Ilse Varga

Ilse Varga is a Principal Officer of the Music Corps, of its Xenomusicology branch, and the record holds her at one posting: a Survey Corps rotation at Eden Space Habitat in the late summer of 2825 UCSD, attached to the delegation on the standing terms by which a branch borrows a desk where it has no business of its own. The delegation did the Passage's work. She did hers in the hours around it, in a common room two decks under the dock ring, where a three-person band played nine songs a night to the loaders coming off shift.

What she did there is the branch's method in its plainest form. She sat where the sound was worst, wrote what she could show and nothing she could not, and struck a question mark on the ninth night when a thin room gave her the observation that settled it. She recommended the band's singer to the college as a serving officer of the branch, on the ordinary road, with the band she was already in as the placement, and her one instruction to the new Novice was about whose the room was: in it, the band's; the file, the Corps'. See The Time the Study Needs (S01E00C06).

The Novice was Tissadelle Shepherd. The project was Slipwave.

What the record does not hold

Her home world, her age, her own road into the Corps, her service track and the rest of her career. Whether she sat on the college's side of the table when Shepherd's Cadet standing was confirmed a year later. Whether the two ever met again. The record holds her where it found her, at a back table, and has not been asked for more.

See also

• The Star Rangers Music Corps
• Xenomusicology
• Slipwave
• Tissadelle Shepherd