Regan was grinning at him.
“What would have happened if we had missed the pad?” he asked, feeling obscurely defensive.
“I would have brought us around for another approach,” she answered.
“So we were never in any real danger.”
She cocked her head, as if considering this thought for the first time. “Well, I don’t suppose I would go that far. Wind gusts along the cliff face tend to be strong and erratic. I would hate to have caught a wing on the rocks.”
“Right,” he said.
Following Regan’s example, Rey pulled the latch at his side. The wall fell outward to the ground, becoming a makeshift gangway. He took two unsteady steps and hopped to the ground. A warm fog was blowing up from the cliff edge. More than once, older acquaintances in the Terraces had described the odor of the world jungle as an affluvium of rottenness, as if the entire world were decaying. This was not at all like that. It was a smell of openness, accented by traces of spice and mint.
Rey reached out to steady himself on the Sunbird, his sense of balance deceived by the gusting fog. His nasal passages were already beginning to close off. He reached for the box of antihistamines he kept in his shirt pocket.
Figures loomed out of the dimness. Rey turned on them quickly. Luckily, nobody could see the flush of embarrassment which immediately followed. Even in the gloom, he could see that none of them had the star-burst manes of the White People. If the White People actually existed. It had been nearly five years since the Bainbridge child had been stolen and a Changeling left in his place. Efforts to retrieve the child had been thwarted by the planet itself as much as by his captors, who had come to be known as the White People. Their existence was officially denied. Rumor and a rapidly growing folklore had mushroomed to fill the gaps.
Regan had already opened the cargo hold and was lifting out packages to the ground crew. Rey went to help her. As he placed the last of the boxes onto a hand trolley which, like the people, seemed to have just materialized out of the mist, he became aware of someone standing nearby, examining him.
“Dr. Morrill-Landers?” A woman’s alto voice, low and hoarse. The way she pronounced his name made it sound like “mer-landers.” So much, he thought, for all the families struggling to preserve the old names and lineages. Human laziness warred and won against the ever-increasing number of syllables.
“Not yet,” he said, straightening and offering his hand. “Medical Master only. You must be Practitioner Mazio-Carr.”
She shook his hand absently. Martina Mazio-Carr was a big-boned woman, with hands as rough as her voice. “I asked for a full doctor. Can you tell me why they sent you?”
The irritation was not directed at him, Rey realized, but at the bureaucracy of the Terraces. “I have no idea,” he said mildly. “The fact is, though, that nobody sent me. I came to do research.”
“Research?” The concept seemed to astound her. “Much time you will have for that. There are the sick to be taken care of.”
Rey located his duffel bag and shouldered it. “Really? I was told people here were unusually healthy on Far Edge.”
“Were you indeed?” she asked. “Well, there may be something to that. I’m not talking about people. I’m talking about the livestock.”
II.
Mazio-Carr got him installed in the Murchisons’, a rambling building, or series of buildings, which had originally been a Freehold but now served as a boarding house for colony singles and young families. It was half-buried in the side of the central crater for protection from the storms which blew up from the jungle depths. High winds could do tremendous damage at one and a half standard atmospheres. Rey was shown to a comer room that was little more than a bed and a small desk with a horizontal slit window above each.
During dinner that night, he met his fellow roomers. Juanita Buergher-Murchison owned the house and ran it with the assistance of her daughter, Katarina, and her teenaged son, O’Donnel. Don was a good-looking boy with the reputation of being something of a Romeo. Dinner table conversation had it that he and Andrea Calley-Li, the governor’s youngest daughter, had been a hot item during Old Earth Days. But despite all the kidding, Don appeared to be friendly and hard-working, if not overly bright.
When not insisting that he take overly-generous portions of her cooking, Juanita wanted to know whether any more children had been kidnapped by the White People. Her eyes, as she asked the question, kept straying to her own children.
“None,” Rey assured her. “There are always rumors, but they are never confirmed.”
“Well, they wouldn’t be,” said a burly man with a mustache seated across from Rey. He introduced himself as Garrard Ryn-Rosenberger, a mechanic in charge of the robots which continually sanitized the cordon surrounding Far Edge. “After all, the government would just use the Public Safety laws to suppress that sort of news.”
Rey chewed a slice of lamb as he considered that, suddenly acutely aware that he had paid almost no attention to politics for the past three years. “I don’t think they could do that successfully,” he said after a moment. “Oh, they might try, but from what I’ve seen, the government really isn’t all that efficient. If more children were kidnapped, there would be a hue and cry that they would never be able to quiet.”
They seemed to accept that, yet for the rest of the evening Rey was aware that behind their questions was a lingering doubt that the satellite news feeds were telling them the whole story. Chandler and Linda Karatnycky-Sullum were newlyweds, both working two jobs in hopes of putting enough money together to establish their own freehold. Linda wanted to hear all about the Naturalers. Rey amused the whole table by relating how one had become deathly ill after sneaking though the cordon surrounding the Terraces to gorge on the fruits of a native bush. The Alienist poets had been especially harsh, comparing this to a reversion to bestiality.
“But, of course, the Alienists suffer from enough of their own contradictions,” Rey added. “Their incessant whining about how we can never be at home on this world is bad enough, even without declamations to the effect that the only completely free act is suicide.”
Chandler was more interested in the Technics. He confided to Rey that he had once dreamed of joining the Astronaut Corps, that he had wanted to help maintain the Ark for the day when it could be used to explore their solar system and, perhaps, even reclaim its heritage as a starship.
“From what I hear, the Technics have been coming up with grand plans to make the rest of the planet habitable,” he said.
Rey nodded cautiously. “There was some discussion of nudging an asteroid out of orbit and directing it so that it would impact in an uninhabited portion of the planet, the idea being that the explosion would blow off enough of the atmosphere to make the surface pressure approximately one atmosphere.”
“Then we wouldn’t be confined to mountain peaks any more,” Chandler said, his eyes shining.
“Quite so,” Rey agreed. “However, the Naturalers produced calculations demonstrating that any such impact would raise the temperature of the atmosphere by ten degrees. Only temporarily, to be sure, but long enough to destroy most of the oxygen-producing biosphere at the lower levels. Not to mention the fact that such an abrupt lowering of the atmospheric pressure would make our mountain colonies completely uninhabitable.”
He slept that night, listening to the wind whistling about the eaves. He dreamt that he had been taken to the most secret place on the planet, a Freehold basement where the Changeling, which had been exchanged for the Bainbridge boy, was kept. It talked of Alienists and Naturalers and Technics, its approximately human face contorted with an almost pathetic earnestness. Rey listened intently, but when he woke, all he could remember was a low growling, like that of a sick dog.