“Bugs don’t work that quickly,” Vrel assured him. “It’s altitude sickness. Terrans seem to be more affected by it than us. Get some rest. Most people adapt after an initial lousy night. I haven’t arranged anything for tonight. We’ll be going to see Corto first thing tomorrow.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CADE FELT BETTER ON AWAKENING, able to take on the world again. After showering and shaving, he selected olive pants, the lightweight jacket, and a narrow-check shirt with knitted tie as his attire for the day. When he stopped by Marie’s room, it turned out that she had recovered too. Vrel and Thryase arrived soon afterward to collect them. Although there was a communal canteen on the ground floor of the accommodation complex, they ate in a private room nearby, to avoid needless questions as to who the Terrans were. It was gray with metal furnishings and exposed pipes, reminding Cade of the wardroom in a Navy ship that he had visited once. Breakfast was an insipid Hyadean vegetable-based pseudo-sausage covered in a kind of synthetic liquid cheese, accompanied by yellow bread and a warm, fruity drink. Only then, through talking to Thryase, did Cade appreciate fully the audacity that Vrel had displayed in spiriting him and Marie out of the U.S. The normal Hyadean, inured to authority and needing orders from above before acting, would have been incapable of conceiving such a scheme, which was probably why nothing Vrel did had been questioned. Thryase wondered if Vrel’s stay on Earth was turning him into a Terran—a remark that Vrel seemed to find pleasing. They departed for Tevlak’s in a Hyadean flyer shortly afterward, heading northeast across the southern extremity of the Altiplano.
From the conversation during the flight, it seemed that Thryase was visiting Earth on behalf of a dissident movement of political “doves” who questioned the militant Hyadean policy toward the Querl. The Querl had not been expelled because of their inability to merge into the Hyadean system, Thryase maintained, but had separated because of their refusal to submit to it. He had entertained doubts about the official line for some time, but surrounded on all sides by a majority steeped in the conventional mindset, like many others he had hung back from speaking out strongly. Coming to Earth had opened his eyes to a lot of things and given him more confidence. What the Hyadeans were told represented lawlessness was nothing more than the expression of independent people free to live as they chose. He saw the variety and richness of Earth’s cultures as a consequence of the same thing. Marie didn’t quite share Thryase’s idealistic view of universal freedom on Earth, but she seemed encouraged. It was the first time she had heard the official Hyadean line being questioned by a Hyadean.
They flew low over white salt wastes and reedy marshes where flamingos rose in sunlit flurries of orange and magenta reflecting from the pools like fireworks displays. Ahead, the land became more hilly, rising toward mountains with the snow line of the Cordillera Real visible distantly behind. A valley opened out to reveal a huddled township set astride a meandering creek and giving way at the outskirts to patches of green cultivation crisscrossed by trails. The flyer dipped to pass over red-roofed, Spanish-style houses looking aged and dusty, and singled out one of several residences standing apart among clumps of yucca bush and a scattering of trees along the creek bank on the far side. It was built of adobe with a tile roof, and enclosed by a slatted fence running down to the creek on two sides. Outside the fence, a ramshackle assortment of maybe a dozen cars, trucks, and other vehicles was drawn up haphazardly along the roadside among the boulders and trees. Brown-skinned figures sitting in the open doors or under leanto shelters of blankets or plastic sheeting poles looked up curiously as the flyer descended. It landed inside the enclosure, alongside several automobiles, a newish-looking pickup truck, and a couple of Hyadean personal-model flyers. There was also a larger, more impressive model of flyer, sleek and businesslike, consisting of a dark blue body riding on two yellow nacelles. The Hyadean equivalent of a Learjet, Cade decided. Two men with the high-cheeked, long-nosed features of Andean Indians, neatly groomed and wearing loose white shirts with black pants, but tough-looking nevertheless and carrying sidearms, had already appeared from the house and were standing in front of the door when the arrivals got out.