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friend Tevlak in Bolivia is talking about opening up outlets on Chryse. I was
talking to Tevlak about it earlier.
Erya appeared in an entrance behind Vrel and came forward to greet Cade and
Luke. Mr. Cade and
Mr. Luke. Mimi said you wanted to see me.
We couldn t let you go back without saying goodbye, Cade said.
How thoughtful. Only then did Erya s gaze drift down to the case that Cade
was holding. She looked at it uncomprehendingly as Cade, grinning, lifted it
onto a nearby worktop and opened the lid. Erya s jaw dropped incredulously.
From the movie, like I said, Cade told her. I couldn t get the first
violin, as I d hoped. But this is the next best.
Erya was speechless for several seconds. You remembered! . . . But I don t
understand. I m just about to go back. There s no possible return. Why would
you choose . . . She consulted her veebee for an appropriate phrase.
Negative payoff.
Even Vrel, who should have known better by now, seemed taken aback. Cade shook
his head, doing his best not to let his bemusement show. It was this strange
Hyadean calculus of short-term returns again.
They couldn t comprehend giving for its own sake. Don t let worrying about it
spoil your trip, he said.
It ll do more good on Chryse than it would have done if it stayed where I
found it. You re still on Earth now. Just accept it as a Terran way of saying
we re friends. Maybe one day it ll become your way too.
While Erya was making a round of the offices to show Cade s gift before she
left for the airport, Michael Blair yawned and stretched in one of the rooms
upstairs as he rested his eyes after two hours of concentration at a display
screen showing Hyadean text and mathematical representations. Learning the
language was part of the program he had set himself for understanding the
Hyadean sciences. It no longer
awed him to think that some of the sources that he accessed, and individuals
that he was growing accus-
tomed to interacting with, were located on strange worlds that existed
light-years away.
The ironic conclusion he had come to was that, contrary to everything that
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anyone raised in the self-
congratulatory Terran tradition would have believed, the very
unimaginativeness that Terrans found incomprehensible was what had enabled the
Hyadeans to make breakthroughs that left Earth s scientific community dazed
and incredulous. Truth was, the insights he had vowed to share were turning
out to be not really that exciting after all. It was the flights of
imaginative fancy dreamed up by generations of
Terran scientists that were exciting; the only problem was, overwhelmingly,
they had this tendency to be wrong.
The Hyadeans ploddingly followed wherever the facts led, without subscribing
to elaborate theoretical constructs that emotional investment would cause them
to defend tenaciously instead of testing impart-
ially. True enough, the textbook accounts and rhetoric bandied around on Earth
praised the scientific method as an ideal; and academia could always count on
a staunch cadre of apologists to exalt it into reality.
But the basic human drives were emotional, not objective, resulting in
commitment to protecting ideas that were com-
fortingly familiar instead of openness to the research that might threaten
them. Most of what Earth took such pride in as science was as much a product
of human inventiveness as its other arts and fables.
By contrast, the Hyadean attempts to understand the universe were closer to
what would have been described on Earth as engineering. What didn t work was
abandoned without compunction, and what did was accepted at face value without
need of credentials to fit with prevailing theory. The resulting scheme of
things was messy, incoherent, and to Terran eyes, crying out to be organized
under grand unifying principles postulating answers to questions the Hyadeans
had never asked. But so what? At the end of it all the fact remained that they
were here, while we hadn t gotten there. That had to say something.
Krossig, the Hyadean anthropologist who was here to study humans, came in and
began rummaging for something among the shelves on the far wall. As Blair
watched him across the desktop, he reflected on the irony that the Hyadean
inclination not to question was also what made them so susceptible to their
own social conditioning propaganda, and hence ideal subjects for a conformist
society. His brow creased at the seeming paradox. Wasn t readiness to question
supposed to be the hallmark of what science was all about?
If the Hyadeans didn t question, how could they have made such superb
scientific accomplishments? He sat back in his chair and mulled over the
problem.
Questioning led to good science when what was being questioned was a belief
system that had become dogma. Since the Hyadeans didn t create dogmas, they
could get by without need to question them.
Accepting uncritically worked when the facts were allowed to speak for
themselves. It also produced rigidly structured social orders.
CHAPTER EIGHT
H
YADEANS HAD NEVER FALLEN
into the Terran habit of creating false gods that would reveal the ultimate
truths of the Universe. One of the most recent creations to be elevated to the
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