Текст книги "Inherit the Earth"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

Twelve

K

arol Kachellek was still in the workroom where he and Damon had watched the tape of Silas Arnett’s mock trial. When Damon came back he was under the phone hood and the room was unlit, but he came out as soon as he realized that he wasn’t alone and brushed the light-switch on his console. Damon hadn’t managed to catch the last few words Karol had spoken before signing off but he blushed slightly anyway, as if walking into a darkened room were an infallible sign of stealthy intent.

Damon was all set for more verbal fencing, but the bioscientist was in a very different state of mind now.

“I’m sorry, Damon,” Kachellek said, with unaccustomed humility. “You were right. This business is far more complicated than I thought—and it couldn’t have come at a worse time.”

“What’s it all about, Karol?” Damon asked quietly. “You do know, don’t you?”

“I only wish I did.” The unprecedented plaintiveness in his foster father’s voice made Damon want to believe that he was sincere. “You mustn’t worry, Damon. It will all be sorted out. I don’t know who’s doing this, or why, but . . . . ” As the blond man trailed off, Damon stared at him intently, wondering whether the red flush about his brow and neck was significant of anger, anxiety, embarrassment, or some synergistic combination of all three.

Karol reddened even more deeply under his foster son’s steady gaze. “It’s all lies, Damon,” he said awkwardly. “You can’t possibly believeany of that stuff. They forcedSilas to say what he did, if he said it at all. We can’t even be sure that it really washis voice. It could all have been synthesized.”

“It doesn’t much matter whether it’s all lies or not,” Damon told him grimly. “It’s going to be talked about the world over. Whoever made that tape is cashing in on the newsworthiness of the Eliminators, using their crazy crusade to ensure maximum publicity for those accusations. The tape doctor didn’t even try to make them sound convincing. He settled for crude melodrama instead, but that might well be effective enough for his purposes if all he wants is to kick up a scandal. Why put in those last few lines, though? Why take the trouble to include a section of tape whose sole purpose is to establish the possibility that Silas might have known his captor? What are we supposed to infer from that?”

“I don’t know,” Karol said emphatically. His manner was defensive, but he really did sound sincere. “I really don’t understand what’s happening. Who would want to do this to us, Damon? Why—and why now?”

Damon wished that he had a few answers to offer; he had never seen any of his foster parents in such a state of disarray. He felt obliged to wonder whether the tape could have been quite as discomfiting if there had been no truth at all in its allegations, but he was certain that Karol’s blustering couldn’t all be bluff. He really didn’t understand what was happening or who was behind it, or why they’d chosen to unleash the whirlwind at this particular time. Maybe, given time, he could work it all out—but for the moment he was helpless, to the extent that he was even prepared to accept guidance from Damon the prodigal, Damon the betrayer.

“Tell me about Surinder Nahal,” Damon said abruptly. “Does hehave motive enough to be behind all this?” He was avid to seize the chance to ask some of the questions he’d been storing up, hoping that for once he might get an honest reply, and that seemed to be the best item with which to begin. Karol was far more likely to know something useful about a rival gene-tweaker than the disappearance of an eighteen-year-old girl.

However far Karol was from recovering his usual icy calm, though, he still had ingrained habit to come to his aid. “Why him?” he parried unhelpfully.

“Come on, Karol, think,” Damon said urgently. “Silas isn’t the only one who’s gone missing, is he? If nothing was wrong, Madoc would have found Nahal by now and let me know. If he isn’t part of the problem, he must be part of the solution. Maybe his turn in the hot seat is coming next—or maybe he’s the one feeding questions to the judge. How bad is the grudge he’s nursing?”

“Surinder Nahal was a bioengineer back in the old days,” Kachellek said, with a slight shrug of his shoulders. “His field of endeavor overlapped ours—he was working on artificial wombs too, and there was a difference of opinion regarding patents.”

“How strong a difference of opinion? Do you mean that he accused Conrad Helier of obtaining patents that ought to have been his?”

“You don’t know what it was like back then, Damon. The queue outside the patent office was always five miles long, and every time a significant patent was granted there were cries of Foul!all along the line—not that it mattered much, the way the corps were always rushing to produce copycat processes just beyond the reach of the patents and throwing lawsuits around like confetti. The Crash put an end to all that madness—it focused people’s minds on matters of realimportance. There’s nothing like a manifest threat to the future of the species to bring people together. In 2099 the world was in chaos, on the brink of a war of all against all. By 2110 peace had broken out just about everywhere, and we were all on the same side again.

“Sure, back in ninety-nine Surinder Nahal was hopping mad with us because we were ten places ahead of him in the big queue—but it didn’t last. Ten years later we were practically side by side in the struggle to put the New Reproductive System in place. There was a little residual bad feeling because he thought he hadn’t been given his fair share of credit for the ectogenetic technology that was finally put in place, but nothing serious. I haven’t heard of him in fifty years; if I’d ever thought about him at all I’d have presumed that he was retired, like Silas. I can’t believe that a man like him could be responsible for all this—he was a scientist, like us. It makes no sense. It must be someone from. . . . ” He stopped as soon as he had fully formulated the thought in his own mind.

“Someone from what?” Damon asked sharply—but it was too late. The moment of his foster father’s vulnerability had passed, killed by the lengthy development of his judgment of Surinder Nahal. Karol had no intention of finishing his broken sentence; he deliberately turned away so that he didn’t have to answer Damon’s demanding stare. Whatever conclusion he had suddenly and belatedly jumped to, he clearly intended to act on it himself, in secret. Damon tried to make the charitable assumption that Karol had only stopped dead because he was standing in a room whose walls might easily be host to a dozen curious eyes and ears, but he couldn’t help feeling that it was a personal slight nevertheless: a deliberate act of exclusion.

“Is it possible,” Damon said, trying not to sound toohostile, “that the viruses which caused the plague of sterility really were manufactured, by someone?Was it really a Third Plague War, as the judge said? Could the Crash have been deliberately caused?” He didn’t expect an honest answer, but he figured that if a man like Hiru Yamanaka could set such store by eye-to-eye interrogation, there must be something in the theory.

Karol met his eye again, pugnaciously. “Of course it could,” he snapped, as if it ought to have been perfectly obvious. “History simplifies. There weren’t two plague wars, or even three—there was only one, and it involved more battles than anyone ever acknowledged. All that stuff about one war launched by the rich against the poor and another by the poor against the rich is just news-tape PR, calculated to imply that the final score was even. It wasn’t.”

Damon wasn’t at all surprised by this judgment, although he hadn’t expected to hear it voiced by a man like Karol Kachellek. He was familiar with the thesis that allwars were waged by the rich, with the poor playing the part of cannon fodder.

“Are you saying that allthe new and resurgent diseases were deliberately released?” Damon asked incredulously. “All the way back to AIDS and the superbacs?”

“No, of course I’m not,” Karol said, scrupulously reining in his cynicism. “There were real problems. Species crossovers, antibiotic-immune strains, new mutations. There really was a backlash against early medical triumphs, generated by natural selection. I don’t doubt that there were accidental releases of engineered organisms too. There’s no doubt that the first free transformers were spontaneous mutations that allowed genetherapy treatments to slip the leash of their control systems and start a whole new side branch in the evolutionary tree. Maybe ninety-nine out of every hundred of the bugs that followed in their wake were products of natural selection—and nine out of ten were perfectly harmless, even benign—but the people who made good transformers by the score were perfectly capable of making not-so-good ones too.”

“And they could get paid to do it, I suppose? They weren’t too proud to take defense funding.”

“ Everybodytook defense funding in the twenty-first century, Damon. Purely for the good of science, you understand—for the sake of the sacred cause of progress. There must have been thousands who wrung their hands and howled their lamentations all the way to the bank—but they took the money anyway. That’s not the point. The point is that nobody knows for sure where anyof the bad bugs came from—not even the ones whose depredations were confidently labeled the First and Second Plague Wars. The principal reason why the Crash wasn’t called a plague war at the time was that nobody was excluded from it. No one seemed to have any defense ready; everybody seemed to be a victim. That doesn’t mean that no one had any reason to release viruses of that type. As Conrad said in that clip the Eliminator dropped into his little comedy, it forcedus to do what we’d needed to do for a hundred years but never contrived to do—to bring human fertility under careful control.”

“Not so much a war of the rich against the poor, then, as a war of the few against the many.”

“No. If it was any kind of plague war at all it was a war to end that kind of warfare. It was humankind against the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—the last stand against the negative Malthusian checks.”

“So if it wasdeliberate, the people responsible would have had your wholehearted support?”

“You don’t understand, Damon,” Karol said, in a tone of voice that Damon had heard many times before. “People don’t talk about it nowadays, of course, because it’s not considered a fit topic for polite conversation, but the world before the Crash was very different from the one in which you grew up. There were a lot of people prepared to say that the population explosion hadto be damped down one way or another—that if the sum of individual choices didn’t add up to voluntary restraint, then war, famine, and disease would remain necessary factors in human affairs. People were already living considerably longer, as a matter of routine, than their immediate ancestors. PicoCon and OmicronA were only embryos themselves in those days, but their mothercorps were already promising a more dramatic extension of the life span by courtesy of internal technology. It was easy enough to see that matters would get very fraught indeed as those nanotechnologies became cheaper and more efficient.

“The world was full of new viruses. A lot of them were arising naturally—more than ten billion people crammed into polluted supercities constitute a wonderland of opportunity for virus evolution—and a lot more were being tailored in labs for use as transgenic vectors, pest controllers, so-called beneficial fevers, and so on. All kinds of things came out of that cauldron, far more of them by accident than by design. It really doesn’t matter a damn, and didn’t then, how the Crash was started;the brute fact of it forced us all to concentrate our attention and energies on the problem of how to respondto it.

“We came through it, and we got the world moving again. It’s a changed world and it’s a better world, and Conrad Helier was one of its chief architects. Maybe you think we made a lot of money out of the world’s misfortune, but by comparison with PicoCon, OmicronA, and the other cosmicorps we’ve always been paupers. What we did, we did for the common good. Conrad was a fine man—a greatman—and this crazy attempt to blacken his name is the product of a sick mind.”

Damon reminded himself that Karol Kachellek had been born in 2071, only four years after Silas Arnett but fifteen years after Conrad Helier. Karol was only thirty years short of the current world record for longevity, but he still thought of Conrad Helier as the product of an earlier generation: a generation that was now lost to history. Conrad Helier had been a more powerful father figure to Karol Kachellek than he ever could have been to Damon.

“Were you actually present when my father died, Karol?” Damon asked quietly.

“Yes I was. I was by the side of his hospital bed, watching the monitors. His nanomachines were at full stretch, trying to repair the internal damage. They were PicoCon’s best, but they just weren’t up to it. He’d suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage and there were more complications than I could count. We like to think of ourselves as potential emortals, but we’re not even authentically immune to disease and injury, let alone the effects of extreme violence. There are dozens of potential physiological accidents with which the very best of today’s internal technology is impotent to deal. Kids of your generation, who feel free to take delight in savage violence because its effects are mostly reparable, are stupidly playing with fire. The proximal cause of your father’s death was a massive stroke—but if the lunatic who made that tape intends to build a case on the seeming implausibility of that cause of death he’s barking up the wrong tree. If Conrad had wanted to fake his death, he’d have chosen something far more spectacular.”

“How did you know he was dead?” Damon asked. He couldn’t help comparing the lecture that Karol had just given him with the one he’d given Lenny Garon; the depth of his estrangement from his foster parents didn’t seem quite so abyssal now.

“I told you,” Kachellek replied, with ostentatious patience. “I was watching the monitors. I also watched the doctors trying to resuscitate him. I wasn’t actually present at the postmortem, but I can assure you that there was no mistake.”

Damon didn’t press the point. If Conrad Helier had faked his death, Karol Kachellek would surely have been in on the conspiracy, and he was hardly likely to relent in his insistence now.

“I’m going back to Los Angeles as soon as I can,” Damon said quietly. “Maybe you ought to come with me. The people who took Silas might have designs on you too. Interpol can offer you far better protection on the mainland than they can in a desolate and underpoliced spot like this.”

“I can’t possibly go to Los Angeles,” Karol said mulishly. “I’ve got important work to do here.”

I have work to do too, Damon thought. I know what skills it took to put that tape together, technically and in terms of its narrative implications. Through Madoc I have access to some first-rate outlaw Webwalkers, including Old Lady Tithonia herself. I can get to the bottom of this, if I try hard enough, no matter how insistent Karol and Eveline are in trying to keep me out of it. Maybe I can get to the bottom of it sooner than Interpol. Maybe I can get to the bottom of it quickly enough to take a hand in the game myself.

That bold and positive thought was, however, quickly followed by a host of shadowy doubts. Perhaps he could get to the bottom of the matter faster than Interpol—but might that not be exactly what Operator 101 wanted? Why would the mysterious Operator bother to push a note under his door unless he was intendedto take a hand in the game? What, exactly, did the writer of that note want him to do? Might he not be lending unwitting assistance to the persecutor of his foster parents, collaborating in the assassination of his biological father’s reputation? Rebel though he certainly was, did he really want to take his rebellion to the point of joining forces with his family’s enemies—and if not, how could he be sure that he wouldn’t do so simply by uncovering the truth?

The night air was surprisingly cold, given that the day had been so hot. The wind was brisker than it had been earlier, and it had reversed its direction now that the sea was warmer than the land. The palm trees planted in a neat row in the forecourt of the hotel were waving their fronds murmurously.

Once he was back in his room Damon tried to book a seat to Honolulu on the first flight out in the morning, but it wasn’t scheduled to leave until eleven and he didn’t want to wait that long. He called Karol to ask about the possibility of arranging a charter.

“No problem,” Karol said, showing evident relief at the thought that he wouldn’t have to face any more of Damon’s questions. “Name your time.”

Damon was tempted to name first light, but he was too tired. His IT was supposed to have the capacity to keep him going for seventy-two hours without sleep, if necessary, but when he’d tried to use the facility in the past it had brought home to him the truth of the adage that the flesh was not the person. His mind needed rest, even if his body could be persuaded that it didn’t. Whatever faced him tomorrow, he wanted to be fully alert and mentally agile.

“Make it eighty-thirty,” he said.

“It’ll be waiting,” Karol promised—and then added: “It willbe all right, Damon. Silas will be okay. We all will.”

Even though he knew full well that the promises were empty, Damon was glad that Karol had taken the trouble to make them.

Eveline Hywood wouldn’t have bothered—or, if she had, would certainly have affected an infinitely more patronizing tone.

“Sure,” Damon said. “Thanks. I’m sorry I got under your feet—but I’m glad I came.”

“So am I,” said Karol—and he might even have meant it.

Thirteen

K

arol Kachellek took time out from his busy schedule to drive Damon out to a small private airstrip near the southeastern tip of the island. Damon couldn’t help thinking, churlishly, that the gesture had less to do with courtesy than a keen desire to see the back of him, but there was no hostility in his foster father’s manner now. The Eliminator broadcast had knocked all the stiffness out of the bioscientist, who was visibly anxious as he bounced his jeep over the potholes in the makeshift road. Damon had never seen him so obviously distressed.

“Bloody road,” Karol complained. “All it needs is a man with a shovel and a bucketful of gantzing bacs. He could take the dirt from the side of the road—there’s plenty of it. Nobody ever admits responsibility without a fight, and when they have to, it’s always going to be done tomorrow—the kind of tomorrow that never comes.”

“Wouldn’t be tolerated in Los Angeles,” Damon agreed, with a slight smile. “If the city couldn’t take care of it immediately the corps would race one another to get a man out there. OmicronA would be determined to win, in order to demonstrate that Pico-Con’s ownership of the patents is merely an economic technicality. The staff in the California offices pride themselves on being hands-on people, always willing to get involved in local issues.”

“I bet they do,” Karol muttered tersely. “Nanotech hands by the trillion, at work in every last nook and cranny of the great showcase of the global village—it’s different here, of course. No Silicon Valley-type monuments to the Third Industrial Revolution, no social cachet. We’re still the backwoods—the kind of wilderness that isn’t even photogenic. Nobody gives a damn about what happens out here, especially the people who live here.”

“You live here,” Damon pointed out. He refrained from adding an observation to the effect that Karol could have packed his own bucket and spade, pausing to repair the potholes on his way back to the lab. After all, Karol was verybusy just now.

“Here and hereabouts,” Karol admitted grimly.

Damon relented slightly. “Actually,” he said, “the corps are selectively blind even on their own doorstep. Until the deconstructionists move into the LA badlands in earnest nobody’s going to tidy them up. Filling in a hole downtown counts as an ad—filling one in where the gangs have their playgrounds wouldn’t win a nod of approval from anyone. You know how corpthink goes: no approval, no effort.”

“If only the world were as simple as that,” Karol said sadly. “The real problem is that too many people spend their entire lives sweating blood for the best possible causes and end up being denounced as enemies of mankind.”

That was more like the Karol he knew of old, and Damon was perversely glad to see the real man surfacing again, filling in his psychological potholes with great globs of biotech-cemented mud. Karol wasn’t sweating yet because the sun was too low in the eastern sky, but Damon knew that he’d be sweating by noon—not blood, to be sure, but beads of good, honest toil. Para-DNA had no chance of keeping its secrets, no matter how fervently it clung to the fugitive backwoods of the global village, and no matter how hard it tried to disguise itself as the detritus of a twentieth-century oil spill. Moves like that couldn’t possibly divert the curiosity of a true scientist.

As the jeep lurched onto the lawn beside the strip a flock of brightly colored birds grudgingly flew away, mewling their objections. Damon couldn’t put a name to the species but he had no doubt that Karol could have enlightened him had he cared to ask.

The two of them said their good-byes brusquely, as if to make sure that they both understood that their mutual mistrust had been fully restored, but there was a manifest awkwardness in their lack of warmth. Damon suspected that if he’d only known exactly what to say, he might have made a better beginning of the process of reconciliation, but he wasn’t certain that he wanted to try. Karol might be showing belated signs of quasi-parental affection, but he hadn’t actually told Damon anything significant. Whatever suspicions Karol had about the identity and motives of Silas Arnett’s kidnappers he was keeping to himself.

Damon would rather have sat up front in the cockpit of the plane, but he wasn’t given the choice. He was ushered into one of the eight passenger seats by the pilot, who introduced himself as Steve Grayson. Grayson was a stocky man with graying temples and a broad Australian accent. Maybe he thought the gray made him look more dignified, or maybe it was a joke reflecting his surname; at any rate, he was certainly no centenarian and he could have had his hair color reunified without recourse to the new generation of rejuvenation techniques. Damon took an immediate dislike to the pilot when Grayson insisted on reaching down to fasten his safety harness for him—an ostensible courtesy which seemed to Damon to be an insulting invasion of privacy.

“We’ll be up and down in no time at all,” Grayson told Damon before taking his own seat and fastening his own belt. “Might be a little rough in the wind, though—I hope your IT can cope with motion sickness.”

“I’ll be fine,” Damon assured him, taking further insult from the implication that in the absence of his IT he’d be the kind of person who couldn’t take a few routine aerial lurches without losing his breakfast.

While the plane taxied onto the runway Damon watched Karol Kachellek jump back into the jeep and drive away, presumably hastening back to the puzzle of para-DNA. Damon had a puzzle of his own to play with, and he had no trouble immersing himself within it, taking up the work of trying to figure out whether there mightbe something in what Karol had said to him that might lead to a fuller understanding of the game that Operator 101 was playing.

He was so deep in contemplation that he took no notice of the plane’s banking as it climbed. He watched the island diminish in size until it was no more than a mere map, but even then it did not occur to him that there was anything strange in the course they were taking. Ten or twelve minutes had elapsed before it finally occurred to him that the glaring light which had forced him to raise his left hand to shield his face should not have been so troublesome. Once Grayson had settled the plane on its intended course the sun ought to have been almost directly behind them, but it was actually way over to port.

“Hey!” he called to the pilot. “What’s our course?”

Grayson made no reply.

“Isn’t Honolulu due west of Molokai, away to the right?” Damon asked. He was beginning to doubt his knowledge of geography—but when Grayson again failed to turn around and look him in the eye, he knew that something was amiss.

He tested his safety harness and found that it was locked tight. The belt which Grayson had advised him to keep locked couldn’t be unlocked; he was a prisoner.

“Hey!” he shouted, determined not to be ignored. “What’s going on? What are you doing? Answer me, you bastard.”

At last, the pilot condescended to turn his head. Grayson’s expression was slightly apologetic—but only slightly.

“Sorry, son,” he said. “Just take it easy—when there’s nothing to be done, that’s what you might as well do.”

The homespun philosophy was a further annoyance, but Damon still couldn’t unfasten the seat belt. Like Silas Arnett before him—and possibly Surinder Nahal, not to mention Catherine Praill—he was being kidnapped. But why? And by whom? The mystery briefly overwhelmed the enormity of the realization, but the brute fact of what was happening soon fought back, insistently informing him that whoever was responsible, he was in danger. Whether he was in the hands of Eliminators or not, he was being carried off into the unknown, where any fate at all might be waiting for him.

His years of experience on the streets were supposed to have hardened him against fear and dread, but all that seemed futile now. However mean the streets were—and however one might try to dignify them with titles like “the badlands”—they were only a half hour away from the nearest hospital. As he had explained to Lenny Garon, people did die in knife fights—but if one drew back to consider life less narrow-mindedly, there were still a thousand otherways a man might die, even in the New Utopia. It didn’t require a bullet or a bomb, or any act of violence at all. A man might drown, or choke, or. . . .

He abandoned the train of thought abruptly. What did it matter what mighthappen to him? The real question was what he intended to doabout the ugly turn of events.

“Who are you working for?” he called to the pilot.

“Just doing a job,” Grayson called back. “Delivering a package. You want explanations, I don’t have them—I dare say the man on the ground will have plenty.”

“Where are you taking me?”

Grayson laughed, as if he were taking what pleasure he could in holding on to his petty secrets. “You’ll see soon enough,” he promised.

Damon abandoned the fruitless inquisition for the time being, instructing himself to take more careful stock of his situation.

He could see Maui away to port, and he assumed that if he were seated on the other side of the plane he’d be able to see Lanai as well, but there was nothing directly below but the Pacific. Damon’s knowledge of the local geography was annoyingly vague, but he figured that on their present heading—which seemed to be slightly east of south—they’d be over Kahoolawe at much the same time that they ought to have been coming down at Honolulu. If they kept going twice as long they might eventually hit the west coast of Hawaii. How many other islands there might be to which they might be headed Damon had no idea, but there were probably several tiny ones and the plane was small enough to land on any kind of strip.

He tried to make a list of the possibilities. Who might want him out of the way badly enough to bribe Grayson? Surely not Operator 101, who had sent him a note inviting him to investigate—nor Rachel Trehaine, who presumably thought of him as an irrelevance. There was, of course, another and more obvious possibility. Karol Kachellek had hired the pilot—it was most probable, therefore, that hehad decided that Damon ought to be removed from the field of play until the game was over. Grayson might well have been instructed to take Damon to a place of safety, not merely to keep him from harm but also to keep him from asking any more awkward and embarrassing questions.

Damon had to admit that this was not an unattractive hypothesis, insofar as it suggested that no one was intending to flush out his IT and force him to confess that he was an enemy of humankind, but he felt no relief. To the contrary, as soon as he had convinced himself of its likelihood he felt exceedingly annoyed. The fact that his foster father might think that he had the right, and also the responsibility, to do such a thing was a terrible slur on his adulthood and his ability to look after himself.

“Whatever Karol’s paying you,” he shouted to Grayson, “I’ll double it if you take me to Honolulu.”

“Too late, mate,” Grayson shouted back. “I’m on the wrong side of the law now—once you cross the border you have to keep on going. Don’t worry—nobody’s going to hurt you.”

“This is for my own good, is it?”

“We all have to lend one another a helping hand,” Grayson told him, perhaps faking his malicious cheerfulness in order to cover up his anxiety at the thought that he was indeed beyond the bounds of the law. “If things work out with the IT fountain of youth, we could all be neighbors for a long, long time.”

It was difficult to be patient, or even to try, but Damon had no alternative.

It turned out that the journey wasn’t that much longer than it would have been had Grayson actually gone to Honolulu, but the plane eventually passed beyond the southern tip of Lanai and missed Kahoolawe too. The pilot headed for a much smaller and more densely forested island top to the west of Kahoolawe. It was dominated by what appeared to be a single volcanic peak, but Damon wasn’t convinced that it was genuine.