“Who is this?” her voice asked.
“The guy who questions.”
“Yes?” Since he hadn’t used his name, she knew the subject was sensitive.
“We need to talk privately. Here’s where I’ll be to take it.” He read out the code he had copied for Uyali Headquarters Command. “Make it thirty minutes. There’s something slightly wrong that’ll need straightening out. That’s important. Okay?”
“Okay. . . .” There was anxiety in her tone. “Is there—”
“Later.”
Yassem would know what to do. The remark about something being slightly wrong was a code they had agreed previously for emergencies.
Hudro went back into the Administration Center, sent a cheerful nod to the desk sergeant, and made his way up to the Headquarters Command office. The female captain was still at the desk. Hudro approached her.
“Yes?” she inquired.
“My name is Hudro.” He showed his identification.
“Sir!”
“I was here earlier. I’m expecting a call on a secure channel. Did it come through yet?”
“I haven’t heard anything.” The captain called a log onto a screen and consulted it. “I’m sorry, there’s no sign yet.”
“Thanks.”
Hudro took a seat, browsed through some journals again, and made a show of looking irritable and restless. “Are you sure there isn’t anything through for a Colonel Hudro?” he called over to her ten minutes later.
She checked again. “I’m sorry, sir.”
Two soldiers appeared, conducted a brief conversation, and were taken by a clerk to one of the rooms. “Who’s your commanding officer?” Hudro demanded after another ten minutes or so.
“That would be Major Sloorn, sir.” She was getting rattled. Just what he wanted. He sat glaring at the folio, flipping the pages and moving his head in short, jerky movements. Finally, her voice almost cracking with relief, the captain called, “Colonel Hudro, sir!”
“Yes!” He got up and strode over.
But already she was looking uncertain. “A secure-channel call just came in. . . . But it’s specifying a Colonel Mudro. I don’t know if . . .”
“Well, of course it’s the one!” Hudro snapped. “Some native clerk somewhere.”
“Well, I really should call them back and . . .”
“Look, this is an important matter, and I need privacy. I’ve waited long enough. Where can I take it? Just connect it through, please.”
“Room 1304. It’s just along the corridor.”
“Thank you.” Hudro strode away in the direction she indicated. Being a communications specialist with an intelligence unit, Yassem would be able to make the call without its being logged as official procedure required. In the past, some of the things she had managed to extract from official files had been astounding. Misspelling his name by one letter—the “something slightly wrong”—would be a fairly elementary error—to any person. But it meant that the surveillance computers wouldn’t have found a match.
A minute later, he was looking at the features of Yassem. “Are you all right?” she asked. “Where are you? Still in Bolivia? That was the longest half hour I’ve ever spent. I’ve been so worried!”
“I’m not hurt or anything. But I might have been compromised. If so, then we might have to move our plans forward and get out right away. Is that still what you want to do?”
Yassem swallowed and nodded her head. “If we must.”
God, how he loved this girl, Hudro thought. Had he just appealed in his mind to the Terran deity? Yes, he had. “Look, this is what I want you to do,” he said. First, he needed to know if his name was on any surveillance lists. That would be fairly straightforward. The next thing was trickier. He summarized what had happened at Tevlak’s and named the persons, Hyadean and Terran, who had been there when he and Vrel left. Could Yassem find out if the house had been raided by security forces—maybe from operations lists? If so, what had happened to those who were there? Yassem promised to see what she could do. Some of the things she had extracted from official files in the past had amazed him. Hopefully, she could turn up something within three or four hours, she said. Hudro thought he could lose himself in the officers’ club or somewhere during that time.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Luodine had engineered her posting to Earth to escape from the banality of life among the professional and social elite on Chryse that her work immersed her in. She had to find something different, far away, she had decided—before she either destroyed her career by reporting what she really thought, or became one of them. As an executive investigator with one of the major media organizations, she had specialized in exploring success stories, which was an approved and well rewarded choice because it put her among the molders of the role images that it was felt healthy for average Chryseans to emulate. It kept them busy, distracted them from thinking too much about what it all meant, and the economy as a whole remained prosperous.
The only problem was, just about everything she saw brought out the side of her that was decidedly not average for a Chrysean. She met officials in charge of government bureaucracies that dreamed up forests of regulations and employed thousands who buzzed around importantly day after day, intent on their mission, no end result of which, as far as Luodine could see, added up to anything of actual use to anybody. All that the elaborate machinery did was get in the way of the few left who were trying to do something useful. A long, red curvy fruit called an iliacen grew on parts of Chryse, not unlike a Terran banana, but larger. There were specifications giving the limits of size, weight, color, water content—even curviness as determined by a procedure spelled out in detail—that defined what was a permissible iliacen. Any commercial transaction involving one that didn’t conform was illegal. They couldn’t even be given away by producers. Huge numbers of perfectly good, edible fruits had to be thrown away because they were a little bit too straight or a little bit too curvy. This was considered “efficient.” Efficiency, Luodine discovered, had little to do with what was obtained for the cost. It had to do with the extent and effectiveness of control. When she pressed for an explanation of why it mattered, and how the enormous effort expended on preventing people deciding for themselves what kind of iliacen they liked could be justified, nobody could give her one. It seemed that the regulators were simply unable to function without books of rules and numbers telling them what to do. They had become extensions of their own machines.
She had once talked with the head of a large contractor involved in developing and supplying advanced space weaponry deemed essential for meeting the threat posed by the Querl. Said to be among the richest thousand on Chryse, he worked in his office from early morning until after the staff had left, and hadn’t taken private time off for two years. When Luodine asked why he didn’t do something else now, he had looked at her blankly and asked in seriousness what else there was. “Build a house with your own hands. Learn to sail a boat,” Luodine had said. “When you were a young man, weren’t there things you dreamed of? Things you told yourself you wanted to do some day, when you had the time, and circumstances permitted?” The executive had become angry and terminated the interview.
She had listened, smiling, to wives whose lives revolved around hosting ever-more bizarre parties, the principal aim of which was to achieve prominent mention in the socialite gossip columns—one had been set on an island park stocked with over two thousand animals from one of the Querl worlds; another was held orbiting in freefall. She dutifully recorded the wisdoms of generals who measured the cost-effectiveness of a battle with a formula that mixed money, fatalities, and five categories of casualty; of media chiefs who sold rights to dictate what slant should be put on news stories; and of “image consultants” who had built a respectable profession out of presenting things to the world as other than they were, and coaching influential people in the art of lying convincingly from a screen.
Somewhere, she had told herself, there had to be
a place where words meant what they said and not the opposite, and reality was what it seemed. And then she heard of the amazing planet that had been discovered in the course of exploring more distant star systems following development of a new, range drive—a planet whose inhabitants wove dreams into worlds of thought, created forms for no other purpose than to delight the senses, and described realms of vision and being that confounded all of the professors and scientists. Fads and fashions extolling Terran art and creativity appeared all over the Chrysean worlds. The ingenuity and imaginativeness of Terran minds stimulated great demand among Chrysean industries. And Luodine talked her way into an assignment there.
At first she had found herself bewildered by this world of chaotic, colorful craziness. But then, as she traveled and learned to reorient her thinking, she began to discover ways of looking at life, its values, that Hyadeans could never have conceived—unless, as some maintained, they had once known such things in a distant past age and forgotten them. There was the advertising executive in Sweden who gave up a secure, lucrative career and mortgaged his house to raise capital because he had always wanted to make a movie. She met a couple in Iran who for two years had been bicycling around the world—utterly pointless to the average Hyadean; captivating to Luodine. There were the religious missionaries in Africa who taught and treated the children of strangers with no prospect of gain other than the following of their convictions. There were dozens of stories from every continent.
And then Luodine found that the real policy being enacted was to turn them all into Hyadeans. Not only that; they were expected to be grateful. Sometimes, apparently, a little help was needed to make them see the benefits.
“Look, I’ve already told you, one of them had come from the United States; I don’t know who the other one was.” Luodine turned in front of the table in the room at Tevlak’s house and regarded the officer in charge of the Hyadean security unit, who was dictating notes to a communicator pad. Cade and Marie had already been taken away in two of the six personnel carriers that had arrived. Since the officer had disclosed that Vrel had been identified, she wasn’t giving anything away by repeating it. “We refused even to consider recording the kind of story they wanted. They realized they were wasting their time, and they left.”
“Heading where?” the officer asked.
“I don’t know. It’s not the kind of thing people in their situation would shout to everyone.”
The officer looked at her uncertainly. He was young and seemed not very experienced. Luodine was taking the only line that held any promise of getting her and Nyarl out. “You’re saying that none of this was actually used?” He gestured at the equipment set up in the room, which the technicians had examined and pronounced clean of any recent recordings.
“They were talking about subversive material!” Luodine looked and sounded shocked. “Claims directed at undermining our Terran policy! Would you believe that?” She shook her head. “We’d simply been told there would be an interview involving some important, undisclosed people. After all, that’s our job. That’s what we’re here for. We didn’t know anything about fugitives from the U.S. We set up and prepared, sure. When they arrived, and we found out what it was all about, we said no.” Luodine shrugged, turned away, and then back again. “And the rest I’ve already told you.”
The officer seemed perplexed. He went outside the door to consult with a colleague for several minutes, and then retired to another room for privacy while he sought instructions from a remote higher authority.
The remaining Terran security soldiers—those who had not gone with Cade and Marie—had dispersed to other parts of the house or were carrying out routine searches of the people and vehicles outside while the Hyadeans settled their own affairs. Thryase was in the next room, where he could be heard protesting vehemently to officials at the Hyadean General Embassy at Xuchimbo, the principal diplomatic presence on Earth. He was here as a political observer, he insisted. When he was approached in St. Louis to accompany two Terrans introduced to him as social-science academics to South America for what he was told would be a major political news event, of course he had accepted. What did they think he was—some kind of parasite who came to Earth to enjoy the scenery and avoid the work he was paid to do?
Tevlak had taken the line of simply knowing nothing. Sure, he had agreed when somebody from the U.S. contacted him to ask if they could use his house—he was Terran in his ways now: hospitable to everybody. Had he known who they were? No, he didn’t care. How had they known of him? As far as he could make out, Tevlak said, his name had been mentioned at a party in California.
The officer came back in. Luodine confronted him, hands on hips. “Well? Are we supposed to have committed some kind of offense?”
“Ah, no. It appears not. . . .”
“Then I take it we are free to go.” Without waiting for confirmation, Luodine began disconnecting pieces of equipment and motioned at Nyarl to start packing up.
“It would be considered cooperative if you remained while the rest of our business is being concluded,” the officer said.
“Are you making some specific charge or charges?” Luodine asked him.
“No. All the same—”
“Well, we have our business to think of too, and we’ve lost too much time already. If your people in the U.S. had been doing their job, we wouldn’t have their renegades coming down here in the first place. Now, I suggest you follow after them, wherever they’ve been taken, and make sure they don’t get away again, instead of wasting more of everyone’s time here.”
The officer capitulated. Luodine and Nyarl stopped to say a brief farewell to Tevlak and Thryase on the way out to their blue-and-yellow flyer. “We’ll come back when the atmosphere and the company are more conducive to something constructive,” she told Tevlak. “I must do a piece on these art collections of yours! Absolutely fascinating! The viewers back home will love it.” She left, giving them a brief glance that conveyed there had been nothing else she could do. Their looks in turn said that they understood.
Ten minutes later, Luodine and Nyarl were airborne, heading north along the eastern edge of the Altiplano. Evening was approaching. The first thing they needed to do was warn Vrel and Hudro against going back to Tevlak’s.
Luodine still had the phone that Cade had used to send the file. Vrel’s number would still be in its log. After the way Vrel and the others had been traced to Tevlak’s, however, Nyarl was leery about using it. “I wouldn’t risk calling direct,” he said. “It would be safer to go through an intermediary.”
Luodine thought for a moment. “You’re right,” she agreed. “But who? We don’t even know where they are.”
“Hudro was going back to his unit in Brazil, which means they were heading for Uyali. Who have we talked to there, that we know can be trusted?”
Luodine thought back to a documentary they had made about Hyadeans who worked at Uyali and the lives they lived there, and slowly, a smile came into her face. “I think I know just the person,” she said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
It was getting dark in the Terran sector of Uyali. The streets of the shanty city that had grown in months from a jumble of prefabs and mobile units were filling as workers back from the mining operations and construction projects headed for the restaurants, the bars, and the clubs. Vrel still hadn’t heard anything from Hudro. A few other Hyadeans out shopping or curious just to visit the Terran sector had stopped to talk and in a couple of cases invited him to join them, but it had seemed prudent to keep his own company. He sat nursing a fruit juice and nibbling on a roll of flat, crispy bread filled with some kind of cooked vegetable paste in a dingy coffee shop that he had found near one of the three main thoroughfares. It was quiet but not empty, out of the way but not isolated in a way that would make him conspicuous—good for losing himself in for another half hour, say, before moving on to somewhere else.
The more respectable Hyadeans were drifting back to their own sector, which w
as fenced, orderly, and felt safer after sunset. Those who remained prowled around in ones and twos or groups, acting too self-assuredly: off-duty troops; engineers with billfolds full of Terran money; lonely clerks light-years from home—all curious to sample the forbidden fruits they’d heard about. Mind-altering drinks that it was illegal to possess on Chryse; the atmosphere of a place where Terrans sang, danced, and for a while let their feelings take over—some Hyadean doctors said it could be beneficial; an experience with a Terran woman, perhaps? Hyadean and Terran military police patrolled the district in pairs of either one race or the other. Vrel felt himself tensing when any of them came too close or treated him to anything more than a cursory glance. But so far he hadn’t been troubled. If anyone was looking for him, he could only presume they were concentrating on the air terminal, where he would be expected to appear.
Six years ago, Vrel would have looked at a scene like that around him now with a sense of incomprehension at the purposelessness of the ways Terrans chose to spend so much of their lives, and contempt for their inability or refusal to do anything to improve themselves—especially with the Hyadean example before them. So much time and energy wasted on things that weren’t needed. No plan. Contrived evasion of what should have been duty. The incredible inefficiency of it all. And underneath, there would have been a feeling that didn’t need to be expressed, since the facts were so obvious, of the innate superiority of the Hyadean—the kind of smugness that he had detected in so many Hyadeans since, and now found mildly sickening. It was only in the latter part of his time here that he had finally come to grasp one of the most profound insights that the whole Terran worldview and way of life expressed, which most Hyadeans weren’t within a lifetime of understanding: The purpose of existing, what mattered, was simply to experience it. Just that. Nothing more. If one chose to seek additional satisfaction from achieving or striving, then that was fine too. But it didn’t matter. Dee had told him once that she thought they put statues up to the wrong people: usually those who had lasted the longest in contests of wiping each other out, or invented the most ingenious ways for legalizing thievery.
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