Strangers by Gardner Duzois Page B

there was a note waiting for him, asking him to call on Dr. Anthony Ferri, the Co-op ethnologist.
    Ferri was a phlegmatic, reclusive man, but his cool reticence was a mask for voracious ambitions of a sort that must have burned themselves to slag in Keane years before. He worked for the Co-op, but he was simultaneously doing field work for Cornell— really doing field work for Cornell is the way he himself would have put it, if you caught him in a confiding mood—and all his dreams were centered on the marvelous monographs he would publish, on the books he would write, on the honors he would earn, on grants and university chairs and lecture tours and tenure. He wanted to be famous, to be well respected, to be a giant in his field. That was his one passion; everything else had been sublimated into it. And it was possible that he would yet translate dream into reality. He had a brilliant mind, an enormous—though somewhat specialized—store of erudition, and enough practicality to realize that he would have to work like a demon every moment of his stay on “Lisle” if he were ever to realize his ambitions. All that was on the credit side of the ledger. On the debit side was his own personality. Most men found him cold, distant, and unfriendly. Actually, he was a fairly sociable man, and, when he noticed them, sincerely liked people. But he seldom noticed them—he was too absorbed by work, too haunted by the sense of time ticking by and taking him no closer to his goal. He was taciturn to the point of insult. That was because, basically, he had nothing to say about most things. But when he judged that a bit of communication might advance his career, and especially when the subject under discussion fell within his own sphere of expertise, he could suddenly become affable, loquacious, enthusiastic, persuasive, even glib.
    He was all of those things that evening.
    He wanted Farber to work for him. More precisely, he wanted Farber to be a “research assistant,” gathering the type of data that he was unable to get himself. Ferri was too much of a cold fish—although he didn’t put it quite that way when he was explaining it to Farber—to become really friendly with the Cian, to be accepted into their homes; he had tried, in his most ingratiating manner and with all the professional wiles he could command, and he had been rebuffed—with characteristic Cian politeness, but decisively. That meant that some doors were forever closed to him in Shasine. But Farber was already intimately involved with a Cian, and if, as the gossip had it, he was going to marry her, then the chances were that he’d eventually be able to penetrate even deeper into Cian society. Ferri, seeing that Farber was getting angry, admitted hastily that it was none of his business whether Farber married Liraun or not, but if he did, if he did — The job wouldn’t be very demanding, Ferri explained, mostly a matter of keeping his eyes open, surreptitiously recording conversations—here Ferri exhibited a bracelet containing a hidden microminiaturized recorder—and telemetering the stuff back to Ferri. Just the raw data; he wouldn’t have to try to analyze it or draw conclusions. Ferri and his semantic and anthropological computers would do that. But only Farber could get the data in the first place.
    “Joe, listen to me,” Ferri said urgently. “You’re new here, you don’t realize yet what a godawful secretive culture this is. On the surface it looks like a pretty open and relaxed society, everybody friendly and polite, almost stress-free when compared to an Earth society like America or Russia, low incidence of neurosis, lower incidence of insanity, suicide relatively rare, stress-induced illness infrequent, psychosomatic illness almost completely unknown. But they’re so completely obsessional in guarding their privacy! Their private lives are sacrosanct, they won’t talk about them, they won’t let us investigate them. We’ve been here