"I'm to see that you aren't bored to death here among strangers," she said. "All work and no play isn't good for anyone. Especially," she said to Ellis, "for one so handsome. I didn't dream he'd look so—"
"So Terran," Ellis finished before she could say so human. "And why not? We're from the same original stock, separated ages before our history begins. Martian annals run back for millennia, did you know? Gold mine of information, settle problems our experts have puzzled over for centuries."
"I am not truly representative of my people," Mirrh Yahn y Cona said with some bitterness. "A special case, reared from birth for this assignment."
The multisensory projector swung into the Tchulkione Serafi's Song of Parting. Mirrh Yahn y Cona's resonant baritone, operatically assertive above Yrml's reedy soprano, filled the room. He shut off the machine abruptly, feeling a sense of desecration that the tender scene had been bared to alien eyes.
Still he felt a puzzling premonitory twinge of guilt when the projection collapsed. Yrml had been infinitely desirable when the sequence was cubed; why should she now seem so sallow and angular, so suddenly and subtly distant?
"Remarkable voice," Ellis said. "You could make a fortune with it here."
"It was lovely," Leila Anderson said. "Could I hear the rest of it some time?"