The Legend That Was Earth (18 page)

The Hyadean residential settlements were farther north in the more picturesque parts of eastern Peru and the highlands in the tip of Brazil, west of Amazon basin. Their main spaceport for connection to the interstellar ships parked in orbit was at Xuchimbo, in western Brazil, near the point where the borders of the three countries meet. The Hyadean presence had brought a prosperity boom to local businesses, and workers and unions were more than happy with the wages. This provided a broad popular base of political support for the Hyadean-backed government operations being conducted against the insurgency forces active throughout the area.

* * *

Cade's reality—the accumulation of perceptions and experiences that he lived in—had always reflected the world of the affluent and the comfortable. Having taken twenty-first-century global communications for granted as part of growing up, he had paid a token concession at the intellectual level to the existence of other places ruled by other conditions; but despite the background detail woven into movie presentations and the vividness of travel documentaries, the places he acknowledged at that detached level of awareness had never before, somehow, taken on the deeper, emotional quality that brings on a sense of being
real
.

"Vast," "rugged," "empty" were the words that formed in his mind as he took in the cabin displays while the SST slowed for its vertical descent into the landing zone. It was now late in the day. To the west, broken ramparts of reds, browns, yellows and grays, rising in ranks of fading ridges to a line of snowy peaks barely visible in the distance, were darkening against the background sun. Arid hills and rocky basins extended away north and south, opening out and leveling eastward into barren salt flats. Amid it all stood the installations at Uyali.

Uyali was Hyadean-built to serve as the center of their extraction operations, sprung out of the Altiplano desert south of previously worked Terran mining areas. On the western side was what Ni Forgar, who seemed to be some kind of engineer returning to base, said was the reduction and processing complex. With its metal domes, cylinders, and spherical constructions standing among large, white boxlike structures, it looked more like a refinery than what Cade would have expected, though with less clutter and piping. It seemed ugly and sprawling, but visiting Terran engineers had apparently been amazed at its compactness for the volume of material that it handled. This arrived by way of two gigantic moving-belt conveyors converging in a V across the landscape, carved through hills and spanning canyons until they were lost from sight; farther on, Forgar told them, the root conveyors divided repeatedly to form a branching tree probing its way through to extraction points scattered among the mountains. He described the processing complex with typical Hyadean bluntness, never slow to make a point of what he thought they did better.

"That's where the rock is crushed, vaporized, and separated into its various elements," he told them. "It doesn't have to be high-grade ore. Any shovelful of desert contains traces of just about everything you can name. But low grades aren't economic with your methods. You know how to produce nuclear heat but you don't use it. It reduces all materials to a plasma state of charged particles which can be separated magnetically. All clean and efficient. Tuned radiation fields direct the recombination to whatever compounds, alloys, and other forms you want. Surplus energy is tapped for generating electricity and process heat as byproducts. The refined output is sent up to the rail links and Amazon system." Forgar indicated a wide roadway disappearing to the north, on which processions of robot trucks could be seen moving both ways. "The Pacific coast will become the most important outlet when the tunnel is completed." Forgar looked at Cade and Marie as if expecting questions, but neither of them had any for the moment. He turned toward Vrel.

"Terrans stumbled upon the beginnings of low-energy transmutation years ago, but they didn't read it right. We run reactions at levels far below anything their scientists believed were possible."

"Was that what they called cold fusion?" Vrel queried. This really wasn't his field.

"Bad name. `Nuclear catalysis' would have been better. They misinterpreted what was going on, then abandoned it because they couldn't explain it."

Vrel looked at Cade. "Is that beginning to sound like someone we know?" he invited.

"Mike Blair?" Cade guessed.

"
Because it didn't fit with the theory
," they both quoted together.

Forgar looked mystified. "Theories! They'd rather stay with products of their imagination? I don't think I'll ever understand it."

A couple of miles east from the reduction complex was the "town" of Uyali itself—more the advanced-alien equivalent of a mining camp. Stark and utilitarian even for something conceived by Hyadeans, conceding nothing to adornment or elegance, it provided living space, services, and administration for the area. From above it resembled an irregular, colored-tile mosaic. As the SST descended, the tiles took on the form of rectangular boxes and cubes aligned and stacked like creations of children's blocks, making bridges here, adding a level there, the whole giving the impression of being added in haphazard leaps according to need rather than resulting from any unifying design. Beyond, separated by an expanse of fenced open ground, was a sprawl of familiarly styled Terran office units and prefabricated buildings thrown together into streets, blending on the far side into a shantytown of cabins and trailers.

The SST landed and taxied from the touchdown point to a handling area where a mix of Hyadean aircraft was standing amid service buildings, maintenance gantries, and cargo conveyors. A driverless bus took the passengers to a jumble of more Hyadean domino and shoebox constructions that Cade took to be the terminal facility. Along the far side of the landing area, were huge, hangarlike enclosures giving glimpses of sleek shapes surrounded by service platforms and access stairways within, standing in front of clusters of storage tanks, various unidentifiable structures, and tall towers bristling with antenna arrays. To one side, away from the main scene of activity, stood a line of what were unmistakably Terran-built military jets. Armored cars and other camouflage-painted vehicles were parked in a fenced compound nearby. Cade could only speculate as to what they were doing here. They passed a construction area where Terran work crews, some in shirts and jeans, others wearing orange coveralls, using unfamiliar machines, were excavating a new site for something. Evidently, local labor was being employed even inside the air base.

From closer range, the terminal revealed itself as a composition of what appeared to be prefabricated modules and tubelike connecting units stacked and combined in various ways to form office units, living quarters, or work space as desired. The resulting outlandish creations had ends of boxes projecting out into space; blocks straddling gaps and leaving holes through to daylight on the other side; connecting tubes emerging from walls to make right-angled turns in midair, as if changing their minds as to where they wanted to go. It seemed odd that with their obsession for efficiency, Hyadeans should be so incapable of realizing anything that on Earth would be regarded as "pleasing."

The interior was predictably functional. The mission in Lakewood had used a regular building adapted to Hyadean use. This was the first time Cade had been in an environment that was Hyadean in origin. The part of the building they had entered consisted of several large and irregular interconnecting spaces rather than the linear arrangements of rooms and corridors that typified Terran buildings. The predominant color was unfinished metallic gray, with a rigid white mesh in most places serving as ceilings below tangles of cables, pipes, and ducting that were plainly visible. Dividing up the area was an assortment of structures functioning as partitioning, shelving and storage, seating, control consoles aligned and combined in various ways, making it difficult to distinguish furnishings from parts of the architecture. They seemed to be both. One of the Hyadeans working nearby said something to the unit near him and got up to move to another station. The unit reconfigured itself to present a counter and convenience shelf that hadn't been there before, lost a corner, and moved after him to attach itself to a different part of the surroundings. A voice spoke from somewhere in the wall; the Hyadean grunted a reply and carried on. Cade noticed that Marie was staring in surprise. Not being familiar with the ubiquitous Hyadean low-level AIs, she had thought for a moment that the Hyadeans were talking to themselves.

A Bolivian immigration agent processed their papers as well as those of Vrel and his companions. Once again there were no hitches with the system, and Professor Wintner and Dr. Armley were officially admitted to the country. The party came through into what appeared to be the central concourse, where a number of armed Hyadean military were on duty. It was the first time that Cade had seen Hyadean combat troops close-up. They wore dark brown uniforms and black helmets, with lots of gadgets and pouches, and carried short weapons suggestive of assault rifles but stubbier, wider at the muzzle, and studded with controls. They had superb physiques and looked tough, a suggestion enhanced by the blockish, square-faced Hyadean build. Cade decided he could get by without tangling with them.

Forgar left them there to go his own way, along with most of the other passengers from the SST. Several, however, rode with Cade and Marie, Vrel and Thryase, in a transparent-topped car running on a monorail into another modular hodgepodge, only on a larger scale. They learned that this was the Hyadean residential part of Uyali. The area beyond, looking more like a familiar if somewhat ramshackle town, which they had seen during the descent, was the Terran sector. The two areas were segregated because of an ongoing problem of insurgents from the north infiltrating into the work force to spread discontent and conduct sabotage.

The two Hyadeans checked with some kind of office and then conducted Cade and Marie to separate quarters in a hive of cells sprouting off in different directions. They turned out to be quite comfortable accommodation units, plain but serviceable, yet surprisingly spacious. Cade's first problem was with the unfamiliar wall units and gadgets intended for Hyadean voice-direction, which were supposed to have been adapted for English but in reality rapidly became confused. In the end, he settled for the prospect of making do with minimal luxuries and conveniences. He got the shower to work, and in the course of a learning experience that involved a few minor scaldings, freezings, and flow surges, succeeded in taming it. Afterward, he laid out the collection of casual slacks, plaid, check, and plain shirts, lightweight tan jacket, straw hat, reserved sweaters, zippered topcoat, and other items that had seemed an appropriate wardrobe for a visiting academic—all very conservative compared to his customary choices—and considered what might be appropriate for the evening. He really had no way of telling, since he didn't know what the plans were. But before he could give the matter much thought, he felt himself being overcome by a shortness of breath and acute muzzy-headedness. Minutes later, Marie tapped on the door, and when Cade found the right word to open it, tottered in saying that she felt the same way. Then Vrel called to say that he had talked to Corto Tevlak, who was anxious to meet them. Cade groaned that right now neither of them wanted to meet anybody. They'd picked up some kind of South American bug or something already, he was sure.

"Bugs don't work that quickly," Vrel assured him. "It's altitude sickness. Terrans seem to be more affected by it than us. Get some rest. Most people adapt after an initial lousy night. I haven't arranged anything for tonight. We'll be going to see Corto first thing tomorrow."

CADE FELT BETTER ON AWAKENING, able to take on the world again. After showering and shaving, he selected olive pants, the lightweight jacket, and a narrow-check shirt with knitted tie as his attire for the day. When he stopped by Marie's room, it turned out that she had recovered too. Vrel and Thryase arrived soon afterward to collect them. Although there was a communal canteen on the ground floor of the accommodation complex, they ate in a private room nearby, to avoid needless questions as to who the Terrans were. It was gray with metal furnishings and exposed pipes, reminding Cade of the wardroom in a Navy ship that he had visited once. Breakfast was an insipid Hyadean vegetable-based pseudo-sausage covered in a kind of synthetic liquid cheese, accompanied by yellow bread and a warm, fruity drink. Only then, through talking to Thryase, did Cade appreciate fully the audacity that Vrel had displayed in spiriting him and Marie out of the U.S. The normal Hyadean, inured to authority and needing orders from above before acting, would have been incapable of conceiving such a scheme, which was probably why nothing Vrel did had been questioned. Thryase wondered if Vrel's stay on Earth was turning him into a Terran—a remark that Vrel seemed to find pleasing. They departed for Tevlak's in a Hyadean flyer shortly afterward, heading northeast across the southern extremity of the Altiplano.

From the conversation during the flight, it seemed that Thryase was visiting Earth on behalf of a dissident movement of political "doves" who questioned the militant Hyadean policy toward the Querl. The Querl had not been expelled because of their inability to merge into the Hyadean system, Thryase maintained, but had separated because of their refusal to submit to it. He had entertained doubts about the official line for some time, but surrounded on all sides by a majority steeped in the conventional mindset, like many others he had hung back from speaking out strongly. Coming to Earth had opened his eyes to a lot of things and given him more confidence. What the Hyadeans were told represented lawlessness was nothing more than the expression of independent people free to live as they chose. He saw the variety and richness of Earth's cultures as a consequence of the same thing. Marie didn't quite share Thryase's idealistic view of universal freedom on Earth, but she seemed encouraged. It was the first time she had heard the official Hyadean line being questioned by a Hyadean.