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 justify 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.