“Physics exposes the backstage machinery. Eastern insight says that what the machinery supports is illusion. But surely the whole purpose of it is to experience the illusion.” The company was listening intently. “It’s a bit like a physicist finally figuring out that the movie is a product of electrical patterns and photons, and the mystic observing that what they depict isn’t real. But all the time, neither of them sees that the purpose of the movie was to . . .” He waved a hand about. “Whatever the movie is made for.”
“Tell a story. Teach a lesson,” Susan supplied. She was now transformed in a close-fitting black cocktail dress and looking devastating.
“Exactly.”
Susan looked at the others. “Interesting. I’ve always thought of myself as a hard-boiled science type too. But you know, fellas, I like it.”
“You see, it needs Hyadean and Terran brains combined,” Freem said.
Hudro was enraptured. “So, is all designed for consciousnesses to make choices and learn,” he said to Krossig. “What is it does the designing?”
Krossig spread his hands. “I don’t know. Not my department.”
Hudro turned to Cade. “Here is what I seek. Is as you say, like fresh air. We bring Yassem here. Already I think we stay in this country.”
Cade looked inquiringly at Susan and Freem.
“I don’t think that would be too much of a problem,” Susan said. “There’s a good community of Hyadeans here—all learning to be individuals. Sounds like they’d fit right in.”
* * *
For the next couple of days, Cade and Hudro were given a tour of the area, particularly to see some of the ways in which Hyadeans and Terrans were working together without organizing directives from above or centralized policies favoring corporate economics. The scientific station was larger and more diverse in its activities than Cade had imagined. He toured the labs and workshops, saw prototype rigs of the catalyzed hydrogen turboelectric system that Tolly had talked about in the bus on the way from the airport, and didn’t really understand a lot else. Like the mission in Los Angeles, the station had gravitic communications equipment in touch with Chryse via the orbiting Hyadean relay system, and Cade watched Terran scientists still spellbound at the thought of interacting with counterparts light-years away.
“This makes the web look like Pony Express,” one of them told him.
They were from a surprisingly wide range of places and backgrounds, brought in one way or another through influences of the cosmopolitan influx of the individualist-minded from Asia, Europe, and the Americas to what had already been a mixed region. There were also a lot more Hyadeans than Cade would have expected. Freem said that most had paid their own way privately to come to Earth in search of the independent way of living they had heard of that was new to them. Krossig felt there was more going on here than just a collaborative scientific center. It could be a microcosm of how an alternative might evolve to the imposed, top-down form of organized dealings between the two races that had taken root in the West.
* * *
But there was another side that was disconcerting. “China’s policy,” Susan said when she and Cade were with Freem in Freem’s office, next to the gravcom room. “What we think is their real aim in leading the AANS—and we’ve talked to Hueng about it, and he agrees. They see the lineup of Hyadean and America-Europe as an attempt to preserve a Western-dominated economic order that should have died after the twentieth century and two world wars. They made the Hyadeans a symbol for the rest of the world to rally against. Beijing seems to think that now the U.S. has broken up, it’s as good as over. All it has to do is deliver a knockout blow. They’re underestimating what they could be up against. We could never beat Hyadeans by taking them on in a straight fight—if it ever came to that. Hudro understands that. But there’s no need to. From the things we’re hearing here, they’re ripe for their own form of revolution. Why confront when you can undermine? With the right strategy, we can win enough of them over that their system caves in.”