The Hyadean universe, by contrast, was electrical. Matter was fundamentally an electrical phenomenon. The basic force was electrical, and gravity a byproduct. The cosmos, its galaxies, stars, and other constituents, hadn’t condensed gravitationally out of gas, dust, and spinning nebulas produced from the debris of some primordial Big Bang. Such an explosion would have resulted simply in permanent dispersion of energy and whatever particles formed out of it. Again, the Terrans’ grand theory had gotten things backward. Cosmic objects, from dust clouds and planets to neutron stars and quasars weren’t the results of condensation and collapse from rarefied clouds of matter, but of the progressive breaking down from superdense concentrations of it. Electrical interactions operating on a titanic scale spun these objects to instability, causing them to throw off parts of themselves which then repeated the process, engendering a succession of bodies of progressively diminishing mass, rotation, and magnetic energy. Depending on the mass of the original fragmenting singularity, the products could be quasars, which in turn gave rise to radio galaxies, and from them, spiral galaxies; globular halos of younger stars around galaxies; or supernovas evolving into pulsars or white dwarves. Gravity only had any significant effect as a comparatively feeble cleaning-up process in the latter phases.
Fragments that didn’t make it as stars cooled to form the gas giants, which when meeting and entering into capture with a star or another gas giant threw off what became minor planets, their satellites, comets, and the other debris that formed planetary systems. These were the times when space became an electrically active medium, transmitting forces that disrupted orbits to bring about the encounters that renewed and revitalized worlds. During the quiescent periods between, the interplanetary plasma would organize into an insulating configuration in which gravity was allowed to predominate. Local observations conducted during a few centuries of such a quiet period had led Earth’s astronomers to overgeneralize such conditions as representing the permanent situation.
However, many surface characteristics of bodies in the Solar System were impossible to reconcile with the conventional picture of nothing having essentially changed for billions of years.
Furthermore, the farthest, hence oldest, objects visible in the cosmos—such as quasars—were the most massive and energetic: precisely the opposite of what gradual condensation from initially rarefied matter would predict. And the detection of vast structures of galaxy-cluster “walls” and voids at the largest scales of observation indicated processes having been operating in the universe for far longer than the fifteen billion years that the Big Bang model allowed since its inception.
But things like that didn’t fit with the theory.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CADE HADN’T PUT A LOT OF TRUST in the messages he sent out electronically via the net. They had been worded cryptically, with obscure references that only the recipients would recognize. A friend who worked on communications had told him that most computers these days were required to carry chips that tagged messages with invisible codes enabling senders to be traced. As was his custom, he’d had more faith in word of mouth.
He had no idea how to go about finding a channel to contact Marie directly. People who knew about such things told him if she were indeed back in the U.S. and was working with CounterAction, she would be using a different name and operating in an environment carefully structured such that she couldn’t be located. However, Cade knew a minister in San Pedro by the name of Udovich, a staunch Republican disapproving of Ellis’s Washington regime, who ran a church and a shelter for evicted families by day, and at other times disappeared on long camping and hiking trips up into the Sierra. One of the people that Cade talked to whispered that Udovich was involved with some kind of conduit that routed arms in via Mexico to paramilitary groups up in the mountains. Californian laws would have made this impossible in earlier years. But by this time, even law enforcement agencies were rebelling against the Washington line and turning blind eyes. Many took it as seeds of revolution in the wind. That suggested Udovich could have connections with Sovereignty, and through them access into the higher levels of their militant arm, CounterAction, somewhere. If so, Cade reasoned, they ought to have a way of getting a message through to Marie, even if it meant going all the way back up the tree and then down again via China. Around noon on the day following the boat trip, he drove up to San Pedro and talked with Udovich over iced teas at a sidewalk table outside a sports bar called O’Reilly’s, down by the bay.