“This has been such a change. I didn’t want to spoil it.” Marie pushed some salad into a wad with her fork and looked up. “Was I always a fanatic?”
“I used to think so,” Cade affirmed candidly. “Now, I don’t know. Julia asked about it a lot lately—but I guess we know why now.” He chewed thoughtfully for a while. “What makes people do a job like that? . . . Live a life of deception. Could you?”
“Some people would say our whole lives are nothing else,” Marie said, seemingly not to make any particular point.
“Greed, hatred, and deception,” Cade intoned.
“What about them?”
“Those are what the Buddhists say are the root of all of life’s evils.”
“What’s this, a new Roland? How long have you been into stuff like that?”
“I’m not, really.”
“Yes, I had noticed.”
“It was something that Mike Blair was on about once. Do you remember him—Mike Blair, the scientist?”
“I only met him a couple of times, I think. Hair with bits of gray in? Wears glasses?”
Cade nodded. “That’s him—except the hair’s probably a bit grayer now. He’s been getting into Eastern philosophy as well as science. It seems our religions are making a big impression with some of the Hyadeans. They don’t have deep philosophical views about things. They just look at what the basic facts are saying and leave it right there. Mike says it has something to do with why they’re flying starships and we’re not. I didn’t really follow it.”
Marie stopped eating for a moment to frown dubiously. “In that case, why should they care about deeper philosophies? What do they need one for?”
“Because they live their lives stressed out on treadmills tied to getting better ratings on this `entitlement’ system of theirs, which I don’t understand either.”
“Right. Like taking a day out fishing in a boat off California.”
“I told you, a few like Vrel are different. . . . Well, they’re changing. To them, a view of life that values other things beyond just status and material success is a revelation—literally. They’ve never heard of anything like it. Krossig—he’s another Hyadean, who works with Vrel in LA, being moved to Australia—says it’s catching on among the kids back home. They talk about Earth as the home of a deeper spirituality: ways of getting in touch with reality that the Hyadeans had once, but lost.”
Marie pulled a face. “I guess I’m a little more cynical with regard to human spirituality. I’ve been too much in touch with conventional reality these last few years.” She eyed him for a moment before spearing more of her salad. “Isn’t this a bit out of your line, Roland? Are you changing or something, or did I just never see it?”
Cade shrugged in a way that said surprises happen all the time. “I see a lot of aliens.”
Marie studied him curiously. “I don’t think you realize what an unusual insight it’s giving you into alien psychology,” she said. “I’ll admit, I’ve tended to see them as all alike—and not all that nice.”
“I do an unusual job,” Cade replied.
* * *
Vrel arrived later in the evening and joined Cade and Marie in their suite. To show off his expanding repertoire of acquired Terran tastes, he started off by refreshing himself after the day with a cool beer, and then settled down to follow it with black, unsweetened coffee. Marie’s manner was guarded to begin with, in the presence of possibly the first alien she had spent any time with at close quarters, but she loosened up as time went on.
Vrel was anxious to make it clear that Dee hadn’t known Rebecca was a setup. Even with his exposure to Terrans, he didn’t seem to grasp that the possibility that she might have had never crossed Cade’s mind. His concern seemed to imply that a Hyadean in Dee’s position might have sold Cade out knowingly if it gained points somehow in the game-plan calculus that they lived by, and hence by their norms some defense of Dee should be necessary. Cade didn’t really follow but accepted it as well meant. It was beyond Marie’s experience or comprehension.