Marie was with Cade, looking for once the part of a presentable, urbane Western woman instead of a desperado, in a cream jacket-skirt set with chocolate blouse and trim. Vrel was there too, insistent on being their self-appointed tour guide and general attendant on Chryse. And Dee was with Vrel too, of course. And finally, making up their group, was Nyarl, going home by popular demand to meet millions for whom his face had become a phenomenon on display screens, and receive a public honor decreed by the provisional administration that the Querl had installed to take stock of the Chrysean condition.
A month had gone by since the people of Earth—bewildered and frightened; resolute and defiant—had emerged from foxholes, come out onto streets, listened to announcements in refugee centers, turned on radios and TV screens, to learn that the war which yesterday had seemed about to explode into ever greater levels of ferocity and consume the whole planet, was over. It didn’t mean that the world’s problems or the future of Terran-Hyadean dealings was solved, or that anyone had clear ideas as yet of how to solve them. Nobody knew what form the reconstruction of what had been the United States was to assume, based on what formulation Constitution. It was not even agreed where the capital would be, which was why negotiations were taking place in Denver: as effectively neutral as anywhere, and the nearest principal city to the Querl’s first landing. But what it did signify was something akin to a collective version of the shaking up experienced after an automobile accident that could have killed everyone. If all the pain, grief, and loss of those three weeks of mass insanity—and it had been substantial—had been for anything, it was the imperative now acknowledged across both worlds that the fundamental values that life should be seeking were in drastic need of reexamination. And the people who needed to make the judgment were not the ones who so far had been allowed to be in charge.
Representatives from various Terran nations, organizations, institutions, other interests, had been invited to Chryse to begin a joint exploring of which way to go next. The other passengers on the flight from Denver were some of them. More had arrived the day before. And to Cade and Marie’s amazement, they had been invited too. Nyarl, it seemed, wasn’t the only one to have become an instant celebrity among the Chrysean worlds. The Terran couple who had appeared with him and symbolized their world’s defiance and determination to fight through in the face of impossible odds, facing Hyadean war engines, speaking against backgrounds of burning cities, were equally famous. The Chryseans wanted to meet them too.
The transport landed among rows of cavernous cargo-carrying hulls looking vaguely like monstrous, flattened guppy fish; single-stage space-planes that could make orbit, maneuver for hours, and return; assorted special-purpose craft whose nature could only be guessed. From ground level, the peculiar alien structures rising in the background were as imposing as the launch complex had appeared from the air. Cade had the feeling of practically being on a small piece of Chryse already. The transport’s cabin section detached from the airframe as a unit and slid onto a conveyor rail alongside. Moments later, it was being carried toward an opening into the terminal complex.
Hudro and Yassem were installed in Cade’s place at Newport Beach, which was where Vrel would be returning. The area had escaped damage, although the house itself had shown the wear and tear of being used as a shelter for displaced children from the war areas by the time Cade came back to it. Cade wasn’t quite sure what he wanted to do with the house. It struck him as gaudy and extravagant now, somehow. Luke had suggested making it an open house for visiting Hyadeans. Whatever the outcome, Cade couldn’t see the kind of life being resurrected that he had come to know over the years. It wasn’t so much that the rewards seemed shallow now in comparison to the cost—which was true enough—so much as life having so much more to offer that was too intriguing to ignore. Trying to understand some of the questions that Krossig and Blair had raised, for example; or seeing people in terms of more than just gains to be assessed and realized. And in any case, the prospects, contacts, hangers-on, around whom that life had revolved and depended weren’t going to be around anymore—at least, not in those roles. They all seemed to have changed too in some fundamental ways, just as he had.