Текст книги "Inherit the Earth"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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Fifteen

D

uring the hours when the last vestiges of his internal technology had tried their damnedest to maintain some semblance of function Silas Arnett had felt like a turtle floating beneath the surface of a stagnant pond. It was as if his self-consciousness had been immersed in murky, cloying depths which lay upon him like a horrid dead weight, compacting his bodily mass.

In the meantime, his weary and leaden eyes had looked out into a very different world: a world that was all light and color and action where there seemed to be no weight at all.

Now, he felt that he was the same turtle rudely stripped of its shell. His frontier with the outer world was exposed to all manner of assaults and horribly sensitive. He could hardly believe that thousands of generations of human beings had lived their entire lives becalmed in flesh as awkward and as vulnerable as this. The novelty of the experience had already worn off—and the process of psychological readaptation was neither as radical nor as difficult as he had feared—but the sensitivity remained.

No matter how still Silas sat, simple existence had become a torrent of discomforts. The straps at his wrists and ankles chafed his skin, but that was not the worst of it. The worst of it was that he could not scratch his itches, although the fact that he could not alter his position save by imperceptible shifts of weight and strain was almost as bad.

It was torture of a kind, but the wonder of it was that it was not realtorture. No pincers had been applied to his nipples, no electric shocks to his genitals, no hot irons to his belly, no slivers of bamboo to his fingernails. It was as if he had been prepared for the operating theater only to discover that the surgeon had been called away . . . and had left no word as to the likely time of his return. He had been thoroughly insulted, in body and in mind, but no dire injury had as yet been added to the insult.

What made this all the more puzzling was the tape he had been shown of his “trial,” whose maker had taken the trouble to include one very audible—and rather realistic—scream, and had made some effort to imply that others had been edited out of the package.

The trial scene was gone now, and Silas was in a very different virtual environment—one which mimicked the texture of visual reality reasonably faithfully. The room in which his prison chair now seemed to be standing was also mostly white. It had white walls and a cream carpet, and its ceiling was uniformly lit by a gentle artificial bioluminescence which had very little color in it.

Silas knew that the universe of virtual reality was overabundantly well-equipped with white rooms. Far too many of the people who specialized in VE design cultivated a thorough understanding of the hardware and software they were using while neglecting the development of their own creative imagination and aesthetic sensitivity. It was becoming routine for software engineers and “interior decorators” to form up into “renaissance teams,” although youngsters like Damon Hart always figured that they could do everything themselves. Silas did not assume, however, that this particular white room was a convenient fiction. Life always imitated art, and he could easily believe that the place of his confinement had been decorated in imitation of an elementary VE.

The man who stood before Silas in the white room was not a judge. He was wearing Conrad Helier’s face, but any halfway competent VE engineer could have contrived that—there was a vast reservoir of archive film which could be plundered for the purpose of making a template. “Conrad” was wearing a white lab coat, but that seemed blatantly incongruous to Silas. Conrad had never been a man for white coats.

“I don’t understand,” Silas said. “The trial tape even lookslike a fake. You didn’t need me at all. You could have put that farce together without any of the snippets of actual speech that you borrowed. If you already knew what you were going to put in my so-called confession, why did you bother throwing all those questions at me?”

He knew, even as he made this speech, that it was ridiculously optimistic to suppose that the fact that he had not been hurt yetmeant that he was not going to be hurt at all, but he was telling the simple truth when he said that he didn’t understand.

“It’s useful to have some authentic footage on which to build,” said the man in the Conrad Helier mask, in Conrad Helier’s voice, “but the only thing I reallyneeded from you was your absence from the world for the three days which it would take to flush out your IT and reduce you to the common clay of unaugmented human flesh.”

“Why have you bothered to do that,” Silas wanted to know, “if you didn’t intend to use real screams in your little melodrama? Doyou intend to interrogate me under torture, or are you just making the point that you could have if you’d wanted to?”

“There you are,” said the man who was not Conrad Helier. “You arebeginning to understand. I knew you could. If only you’d been able to understand a little earlier, all this might not have been necessary. The world has changed, you see—a whole century has passed since 2093. It may have been unlike any other century in history, by virtue of the fact that many of the people who really matteredin 2093 are still alive in 2193, but it still packed in more extravagant changes than any previous century. Whatever the future brings, it will never produce such sweeping changes again. You’vechanged too, Silas. You probably seem to yourself to be exactly the same person you were at twenty-six, but that’s an understandable illusion. If you could only look at yourself from a detached viewpoint, the changes would be obvious.”

“So what?”

The fake Conrad Helier was already standing at ease, but now he put his hands into his pockets. In the sixty years that he had known him, Silas had neverseen Conrad Helier put his hands into his pockets.

“It used to be reckoned that people inevitably became more conservative as they got older,” the man in the white coat said, with only the faintest hint of irony in his earnest expression. “Young men with virile bodies and idealistic minds, it was said, easily embraced utopian schemes for the radical transformation of society. Old men, by contrast, only wanted to hang on to the things they already had; even those who hadn’t made fortunes wanted to hang on to the things they were used to, because they were creatures of habit. The people who spoke out against technologies of longevity—and there werepeople like that, as I’m sure you can remember—often argued that a world ruled by the very old would become stagnant and sterile, fearful of further change. They prophesied that a society of old people would be utterly lacking in potency and progressive zeal, devoid of any sense of adventure.

“They were wrong, of course. Their mistake was to equate getting olderwith nearing the end. The old became conservative not because of the increasing number of the years they’d lived but because of the dwindling number of the years that still lay before them. The young, whose futures were still to be made, had a strong vested interest in trying to make the world better as quickly as was humanly possible; the old, who had little or no future left, only wanted to preserve what they could of their old and comfortable selves. Things are very different now. Now, the prospect of true emortality lies before us, like the light at the end of a long dark tunnel. Not everyone will make it all the way to the light, but many of us will and we alllive in hope. The old, in fact, understand that far better than the young.

“The young used to outnumber the old, but they don’t now and never will again; the young are rarenow, a protected species. Although the future which stretches before them seems limitless, it doesn’t seem to them to be theirs. Even if they can still envisage themselves as the inevitable inheritors of the earth, the age at which they will come into their inheritance seems a very long way off and likely to be subject to further delays. It’s hardly surprising, therefore, that the young are more resentful now than they have ever been before. It is the old who now have the more enthusiastic and more constructive attitude to the future; they expect not only to live in it, but also to ownit, to be masters of its infinite estates.”

“I know all this,” Silas said sullenly, wishing that his itches were not so defiantly unscratchable.

“You know it,” said the man masked as Conrad Helier, “but you haven’t understoodit. How, if you understood it, could you ever have thought of retirement?How, if you understood it, could you waste your time in pointless and undignified sexual encounters with the authentically young?”

“I can live my own life any way I choose,” Silas told his accuser coldly. “I’m not just old—I’m also free.”

“That’s the point,” said the ersatz Helier. “That’s why you’re here. You’re notfree. Nobody is, who hopes and wants to live forever. Because, you see, if we’re to live forever, we have to live together. We’re dependent on one another, not just in the vulgar sense that the division of labor makes it possible to produce all the necessities of life but in the higher sense that humanlife consists primarily of communication with others, augmented, organized, and made artful by all the media we can devise. We’re social beings, Silas—not because we have some kind of inbuilt gregarious instinct but because we simply can’t do anything worthwhile or be anything worthwhile outside of society. That’s why our one and only objective in life—all the more so for everyone who’s a hundred and fifty going on a hundred and fifty thousand—ought to be the Herculean task of making a society as rich and as complex and as rewardingas we possibly can.”

“The only reason I’m not free,” Silas replied tersely, “is that I’ve been strapped to a fucking chair by a fucking maniac.”

Conrad Helier’s face registered great disappointment. “Your attitude is as stupidly anachronistic as your language,” he said—and went out like a switched-off light, along with the virtual environment of which he was a part. Silas was left entirely to himself.

Silas was stubbornly glad that he had had an effect on his interrogator, but the effect itself was far from rewarding. In the darkness and the silence he was alone with his discomforts, and his discomforts were further magnified by lack of distraction. He was also acutely aware of the fact that he had failed to obtain answers to any of the questions which confronted him—most urgently of all, what would happen to him now that Operator 101 had released his slanders onto the Web?

Mercifully—although mercy may not have been the motive—he was not left in the dark and the silence for long.

His senses of sight and hearing were now engaged by a kaleidoscopic patchwork of fragments excerpted from old and nearly new VE tapes, both documentary and drama. If there was any pattern of relevance in the order in which they were presented to him, he could not discern it—but he became interested in spite of that, not merely in the individual snatches that had been edited together but in the aesthetic experience of the sequence.

He “walked” on the surface of Mars, surveying the roseate desert and looking up into the tinted sky at the glaring daystars. He saw the rounded domes where the human Martians lived and watched the glass facets sparkle and glint as he changed his position. Then, on the horizon, he “saw” the crazy-tale castles of the Mars of obsolete dreams, the skycars riding the imagination-thickened air—and dramatic music crashed through the brief, golden silence. . . .

He saw earth-moving machines on the fringe of the Australian superdesert, laying out the great green starter plane which would begin the business of soil manufacture, bridging the desiccation gap which had deadened the land in spite of all life’s earlier attempts to reclaim it. A sonorous voice-over pumped out relentless adspeak about the technical expertise behind the project: glory, glory, glory to the heroes of the genetic revolution . . ..

He saw a gang fight in the derelict suburban wasteland of a city he couldn’t name: young men costumed and painted like crazy fetishists, wielding knives and razors, eyes wild with adrenalin and synthetic ecstasy, living on and by the edge. He watched the vivid blood spurt from wounds, and he winced with sympathy because he knew full well that these would-be savages must be equipped with relatively primitive internal technology, which provided elementary protection against permanent injury but left them horribly vulnerable to pain and the risk of death. He heard their bestial cries, their wordless celebration of their defiance of civilization and all its comforts, all its protective guarantees . . ..

It was as if the virtual aspect of the life of modern man were being condensed into a stream of images. Silas couldn’t help but feel annoyed about the fact that his captors seemed hell-bent on educatinghim, but the process had a curious fascination of its own. Much of the imagery was, of course, “reality-based”—videotapes of actual events reformatted for VE playback, sometimes in 2-D, sometimes in 3-D—but even in the documentary material, reformatted footage was juxtaposed and mingled with synthesized material produced by programmers. Today’s programmers were almost good enough to synthesize lifelike fictions, especially when they used templates borrowed from reality-based footage which could be mechanically animated and subtly changed without losing their photographic appearance.

With only a hood at his disposal, Silas couldn’t obtain the full benefit of such illusions, most of which were designed to provide tactile sensations with the aid of a full-body synthesis suit, but the detachment that was heir to limitation made it all the more difficult to tell the reformatted real from the ersatz.

Silas saw himself standing by Conrad Helier’s side, listening to the older man saying: “We must regard this new plague not as a catastrophe but as a challenge. It is not, as the Gaian Mystics would have us believe, the vengeance of Mother Earth upon her rapists and polluters, and no matter how fast and how far it spreads it cannot and will not destroy the species. Its advent requires a monumental effort from us, but we are capable of making that effort. . . .”

He saw two women, naked and oiled, caressing one another sinuously, engaged in carefully choreographed mutual masturbation, first with fingers and then with tongues, moving ceaselessly, putting on an ingeniously artful and tantalizing display for voyeurs. The soundtrack was soft music, overlaid by heavy breathing and gasps of simulated ecstasy, and the flesh of the two women seemed to be taking on a life of its own, a strange glow. Their faces were changing, exchanging features; they seemed to flow and merge, as though the two were becoming one as the carefully faked climax approached. . . .

Silas recognized this as one of his foster son’s compositions, as crudely and garishly libidinous as one might expect of a youngman’s imagination. He was glad when it was replaced by scenes from a food factory, where tissue cultures were harvested and processed with mechanical efficiency and hygiene by robot knives and robot packagers.

After that there was more Conrad Helier, this time in closeup—which meant that it was probably faked. “We must be sure,” the probably fake Conrad was saying, “that our motives are pure. We must do this not to secure an advantage for ourselves, but for the sake of the world. It is time to set aside, for the last time, the logic of the selfish gene, and to proclaim the triumph of altruistic self-awareness. The first children of the New Utopia must be not the children of an elite; they must be the children of everyman. If we ourselves are to have children we must allocate ourselves the lowest priority, not the highest.”

The viewpoint swung around to bring Eveline Hywood’s face into embarrassingly intimate focus. “It’s the privilege of gods to move in mysterious ways,” she said laconically. “Let’s not tie ourselves down with self-administered commandments that we’ll surely have occasion to break and break again.”

Conrad Helier’s disciples had, in fact, bound themselves with edicts and promises—and had kept them, after a fashion. Silas believed that he had kept them better than most, in spite of the heresies which had crept upon his mind and condemned him, in the end, to confusion. He had kept almost all his promises, if only in order to ensure that whatever else he lost, he would have clean hands.

Now he was looking out at the factory again, at the robot butchers working clinically, tirelessly, and altruistically for the greater good of ambitious humankind. He presumed that the image was meant to be symbolic, but he refused to try to figure out exactly what it was symbolic of, and why it had been laid before him now.

The robot butchers tirelessly plied their gleaming instruments for a few seconds more, and then dissolved into a vision of cars racing through city streets, speeded up until they were little more than colored blurs, racing ceaselessly past.

But it is true, he reflected, that some of those of us who are left over from the old world remain anchored to that world by our habits of mind. Some of the old haven’t yet become accustomed to the new outlook, and perhaps I’m one of them—but we can’t be expected to shed the superficialities of our heritage as easily as a snake sheds its skin. We do evolve—but we can’t do it overnight. Conrad would have understood that. Whoever is using his face must be younger than Conrad, and younger than me—but not as young as Damon. He surely belongs to the new old, not to the true old.

The scene changed again; this time it was an episode of some popular soap opera, but the characters were mercifully silent. As they exchanged insults and bared their overwrought souls they were rendered impotent and absurd by silence. A girl slapped a man across the face; without the sound track there was no telling why, but the blow wasn’t halfhearted. These days, blows rarely were. Nobody pulled their punches for fear of hurting people, because everybody knew that people couldn’t be hurt—even “primitives” had some degree of artificial insulation from actual bodily harm. Hardly anyone went entirely unaugmented in the world, and the prevailing view was that if they wanted to do so, they had to accept the risks.

All the old inhibitions were dying, Silas reminded himself, in an appropriately grim fashion. A radically different spectrum of dos and don’ts was establishing itself in the cities of what would soon be the twenty-third century.

Silas’s head, isolated within its own private pocket universe, took off from the cape, mounted atop a huge sleek rocket. His eyes were looking up into the deepening sky, and the sound which filled his ears was a vast, angry, undeniable roar of pure power, pure might.

It went on, and on, and on. . . .

In the end, Silas couldn’t help but call out to his tormentors, to beg them to answer his questions, even to lecture him like a recalcitrant schoolboy if they felt the need. He knew as he did it that he was proving them right, demonstrating that the limits of his freedom extended far beyond the straps binding him to his ignominy, but he no longer cared. He wanted and needed to know what they were doing to him, and why, and how long it would last.

He wanted, and needed, to understand, no matter what price he had to pay in patience and humility and craven politeness.

Sixteen

T

he message was dumped shortly after you boarded the plane at Kaunakakai,” Rajuder Singh told Damon, when the import of the words displayed on the screen had had time to sink in. “When Karol decided to send you here instead of Los Angeles he couldn’t have foreseen anything as outrageous as this, but it’s better proof than any he couldhave imagined that his instincts were right.”

“If he had such faith in his instincts,” Damon said sourly, “why didn’t he do me the courtesy of explaining what he wanted me to do, and why?”

“He thought that telling you his plan would make it impossible to carry through. He seems to be of the opinion that you always do the opposite of anything he suggests, simply because it’s his suggestion.”

Damon could understand how Karol Kachellek might have formed that impression over the years, but he felt that it was an injustice nevertheless. The matters on which he had habitually defied Karol in his younger days had all been trivial; he was now an adult and this was nota trivial matter. “It’s crazy,” he said, referring to the message. “It’s completely crazy.”

“Yes it is,” said the dark-skinned man. “Denials are going out, of course—not just from our people but from Interpol and the doctors who attended the womb in which your embryo developed. Your progress from egg to adult has been mapped as scrupulously as that of any individual in the history of the world. The lie is astonishingly blatant—but that only makes it all the more peculiar. It’s attracting public attention and public discussion, I’m afraid. Together with Silas Arnett’s supposed confession, it’s getting coverage on the worst kinds of current affairs and talk shows. I suppose any man who lives a hundred and twenty years might expect to make a few enemies, but I can’t understand why anyone would want to attack youin this bizarre way. Can you?”

It occurred to Damon that some of the people he had ordered Madoc Tamlin to investigate might have resented the fact—and might possibly be anxious that the buying-power of Conrad Helier’s inheritance might pose as great a threat to their plan as Interpol or the friends and allies of Silas Arnett. All he said to Rajuder Singh, however, was: “No, I can’t.”

“It’ll be a nine-day wonder, of course,” Singh observed, “if it even lasts that long. Unfortunately, such slanders sometimes linger in the mind even after convincing rebuttals have been put forward. It really was the best course of action to remove you from harm’s way as quickly as possible. We’re truly sorry that you’ve been caught up in all this—it really has nothing to do with you.”

“What hasit to do with?” Damon asked, his voice taut with frustration. “What are you people up to and who wants to stop you? Why is this such a bad timefor all this to blow up?”

“I can’t tell you what we’re doing,” Singh said, with a note of apology in his voice that almost sounded sincere, “and we honestly don’t know why we’re being attacked in this fashion. All I can say is that we’re doing everything we can to calm the situation. It can only be a matter of time before Silas is found, and then. . . .”

“I’m not so sure of that,” Damon said, cutting short the string of platitudes. “Maybe he will be found and maybe he won’t, but finding him and catching the people who took him are two different things. This whole thing may look amateurish and stupid—just typical Eliminator nonsense taken to a new extreme—but it’s not. That tape of Silas could have been edited to look real but it was edited to look fake. All the artlessness in this seems to have much subtler thought behind it—and real power too. The kidnapping itself is a case in point—a confusing compound of the brutal and the clever. The same is true of my involvement: one day I’m getting sly messages pushed under my door, the next I’m being publicly denounced in an incredible fashion. In between times, the girl Silas was entertaining is spirited away—but not until afterthe police have questioned her, investigated her thoroughly, and decided that she’s not involved. To add even further to the sum of dissimulation, while Karol Kachellek is busy insisting that there’s absolutely nothing for me to worry about he’s actually planning to have me bundled up and sent to some stupid mock-volcanic island in the middle of nowhere where even the local ecology is a blatant fake.”

“I really am sorry,” Rajuder Singh assured him. “Alas, it’s not for me to explain matters even if I could. I think that Eveline Hywood might be willing to take your call, though, once we’ve gone down.”

“Down where?”

Damon had so far been under the impression that the room he was in had only three doors, one of them part of a pair. Singh had closed the double doors through which they had entered but two others stood half-open, one offering a glimpse of a bedroom while the other gave access to a narrow corridor leading to a kitchen. Singh now demonstrated the error of Damon’s assumption by going to the wall alongside the kitchen door and pressing a hidden switch of some kind. A section of “wall” slid aside to reveal an empty space—presumably an elevator.

“So the mountain’s hollow as well as fake,” Damon said incredulously. “Down where the magma ought to be there’s some kind of secret laboratory, where my father’s old research team is laboring away on some project too delicate to be divulged to the world.”

“It’s not a laboratory,” Singh told him. “It’s just a hiding place. There isn’t any legion of white-coated workers conducting secret experiments—although I suppose it’s possible that someone thinks there’s more going on here than there is. The original setup was built more than a hundred and fifty years ago—long before we acquired it, of course—as a nuclear bunker. It was a rich man’s fantasy: a hidey-hole where he and a few friends could wait out the coming holocaust. The plague wars were running riot at the time and the fear of escalation was acute. A hundred years after the bunker was built—still some little time before the island came into ourhands—someone equally rich and equally paranoid expanded it with the aid of primitive gantzers. I presume that he was more anxious about an asteroid strike or some other natural disaster than about nuclear war, but I don’t know for sure. I suppose it would still be capable of fulfilling any of those functions, were the need to arise.”

“But youaren’t interested in anything as absurdly melodramatic as that, of course,” Damon said sarcastically.

Singh was standing beside the open door, politely indicating that Damon should precede him into the empty space. Damon stayed where he was, waiting for more answers.

“We’re interested in privacy,” Singh told him brusquely. “It’s an increasingly rare commodity in a world of rampant nano-technology. We’re interested in independence—not political independence, just creative independence.”

“And this we, I suppose, comprises Karol Kachellek and Eveline Hywood—if she should ever return to Earth—and other old chums of Conrad Helier. Maybe you even have Conrad Helier himself hidden away down there, dead to the world but still slaving away at all the labor of creation that God somehow left undone? Perhaps that’s what Operator one-oh-one believes, at any rate.”

“Please, Mr. Hart,” the thin man said plaintively.

“I’ll find out what this is all about eventually,” Damon told him, “one way or another.” He was wary enough not to let bravado lead him to give too much away, though. It might be inadvisable to boast about Madoc Tamlin’s capabilities to people who might be just as reluctant to be found out as the mysterious Operator 101 was.

The words displayed on Singh’s screen suddenly disappeared, to be replaced by an urgently flashing message which simply said: READ NOW. The system had presumably been programmed with nets set to trawl the cyberspatial sea for items of a particular kind, and one of them had just made contact.

“You’d better come look at this,” Damon said.

Singh was reluctant to come away from the open elevator, but he did come. When he saw the message, though, his suspicious expression cleared. “Excuse me,” he murmured, as he moved to obey the flashing injunction.

When the thin man’s skeletal fingers brushed the keypad beneath the screen the flashing words were replaced by an image of a man sitting on a perfectly ordinary chair. Damon was not in the least surprised to recognize Silas Arnett. Silas was no longer under any obvious restraint, but there was a curious expression in his eyes, and both of his hands were heavily bandaged. He began speaking in a flat monotone.

Damon knew immediately that the image and the voice were both fakes, derived with calculated crudity from the kind of template he used routinely in his own work.

“The situation was out of hand,” the false Arnett said dully. “All attempts to limit environmental spoliation by legislation had failed, and all hope that the population would stabilize or begin to decline as a result of individual choice was gone. We were still winning the battle to provide enough food for everyone, even though the distribution system left seven or eight billions lacking, but we couldn’t cope with the sheer physical presenceof so many people in the world. Internal technology was developing so rapidly that it was obvious to anyone with half a brain that off-the-shelf emortality was less than a lifetime away, and that it would revolutionize the economics of medicine. Wars over lebensraum were being fought on every continent, with all kinds of weapons, including realplagues: killing plagues.

“When Conrad first put it to us that what the world needed more desperately than anything else was a full stop to reproduction—an end to the whole question of individual choice in matters of fecundity—nobody said ‘No! That’s horrible!’ We all said ‘Yes, of course—but can it be done?’ When Conrad said ‘There’s always a way,’ no one challenged him on the grounds of propriety.

“I couldn’t see how we might go about designing a plague of sterility, because there were no appropriate models in nature—how could there be, when the logic of natural selection demands fertility and fecundity?—and I couldn’t envisage a plausible physiology, let alone a plausible biochemistry, but Conrad’s way of thinking was quite different from mine. Even in those days, all but a few of the genes we claimed to have ‘manufactured’ were actually simple modifications of existing genes or the chance products of lab-assisted mutation. We had little or no idea how to go about creating genes from scratch which would have entirely novel effects—but Conrad had a weird kind of genius for that kind of thing. He knewthat he could figure out a way, using the somatic transformer packages that were then routinely used to treat genetic deficiency diseases.