“We’re not lost, Rey,” Commander Mayweather replied with studied patience. “This thing has satellite navigation.” The first officer chuckled. “I thought you colonials were supposed to be hardy frontier types.”
“Frontiers of science, sure. My parents teach at the University of Alpha Centauri. I grew up in the heart of civilization. Not very close to the ocean.”
“It’s a river, not an ocean.”
“It’s a river doing a damn good impression of an ocean.” He glanced left, then did a double take. “I think I saw something move down there.”
Director Sajithen, who sat beside Sangupta in the rear seat while her two escorts sat up front with Mayweather, threw the science officer an irritated look. “The river contains much life. Many things move down there.”
“Thanks, that’s a comforting thought.”
“What you should be watching out for,” Mayweather told him, “are First Family agents. Someone could be waiting for us besides Director Sajithen’s contacts.” The director had finally received a response from the Chelon nationalists, a group that resided deep within the rainforest that covered much of Rigel III’s northern continent. As Chelons were adapted for a semi-aquatic existence, the majority lived along the planet’s many rocky coastlines or on smaller land masses like Janxor, readily accessible to the Jelna traders who had started coming to their world more than six centuries ago and introduced them to metallurgy, writing, and other technologies that the bulk of the Chelon populace had taken to readily. But the tribes of the Hainali had remained more isolated and traditionalist, resisting the efforts of civilized Chelons and offworld traders to “develop” their lands and harvest their natural resources. It was no surprise that the nationalist movement had its heart here.
But while Sangupta had enough doubts about getting the Hainalians to cooperate, he dismissed Mayweather’s concern. “How would they even know we’re here? You said it yourself, sir, they have no idea we know about the Rigel III connection.”
“They had no idea,” Sajithen replied. “But as I have noted, they had one agent inside the Commission, so they could still have another. By now they may know we discovered the hypnoids’ involvement and are coming here.”
“Oh. Wonderful.” Sangupta resumed scanning the horizon. “Then the sooner we can find these old friends of yours, the better.”
Fortunately, it was not much longer before the shoreline started to emerge on the horizon. Initially it appeared overgrown with lush rainforest vegetation, but the skiff drew nearer swiftly enough that he soon began to discern settlements along the shore. As the Chelon escort slowed the skiff and turned it to enter a tributary, Rey got a closer look at one of the villages: no mere cluster of huts, but a large community containing hundreds of single-story dwellings atop sturdily built earthen mounds connected by causeways. The earthworks were high enough that now, at the peak of the flood season, the dwellings and causeways remained a couple of meters above the waterline, making things easy for the villagers who dove into the water with empty nets and climbed out later with hauls of fish. There were a few signs of outside technology—thermoconcrete reinforcements for some of the mounds and causeways, solar panels atop many of the dwellings—but they were integrated smoothly into the Hainalians’ traditional designs and construction materials. Rey reflected that some of his distant maternal ancestors in the Amazon Basin had probably lived much the same way half a millennium before. Francisco de Orellana, a member of the first group of Spanish explorers to travel that way, had described riverbanks densely populated with hundreds of such communities—communities that had all but disappeared by the time later explorers returned, their populations devastated by the imported diseases that had raced ahead of European colonization. Here, mercifully, the Chelons had been spared that fate, their exotic biology leaving them immune to the plagues that had ravaged their humanoid neighbors in the past.
Soon they left the villages behind, though the forests along the bank were clearly well-cultivated. In these rainy climes, clearing the forest would wash away the soil, leaving traditional agriculture untenable. So like the native Amazonians, the Hainalians had turned the forest around them into a vast orchard, its trees and smaller plants bred over centuries into forms useful to the Chelons for food, textiles, dyes, building materials, medicines, and so forth.
Still, as one got farther from the villages, the forest grew thicker and less populated. Eventually the Chelon escort settled the skiff in the water in one of these backwoods areas and retracted the canopy. Sajithen herself emitted a loud ululating cry punctuated by a rapid clicking of her beak. No doubt it was the signal to let her contacts know they’d arrived. Sangupta hoped the nationalists were prompt—if only so that his ears hadn’t suffered for nothing. Not to mention the rest of him. The heat and humidity here were stifling, a shock after the climate-controlled environment of the enclosed skiff. Even diffused by the mists that hung overhead, the radiance of Raij at this proximity was intense.