earth—it should be declared a free zone, with unlimited right of access for scientific observers.
’We reject that viewpoint, of course—especially as the whole Terran civilisation is balanced on a knife-edge—but the Attatorians are pushing pretty hard, and the number of unauthorised atmospheric penetrations is going up every decade. You’ll probably see evidence of that yourself when you go into the field. Are you nervous about it?”
“I’m afraid so,” Gretana said. Everything would have been all right if only I could have seen Vekrynn…
“In that case, you shouldn’t spend too much time here.” Ichmo spoke with brusque sympathy. “My advice is to hear what the Old Man has to say to you, then move straight on to Earth before the witchcraft wears off. I’ll be waiting in my office.”
“Witchcraft?” Gretana was prepared to be offended on Vekrynn’s behalf. “I’m afraid I…”
“Don’t take it the wrong way,” Ichmo said, smiling his homely smile. “The Warden couldn’t have achieved a tenth of what he has done without using his own kind of magic to make people believe what he wants them to believe. He’s a monomaniac, you see, totally obsessed with the Wardenship of Earth, and the rest of us aren’t used to dealing with that type of mentality—so he wins all the battles.”
Gretana, eager to add to her scanty store of knowledge about Vekrynn, was both intrigued and disturbed by the hint that the Warden had to face his share of problems like any other human being. “But he’s the doyen.”
“So was his father, which means Vekrynn was generally expected to accept an administrative post on the High Council. Instead of that, he used the family influence to get Earth added to the list of the Hundred Worlds, and he has kept it there ever since, in spite of all the opposition.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“That’s because Vekrynn programmes all our educational imprints in person, and he likes to engender positive attitudes.”
“But you don’t.”
“Wrong! I simply prefer different methods.” Ichmo regarded her quizzically for a moment, then turned and with a wave of one hand conjured up from the dimness a simulation of Earth, minus its normal cloud cover, as viewed from a distance of several planetary diameters. “There it is—the unlucky one—in all its seething short-lived misery. As you must know, the sole purpose of the Bureau of Wardens is to study the evolution of civilisation on a nominal one hundred human worlds—the actual number is now somewhat less than a hundred—and to develop a science which will enable the Mollanian culture to survive for ever. The official term is ‘indefinitely’, but it means for ever.”
Gretana nodded. “Well?”
“We come to the delicate question of relative time scales. As a matter of policy, we have mostly chosen worlds which have had no success in extending life expectancy beyond the norm of six or seven centuries, the theory being that they conveniently telescope or condense all social and evolutionary processes and thus yield far more data. The theory isn’t generally accepted, though. Some authorities take the view that the lifespan of the individual dictates virtually all of his attitudes and consequently has a profound effect on the development of his civilisation. They claim that the data obtained from human cultures with unmodified lifespans are highly suspect, not at all applicable to Mollan. They also claim that all observations of a pitiful freak like Earth are of academic interest only. Putting it bluntly, they would like the Wardenship of Earth to be discontinued.”