The Legend That Was Earth (38 page)

"Tell a story. Teach a lesson," Susan supplied. She was now transformed in a close-fitting black cocktail dress and looking devastating.

"Exactly."

Susan looked at the others. "Interesting. I've always thought of myself as a hard-boiled science type too. But you know, fellas, I like it."

"You see, it needs Hyadean and Terran brains combined," Freem said.

Hudro was enraptured. "So, is all designed for consciousnesses to make choices and learn," he said to Krossig. "What is it does the designing?"

Krossig spread his hands. "I don't know. Not my department."

Hudro turned to Cade. "Here is what I seek. Is as you say, like fresh air. We bring Yassem here. Already I think we stay in this country."

Cade looked inquiringly at Susan and Freem.

"I don't think that would be too much of a problem," Susan said. "There's a good community of Hyadeans here—all learning to be individuals. Sounds like they'd fit right in."

* * *

For the next couple of days, Cade and Hudro were given a tour of the area, particularly to see some of the ways in which Hyadeans and Terrans were working together without organizing directives from above or centralized policies favoring corporate economics. The scientific station was larger and more diverse in its activities than Cade had imagined. He toured the labs and workshops, saw prototype rigs of the catalyzed hydrogen turboelectric system that Tolly had talked about in the bus on the way from the airport, and didn't really understand a lot else. Like the mission in Los Angeles, the station had gravitic communications equipment in touch with Chryse via the orbiting Hyadean relay system, and Cade watched Terran scientists still spellbound at the thought of interacting with counterparts light-years away.

"This makes the web look like Pony Express," one of them told him.

They were from a surprisingly wide range of places and backgrounds, brought in one way or another through influences of the cosmopolitan influx of the individualist-minded from Asia, Europe, and the Americas to what had already been a mixed region. There were also a lot more Hyadeans than Cade would have expected. Freem said that most had paid their own way privately to come to Earth in search of the independent way of living they had heard of that was new to them. Krossig felt there was more going on here than just a collaborative scientific center. It could be a microcosm of how an alternative might evolve to the imposed, top-down form of organized dealings between the two races that had taken root in the West.

* * *

But there was another side that was disconcerting. "China's policy," Susan said when she and Cade were with Freem in Freem's office, next to the gravcom room. "What we think is their real aim in leading the AANS—and we've talked to Hueng about it, and he agrees. They see the lineup of Hyadean and America-Europe as an attempt to preserve a Western-dominated economic order that should have died after the twentieth century and two world wars. They made the Hyadeans a symbol for the rest of the world to rally against. Beijing seems to think that now the U.S. has broken up, it's as good as over. All it has to do is deliver a knockout blow. They're underestimating what they could be up against. We could never beat Hyadeans by taking them on in a straight fight—if it ever came to that. Hudro understands that. But there's no need to. From the things we're hearing here, they're ripe for their own form of revolution. Why confront when you can undermine? With the right strategy, we can win enough of them over that their system caves in."

Cade was both intrigued and gratified. In effect, this was stating in other words what he himself, Vrel, Luodine, and others had also concluded. At the same time, he was mildly perplexed. "I agree with what you're saying," he told them. "But why are we going through all this? You sound as if you expect me to do something about it."

"I talked to Hueng," Freem replied. "His connections in Beijing go higher than you perhaps imagine. I'm sure he provides an efficient direct conduit back of anything of interest that goes on here." Freem held up a hand before Cade could respond, as if to say that was of no consequence. "But he also shares our concern. Naturally, he has made his superiors fully aware of the presence here of the American featured in the South American documentary, and the Hyadean officer whose story he helped narrate. Hueng put out some feelers, and it seems they would be interested in inviting you there. You have a chance to present our case maybe where it stands the most chance of having some effect."

Cade blinked. "You mean go to Beijing? Me?"

"While there's still a chance," Susan said. "You understand Hyadeans as well as anyone."

Cade didn't have to think too much about it. He was prepared for just about anything by now. "It would need Hudro there too," he told them. "The documentary wasn't only me. He'd carry a lot of weight there too."

"Then let's talk to Hudro," Freem suggested.

* * *

Hudro returned that evening from visiting an experimental school the Hyadeans had set up for teaching their way of science, which was proving to be a big hit with the local children. Cade and the other two put Hueng's proposition to him over beer and burgers in the station's canteen. "There are people in Beijing who have the power to make decisions that will affect many people, but I'm not sure they understand what a full-scale conflict might bring," Freem told him. "You are a former Hyadean military officer. Also, your experiences in South America give you insights that they do not share. If you really want to prevent what could happen, there would be your place to try."

Cade and Susan stared at each other somberly. Hudro gave Freem a long, searching look. Finally, he nodded. "Very well. I will go to Beijing with Roland and say what I know and what I think. Then I come back to you here. Yassem comes across from over ocean. Then we live here in Australia as Terrans. Is what we dream."

"That would be understood," Freem said.

THEY STAYED IN CAIRNS a little over a week. Everything Cade saw reinforced his impression that it modeled on a small scale the way things could have been: Australian whites and blacks, Europeans, Asians, Americans, Hyadeans, working out their own ways of getting along.

Meanwhile, three Eastern Union nuclear supercarrier groups had put to sea in the Atlantic and were heading south, presumably to enter the Pacific via Cape Horn. The confrontation in Texas was heating up, with both sides using air support. Oil installations along the banks of the Houston ship canal were ablaze under artillery fire. A suburb of St. Louis had been hard hit by overshoots from an attack on an air base.

Then the formal invitation that Hueng had set up came through from Beijing. A farewell party that included Krossig, Freem, Susan, Hueng, and Tolly but which had grown significantly from the one that had greeted them accompanied Cade and Hudro to the airport, where they boarded a Chinese government executive jet sent with two officials from the Department of Foreign Affairs to collect them. The flight north lasted six hours and brought them to Beijing's International Airport, ten miles south of the city center. A white limousine flying the new pennant of the Democratic Republic of China from its hood, preceded by a police escort that seemed to delight in using its siren and lights to clear regular traffic grudgingly out of the way, conveyed them to the seventeen-story Beijing Hotel on Wangfujing Avenue, the busiest of Beijing's shopping streets, marking the eastern edge of the old Imperial City.

The atmosphere was very different from the colorful, provincial informality of Cairns. Even with the time together through the plane trip, the two officials who accompanied them seemed stiff and formal after the easygoing smiles of Tolly and Hueng. The talk was of things hypothetical and impersonal, grandiose schemes for the future, and how people would need to adapt and be educated to play their part—not of people simply allowing life itself to determine whatever kind of scheme took shape.

The same mood set the tone of the obligatory dinner that was given later in one of the hotel's private rooms. Cade had the feeling that in addition to paying the requisite courtesies, it was designed to send a political message. The ranks and numbers of the guests seemed calculated to convey that Cade and Hudro's presence, while acknowledged to be of interest, shouldn't be seen as carrying cosmic significance.

The speeches dwelt on political theory and abstract ideals. China might have made heroic efforts to change the form, but the old habits of thinking were still there, Cade thought as he nodded, smiled, and applauded. It was still the thinking of Earth, which created vast, imaginative symphonies of fantasy setting out what ought to be, and then tried forcing reality to fit. The community that had grown at Cairns embodied, even if it probably didn't understand, what Hyadean thinking had been before opportunism took advantage of it, and conformity stifled it—the thinking that had accepted reality as it is, and pointed the way to building starships; understood it the only way it could be understood: spontaneously, by living and expressing it.

It would have been an oversimplification to say even that Asia stood for one side or the other of the tussle that was dividing Earth. Should that be resolved, then Asia itself would break up into factions, as would other alignments that seemed stable for as long as the greater common threat persisted. Cade was beginning to see Terrans from something like the perspective that he imagined Hyadeans saw them. Whether one agreed with and liked what one saw depended on where in the Hyadean social order the viewing was from. The true dividing lines were complex. There were bulky, blue-to-gray "Terrans," and there were slender pink-to-black "Hyadeans." What better words might have more accurately described which of both groups stood for what was far from obvious.

* * *

The next day, they were taken on a tour of the city by four intense young people, two men and two women, polite, impeccably groomed, dressed, and mannered, all speaking English, and two, to Hudro's surprise and commendation, ably versed in Hyadean. One couple was from the public relations office of the Department of Foreign Affairs, the other from the Central Military Directorate. Beijing had been China's capital city since its founding in the Yuan Dynasty during the thirteenth century, and the layout was still dominated by its imperial past. The city proper, as opposed to the greater metropolitan area of modern times, consisted of two distinct sections: the square Inner, or Tartar City to the north, and adjoining it to the south, the more cosmopolitan and commercial, oblong Outer, or Chinese City. The Tartar City, dating from the earliest period, had originally been enclosed by walls forty feet high, removed only during the 1950s, in the Communist period. Within its fifteen-mile perimeter, it enclosed two other nested walled cities erected during the fifteenth-century Ming Dynasty: the Imperial City, with parks, temples, secondary palaces, and residences and offices of the nation's leaders; and within that the moated Forbidden City, containing the Imperial Palace with its 9,000 chambers, as well as audience halls and terraced courtyards extending over 250 acres, now maintained as a museum. Cade and Hudro stood in reverence at the shrines and temples of wooden beams, red clay walls, and massive, yellow tiled roofs with upturned eaves; admired the broad marble steps, carved stone lions, and ceremonial gates; and walked among the gardens with their ornamental lakes. But it was all an enclosed wonderland, a preserved relic of a past that had gone. When they came back outside, the humorless office blocks of glass and concrete, and imposing government buildings with brooding stone frontages pushing their way in and joining up like a rising tide around the shrinking islands of times gone by, reminded them that the serious business of the world at large and its future set the tone and the rhythm now.

The four young guides talked eagerly about plans for the future and a new society to be built. Yes, mistakes had been made in the past, but they had brought their lessons. In essence, the global conformity that the Hyadeans would impose on Earth if they were allowed threatened the same kind of exploitation that the West's imperialism had the century before. Eastern Asia had resisted successfully then, and it was natural and inevitable that it should form the nucleus of the resistance growing across the world today. Cade heard the total self-assurance that can come only from minds incapable of conceiving the possibility that they could be wrong. The belief that the future could be molded as desired determined planning, and guidance remained unquestioned. Only the plan had changed.

"You're still inventing the perfect society in your minds, then trying to figure out how to shape people to fit in with it," Cade commented to one of the young women.

"Yes. It gives purpose and requires dedication." She looked at him bright-eyed, as if waiting for a revelation. "Is there a better way?"

"Leave people the way they are, and accept whatever society comes out of it," Cade said. "Like the Hyadeans do with facts. You're making your society a theory. Just let facts and people be what they are, and lead to whatever becomes. That's the way to build starships."

But she couldn't make the connection. Her programming didn't include such a concept.

Cade and Hudro were subdued by the time they returned to the hotel. This was going to be tougher than they had thought. That evening, they dined less ostentatiously with a half dozen people from foreign affairs and military departments. Conversation focused on plying Cade and Hudro with questions about Hyadean-Terran relations in the former U.S.A., their impressions of the guerrillas in South America, and Hudro's experiences in counterinsurgency operations. The undisguised object was to gather advance material for the more senior representatives whom they would be meeting in the morning.

* * *

The meeting was held in a large, somber room of paneled walls with portraits of mostly forgotten military and political leaders in one of the government buildings off Tiananmen Square, a couple of blocks from the hotel. There were shelves of ornately bound books that Cade could never imagine anyone opening, brown leather armchairs arranged with side tables along the sides and in the corners, and a bench seat below the end window. Cade and Hudro sat at one end of a polished table forming the centerpiece. The chairman, who had been introduced as Brigadier General Zhao Yaotung of the Army, faced them from the far end. Arranged along the two longer sides were five other principal participants and their several secretaries and translators. Two microphones on the table and a video camera commanding the table from a corner indicated that the proceedings would be recorded.