The Legend That Was Earth (30 page)

* * *

Marie gazed out at mile after mile of rain-forest canopy sliding by below like a sea of frozen green waves. Finally, she could feel some respite from the chaos assailing her life for the last... was it nine days? Ever since Roland walked back into it. She laid her head back into the roomy, Hyadean-size seat and put a hand to her brow wearily. It met bandages. Roland.... Years ago she had tried, despaired, and given up. Then he had come back, starting to become what she had always known he could be.... And now this. She replayed scenes of the crash in her mind, trying to tell herself there might be a way he could have survived. It had been only a moment before impact when he and Rocco disappeared. They couldn't have been more than a few feet from the ground by then. But there had been blood pouring from Roland's head. It was no good. She was trying to create wishful fantasies. Eventually, whatever the reality was would have to be faced. She looked across at Yassem and found the Hyadean watching her with an expression that seemed to read her thoughts. But then, Yassem was having the same problem.

"Hudro's pretty tough," Yassem said. "Sometimes I think he is, what did you say once, `charmed'? Like Roland."

Marie took in the crisp, clean Hyadean military fatigue garb that Yassem had been issued. Everything was so mixed up. Marie was used to thinking in terms close to black and white. There were "us" and "them," good guys and bad; you knew who was on which side. Hyadeans had always been "them." In the last week she had found herself trusting them as much as she had ever trusted anyone—which was ironic, for it seemed that the concept of "trust" itself was something that they themselves were learning from Terrans. Now one of them might have died helping to save her and Roland. And the person to whom that one had meant the most was now Marie's confidante and companion, whose life Marie had recently saved, yet wore the uniform of those who were hunting them. Marie could no longer make any sense of the world.

"How does this happen?" she said. Yassem raised her eyebrows but said nothing. "Hudro was with your counterinsurgency forces. You were with communications, attached to Terran intelligence." Marie shook her head uncomprehendingly. "I
know
how people are selected for jobs like that. They look for a particular kind of personality, the kind that identifies with the system it serves and takes pride in loyalty. People like that don't change their minds and go over to the other side. The one from the federal ISS, Reyvek, that you saw Roland and me talking about on that recording this morning, was an exception. He was very disturbed in some ways that went deep, and the system must have missed it. But normally that doesn't happen."

Yassem had to think for a while, as if the subject were something new. "On Earth, you mean," she said finally. "That's the way it is here."

"Well, yes...." Marie was surprised. "Wouldn't it be the same anywhere?"

Yassem paused again, searching for words. "Here you have these `religions' and ideologies—big schemes that try to explain everything."

"Are you saying they're bad? I thought you and Hudro wanted to understand religion. That was why you left."

"No, they're not especially bad. They can be wonderfully inventive. But sometimes they program your thinking. Who is right and who is wrong becomes accepted as part of the indoctrination. Then life is simple, and killing who you're told to becomes easy."

"So how is it different with Hyadeans?" Marie asked.

"We just accept what we see. We don't try to make it something else because of ideas of what it should be. So who is right and who is wrong depends not on who people are, but on what they
do
."

Marie still didn't follow. "So why is your planet supporting a government that's working with the powers here who are exploiting Earth's peoples? Isn't that supposed to be wrong? Why won't they accept that when they see it?"

"
Because they never have seen it!
" Yassem replied. "Don't you understand? It works both ways. Because Hyadeans don't question, they accept what they're told. And what has happened on Chryse is that for longer than I know, a powerful ruling caste has controlled what Chryseans are given to believe. But when they come here and see for themselves that what they have been told is not true, it's easier for them to decide that what they are doing is wrong and change sides. It happened to Vrel, to Hudro and me, and to others I have known. And it sounds as if it happened to some of the ones you know.
That
was why Luodine was so anxious to make the recording and get it to Chryse. She knew the effect it would have there. Terrans assume they will be lied to and regard it as normal. But to Hyadean minds that have never questioned, the realization would be devastating. You should have seen the effects in the Hyadean officers' mess this morning after you left. For the first time, some of them are questioning what they are doing. You see—until now they have been told they were helping the people defend themselves against terrorists. It never occurred to them that there might be another story. That was just from watching a news item here, put out by the new Western federation. Can you imagine the effect if it were broadcast all over Chryse?"

Marie stared at Yassem fixedly. Finally, she could see what Roland had glimpsed but not had time to understand. The scientist in Los Angeles that he'd talked about had credited the Hyadeans' ability to see things as they were as the reason why they had built ships that could bring them to Earth, while Earth's scientists were still trying to divine from abstruse mathematics whether or not it was possible, and arguing over whether they had evolved from molecules or been created by a god—neither of which the Hyadeans saw any point in caring about. That same faculty could determine whether or not they would tolerate what was happening on Earth. The Hyadean ruling element and the force they controlled could never be defeated in a straight, stand-up firefight—despite her commitment to CounterAction, deep down Marie knew that. But they would topple if the people back home ever learned the truth. And they knew it too. No wonder they fought with all the fear and repression that came from insecurity. Marie snorted to herself at the offbeat humor: "Security" forces described them pretty well.

* * *

They arrived to a warm but sad welcome from the others, and expressions of added delight from the villagers. Vrel in particular was devastated by the news that both Cade and Hudro were lost. There was concern at Marie's appearance, but she assured them the damage was not as bad as all the bandages and tape suggested. The villagers provided a meal, but even before she was halfway though it, Marie, her body stiff and protesting everywhere by now, felt her eyes closing and exhaustion sweeping over her. Yassem seemed to be in about the same condition. The Indian medicine man, assisted by two of the women, applied medications and poultices of pastes and leaves that worked wonders, and the two new arrivals were asleep before there was a chance to discuss anything further.

* * *

It was late in the morning when Marie awoke. Yassem was already up, but as yet nobody had agreed on any firm plans. Luodine had wanted to stay to cover the South American situation, and Vrel's thought had been to head across the Pacific, but now they were wondering about trying for the newly formed Federation territory in what had been the U.S.A. Both the flyers were personal short-haul vehicles and didn't have the range for such a journey. However, Nyarl ascertained from the web that commercial flights into western North America were still operating from Quito in Ecuador, which was reachable. To check on the American situation, Vrel tried calling his colleagues at the Hyadean mission in Los Angeles, which he seemed surprised to find was still functioning. He asked to speak to a Hyadean called Wyvex.

THE PHYSICAL SIMILARITIES
between Terrans and Hyadeans, not just in general appearance but in terms of chemistry and genetic codes as well, had been devastating to Earth's prevalent theory of life and its origins, but had come as no particular surprise to the aliens. They had listened skeptically but with interest to the idea of how ooze could turn itself into a jellyfish and a jellyfish into a horse by selectively accumulating random mutations, and when the evidence claimed to support it proved not to, they dismissed it as another of Earth's secular religions, invented to displace an earlier one.
 

In a way that fitted well with the Hyadeans' catastrophic account of the origins and development of planetary systems, Darwin's original notebooks were filled with observations of evidence written worldwide of epochs of sudden, cataclysmic change. But twenty years later when he published, he had come around to adapting to biology Lyell's principle of gradualism, by then established as the guiding paradigm of geology. Under the new scheme of things, no catastrophic upheavals needed to be invoked to explain the past. Everything could be accounted for by the processes seen to be taking place in the present, provided they were allowed operate for a sufficiently long time. Hence, from an ideology were constructed the immense spans of time that the Hyadeans found it astonishing anyone from Earth could look at the surface of their own planet and believe in.
 

Earth's history fascinated the Hyadeans. Revolution in the American colonies and then France had terrified the ruling houses of Europe. Napoleon's armies had carried notions of rising up against traditional authority from Catholic Spain to Tsarist Russia, and by the middle of the nineteenth century the continent was seething with militant political movements advocating socialism. All it needed now was for science to declare that violent upheaval was the natural way of change. The new scheme, however, depicted change as a slow, gradual accumulation of tiny advantages—so slow that little significant difference should be evident even in the course of a lifetime. And on the other hand, an explanation for life that did away with the supernatural served the new, technocratic wealth, based on commerce and industry, by completing the undermining of the authority on which the old power structure rested. Expedient and intellectually satisfying, it was embraced from all sides and rapidly enthroned as science. When the evidence that had been predicted failed to materialize, and contradictions continued to accumulate, ingenious and imaginative possibilities were devised to explain the facts away. No serious consideration was given to the possibility that the reason so little proof could be found of life's having evolved from simple molecules on Earth might be simply that it hadn't; it had
arrived
there.
 

Yet it had long been known that bacteria and other microorganisms exhibited an extraordinary tolerance to extremes of such quantities as radiation, temperature, and pressure, that was difficult to account for by any selection process on the surface of the Earth, where such conditions had never existed. But it made them ideally preadapted for space. Carbonized structures uncannily suggestive of familiar forms of microbe had been discovered inside meteorites—and yes, with the possibility of contamination excluded beyond reasonable doubt. Refractive indexes in part of the interstellar clouds matched those of biological objects more closely than any of the alternatives put forward to explain them. Some scientists over the years had pointed to these findings as a case for supposing that the genes that directed life had originated from somewhere else. The mainstream scientific community saw warnings of the theological can of worms opening up again, and their general reaction was to ridicule the suggestion or leave it alone.
 

The Hyadeans had made the same observations. Having neither supernatural nor secular fundamentalism to defend, they accepted the evidence as meaning what it said and concluded that living organisms were constructed on planetary surfaces from local materials under the direction of genetic information with which space was seeded. These incoming code units were combined into complex genetic programs that built organisms suited to local conditions.
Infection
was the principal mechanism for spreading new genetic combinations around and establishing initially compatible breeding populations—much faster and more efficient than sexual transmission, the slowness of which was another problem with Terran theory—especially given that the enormous
time spans contrived to make it seem plausible were wrong anyway. The programs were ruggedly constructed in possessing a degree of adaptability to cope with environmental fluctuations, and
this
had been extrapolated into an explanation of everything.
 

The upshot was that similar kinds of places would originate similar kinds of life. Life did indeed evolve on planets, but not in the way Terran scientists had thought. Chryse was roughly like Earth, even if worn down and not reworked as recently, and that was why Hyadeans were roughly like humans.
 

Since they had never observed genetic information originating either through a mechanistic or an intelligently guided process, the Hyadeans hadn't asked how it came together in the first place. About the only possibility they seemed to have considered was that it could be an advanced culture's way of propagating itself through the galaxy using a radically different form of starship. Where that culture might have come from wasn't the kind of thing that Hyadeans were going to spend a lifetime worrying about.
 

Hence, the Hyadeans rejected Terran evolutionary theory as a construct having more to do with Earth's political religions than scientific reality. What captivated them, however, and came as a totally new revelation to their thinking, even if the Terrans who had first dreamed it up were now rejecting it, was the concept that
life itself
might have a purpose. So while Terrans were contriving mechanisms to deny all the meaning in, and reasons for, existence that they had once believed, the Hyadeans were discovering questions that it had never occurred to them to ask.