Worlds in Chaos (124 page)

Daybreak brought a scene of dry gulches, mesas, and rocky bluffs rising among broken, dusty mountains of brown and gray ahead. This seemed to be the outer edge of the defensive line, with forward positions being prepared and activity visible away into the distance on both sides. The commander called a halt to regroup the regiment’s scattered vehicles, give the stragglers time to catch up, and assess losses. Two trucks were missing, which was not as bad as the attrition that some units had suffered. One of them, however, was the one that Nyarl, Powell, and Davis had been riding in. Radio calls for it to report in brought no response. Hudro and Koyne were the most shaken by the news—understandably.

Heroic and desperate, maybe, but it all seemed an invitation for a repeat of the carnage that had happened yesterday. Cade and the others made themselves as useful as they could, all the time waiting apprehensively; but as the morning drew on, the skies remained strangely quiet. Subtly but significantly, something had changed. Everyone could sense it, but nobody was quite able to say what.

Cade watched a tank crew carrying out repairs under camouflage netting to something in the engine compartment of their machine, which they had opened up. None of them could have been more than in their early twenties, except maybe the captain, who could have been brushing twenty-five. They worked calmly and competently, despite the stress and fatigue they had to have suffered over the past few days. Cade had never had much of a head for machinery or technicalities—his talents lay more with human foibles—but he had always respected and marveled at the mentalities that could conceive and construct generating plants, jet planes, automobiles, and telephone networks, and generally bring into being the world of material productivity that enabled his world to exist comfortably and prosperously. He marveled at it now, seeing the exposed, precisely machined gears, tangles of piping, bundles of color-coded cables snaking like vines to reach mysterious cylinders and inscrutable metal boxes. What had it taken in human worth and ingenuity, education, training, dedication to make possible the display of skill that he was witnessing now? And by how much more would that need to be multiplied to take into account everything else that was going on across the continent right now? And then add the factories that had produced it all, and behind them all the mining, drilling, rolling, forging, refining, processing that sustained them. For what? The price in expended human value was incalculable.

Though awesome in its image of menace and power, the tank was ugly and utilitarian. Cade took in the squat lines of the turret carrying its long-barreled cannon; the impersonal lethality of the grenade throwers and machine guns protruding from invisible stations within; the hatch lids open, revealing the armor thickness that its crew would depend on when they became the stakes in a duel pitting the abilities of rival teams of designers. Two armorers were loading ammunition from a field tractor: different shapes and casings, some with dull black bodies, others yellow, another kind white. Gerofsky had described a standard type of armor-piercing round which punched a hole through the hull and blasted a jet of white-hot molten metal into the interior.

He looked at the crew again: each life potentially priceless by the measures of the economy of Chryse, dedicated to the sole purpose of killing and maiming indistinguishable others who had played the same games, had the same kinds of kid brothers and older sisters, parents, lovers, guys on the street in the same kinds of neighborhoods of the same kinds of homes. In Australia, Krossig had described the new insight that he and Mike Blair had found, which made all of physical reality an environment contrived—implicitly by some as-yet incomprehensible intelligence?—for the purpose of enabling consciousnesses to make choices. If so, then surely the choices being made by the consciousnesses dominating this particular part of that reality qualified it as the lunatic asylum of the cosmos. Or was it as bad everywhere? Cade wondered.

“
Guys! Look!
” A shout from Marie pulled his attention away. He turned to where she had been managing a stove and dispensing hot water for washing, shaving, and coffee to the troops, and found her standing, pointing toward the road. Hudro and Koyne climbed up from a slit trench that they had been digging. A dust-covered flatbed carrying two large-caliber howitzers, and with disheveled passengers taking up every spare foot of space, had stopped to let several figures dismount. Most were in regular combat dress, carrying packs and weapons, but two stood out immediately. One was of pinkish countenance beneath streaks of dirt and a field dressing on one cheek, with a wide brow, and wearing a bedraggled Air Force flying suit; the other was big and wide although youthful in looks—and blue-skinned. It was Nyarl and Davis. They both managed tired grins as they traipsed across the rocky shoulder of the road to where the regiment’s vehicles were clustered. Gerofsky appeared as the others went forward to greet them.

“We’d given you up,” Koyne told Davis, clapping him on the back. “What happened to the truck? They’ve been trying to raise you on radio.”

Hudro clasped both Nyarl’s hands and said something in Hyadean that sounded very emotional and happy. Cade took the camera and shoulder bag of ancillary equipment, which Nyarl still had with him.

“A stick of bombs went through us while we were taking cover,” Davis said. “The truck was totaled, and some of the guys didn’t make it. We thought we might end up walking all the way, but that transporter picked us up.”

The news was not all happy, however. Powell was among those who hadn’t made it. Something like that had been expected eventually, of course. Nevertheless, it dulled what spirit they had been managing to summon back together that morning.

Shortly afterward, Gerofsky revealed what perhaps was the reason for the absence of hostile activity all morning. The Hyadean conveyor had unrolled around and behind them. Denver to the north and Albuquerque to the south were already occupied. A blocking force had landed in the pass this side of Grand Junction. There was no way open to the west.

Presumably, the lull was an invitation to give it up in the face of a hopeless situation. But no surrender appeared to be forthcoming. Jeye—assuming orders were still coming from Sacramento—was sticking to his word. The brigade that the regiment belonged to received orders to move on deeper into the mountains to a position in what was evidently being prepared as a last stronghold for the Federation forces fleeing westward along the central front. Cade and the others stayed with them. What else was there to do?

That night, they found themselves preparing to bed down with one of the sections dug in on a forward slope ahead of brigade headquarters. The air was calm, bringing the creaking of tanks moving among the light of arc lamps in the darkness below. Still, the respite was continuing. It was generally interpreted as a last lull before the storm that would unleash with the morning: a final chance to reconsider. Apparently, there had been heavy air attacks in California, but once again, it proved impossible to get a communications link to the group in Los Angeles to find out more.

It was going to be a chilly night, spent in holes scraped in the ground, huddling in blankets or whatever else could be improvised. Cade and Marie sat sharing a mess tin of soup in the pit that they occupied with Nyarl, separated by a parapet from Hudro, Koyne, and Davis. Gerofsky was away, conferring with the brigade staff in the tents and trailers farther back below the ridge line. Soldiers were talking, brewing coffee, and sharing cigarettes in sandbagged positions dimly visible on the far side.

“I don’t like it,” Marie said, dunking a piece of biscuit and nibbling on it. “It feels too much like where we were in Oklahoma—before the big attack came in. Everything’s going to hit in the morning. I can feel it.”

Cade stared at the rocky hillside, formless in the starlight, while he searched for an encouraging response. There wasn’t one. “Well, if you’re right, at least we go out together,” he offered finally. “We made it in time to do that.”

Nyarl shook his head. “Fighting to the end when there is no hope. Again this is part of the Terran mystery. Hyadeans would never understand it.”

“So how would it affect them on Chryse . . . if they knew?” Marie asked.

“It’s part of the mystery,” Nyarl said again. “Or is it mystique? They wouldn’t let you do it.”

“Then maybe Jeye’s doing the right thing without realizing it,” Marie said. She turned her head toward Cade. “I thought I was a born fighter. You know—one of those deluded self-images that you carry around in your head. And in the games I got mixed up in these last five years. Because that’s what they were, games. . . . But all this in the last few days—the real thing. I never knew the insanity of it. Whatever problem this is supposed to solve, it could have been solved for a fraction of what it all costs. And it doesn’t even solve anything. It only makes it worse for next time.”

“I was thinking the same earlier,” Cade said. He shifted to ease a cramped foot. “I used to think that what made people worth getting to know was who they networked with, what favors they could do—what you could get out of them. Now I’ve seen the qualities that make people truly valuable. And often it’s in the same people . . . like Clara, maybe, or George, or Anita, Neville Baxter . . . even Dee.”

“Dee was always okay.”

“Yeah, well. . . . But you know what I’m saying. Why does it have to take something like this to bring that side of people out? Why couldn’t they be what they’re capable of from the beginning?”

“I hope they’re okay back there,” Marie mused. “Dee and Vrel, Luke, Henry . . . all of them.”

“It’s the same with us too,” Cade went on. “Don’t you get the feeling it’s a bit late to find out now who you really are? Especially since it seems there’s not going to be a lot we’ll be able to do with the knowledge.”

Marie could only shrug. “Maybe better late than never, all the same.”

“Unless those things that Krossig and Michael Blair used to get excited about turn out to be close after all,” Nyarl suggested.

“What things?” Cade asked.

“Personalities in this reality being incarnations of souls to help them develop. The things Hudro wants to discover. As do many Hyadeans.”

“If it’s true, then I must be working some enormous piece of karma off the debit side,” Cade said resignedly.

“If?” Nyarl repeated. “Now you’re sounding as if you don’t believe it yourself.”

Cade looked at him, the dark-hued face all but invisible against the jacket hood pulled around in the darkness. “It was a legend that you wanted to hear, and we played at being. It was how I got rich, and my friends got rich.”

“You’re making you and them sound responsible,” Nyarl objected. “But you just used the situation that you found. You didn’t create it. It resulted from the worst elements of both our worlds working in collusion.”

“That’s my point,” Cade said. “If Earth had really been the legend that you thought, none if this could have happened. The best elements of both worlds would have . . .” He sighed and shook his head. “I don’t know what.” The strange thing was, he found himself almost believing that it could have been different. But even those who he’d thought might bring about something better had ended up going for the throat when they thought everything was in their favor. He leaned back and looked up at the stars. “Maybe one day it will all be told differently as stories change,” he said to the others. “Another legend of an Earth that never happened.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

Cade awoke chilled and stiff. He freed his arms from the blanket and stretched sluggishly. Marie was gone; Nyarl, still asleep, was wrapped in blankets and a greatcoat. He stood up, brushing frost from the predawn cold of the mountains off his jacket and beating his arms across his chest, while his breath steamed in white clouds. A thin film clung to the tops of the sandbagged parapets and the boulders, adding extra bleakness to the scene of daybreak creeping into the landscape like the light being slowly turned up on a stage setting. He saw Marie now, with Hudro, Koyne, and some soldiers, huddled around a stove under the awning covering the field kitchen a hundred yards or so back in a gully.