What was the real culture? What lay behind this facade? Why did he think the impressions of his ordinary senses reported only the outward effect of a mere stage play? It was a mighty big play, performed for a very small audience—the eleven investigators for Galethsurv. How could he get to the bottom of the puzzle in the few days remaining, with no more guide than an inexplicable "feeling" of falseness? Time was so short!
The illusion of reality in the village was strong enough to overwhelm him. Teramis was scratching in his garden while the light faded from the sky. He waved and called out to Rowley as he went by. Teramis had spent the day, with the rest of the villagers, among the trees, removing moss and insects, clipping dead branches ... why?
Shy, big-eyed little kids, showing brown where they weren't clothed, ran in the grassy streets. Unusually—unnecessarily—clean for the offspring of a semi-savage people, he thought.
Tsu was drawing water from the creek as he came up. She paused, holding the water jar against youthful breasts, restrained under the taut fabric of her yellow sarong. Like others of her race, she was surpassingly slender, breathtakingly beautiful in the liquid melody of her movements. Her face was long, tanned, glowing with the ripeness of youth. Her eyes, long, tip-tilted, were lidded with mystery, and her black hair was substanceless shadow caressing her shoulders.
It almost came to him as he looked at her, greeted her. Did Tsu look the part of a shy, savage maiden of the wild? He had to admit that she did ... she looked like an over-enthusiastic video casting director's idea of category two X sub one maidenhood.
The implications slipped from his mind as she clasped his hand. The warm flesh of her palm felt firm against his.
An electric tingle wriggled up his arm. Not even the rigor of his emotional conditioning could have prevented that much. It was not good for field men to be bothered by emotions. It made their work difficult; they found wives on sub-standard worlds and wanted to bring them out to civilization; or, they reverted to the wilds themselves with their mates. The Corps conditioned its men against anything like that, so that emotional vagaries could not disturb the single-mindedness trained into them—to discover and interpret in the field.