The Legend That Was Earth (7 page)

Some of the Hyadeans nodded in recognition, though without displays of overt familiarity—as a rule they were more stiff and formal by day. A number of Terrans worked there too in such roles as advisors and translators—the pay the Hyadeans could offer was impossible to turn down. Whether because they had never become comfortable with the practice, or because the Hyadean translation programs couldn't capture the subtleties of natural language sufficiently for fluency, they prefered using conventional touchpad and wireless mouse rather than voice when operating equipment.

The brave attempts at color and decoration that Cade noticed here and there were doubtless due to the Terrans too. A noticeable exception was anything of floral design, which the Hyadeans wouldn't permit, even to the extent of prohibiting it from acceptable office dress. Seemingly, their managerial caste had some hangup about displays of sexual organs, whatever the species.

Vrel was waiting at the far end, his mouth stretched into the faint smile that was the most a Hyadean would allow while on duty. However, he had followed Wyvex's example in relieving the drabness of the standard tunic with a colorful patch on the breast pocket—a fractal pattern this time. Vrel's hair seemed almost to glow in a strange mix of electric blue and violet hues that coordinated well with the paler blue of his skin. He had been among the original group to set up the mission six years previously, and had first met Cade then, already expanding his business circles to make Hyadean acquaintances.

"Hello, Roland... Luke," he greeted. "Exactly on time. I'm surprised. The traffic is supposed to be bad this morning."

"Luke has his own routes," Cade answered. Vrel was picking up Terran ways. In some places, conversation opened with the weather or inquiries about one's health. In Los Angeles it was the traffic. Cade gestured at the patch on Vrel's pocket. "What's this riot of abandonment? You'll be showing up in beach shirts next."

"I kind of like it. It amazes me that Hyadeans never thought to put pictures on things. Besides, I couldn't let Wyvex get all the attention."

The complex Hyadean system of social ordering, which Cade had given up trying to understand, exploited competitiveness and was what made them so conscientious about having to conform. By their standards Vrel's gesture would constitute a blaze of individuality bordering on irresponsible. The interesting thing was that Vrel seemed to be enjoying it. "Is Wyvex here?" Cade asked.

"No. Damien Philps took him up to San Francisco to tour some galleries. His friend Tevlak in Bolivia is talking about opening up outlets on Chryse. I was talking to Tevlak about it earlier."

Erya appeared in an entrance behind Vrel and came forward to greet Cade and Luke. "Mr. Cade and Mr. Luke. Mimi said you wanted to see me."

"We couldn't let you go back without saying goodbye," Cade said.

"How thoughtful." Only then did Erya's gaze drift down to the case that Cade was holding. She looked at it uncomprehendingly as Cade, grinning, lifted it onto a nearby worktop and opened the lid. Erya's jaw dropped incredulously.

"From the movie, like I said," Cade told her. "I couldn't get the first violin, as I'd hoped. But this is the next best."

Erya was speechless for several seconds. "You remembered!... But I don't understand. I'm just about to go back. There's no possible return. Why would you choose..." She consulted her veebee for an appropriate phrase. "Negative payoff."

Even Vrel, who should have known better by now, seemed taken aback. Cade shook his head, doing his best not to let his bemusement show. It was this strange Hyadean calculus of short-term returns again. They couldn't comprehend giving for its own sake. "Don't let worrying about it spoil your trip," he said. "It'll do more good on Chryse than it would have done if it stayed where I found it. You're still on Earth now. Just accept it as a Terran way of saying we're friends. Maybe one day it'll become your way too."

* * *

While Erya was making a round of the offices to show Cade's gift before she left for the airport, Michael Blair yawned and stretched in one of the rooms upstairs as he rested his eyes after two hours of concentration at a display screen showing Hyadean text and mathematical representations. Learning the language was part of the program he had set himself for understanding the Hyadean sciences. It no longer awed him to think that some of the sources that he accessed, and individuals that he was growing accustomed to interacting with, were located on strange worlds that existed light-years away.

The ironic conclusion he had come to was that, contrary to everything that anyone raised in the self-congratulatory Terran tradition would have believed, the very unimaginativeness that Terrans found incomprehensible was what had enabled the Hyadeans to make breakthroughs that left Earth's scientific community dazed and incredulous. Truth was, the insights he had vowed to share were turning out to be not really that exciting after all. It was the flights of imaginative fancy dreamed up by generations of Terran scientists that were exciting; the only problem was, overwhelmingly, they had this tendency to be wrong.

The Hyadeans ploddingly followed wherever the facts led, without subscribing to elaborate theoretical constructs that emotional investment would cause them to defend tenaciously instead of testing impartially. True enough, the textbook accounts and rhetoric bandied around on Earth praised the scientific method as an ideal; and academia could always count on a staunch cadre of apologists to exalt it into reality. But the basic human drives were emotional, not objective, resulting in commitment to protecting ideas that were comfortingly familiar instead of openness to the research that might threaten them. Most of what Earth took such pride in as "science" was as much a product of human inventiveness as its other arts and fables.

By contrast, the Hyadean attempts to understand the universe were closer to what would have been described on Earth as engineering. What didn't work was abandoned without compunction, and what did was accepted at face value without need of credentials to fit with prevailing theory. The resulting scheme of things was messy, incoherent, and to Terran eyes, crying out to be organized under grand unifying principles postulating answers to questions the Hyadeans had never asked. But so what? At the end of it all the fact remained that they were here, while we hadn't gotten there. That had to say something.

Krossig, the Hyadean anthropologist who was here to study humans, came in and began rummaging for something among the shelves on the far wall. As Blair watched him across the desktop, he reflected on the irony that the Hyadean inclination not to question was also what made them so susceptible to their own social conditioning propaganda, and hence ideal subjects for a conformist society. His brow creased at the seeming paradox. Wasn't readiness to question supposed to be the hallmark of what science was all about? If the Hyadeans didn't question, how could they have made such superb scientific accomplishments? He sat back in his chair and mulled over the problem.

Questioning led to good science when what was being questioned was a belief system that had become dogma. Since the Hyadeans didn't create dogmas, they could get by without need to question them. Accepting uncritically worked when the facts were allowed to speak for themselves. It also produced rigidly structured social orders.

HYADEANS HAD NEVER FALLEN into the Terran habit of creating false gods that would reveal the ultimate truths of the Universe. One of the most recent creations to be elevated to the status of infallible deity was mathematics. The Hyadeans took advantage of the fortuitous fact that some mathematical procedures approximated real-world processes sufficiently closely over a limited range to be useful, and looking no further than that, found an invaluable servant. Terrans turned things upside down by persuading themselves that their manipulations of formal systems of symbols defined "laws" that reality was somehow obliged to imitate. In doing so they subjected themselves to a tyrannical master.
 

Relativity theory had pursued mathematical elegance by seeking to extend to electromagnetism the familiar principles of Galilean relativity, whereby the equations describing mechanical motion came out the same regardless of whose moving reference frame measurements were made from. A consistent solution required that the velocity of light be the same for all observers, which became one of the theory's postulates. Peculiar distortions of space and time were necessary to maintain a velocity as constant, and the various relativistic transformations followed. These also enabled the famous experiment by Michelson and Morley in 1886, and its variants repeated to greater accuracies ever since, which failed to find an ether "wind" due to the Earth's motion around the Sun, as demonstrating that there was no ether—no "preferred" reference frame in which "true" laws of physics operated.
 

The Hyadeans went out into space—which required, after all, solid engineering more than esoteric theories—and discovered that the sought-after medium was simply the locally dominant electromagnetic field. Since in the vicinity of Earth this traveled with the Earth around the Sun, the Terran physicists had, in effect, been trying to measure the airspeed of their plane with their instruments anchored solidly inside the cabin.
 

In the Hyadean scheme of things the Galilean transformations remained valid; yet experiments performed on the surfaces of planets yielded the same results that appeared to support relativity. The reason was that the electric field surrounding a photon experienced an aerodynamic-like distortion when moving through a gravity field, which affected the propagation velocity. Since local gravity varied from place to place, the speed of light changed in different parts of the cosmos, upsetting all manner of long-cherished Terran calculations and models.
 

This distortion was responsible for the phenomenon measured as inertial mass, which explained why mass increased with velocity. Increase in mass resulted in the slowing down of a moving system's clock rates. Hence, "time" didn't dilate in the way relativity maintained—for example to extend the lifetimes of incoming muons created in the upper atmosphere. The "clocks" of particles moving through the Earth's gravity field ran slower than laboratory clocks at rest in it. Hence, the Twin Paradox didn't arise, and space and time remained what common sense had always said.
 

The associated energy dynamics restricted velocities in situations where the gravitational field of the body being accelerated was small compared to the field through which the acceleration was taking place. This had been observed in experiments performed on Earth using nuclear particles, and been misread as a universal limit. But that was merely a locally valid approximation. Away from large gravitating masses, hyperlight velocities could be achieved with surprisingly little outlay of energy, and that was why the Hyadeans were able to measure their interstellar journeys in weeks and months.
 

The gravitational effect itself emerged as a residue of the electrical asymmetry arising from the distortion of hadrons within nuclei by intense internal field stresses. Disturbances superposed on it propagated at close to ten billion times the speed of light, which afforded the basis for Hyadean long-range communications.
 

Evidence hinting at such possibilities had been available on Earth all along, filed in the reports of unfashionable experiments and cited by critics of the orthodoxy. But the mainstream had always ignored it, or found ways to explain it away.
 

Because it didn't fit with the theory.
 

IN NEW YORK, THE SUN was shining from a clear sky, reflecting as a subdued orb from the tinted windows of the skyscraper at the end of Manhattan island housing the offices of the Global-Interplanetary Export-Import Bank. The board room on the floor below the penthouse commanded a clear view over Battery Park, past Governors Island and the upper bay all the way to the Narrows, with the Jersey City docks fading in haze across the mouth of the Hudson to the right, behind the Statue of Liberty.

Casper Toddrel appended his signature on all six copies of the Deed Transfer Agreement, handing each to the financial secretary to be witnessed and dated. These were followed by a ten-page Disclosure Affidavit, Financial Underwriter's Statement, and Supplementary Articles of Contract. The documents were passed along the table to the signatory for the three representatives from the Brazilian Land Commission, and finally to the head of the Hyadean delegation at the far end. These were top-level Hyadeans, the real movers—taking in the U.S. and parts of Western Europe in what came close to a state visit. They sat aloofly in a group, with fans directing scented air streams on the table in front of them—as if not really comfortable at being this close to sweaty, smelly Terrans. Toddrel would have welcomed a greater display of togetherness, but he wasn't troubled all that much. By his estimation, when the various transactions, payments, share allocations, and commissions were completed, his net personal worth would have increased by somewhere in the order of a cool half-billion dollars.

Toddrel was a medium-set man in his midfifties, with black curls of hair fringing a smooth head, and dark, moody eyes adding depth to a face controlled and inexpressive about the mouth and jaw but otherwise untroubled. He believed in being thorough in all that he did, expected the same from the people he paid, and accepted his secure and comfortable existence as no more than the due return for hard work, innate intelligence, and summoning the will to get things right. He was tired of hearing about the self-inflicted problems of people who never had developed a worthwhile thought in their lives, refused to make decisions, did nothing with opportunity when it came, and then complained that they'd never been given a chance. Professionally, if not entirely socially, he had to admit he had a grudging admiration for Hyadeans. They did what was necessary to get the results they wanted.