"Are you mixed up with that thing that's been in orbit up there for the last couple of weeks?" Jerry asked. "I saw on the news that a bunch of 'em from there were down at Goddard." A gigantic Thurien space vessel, named the
Vishnu
by Terrans, after the Hindu deity that was able to cross the universe in two strides, was currently visiting Earth, having brought delegations to meet with representatives of various nations, institutions, corporations, and other organizations for all manner of purposes as the scope of dealings between the two cultures grew.
"Yes, I talk to some of them," Hunt said, nodding.
"What kind of thing do you do there exactly?" Jerry asked curiously.
Hunt drew on his cigarette and stared out at the central valley between the green, terraced slopes. A glint of metallic bronze appeared briefly as a car rounded a bend a short distance away on the road below. "I used to be with UNSA's Navcomms division down in Houston—that was how I got to go on the Jupiter Five mission. So I was out at Ganymede and mixed up with the Ganymeans right from the start."
"Okay." Jerry nodded.
"Well, now this business with Thurien is all happening, one of the things we need to find out is what sense we can make of their sciences, and how much of our own needs to go in the trash can. UNSA moved me up to Goddard to head up a team that's looking into some parts of that."
"And they do things like travel around between stars and remodel whole planets?" Jerry thought about it for a moment. "That could be pretty hair-raising."
Hunt nodded. "They've got power plants out in space that turn eight lunar masses of material a day into energy and beam it instantly to wherever you need it, light-years away. Sometimes I feel like a scribe from an old monastery would have, trying to unravel what goes on inside IBM."
"Wasn't there a woman who used to visit sometimes, when you first moved here?" Jerry asked. "Kinda red hair, not bad-looking . . ."
Hunt nodded. "That's right. Lyn."
"I talked to her once or twice. Said she'd moved up from Houston, too. So was she with UNSA as well?"
"Right."
"Haven't seen her around lately."
Hunt made a vague gesture with the can he was holding, and stubbed his cigarette in a tin lid that he had found in the toolbox. "An old flame from her college days breezed in out of nowhere, and the next thing I knew it was serious and they got married. They're over in Germany now. She's still with UNSA—coordinating some program with the European side."
"Just like that, eh?"
"Oh, it was just as well, Jerry. She'd been sending domestication signals my way for a while. You know how it is."
"Not really your scene, huh?"
"No . . . Probably a great institution, mind you, Jerry. But I don't think I'm ready for an institution yet."
Jerry seemed more at ease, as if back on ground that he understood. He raised his beer. "I'll drink to that."
"Never tried it?" Hunt asked.
"Once. That was enough."
"Not exactly a happy affair?"
Jerry pulled a face. "Oh, no, there's no such thing as an unhappy marriage. They're all happy—you only have to look at the wedding pictures. It's the living together afterward that does it." He crumpled his empty can and dropped it into the carton, then pulled out another, peeled back the tab, and settled back comfortably until he was half lying against a tree standing behind the rock.
Hunt stretched back on the grassy bank and clasped his hands behind his head. "Anyhow, life's full and exciting right now. I don't need any of that kind of complication. A whole alien civilization. A revolution in science—profound things that need concentration."
"You need all your time," Jerry agreed solemnly. "Can't afford the distraction."
"To tell you the truth, life has never been simpler and more exhilarating."
"A good way for it to be."
Hunt lay back in the sun and closed his eyes. "Oh, you don't have to worry about that. All the complications are three thousand miles away now, in Germany, and that's about where I intend to keep them."
At the sound of a car coming to a halt, he opened his eyes and sat up again. The metallic bronze car that he had glimpsed approaching a minute or two before had come up the access road and was standing outside the gateway where the driveways from the two apartments merged. It was a newish-looking Peugeot import, sleek in line, but with just the right note of restraint in dark brown upholstery and trim to set it apart from pretentiousness.
The same could be said of the woman who was driving it. She was in her early to mid-thirties, with a sweep of raven hair framing an open face with high cheeks, a slightly pouting, well-formed mouth, rounded, tapering chin, and a straight nose, just upturned enough to add a hint of puckishness. She was wearing a neatly cut, sleeveless navy dress with a square white collar, and the tanned arm resting along the sill of the open window bore a light silver bracelet.
"Hi," she said. Her voice was easy and natural. She inclined her head slightly to indicate the still-open hood of Jerry's Husky. "Since you're relaxing, I assume you got it fixed."
Jerry detached himself from the tree and straightened up. "Yes. It's fine now. Er . . . can we help you?"
Her eyes were bright and alive, with a deep, intelligent quality about them that gave the impression of having taken in everything of note in the scene in a brief, first glance. Her gaze flickered over the two men candidly, curiously, but with no attempt at beguiling. Her manner was neither overly assertive nor defensive, intrusive nor apologetic, or calculated to impress. It was just, simply and refreshingly, the way that strangers everywhere ought to be able to be with each other.
"I think I'm in the right place," she said. "The sign at the bottom said there were only these two places up here. I'm looking for a Dr. Hunt."
The planet Jevlen possessed oceans that were rich in chloride and chlorate salts. Molecules of these found their way high aloft via circulating winds and air currents, where they were readily dissociated by a sun somewhat bluer and hotter than Earth's, and therefore more active in the ultraviolet. This mechanism sustained a population of chlorine atoms in the upper atmosphere, which resulted in a palish chartreuse sky illuminated by a greeny-yellow sun. The atmosphere also had a high neon content, which with its relatively low discharge voltage added an almost continual background of electrical activity that appeared in the form of diffuse, orange-red streaks and streamers.
This was where, fifty thousand years previously, after the destruction of Minerva, the Thurien Ganymeans installed the survivors of the Lambian branch of protohumanity, when the Cerian branch elected to be returned to Earth. Thereafter, the Jevlenese were given all the benefits of Thurien technology and allowed to share the knowledge gained through the Thurien sciences. The Thuriens readily conferred to them full equality of rights and status, and in time Jevlen became the center of a quasi-autonomous system of Jevlenese-controlled worlds.
As the Thuriens saw things, a misguided worldview resulting from the Lunarians' predatorial origins had been the cause of the defects that drove them to the holocaust of Minerva. It wasn't so much that the limited availability of resources caused humans to fight over them, as most Terran conventional wisdom supposed; rather, the instinct to fight over anything led to the conclusion that what was fought over had to be worth it, in other words, of value, and hence in scarce supply.
But once the Lunarians absorbed the Ganymean comprehension that the resources of the universe were infinite in any sense that mattered, all that would be changed. Unrestricted assimilation into the Thurien culture and access to all the bounties that it had to offer would allay aggression, relieve insecurities and fears, curb the urge for domination and conquest, and build in their place a benign, homogeneous society founded on grateful appreciation. Freed, like the Thuriens, from want, doubt, and drudgery, the Jevlenese would unlock the qualities that were dormant inside them like the potential waiting to be expressed in a seed. No longer fettered by time or space, nor constrained to the things that one mere planet had to offer, they would radiate outward in a thousand life-styles spread across as many worlds to complete the upward struggle that had begun long before in Earth's primeval oceans, and thence become whatever they were capable of.
At least, that was the way the Thuriens had imagined it would be.
But in all those millennia the Thuriens had learned less about human perversity than Garuth, former commander of the Ganymean scientific mission ship
Shapieron
, from ancient Minerva, had in six months on Earth.
For self-esteem could only be earned, not given. Dependence bred feelings of inadequacy and resentment. The results were apathy, envy, surliness, and hate.
The more ambitious minority who gained control of Jevlenese affairs had lied, schemed, and eventually gained control of the surveillance operation set up by the Thuriens for monitoring developments on Earth. They had intervened covertly to keep Earth backward while they built up a secret military capability, and almost succeeded in a plan that would have enabled them to overthrow the Thuriens. Although Thurien technology had been indispensable in thwarting the Jevlenese, what had actually saved the situation had been the Thuriens' decision to open direct contact with the Terrans—when the
Shapieron
's story from Earth contradicted the Jevlenese version—and thus involve other minds capable of working at comparable depths of deviousness.
But the circumstances of the greater mass of Jevlenese were very different from those of the minority who rose to take charge. For them, the society that grew under the Thurien guidance became a protective incubator cocooning them until the grave. Smothered by largesse to the point where nothing they did or didn't do could make any difference that mattered to their lives, they abandoned control of their affairs to impenetrable layers of nameless administrators and their computers, and either sank into lethargy or escaped, into empty social rituals of acting out roles that no longer signified anything, or into delusion.
Under the collective name jevex—the processing and networking totality serving the system of Jevlenese-controlled worlds—the computers ran the factories and farms, mining and processing, manufacturing, distribution, transportation, and communications, along with all the monitoring to keep track of what was going on. jevex kept the records, stocked the warehouses, scheduled the repairs; it directed the robots that built the plants, serviced the machines, delivered the groceries, and hauled the trash. And it created the dreams into which the people escaped from a system that didn't require them to be people anymore.
And that, the Thurien and Terran leaders had concluded after the three-day Pseudowar that ended the self-proclaimed Jevlenese Federation, had been the problem. jevex had been modeled on the larger and more powerful Thurien complex, visar, which, while equipping jevex admirably for catering to
Ganymean
temperaments and needs, had done nothing to satisfy the very human compulsions to seek challenge and to compete.
So, the thinking had gone, the key to remedying the situation would be to switch off all but jevex's essential services for a time. By compelling the Jevlenese to take charge of their own affairs—and at the same time leaving them less opportunity for making mischief—they would stimulate them into learning to become human again. And the Ganymeans from the
Shapieron
had agreed gamely to oversee and administer the rehabilitation program with its period of probationary decomputerization.
Garuth was only now beginning to realize what they had taken on.
He sat with Shilohin, a female Ganymean who had been the mission's chief scientist, in his office in the Planetary Administration Center on Jevlen, the former headquarters of the local Jevlenese government at a city called Shiban. Before them an image floated, seemingly hanging in midair in the room. It was being transmitted from Barusi, another city situated several thousand miles away on the coast of one of Jevlen's southern continents, with three towers of its central composition rising more than a mile into the pale green sky. But the scene that Garuth and Shilohin were watching was set against a background of drabness, the buildings shabby and most of the machines idle. A lot of the populace had moved into shanty camps thrown up around the city's outskirts, where the simpler routines of living that they had been obliged to revert to were more easily organized—even an act like collecting and preparing food could turn out to be unexpectedly complicated when removed from the context of what had been a totally automatic, self-adapting environment.
The view, taken from the Civic Center housing the Ganymean prefect and his staff responsible for the Barusi district, looked down over the tiered expanse of Sammet Square. A procession of Jevlenese numbering several thousand was spilling in from an avenue leading east out of the city, adding to a comparable number who had been gathering there through the afternoon. Virtually all of them had contrived to be wearing something of purple, and the bands spread at intervals through the parade came to the front as they entered, massing behind banners carrying the device of a purple spiral in a black circle on a red ground.
The focus of all the activity was a figure waiting behind the speaker's rostrum atop the steps facing the square, backed by a huge, hanging sign showing the purple spiral. As soon as the noise of the bands ceased, he launched into his harangue. His name was Ayultha. He wore a dark blue tunic with a purple cloak, and his face had a fierce, intense look, accentuated by heavy, dark brows and a short beard, which he directed this way and that at the crowd with sharp motions of his head as he spoke, punctuating his words with abrupt gestures of appeal and frequent drivings of a fist into the other palm. His amplified voice boomed across the sea of eager faces to sustained outbursts of roared approval.
"Was it not
we
who believed in the Ganymeans? Was it not we who trusted them and came with them across light-years of space, willing to join their culture and learn their ways? It was the
Terrans
who spurned their offer and chose to go their own way." A pause, with appealing looks to left and right, and a dramatic lowering of voice at the crucial point. "Perhaps the Cerians saw more even in those early days than we credited them for." A sudden rise to crescendo. "It was not them who were betrayed!"