The Legend That Was Earth

by James P. Hogan

  The atmosphere was very different from the colorful, provincial informality of Cairns. Even with the time together through the plane trip, the two officials who accompanied them seemed stiff and formal after the easygoing smiles of Tolly and Hueng. The talk was of things hypothetical and impersonal, grandiose schemes for the future, and how people would need to adapt and be educated to play their part—not of people simply allowing life itself to determine whatever kind of scheme took shape.

  The same mood set the tone of the obligatory dinner that was given later in one of the hotel's private rooms. Cade had the feeling that in addition to paying the requisite courtesies, it was designed to send a political message. The ranks and numbers of the guests seemed calculated to convey that Cade and Hudro's presence, while acknowledged to be of interest, shouldn't be seen as carrying cosmic significance.

  The speeches dwelt on political theory and abstract ideals. China might have made heroic efforts to change the form, but the old habits of thinking were still there, Cade thought as he nodded, smiled, and applauded. It was still the thinking of Earth, which created vast, imaginative symphonies of fantasy setting out what ought to be, and then tried forcing reality to fit. The community that had grown at Cairns embodied, even if it probably didn't understand, what Hyadean thinking had been before opportunism took advantage of it, and conformity stifled it—the thinking that had accepted reality as it is, and pointed the way to building starships; understood it the only way it could be understood: spontaneously, by living and expressing it.

  It would have been an oversimplification to say even that Asia stood for one side or the other of the tussle that was dividing Earth. Should that be resolved, then Asia itself would break up into factions, as would other alignments that seemed stable for as long as the greater common threat persisted. Cade was beginning to see Terrans from something like the perspective that he imagined Hyadeans saw them. Whether one agreed with and liked what one saw depended on where in the Hyadean social order the viewing was from. The true dividing lines were complex. There were bulky, blue-to-gray "Terrans," and there were slender pink-to-black "Hyadeans." What better words might have more accurately described which of both groups stood for what was far from obvious.

  * * *?

  The next day, they were taken on a tour of the city by four intense young people, two men and two women, polite, impeccably groomed, dressed, and mannered, all speaking English, and two, to Hudro's surprise and commendation, ably versed in Hyadean. One couple was from the public relations office of the Department of Foreign Affairs, the other from the Central Military Directorate. Beijing had been China's capital city since its founding in the Yuan Dynasty during the thirteenth century, and the layout was still dominated by its imperial past. The city proper, as opposed to the greater metropolitan area of modern times, consisted of two distinct sections: the square Inner, or Tartar City to the north, and adjoining it to the south, the more cosmopolitan and commercial, oblong Outer, or Chinese City. The Tartar City, dating from the earliest period, had originally been enclosed by walls forty feet high, removed only during the 1950s, in the Communist period. Within its fifteen-mile perimeter, it enclosed two other nested walled cities erected during the fifteenth-century Ming Dynasty: the Imperial City, with parks, temples, secondary palaces, and residences and offices of the nation's leaders; and within that the moated Forbidden City, containing the Imperial Palace with its 9,000 chambers, as well as audience halls and terraced courtyards extending over 250 acres, now maintained as a museum. Cade and Hudro stood in reverence at the shrines and temples of wooden beams, red clay walls, and massive, yellow tiled roofs with upturned eaves; admired the broad marble steps, carved stone lions, and ceremonial gates; and walked among the gardens with their ornamental lakes. But it was all an enclosed wonderland, a preserved relic of a past that had gone. When they came back outside, the humorless office blocks of glass and concrete, and imposing government buildings with brooding stone frontages pushing their way in and joining up like a rising tide around the shrinking islands of times gone by, reminded them that the serious business of the world at large and its future set the tone and the rhythm now.

  The four young guides talked eagerly about plans for the future and a new society to be built. Yes, mistakes had been made in the past, but they had brought their lessons. In essence, the global conformity that the Hyadeans would impose on Earth if they were allowed threatened the same kind of exploitation that the West's imperialism had the century before. Eastern Asia had resisted successfully then, and it was natural and inevitable that it should form the nucleus of the resistance growing across the world today. Cade heard the total self-assurance that can come only from minds incapable of conceiving the possibility that they could be wrong. The belief that the future could be molded as desired determined planning, and guidance remained unquestioned. Only the plan had changed.

  "You're still inventing the perfect society in your minds, then trying to figure out how to shape people to fit in with it," Cade commented to one of the young women.

  "Yes. It gives purpose and requires dedication." She looked at him bright-eyed, as if waiting for a revelation. "Is there a better way?"

  "Leave people the way they are, and accept whatever society comes out of it," Cade said. "Like the Hyadeans do with facts. You're making your society a theory. Just let facts and people be what they are, and lead to whatever becomes. That's the way to build starships."

  But she couldn't make the connection. Her programming didn't include such a concept.

  Cade and Hudro were subdued by the time they returned to the hotel. This was going to be tougher than they had thought. That evening, they dined less ostentatiously with a half dozen people from foreign affairs and military departments. Conversation focused on plying Cade and Hudro with questions about Hyadean-Terran relations in the former U.S.A., their impressions of the guerrillas in South America, and Hudro's experiences in counterinsurgency operations. The undisguised object was to gather advance material for the more senior representatives whom they would be meeting in the morning.

  * * *

  The meeting was held in a large, somber room of paneled walls with portraits of mostly forgotten military and political leaders in one of the government buildings off Tiananmen Square, a couple of blocks from the hotel. There were shelves of ornately bound books that Cade could never imagine anyone opening, brown leather armchairs arranged with side tables along the sides and in the corners, and a bench seat below the end window. Cade and Hudro sat at one end of a polished table forming the centerpiece. The chairman, who had been introduced as Brigadier General Zhao Yaotung of the Army, faced them from the far end. Arranged along the two longer sides were five other principal participants and their several secretaries and translators. Two microphones on the table and a video camera commanding the table from a corner indicated that the proceedings would be recorded.

  The other five were: Madame Deng Qing, an undersecretary of the Directorate; Liu Enulai, military scientific adviser; Colonel Huia Xianem, of the Air Force; Abel Imarak, an Iranian liaison officer from the Muslim side of the AANS; and Major Charles Clewes, from a Canadian military mission that was apparently visiting. The Muslim and Canadian presence was revealing. It seemed that coordination within the AANS was farther advanced than Cade had realized.

  Zhao began by working through a list of questions compiled from the things the deputies had raised the previous evening. He was heavily built with a saggy face, and spoke with a tired detachment, as if used to commanding an authority that was never questioned. His points covered tactics and logistics of the ground operations in South America, the morale of the guerrilla fighters there, their training, equipment, and attitudes toward receiving support from Asia. When the questions zeroed in on specifics of Hyadean weaponry and ways of countering it, Hudro reiterated what he had already told Cade: Although he had come to the conclusion that the Hyadean military intervention on behalf of the Globalist Coalition was wrong, he could not j
ustify saying anything that might contribute to causing casualties or deaths among his own kind. He had left all that now, to begin a new life. Mme. Deng, sharp of face and manner, her hair tied in a bun, wearing a black skirt and jacket over a high-necked, lilac floral-pattern blouse, wanted to know, with a hint of disapproval, if that was the case, why had he come to Beijing? Because he had been asked to, Hudro said. He had accepted in the hope of finding some way to avoid escalation, not to promote it.

  That seemed to open up the latent course that the meeting had been predisposed to follow. Zhao launched into a recitation that flowed smoothly and monotonously as if he had been through it many times, of why the time to strike hard and fast was precisely now. In North America, the Washington regime was still taken by surprise, its forces divided among themselves and disorganized, with reports of defections. The day before, at Amarillo, an entire Union armored brigade had come over to the Western Federation. Their drive into Texas was running down. Mexico was heading toward open civil war against cooperating, which blocked the threat of a Globalist outflanking move from the south for the time being.

  Meanwhile, the Federation was solidly established across the north all the way to Lake Michigan. The underground front and irregulars that the AANS had been cultivating for years were emerging as an effective auxiliary arm of the regular forces. Alaska was pro-Federation, although formally maintaining a neutral stance, and Canada, for a long time seeking ways of easing itself from domination by Washington, was supportive. Zhao gestured across the table toward Clewes, as if by way of vindication. And on the European front, Russia had declined to follow the NATO Globalist alignment, securing Asia's position from the west. It was a time for decisiveness and vigorous action. Nothing worthwhile in history had ever been attained by half measures.

  Imarak, the Iranian, took up the torch. "At this moment, China and the other Asian AANS nations have over five million men under arms. Our air forces started equipping for something like this a long time ago. Hawaii has agreed to cooperate in staging operations and is being reinforced." He looked at Zhao for a moment as if for approval to divulge further detail. The general returned a curt nod. Imarak continued, "With the transportation at our disposal right now, we can airlift five divisions with supporting armor and artillery into Mexico in ten days, followed within a month by landings to intercede in South America. With such a demonstration of support, the South American states will arise." Imarak waved a hand. "From the things you have said yourselves, the people are with us already! What's left? A few tottering governments that are rotten on the inside anyway. With the South gone, Canada denied, and the western two-thirds of the U.S.A. effectively part of the AANS already, the Washington-based Union reduces to an extension of the decaying remains of Europe. We can swing practically the rest of Earth behind us now. How could a few nonrepresentative states—states that do not have the support of their people—backing an alien power stand against that?"

  Cade had a foreboding that they were not going to penetrate this kind of euphoria and overconfidence. "You're not allowing for the aliens," he said, nevertheless.

  Liu Enulai, the scientific adviser chimed in, taking up the party line. "That is the reason why it is so important to move fast," He was lean and hollow cheeked, with close-cropped white hair and skin stretched tight over his skull, looking as if it were about to crack. "We are here now, already mobilizing, our weapons deployed. The Hyadeans won't have fully worked-out plans for intervention, nor any presence here, as yet, in numbers. They have large problems of logistics to deal with and vast distances to cross. But once they set a goal, they pursue it relentlessly and effectively. Therefore, delay is to our detriment and their benefit."

  Cade shook his head, alarmed now at what he was hearing. "You can't take those guys on in a straight slugging match. It isn't a question of numbers. You've all been around for the last twelve years. You can figure out what they're capable of."

  Hudro, beside him, was equally disturbed. "I think you underestimate," he told the company. "These weapons you see in South America are just the small-scales. Experiments, yes? Nothing crosses ocean under orbiting bombs and beam platforms to land in South America. Saturation field turns air into fire, burns whole forest. Same forces that drive Hyadean starship bend space, pile desert into mountain, collapse city block like egg shell. I have seen in Querl wars. But Querl have defenses and understand."

  Clewes, the Canadian, was looking worried—understandably: His country was next door to the developing battle zone, not six thousand miles away. Huia Xianem, the Chinese Air Force colonel, who had asked Hudro a lot of questions earlier, was nodding agreement solemnly. So not everyone was being carried away.

  But the cautious were evidently not the ones calling the tune. "Indeed, that's the whole point," Mme. Deng answered. "To avoid such a direct conflict. Moving quickly now will eliminate the remnant of Terran power that depends on Hyadean support. By the time the Hyadeans are in a position to deploy significant force here, any reason to use it will have gone away."

  "Is reinforcements arriving already from Chryse," Hudro started to point out, but Zhao brushed it aside.

  "They still think in terms of the local-scale conflicts in South America to protect their elite in their palaces there," he said. "In taking things to a planetary scale, speed and surprise will be with us."

  "Do you see Hyadeans intervening actively in your country, Mr. Cade?" Imarak asked, as if that made the point.

  Maybe for the same reason that there weren't any Asians either, Cade thought to himself. Yet, anyway. Surely, the spectacle of Chinese troops landing in California to fight alongside Americans against other Americans was unthinkable. But similar enough things were written all through history.

  "Is fine, maybe, while East Union army is in Texas and they still hope for help through Mexico," Hudro said. "But if Union gets in trouble, yes, you likely see Hyadeans fighting there then."

  Zhao seemed unmoved. "You were in California how long ago, a few weeks?" he said to Cade. "CounterAction has been operating for two years there. Did you ever see any direct involvement of Hyadeans with the federal security forces?"

  "They supplied equipment, advised on training . . ."

  "But were they ever involved in action?"

  Cade could only shake his head. "No." Zhao nodded, satisfied.

  "And before they have time to get involved, Washington will have fallen," Mme. Deng said. "The Hyadeans' base of political collaboration will have ceased to exist. The only option open to them then will be to renegotiate their position here on new terms." She looked from Hudro to Cade. "Our terms."

  Cade looked around at their faces. Clewes, and to a lesser degree Colonel Huia, were uneasy, but they weren't in control here. The rest were committed to their course and intractable. He'd thought that he and Hudro had been brought here for the benefit of their insight and experience. But it was clear that nothing they had to contribute was going to change anything. "What do you want from us?" he asked.

  "Your face is known as the American in the movie," Zhao replied. "You and your former wife . . . What happened to her, by the way?"

  "She's safe—back in California," Cade said.

  "Oh, really? I'm glad." Zhao gestured at Hudro. "And here is the Hyadean whose story you told. We want to use you both in the same capacity here—at this crucial moment when we are about to launch our maximum effort. Talk to the people. Endorse our cause. Tell them that we are taking back our world from the aliens . . ." His gaze shifted to Hudro. "The human aliens as well as the ones who are propping up the Globalists."

  So that was it. A public-relations campaign to promote the war. Cade sat back heavily in his chair. "You seem to disapprove, Mr. Cade," Mme. Deng commented. "Do you have some alternative strategy to suggest?"

  Until the day before, Cade had thought he had. Especially after Cairns, he had entertained visions of sharing his new understanding of how both races were victims of exploitive minorities who together constituted the real com
mon enemy; how the way to defeat them was not by taking on the Hyadean army but by winning over the mass of the Hyadean people. Why confront when they could undermine? Susan Gray had said.

  Although dispirited by what he had heard, now that they were here, he had to try. He spoke with as much force as he could muster about the way Earth affected Hyadeans and how it awakened them to what they believed they could have been, and perhaps once had been. The way to defeat their economic imperialism lay in that direction, Cade said. Missiles and bombs could only bring disaster. Hudro followed, citing his own and Yassem's experience. Hyadeans didn't question, he pointed out. On the one hand that made their society easier to control; but it also meant that when they finally found out that they had been lied to, the effect would be incomparably more devastating than to any population on Earth—who pretty much took it for granted anyway. What had just happened to the U.S.A. could happen a hundred times more intensely across the whole of Chryse. "As Roland says, is the way you win here," he concluded. "Is not with bombs. That way, you, your cities—all goes is destroyed."

  But it fell flat. Cade had told himself that surely the Chinese, if anybody, would respond to such a philosophy. Hadn't they themselves practically invented it? Or was the notion of fomenting a "people's" rebellion now part of a past that they considered themselves to have progressed beyond? But it was clear, even while Cade and Hudro were speaking, that the listeners who mattered were impervious. The leaders they served were already committed and were not going to be budged from their course. It was equally plain that Cade and Hudro would have no heart for the role that had been planned for them, and the matter was not pursued further. Thus, the meeting ended on a note of tacit withdrawal by both sides, each acknowledging that there was nothing further of mutual interest to be discussed.