“My pleasure,” Macgregory responded with satisfaction.
He fixed his attention on Rael. “Now that I can’t be accused of holding that contract over your head, I believe we have something to discuss. Doctor Cofort. — Your Captain did tell you of my offer, I presume?”
“He did,” she replied, “or told me of its nature, rather. He gave me no details.”
“Those are for us to work out if you’re interested in pursuing the matter. It would entail no small change for you, and I expect you’ll have to give it some pretty deep thought.”
She smiled. “Deeper than you imagine, Mr. Macgregory. I didn’t simply choose or fall into a career in space, you see. I was born on a Free Trader. The stars are in my blood. It’d go against everything I am to try to settle on any one world.”
“Think about it all the same. I won’t press you for an immediate decision—I wouldn’t trust the judgment of anyone who’d give me one now under these circumstances— but a drastic change can work out well for a person. I had a bad case of wanderlust in my youth, and I’ve never been sorry for settling down and going into business.”
The woman nodded slowly. “All right, Mr. Macgregory. I will give the possibility serious consideration, but I can’t honestly see myself pursuing it. Even if I were willing to quit the starlanes, I’m still a Medic. I don’t want to give that up to spend my life selling, whatever the product.” Rael eyed him pensively. “Would you mind answering a question, Mr. Macgregory?”
“Probably not. If I do, I’ll tell you when I hear it.”
“You could’ve had the Thornen silk if you’d wanted it. Why didn’t you take it?”
He chuckled. “Not for lack of interest, I assure you. — Every man should know himself and what suits him. I’m a worker ant and must content myself with the browns, blacks, and grays of my kind. Butterfly wings belong to other folk. That material would look ridiculous on my person or in my home, which is as plain as myself now that my wife’s dead. I did toy with the idea of getting it for my sons and dividing it between them, but I’ve never spoiled them with extravagant presents and decided my best course was to stick to that policy.” He laughed. “Besides, I was having too good a time watching my colleagues make noble fools of themselves. I didn’t want to ruin the fun by entering the fray myself.”
Jellico smiled at that, but his eyes were on the woman.
Macgregory was right to try to lure her into his sales organization, he thought. Rael Cofort could move just about anything, herself not least of all, and she did not have to resort to conscious technique or flamboyant stunts to do it. Her talent for fixing her complete attention on a speaker, as if she found him genuinely valuable and infinitely interesting, saw to that. People were going to respond to that, and it would be a rare one who would not give her a favorable hearing in turn.
Their food was brought to them at that point, and the spacers quickly discovered that it was not the view that brought patrons back time after time to the Twenty-Two. Everything was absolutely fresh and superbly prepared.
Canucheans did not go in heavily for strong spices, but the dishes they produced were not lessened because of their delicate, natural taste. The chef here had the best ingredients at his disposal, local and imported, and his hand, though restrained, was unquestionably a master’s.
While they ate, their host filled them in on Canuche’s history and present status both in response to queries by Van Rycke and in keeping with surplanetary courtesy, which prohibited the discussion of business while food was actually before one’s guests.
“. . . She’s an old planet and an odd one. There’s little or no life at all on any of the three continents in the northern hemisphere save a bit right along the coasts.”
“Burn-on?” Jan asked.
“We don’t know. If so, it happened so long ago that all direct evidence has disappeared. It wouldn’t be the Forerunners who did it but rather their Forerunners. A lot of our scientists think a natural disaster, or series of them, might’ve been responsible, and a small minority says the north might never have supported more than we have now in the way of biotics.”
“That’s not very likely,” Jellico said.
“No. It doesn’t fit the pattern shown anywhere else in the galaxy where there’s water and a reasonable atmosphere. Weathering makes soil, and something, evolutionarily speaking, eventually comes along to live in it.”
“Besides, there is native life on Canuche.”
“Yes. Very little and all low level in the north, as I said. The south has a reasonably rich flora. The fauna is species poor, but those creatures that are present often exist in vast numbers. Rambeeves are an example, as are the several kinds of fowl we’ve elected to farm.”
“What about the sea?”
“The same general picture holds for all four oceans. Poor in variety but with large populations of the species that are present. Life of any sort is scarce or entirely absent from smaller bodies of water, north and south.”
“Something happened here, right enough,” the Captain declared. “Someday, maybe Federation scientists or Canuche’s own will discover what it was.”
“We keep hoping,” Adroo replied.
Rael fixed her eyes on her plate. She did not have to hear more or read a library of documentation to be convinced gut level, in her own heart and mind, that Ali Kamil was right. The chill of that realization filled, all but overwhelmed, her. Canuche of Halio had been shattered in the past and maybe more than once, badly enough that most of the rich fauna and flora that should have graced such a planet had been eliminated, leaving the field open on each level of the food chain for the surviving species, plant and animal, to expand into great megapopulations.
She looked up again as the industrialist continued his account of his homeworld’s history.
“Our First-Ship ancestors realized they had no natural paradise,” he told them, “and decided to turn her peculiarities to their advantage and industrialize on a grand scale here in the north. The south, they devoted to farming. Canucheans knew from the start that we wanted to be self-sufficient and since this was a closed colony, claimed and settled by one group at one time, our ancestors enjoyed the luxury of being able to lay pretty definite and precise plans before ever taking ship for her surface. Canuche provides the resources to meet our basic needs on-world, and the colony’s founders made that a prime part of our life charter. — No society can count itself secure, safe from the danger of being overwhelmed by alien influences, or from being annihilated or starved outright, if it has to depend on outsiders for the really essential goods and services. It hasn’t always been easy, and there have been periods of strong temptation, but thus far we’ve managed to appreciate our founders’ wisdom and stick with their ideals and instructions.”
Macgregory was a native of the capital, and his pride in it was apparent when their conversation turned to Canuche Town itself a few minutes later.
“Canuche Town’s actually a misnomer,” he told them. “It may not be an inner-system megalopolis, but we have over two million residents and at least half that number again in the suburbs. That qualifies us as a city by anyone’s lights.
“Like the other Canuchean towns, this is a community of individual neighborhoods. When our future First Shippers were developing their plans for the organization of our urban centers, it was decided to keep our workers near their jobs, ideally within walking distance or, at worst, a short commute away. Each of the neighborhoods thereby created is regarded and treated as a separate entity within the city and has its own schools, hospitals, shopping places, essential support services, and general entertainment and self-improvement facilities, which are often one and the same. Connecting and managing everything are an excellent public transport system and a civic government kept small enough and close enough to its constituents to remain responsive and effective. — The whole system’s efficient, and everything’s kept on a decent, human scale.
“You’re actually seeing us just about at our worst from up here,” Macgregory informed them. “Houses aren’t packed in this tightly in most places, but between the plants down in the waterfront region and the docks themselves, there’s a huge demand for workers. As I mentioned before, they live as close as possible to their jobs. It’s a slum, in point of fact, or the Canuchean version of a slum. We don’t have the poverty and the major problems associated with that in many other places.”
“Why the docks at all?” Van Rycke inquired. “Air transport’s efficient, cheap, and fast.”