Worlds in Chaos (74 page)

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Hyadean West Coast Trade and Cultural Mission on Carson Street in Lakewood occupied a four-story office block of gray and white panels alternating with glass, and a roof crammed with strange antennas and other structures. Formerly, the building housed an assortment of small businesses. It stood back from the highway behind palm-tree-lined lawns and a visitors’ parking area, with access drives on either side and a larger parking area at the rear. The idea had been to establish an informal alien presence without visible barriers isolating it, that would eventually blend in as part of the local scene. Of course, such openness would have been intolerable to the security authorities, had it been genuine. The fences bounding the area were more than they appeared to be, and the building itself had quietly acquired various refinements that the original architects had never contemplated.

It was a week after the reception at Cade’s house: the day Erya was due to leave Los Angeles for the Hyadean space port at Xuchimbo in western Brazil. Cade and Luke arrived at the mission around midmorning in the silver-gray BMW, Luke driving. Luke had been with Cade for five years now. He was a rugged-faced forty with a full head of black hair and a beard that he kept meticulously trimmed. He spoke little, was totally dependable, and was not above overlooking a few legal or quasi-moral niceties when the occasion required. Formerly with the Navy, Luke had done Warren Edmonds a favor by introducing him to Cade’s employ at a time when Warren’s risk-taking with frowned-upon enterprises would otherwise have made his demise only a matter of time.

The security people had relaxed from their tension following the Washington incident, and the temporary police check at the gate had been removed. A number of Hyadean personal flyers and freight lifters were visible to the rear of the building, standing among the regular Terran ground vehicles. A dispensation for operating them had been given when it became clear that the sophisticated Hyadean flight-control AIs presented no hazard to air traffic in the area.

Luke parked in the visitors’ area at the front and released the trunk lid using a button below the dash. Cade got out, went back around to retrieve the black, vinyl-finished violin case that they had brought, and rejoined Luke in front of the car. They began walking toward the main entrance of the building.

“I feel like something out of an old gangster movie going in to rob the place,” Cade remarked, touting the violin case. “All it needs is the fedoras.” Luke grunted.

Inside was a reception counter attended by a Terran woman, with several Hyadeans in an open office area behind. A short passage flanked by display cases of Hyadean gadgetry and pictures showing scenes from Chryse led from the entrance foyer to a door opening to the interior. Two Hyadeans in dark blue garb and gray caps were stationed by the arch framing the near end.

Cade greeted the receptionist with a grin. She had been expecting them. “Hi, Mimi. How’s the world been treating you lately?”

“Good morning, Roland. You’re looking dapper. You want an update on my life?”

“Just the wicked and exciting parts.”

“Yeah, right. . . . Hi, Luke. Still managing to keep him out of trouble?”

“It’s tough at times,” Luke acknowledged.

Mimi glanced at the violin case that Cade was holding. “What’s this? Have you come to give us a recital?”

“A going-away present for Erya.”

“Oh, that’s right. She’s into that, isn’t she? How thoughtful!”

“What else did you expect?”

“
Please permit inspection of the article.
” The voice came from a Hyadean AI in the form of a purple, dome-topped cube, dotted with lenses, sitting on the counter by Mimi’s elbow. Cade hoisted the case up onto the counter, opened it, and stood back while one of the guards lifted out the instrument to examine it curiously, then poked here and there along the lining of the case and lid. Either he was a new arrival or his English wasn’t up to par yet.

“That looks like a quality piece of work,” Mimi commented.

“Not exactly special,” Cade said. “It was used in that movie about Beethoven that came out a while back—the one with David Quine.”

“Yes, I saw it. He was perfect for the part. I loved the bit where he marches through the town waving the cane with the silver knob on the end.”

“It’s a rage back home there. Erya will get a kick out of it.”

The guard replaced the violin and closed the lid of the case. “
Thank you. You are free to proceed,
” the AI announced. “
Hec Vrel has been advised that you are here.
” Cade led the way through, Luke following. There was no call for any ID check. Cade had always thought there was something unnatural about that arch. Probably they had been scanned, sniffed, sensed, and verified before even entering the passage. The door at the end opened automatically and they passed through, into the office section.

The inside had been opened out from the original configuration of suites into larger, interconnecting work areas. Hyadeans tended to shun individual responsibility, Cade had found, making their decisions through committee or relying on the authority of precedent. Perhaps the open layout was preferred for obtaining group consensus and approval. The surroundings were an unimaginatively utilitarian repetition of cream-painted walls and gray or brown furnishings and other equipment, suggesting more the clerical underworld of a low-budget socialist state than the local showcase of a world that could have bought the United States. Screens were everywhere, some showing faces, others graphics mixed with captions in strange scripts and symbols. One type presented its images in relief, looking like windows with solid scenes beyond. Cade remembered Mike Blair telling of his shock at first being confronted by Hyadeans nonchalantly talking to their home worlds with turnaround delay close to instantaneous. The equipment in the mission building communicated electronically with some kind of gravity-wave converters in Earth orbit, which could send signals somewhere around ten billion times faster. The orbiting converters relayed to more powerful devices that the Hyadeans had placed at the edge of the Solar System, which in turn beamed to the home planet. None of this had been especially bothersome to Cade, who had grown up taking instant around-the-world communication for granted; Blair, on the other hand, was a scientist in whose scheme of things it wasn’t supposed to have been possible, and he had taken weeks to adjust to it. Sometimes, Cade concluded, there were advantages in not being too scientific.

Cade and Luke threaded their way among the desks and consoles, where Hyadeans sat staring at screens, sometimes murmuring exchanges with them. Just about everything the Hyadeans made was controlled by a built-in AI of greater or lesser capacity, and voice was their normal way of interacting. Another thing that always intrigued Cade were their reconfigurable pages—sheets of flexible plastic, no thicker than regular paper, upon which characters were generated electronically to produce whatever was desired. A stack of them bound like a book could thus become any book or document at all, selected from a library stored in the spine or loaded externally. Mike Blair had calculated that the spine held the equivalent of half the Library of Congress.

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.