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.