Vrel asked about Krossig. Cade said he was fine and described his situation. “And what about the mission?” he asked. “Orzin’s running things, right? So what’s the status of the place now? I couldn’t quite figure it out.”
“I’m not exactly sure either,” Vrel confessed.
“Do you still have the link to Chryse?”
“Not after Luodine tried to get her agency to put out that documentary there. They ran straight to the authorities. Xuchimbo cut us off in retaliation—and to avoid any further risk.” Cade remembered that the gravity-wave converters in Earth orbit and the outer-Solar-System relays were controlled from the Hyadean General Embassy in Xuchimbo. Vrel shrugged. “Orzin is with us, trying to find a way around the censorship. If the real story got out on Chryse, it would create havoc. That’s what we should be doing.”
“Hudro and I tried to tell them in Beijing, but the hawks are in control there,” Cade said. “What’s the line here? What will Jeye do?” He meant William Jeye, who had become the FWA’s president.
“He’s under pressure to go along with the Chinese,” Clara Norburn said. “You can see the argument: Washington has the backing of technically superior aliens. We’re going to need as much of the world with us as we can get.” Cade listened gravely. Clara sounded as if she almost bought it herself. She went on: “And so far things are looking good. I can’t see the people in Sacramento throwing away the initiative here and expecting Chryse to cave in. Tanks and bombs, they understand. But the psychology and social dynamics of Hyadeans they’ve never met, light-years away?” She shook her head. “You might as well ask them to put their trust in voodoo.”
* * *
The flyer landed at the house first to drop off Cade, Marie, and Luke, and also to introduce Hudro to the rest of the household. Then Hudro departed with the remainder for the mission, where he would be staying. Cade would join them tomorrow after resting from the journey. He showered and changed while Henry put away the bags, clothes, and other things Cade had acquired in New Zealand, Australia, and China. Marie had been using one of the guest rooms, and without Julia’s effects the master suite was strangely empty and bare. But the atmosphere was a lot lighter.
He joined Marie downstairs and took a stroll with her around the house and the outside to see if much had changed during his absence. Not a lot had. Henry had acted quickly before the rationing began to bite, so stocks of most things were good for the time being, apart from gas, which had been the first of the restrictions—although they wouldn’t have to worry about running the Cadillac anymore. The neighborhood now had a siren to warn of incoming air attacks—in Newport Beach! External walls of sandbags had been put up around the garage and adjoining gym to make them into something of a blast shelter. Warren was worried about the vulnerability of the yacht, moored at the rear.
Despite the way they seemed to have found each other again, Cade was conscious of a vague uneasiness between himself and Marie when they sat down together for the evening meal. He had obtained this house since their splitting up, and he could tell that she was uncomfortable in the ostentatious surroundings. But there was more, also. It was as if there were something unseemly, almost, in the rapidity with which it had happened. Marie had been there at one time, and then gone; then there was Julia; and now Julia was gone and Marie back, it seemed virtually instantly. Thousands of miles away in South America, everything had been too different to matter. But here the change was too immediate. He would have felt more comfortable to have been alone for a while before Marie moved back into his life again. He sensed that Marie felt it too. But the mood didn’t have time to take root. A string of old acquaintances began dropping by to say hi, having heard that Cade was back.
Anita Lloyd, from Norm Schnyder’s law firm, had previously been an expert on reinvesting currency earned from cheap Hyadean imports in high-profit land deals. Now she was involved in rebuilding money, credit, and the trading system in conjunction with Asian markets, following the severance of ties to traditional East-Coast-based financial institutions and the issuing of its own currency by the Bank of California. Norman himself was away in Sacramento, working on emergency labor and housing allocation—to conserve fuel, thousands of people were being relocated closer to work. Anita joked that the firm was learning to do things that needed to be done, without worrying about billing. Her own personal million had been wiped out in the currency transition. To Cade’s surprise, she didn’t seem to care all that much. On reflection, she told him, she didn’t really like that person that she used to be.