God, how he loved this girl, Hudro thought. Had he just appealed in his mind to the Terran deity? Yes, he had. “Look, this is what I want you to do,” he said. First, he needed to know if his name was on any surveillance lists. That would be fairly straightforward. The next thing was trickier. He summarized what had happened at Tevlak’s and named the persons, Hyadean and Terran, who had been there when he and Vrel left. Could Yassem find out if the house had been raided by security forces—maybe from operations lists? If so, what had happened to those who were there? Yassem promised to see what she could do. Some of the things she had extracted from official files in the past had amazed him. Hopefully, she could turn up something within three or four hours, she said. Hudro thought he could lose himself in the officers’ club or somewhere during that time.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
LUODINE HAD ENGINEERED her posting to Earth to escape from the banality of life among the professional and social elite on Chryse that her work immersed her in. She had to find something different, far away, she had decided—before she either destroyed her career by reporting what she really thought, or became one of them. As an executive investigator with one of the major media organizations, she had specialized in exploring success stories, which was an approved and well rewarded choice because it put her among the molders of the role images that it was felt healthy for average Chryseans to emulate. It kept them busy, distracted them from thinking too much about what it all meant, and the economy as a whole remained prosperous.
The only problem was, just about everything she saw brought out the side of her that was decidedly not average for a Chrysean. She met officials in charge of government bureaucracies that dreamed up forests of regulations and employed thousands who buzzed around importantly day after day, intent on their mission, no end result of which, as far as Luodine could see, added up to anything of actual use to anybody. All that the elaborate machinery did was get in the way of the few left who were trying to do something useful. A long, red curvy fruit called an iliacen grew on parts of Chryse, not unlike a Terran banana, but larger. There were specifications giving the limits of size, weight, color, water content—even curviness as determined by a procedure spelled out in detail—that defined what was a permissible iliacen. Any commercial transaction involving one that didn’t conform was illegal. They couldn’t even be given away by producers. Huge numbers of perfectly good, edible fruits had to be thrown away because they were a little bit too straight or a little bit too curvy. This was considered “efficient.” Efficiency, Luodine discovered, had little to do with what was obtained for the cost. It had to do with the extent and effectiveness of control. When she pressed for an explanation of why it mattered, and how the enormous effort expended on preventing people deciding for themselves what kind of iliacen they liked could be justified, nobody could give her one. It seemed that the regulators were simply unable to function without books of rules and numbers telling them what to do. They had become extensions of their own machines.
She had once talked with the head of a large contractor involved in developing and supplying advanced space weaponry deemed essential for meeting the threat posed by the Querl. Said to be among the richest thousand on Chryse, he worked in his office from early morning until after the staff had left, and hadn’t taken private time off for two years. When Luodine asked why he didn’t do something else now, he had looked at her blankly and asked in seriousness what else there was. “Build a house with your own hands. Learn to sail a boat,” Luodine had said. “When you were a young man, weren’t there things you dreamed of? Things you told yourself you wanted to do some day, when you had the time, and circumstances permitted?” The executive had become angry and terminated the interview.