“I was thinking the same earlier,” Cade said. He shifted to ease a cramped foot. “I used to think that what made people worth getting to know was who they networked with, what favors they could do—what you could get out of them. Now I’ve seen the qualities that make people truly valuable. And often it’s in the same people . . . like Clara, maybe, or George, or Anita, Neville Baxter . . . even Dee.”
“Dee was always okay.”
“Yeah, well. . . . But you know what I’m saying. Why does it have to take something like this to bring that side of people out? Why couldn’t they be what they’re capable of from the beginning?”
“I hope they’re okay back there,” Marie mused. “Dee and Vrel, Luke, Henry . . . all of them.”
“It’s the same with us too,” Cade went on. “Don’t you get the feeling it’s a bit late to find out now who you really are? Especially since it seems there’s not going to be a lot we’ll be able to do with the knowledge.”
Marie could only shrug. “Maybe better late than never, all the same.”
“Unless those things that Krossig and Michael Blair used to get excited about turn out to be close after all,” Nyarl suggested.
“What things?” Cade asked.
“Personalities in this reality being incarnations of souls to help them develop. The things Hudro wants to discover. As do many Hyadeans.”
“If it’s true, then I must be working some enormous piece of karma off the debit side,” Cade said resignedly.
“If?” Nyarl repeated. “Now you’re sounding as if you don’t believe it yourself.”
Cade looked at him, the dark-hued face all but invisible against the jacket hood pulled around in the darkness. “It was a legend that you wanted to hear, and we played at being. It was how I got rich, and my friends got rich.”
“You’re making you and them sound responsible,” Nyarl objected. “But you just used the situation that you found. You didn’t create it. It resulted from the worst elements of both our worlds working in collusion.”
“That’s my point,” Cade said. “If Earth had really been the legend that you thought, none if this could have happened. The best elements of both worlds would have . . .” He sighed and shook his head. “I don’t know what.” The strange thing was, he found himself almost believing that it could have been different. But even those who he’d thought might bring about something better had ended up going for the throat when they thought everything was in their favor. He leaned back and looked up at the stars. “Maybe one day it will all be told differently as stories change,” he said to the others. “Another legend of an Earth that never happened.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
CADE AWOKE CHILLED AND STIFF. He freed his arms from the blanket and stretched sluggishly. Marie was gone; Nyarl, still asleep, was wrapped in blankets and a greatcoat. He stood up, brushing frost from the predawn cold of the mountains off his jacket and beating his arms across his chest, while his breath steamed in white clouds. A thin film clung to the tops of the sandbagged parapets and the boulders, adding extra bleakness to the scene of daybreak creeping into the landscape like the light being slowly turned up on a stage setting. He saw Marie now, with Hudro, Koyne, and some soldiers, huddled around a stove under the awning covering the field kitchen a hundred yards or so back in a gully.
The scarp they were on faced east, overlooking an expanse of sand and broken rock that lay flat for a mile or two before rising to a line of craggy uplands. They were about twenty miles behind the forward positions that they had seen being prepared yesterday, looking down over rearward missile and gun emplacements, antitank defenses, and staging areas for reserve armor. Over the ridge behind them would be the long-range artillery, antiaircraft positions, command bunkers. Cade was getting to know the pattern already.
Footsteps crunched on the gravel behind. Cade turned to find Gerofsky in a combat jacket and helmet, accompanied by a couple of troopers, coming down from the ridge, where he had gone to learn the latest at brigade HQ. The troopers went off toward their own unit. Gerofsky came to the edge of the parapet and stepped down to join Cade. He looked grim.