“Not quite—there has been a certain amount of divergence. Look here.” Vekrynn touched his wrist console and the solid image of a woman appeared in the room several paces away from where they were seated. She was small and was wearing a crimson blouse and a knee-length grey skirt, garments which had a certain kind of style to them, but which appeared crude to Gretana because of the coarseness of the weave and the fact that the seams were easily visible. The woman’s shoes, which were blatantly designed to add to her stature, drew a glance from Gretana, but it was the head and face which held her attention. They were incredibly narrow by Mollanian standards, creating a disproportion of the features which both repelled and fascinated Gretana. She stood up to get a better look at the simulated face and was almost overcome with a curious blend of pity for the woman’s ugliness and relief that she herself, for all her physical imperfections, had been spared imprisonment behind such a countenance.
“I…I’ve never seen anything so…” Gretana checked herself, remembering the pain a single word had inflicted on her that morning. “Is she normal?”
“On Earth she would be considered so, perhaps even beautiful. The Lucent Ideal is a parochial concept.” As Vekrynn made an adjustment on his console the image of the woman vanished and was replaced by a series of representations of women and men, each persisting for only a few seconds. The men were generally smaller than Gretana would have expected, and she was also struck by the great variety in colorations, bodily shapes and proportions, and the actual arrangements of features. Virtually the only thing the images had in common was the small narrow head which gave their eyes the appearance of being much too close together. Ugliness was the common denominator.
“Were a native of Earth to arrive here on Mollan he would see the people as being tall, large-headed and very much alike,” Vekrynn commented. “We would all be brothers and sisters in his eyes.”
“I must have misunderstood something,” Gretana said, unable to turn away from the constantly merging image. “I don’t know much about the work of the Bureau, but I thought observers had to live as part of the societies under study.”
“Oh, they do. In your case you would have to go to Earth and live in one of their communities as one of them, and it would be essential that you did so without being noticed. If they were to discover that visitors from another world were living among them the data would be invalidated.”
“But…” She gave Vekrynn a perplexed smile. “How could they fail to notice us?”
“Surgery, of course.” Vekrynn leaned back in his chair and spoke in casual tones. “It’s a matter of cutting some sections out of the cranium and facial bones, then reassembling the skull to Earth proportions. The brain has to be shrunk a little to suit the reduced volume of the cranium, but oddly enough that’s one of the easiest parts of the operation. I’m told the surgeons simply spray it with chemicals.”
The idea of saws cutting into her head made Gretana feel that the floor was tilting under her. “Warden, are you making fun of me?”
“No. What I’m describing is standard practice.”
“But nobody would…”
“The process is reversible, of course. The excised bone sections are preserved, and at the conclusion of an observer’s tour of duty the skull is rebuilt. The whole process is quite rapid, it’s painless, and the end result is always perfect.”
Gretana stared at the Warden in disbelief. “Are you trying to tell me that all the people who work for you on Earth—perhaps hundreds of them—have voluntarily submitted…?”
“Gretana, you weren’t giving me your full attention.” Vekrynn rose to his feet, majestic and radiant as he breasted a slanting prism of sunlight. “I told you the end result is always perfect.”
“I must go now,” she said faintly. She tried to move past Vekrynn, but he put an arm around her shoulders and drew her to him with the ease of an adult constraining a small child. He turned her to face the centre of the room again and her resistance faded as she saw that the image at the focus of the hidden projector had steadied and changed.
It was now in the form of a Mollanian woman, possibly the most beautiful Gretana had ever seen. The woman had the same upswept hair-style as Gretana, but there all resemblance ended, because the simulated creature had a face which matched the Lucent Ideal so closely, so perfectly, that looking at her filled Gretana with joy shaded with an obscure anguish which had something to do with the realisation that even fifty centuries was too brief a time for such loveliness to exist. She allowed the vision to fill her eyes, drawing in to herself every detail of the ideally proportioned features and then, incredibly, as her cognizance of the beautiful, blind, immobile face increased there came a stirring of something like familiarity. The woman’s eyes could almost have been those of Gretana’s mother, and there was something about the curve of the chin where it merged with the neck…
“This is a simulation based on just one scan of your bone structure, but I can assure you of its accuracy,” Vekrynn said. “That’s how you would look after returning from Earth.”
There was a prolonged silence during which the air of the room seemed to pulse in time with Gretana’s heart. Across a murmurous distance she heard herself say, “Cosmetic surgery is illegal.”
“The Bureau is allowed certain indulgences,” Vekrynn said, beginning a lengthy reply which Gretana heard only in part. “The law prevents the disguise of what are almost regarded as genetic defects…idea being to ensure that no partner in a marriage can be deceived, especially with regard to the probable appearance of future offspring…observers returning from Earth…special category…amassed social credits…with the proviso that sterilisation is accepted…won’t worry too much if the Bureau’s surgeons ‘accidentally’ fail to restore an observer’s exact former appearance…whole new life before you…my consort at Silver Island…future is yours…”
The words flitted through Gretana’s consciousness like windblown leaves, making brief brittle contacts, tumbling on their way again without having left any real impression. There was room for nothing in her mind but the vision of the face that could be hers, the face that was so perfect, so still, so painfully beautiful.
Chapter Three
The ground began to tremble as the huge nuclear-powered prime mover approached the Carsewell pick-up point. It had left Montreal nine hours earlier, lightly loaded because not many people wanted to travel through the night, and for the greater part of the long haul southwards through the Champlain and Lake George Valleys its twin traction cables had been quite empty. Dawn had been breaking as it rumbled nonstop through the string of towns between Whitehall and Albany, and from that stage onwards transfer modules—many of them bound for New York—had attached themselves to it with increasing frequency. By the time the engine reached Carsewell it was trailing upwards of eighty modules in a double row and the cables were full almost to the point of overcrowding.
The situation was made worse by the fact that a number of the module drivers, having successfully clamped on to the cables, were not closing up to the regulation separation of twenty metres. This was because the automatic points on the southern stretches of the line were badly in need of maintenance and had become tardy in operation, with the result that modules sometimes missed their turn-offs and were carried inexorably onwards to later exits.
Hargate kept those factors in mind as the massive grey hull of the 8.30 nuke rolled past the Carsewell pick-up station and it became increasingly apparent that there would be very little room left on the west cable. He and his wheelchair were in the baggage section at the rear of the module, and from that vantage point he could note the growing restlessness of the passengers as the seemingly endless succession of carriages rolled by.