He stood with Michael Blair on one side of the buffet area in the center of the house, catching strands of conversations. The Hyadeans who were new to this had at first stood together, males and females alike in their plain, tunic-like suits, sipping fruit juices and surreptitiously popping the pills they were told they needed to guard against untamed Terran germs and food prepared by suspect methods—the Hyadean authorities were tyrannical over health care. Now, at last, they were livening up: sampling the seafood dishes, sipping from the glasses that the wine steward had been told to move liberally, and beginning to mingle. There was a hot food table with roasts of beef, pork, and ham for the more daring. Julia was doing her usual great job as hostess, prying the more stodgy out of chairs and corners where they had taken refuge, steering together the right introductions, and igniting conversations with the élan of an arsonist loose in an oil refinery. The two lawyers and a couple of Hyadeans were talking to George Jansing, who was making a fortune contracting Terran software design skills to the Hyadeans—and also taking the opportunity to show off some Hyadean that he had learned. With them was Clara Norburn, tall, lean, raven-haired, from the state governor’s office, her sights firmly set on the opportunities for social and professional advancement that political visibility offered. “I’d like to redirect more of California’s technical talent in that direction,” Cade heard her telling them. “It sounds really profitable.”
“Five times what you’d get from the home market,” Jansing said.
“It’s this human thing that you call flair,” one of the Hyadeans explained. “Our machine designs do the job and are solid. But they are never what you’d describe as brilliant. I have examined some of the tricks and shortcuts that Terran programmers come up with. They astound me.”
Dee and Vrel’s precedent had encouraged several of the other Hyadeans to try nervous lines with the Terran girls—becoming less nervous as the girls and the wine steward assiduously plied their respective trades.
“I have a wife back on Chryse,” a Hyadean told a brunette in purple and pink. “But she doesn’t really . . .” He questioned a veebee in his pocket. “Understand me.”
“Gee,” the brunette said to her companion. “Now there’s one I haven’t heard before.”
“You see, Roland—the same genes everywhere,” Blair said to Cade. Blair was some kind of scientist involved with behavior and biology, formerly with the University of California. Nowadays, he conducted private research, a lot of it at the Hyadean mission, trying to learn more of the aliens’ sciences, since just about everything he had believed before they showed up had turned out to be wrong. He had been explaining to Cade that the reason why human and Hyadean forms were so alike, confounding traditional ideas of evolution, was that the genetic programs that directed the building of life forms didn’t originate on planets at all, but arrived there as space-borne microbes. Planets were simply assembly stations where cues provided by the local environments triggered the programs to express themselves differently. So, similar environments would produce similar collections of shapes and forms. Earth’s was more diverse, hence richer in diversity, that was all.
“So where do these programs get written in the first place?” Cade asked.
“They don’t know.”
“Do they have any theories about it?’
“Not really. They’ve never really thought about it.”
Cade turned his head incredulously. “You’re kidding!” Although no scientist, he assumed that would be the obvious question.
Blair motioned with his glass. He looked the academic, with graying hair brushed to the side and parted, metal-framed spectacles, and a rubbery, expressive face that made a joke of any attempt to conceal his mood. As a concession to the occasion he had donned a dark jacket with tie and slacks. But he could have added an evening shave while he was at it. “That’s the amazing thing. Their minds just aren’t like that. They don’t make big theories that try to explain everything. They just look at the evidence that’s there and stick to that.”
“So is that how come they got here, but we didn’t get there?” Cade queried.