Текст книги "Inherit the Earth"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

Eighteen

D

amon was no more sensitive to heights than the average man, but the sight confronting him would have shocked anyone into instant acrophobia. He looked downward at a face of bare gray rock that plummeted for miles. The bottom of the chasm was visible because it was lit up like the face of a full moon on a clear night, but it seemed so very far away that the notion of it’s being connected to his present station by an actual wall of rock was so incredible as to be horrible.

He felt cold sweat break out on his face as terror grabbed him, and he recoiled convulsively, squeezing his eyes shut and pulling his head back from the rim. He rolled over without even caring what might be behind him, but when he was supine he opened his eyes again to look up, and gasped once again in alarm.

The steep slope extending upward from the left-hand edge of the narrow ledge on which he lay was not as extensive as the chasm that lay to his right, and it posed no threat, but there was a certain sinister malignity in its frank impossibility. The mountain was topped by a building that was lit as brightly and as strangely as the chasm floor, so that every detail of its construction stood out sharp and clear against a cloudless and starless sky.

It was a castle of sorts, with clustered towers and winding battlements, but it was compounded out of crystals, as if it had been gantzed from tiny shards of glass and the litter of a jeweler’s workshop. The walls were not transparent, nor were they even straightforwardly translucent; they were shining brightly, but the manner of their shining was an outrage to logic which played tricks with his mind’s procedures of visual analysis. As he stared at the amazing structure he saw that its towers were linked by crisscrossing bridges whose spans were impossibly knotted, and that its ramparts were decorated with ascending and descending staircases which faded into one another in perspective-defying fashion. It was magnificent—all the more so because it was so far above him, separated by a slope so sheer and forbidding.

There was no path up the mountain—no way the castle could be approached without climbing several kilometers of hostile rock face. Its existence was no more plausible than that awful abyss, which would have plunged halfway to Earth’s molten core had it been in the world he knew: the realworld.

Damon shut his eyes again. Safe in that darkness, he pulled himself together.

It’s just a VE, he assured himself. It’s clever, but it’s just a VE full of optical illusions.

Carefully, he began to run his fingers over his limbs. His fingers registered the texture of his suitskinned flesh; the muscles of his belly and his thighs registered the passage of his fingers. He assumed that the suitskin must be an illusion and that he must really be wearing a synthesuit delicately wired to reproduce the sensations of touch. It was obviously state-of-the-art, given that the movement of his fingers seemed so very natural, but all such suits had limitations of which he was very well aware.

He put his right forefinger into his mouth, running it back and forth over his teeth and tongue. Then he touched his closed eye and gently depressed the eyeball. Then he passed his hand back over the crown of his head, feeling the texture of his hair and the vertebrae of his neck. Finally, he put his hand inside the collar of the virtual suitskin and shoved his hand into his armpit; when he withdrew it he sniffed his fingers.

None of these sensations were capable of synthesuit duplication, at least in theory. Taste and odor were beyond the present limits of synthesuit sensoria; eyeballs were reserved for confrontation with the screen and couldn’t be touched; every synthesuit required input cabling, which was usually situated at the rear of the head or the back of the neck. All four tests had failed to reveal any deception; according to their verdict, everything he had seen was real.

And yet, he told himself, it must be a virtual environment, because no such real environment exists. However improbable it seems, this is a charade. I don’t know who has the equipment to play such a trick, or how they’re doing it, or why, but it’s a trick and nothing more. It’s just a trick.

“You can open your eyes, Damon. It’s perfectly safe.” Damon didn’t recognize the voice.

He opened his eyes, hoping that the VE into which he’d woken might have changed into something far more accommodating.

It hadn’t. The impossible building still sat atop the impossible mountain, against the backdrop of the impossible sky. He knewthat he was safe, but it was extremely difficult to believe it. Damon’s reflexes fought to shut his eyes again, but his consciousness fought to keep them open. It was a hard fight, but reason won.

During the last five years Damon had spent a great deal of time in VEs of every marketed and marketable kind, searching for better illusions of reality in order that he might become a better architect of artificial spaces. He needed to be able to cope with this—indeed, he needed to come to terms with it, to master it, and, if possible, to find out how it was done and how he could do likewise.

When he was sure that he could keep his eyes open he deliberately moved back to the rim of the ledge and extended his head into the position it had been in when he first opened his eyes. He wanted to look down again. He neededto look down again, in order to sustain his credentials as an artist in virtual realities, a virtuoso of illusion.

Vertigo seized him like a vice, but he fought it. Knowledge conquered sensation. He looked into the abyss and knew that he would not fall.

Only then did he move again, coming back from the rim and scrambling into a sitting position. He set his back against the upper cliff face and extended his legs so that his ankles were balanced on the lip he had just vacated. Thenhe turned, to look at the person who had spoken to him.

The figure was as strange as the world which contained him. His shape was human, and recognizably male, but his body was literally mercurial, formed as if from liquid metal. He shone with reflected radiance, but the light which flowed across his contours as he moved was as deceptive as the light which flowed through the walls and spires of the crystal castle, defying all the experience of Damon’s educated eyes.

For a moment or two, Damon wondered whether this gleaming silver exterior might be a new kind of synthesuit—a kind which extended into the mouth and nasal cavities as well as covering the eyeball, and which needed no input cable. Could it be a monomolecular film of some kind, as perfectly reflective as a mirror or chrome-plated steel? It was just about plausible, although meetings in VEs usually hid the equipment required to produce and perpetuate the illusion. When he worked on his illusions from within, Damon typed his instructions on a virtual keyplate.

He looked down at his own body, half expecting to see that he too had turned to mercury, but he hadn’t. He recognized the blue-and-gray suitskin he seemed to be wearing as one of his own, but it was not the one he had been wearing when Steve Grayson had carried him away to Rajuder Singh’s island.

“Who are you?” Damon demanded of the mercury man. The shape of the apparition’s face did not seem familiar, although he was not sure that he could have recognized someone he knew reasonably well were their features to be transformed to a fluid mirror in this remarkable fashion.

“I think you can probably figure that out,” the other replied. “My name doesn’t matter. It’s what I am and where we are that counts. You did very well. Not everyone can learn to cope with worlds like this, and few can adapt so quickly—but the real test will come when you try to fly. That requires genuine artistry and limitless self-confidence.”

“So whatare you?” Damon demanded, determined to take matters one at a time and to follow his own agenda.

“I like to think of this as Mount Olympus,” the mercury man told him, ignoring the question. “Up there, the palace of Zeus—impossible, of course, for mere human eyes to figure—where Apollo, Aphrodite, Ares, and Athena have their separate apartments. Down there, the earth, unquiet even by night with the artificially-lit labor and the radiant dreams of billions of men.”

“The illusion’s magnificent,” Damon conceded. “Far better than anything I ever thought Icould make—but you’ll spoil it all if you insist on talking nonsense. You went to a great deal of trouble to bring me here. Why not tell me what it is that you want?”

“Fair enough,” said the mirror man agreeably. “I’d like you to get a message to your father. We can’t find him, you see—and while we can’t find him, it’s rather difficult to negotiate with him. We’ve tried talking to his underlings, but they simply aren’t licensed to be flexible. We rather hoped he might be hiding out on that artificial island, but he isn’t; all we found was you.”

“Conrad Helier’s dead,” Damon said wearily.

“We’re almostready to believe that,” the apparition conceded, “but not quite. It isconceivable that it’s only his spirit that lives on and that Eveline Hywood is pulling the strings herself, but you’ll understand our scepticism. We live in a world of deceptive appearances, Damon. You only have to look at me to realize why we aren’t prepared to take anything on trust.”

Damon didn’t have any ready answer to that.

“It’s the same with the people at Ahasuerus,” the mercury man continued. “They’re obsessed with the continuation of Adam Zimmerman’s plan, and they refuse to see that all plans have to adapt to changes in the world’s circumstances. That’s why we sent you to them—we figured that we might as well trap both wayward birds with a single net, if we can. There’s always the possibility, of course, that the foundation has your father salted away in the same cold place as Adam Zimmerman, but we don’t think it’s likely. Your father isn’t the kind of man to settle for an easy ride to Ultima Thule via suspended animation.”

By this time, Damon had found his answer. “If Conrad Helier isn’t dead,” he said, “he’s certainly not disposed to let me know it. Karol doesn’t trust me, and neither does Eveline. Even Silas never gave me the slightest reason to think that Conrad Helier is alive. Anyhow, if you think he’s still guiding Eveline and Karol, you only have to leave your message on their answerphones.”

“It’s not as easy as that, as you know very well. When I say that we want you to get a message to him, I mean that we want you to get throughto him. We want him to listen. We think that you might be the person to do that for us. Karol and Eveline are only his hirelings, and they’ll be dead within thirty or forty years. You’re his son, and he must at least hope, if he doesn’t actually believe, that you might live for a thousand years. I know that he poses as a lover of all mankind, making no discrimination between rich and poor, worthy and unworthy, but he took the trouble to have a son and to deliver that son into the patient care of his most trusted confidants. Doesn’t that suggest to you that the plans he makes for the future of mankind are really plans for yourfuture—or at least that he imagines you as a central figure, somehow symbolic of the race as a whole?”

“If he did, and if he werealive, I’d be a great disappointment to him,” Damon said shortly. “I’ve my own life to lead. I’m not interested in delivering messages for you.”

“It’s a little late to make that decision,” the mirror man observed.

Damon could see what he meant. What his captors wanted, apparently, was to get through to whoever was running Conrad Helier’s operation—and Damon had obligingly hopped on a plane to Molokai, calling in on the Ahasuerus Foundation en route. He’d also unleashed Madoc Tamlin—and thus, in all likelihood, every outlaw Webwalker on the West Coast. He’d already collaborated as fully as anyone could have desired in the mission of getting throughto Karol Kachellek. The only person he hadn’t quite got through to, yet, was Eveline Hywood.

“None of this makes sense,” Damon complained. “None of it was necessary. You’re just playing games.”

“Perhaps we are,” the mirror man admitted, “but we aren’t the only ones. Your father started this, Damon—our moves have been made in response to his, and he’s still responding to ours. He should have come to the conference table the night we took Silas Arnett hostage, but he called our bluff. I suppose you realize that the second tape of his supposed confessions was theirs, not ours? It was a move we hadn’t anticipated—a sacrifice we thought he wouldn’t be prepared to make. We didn’t anticipate that Karol Kachellek would send you off to the island either, but that may have worked out to our advantage. Naming you was a rather crude response, but the Operator one-oh-one pseudonym was about to become useless and it seemed politic to increase the general confusion. We’re suitably impressed by your father’s initiative and his fighting spirit, but it doesn’t alter the situation. He shouldn’t try to keep us out. He mustn’ttry to keep us out, Damon. It’s not that we want to stop what he’s doing—but we can’t let him do it alone. The world has changed, Damon. We can’t tolerate loose cannons. The day of littleconspiracies, like your father’s and Adam Zimmerman’s, is long gone. Now they have to submit to the same discipline as the rest of us.”

“I don’t have the least idea what you’re talking about,” Damon said, “and I still believe that Conrad Helier’s been dead for nearly fifty years.” The latter statement was a straightforward stalling move, intended to slow things down while he tried to fathom the implications of what the mirror man was saying.

“We have confidence in your ability to figure it out,” the apparition told him. “We also have confidence in your ability to see reason. You’re fully entitled to resent the way we’ve used you, but we hope that you might be prepared to forgive us.”

“I’m not the forgiving type,” Damon retorted, although he knew that it wasn’t the diplomatic thing to say.

The mirror man ignored the futile threat. “What do you think of the quality of the VE?” he asked.

“It’s forced me to revise my estimate of what can and can’t be done,” Damon admitted. “I didn’t think anykind of bodysuit would ever get this close to reproducing the minutiae of tactile experience. It makes the kind of work I do seem rather childish.”

“It’s next-generation technology. Now that you know it canbe done, can you guess how?”

“Not exactly. I suppose it has to be done with some kind of new nanotech, using a synthesuit that’s even thinner than a suit-skin.”

“It’s an interesting idea, but it’s headed in the wrong direction. You’re not in any kind of bodysuit. You’re lying down on a perfectly ordinary bed, fast asleep. This is a lucid dream.”

Damon quelled a reflexive response to deny the possibility. He knew that research into the mechanisms of dreaming had been going on for more than a hundred years, attended all the while by speculations about taped dreams that would one day be bought off the supermarket shelf just like VE paks, but he’d always believed the sceptics who said that such speculations were unreasonably wild, and that the plausibility of the notion was just an accountable illusion, like the plausibility of telepathy. “You’re right about one thing,” he said drily. “If you can do that, I ought to be able to work out who you are. There can’t be more than a handful of research teams who’ve got within a light-year of that kind of device.”

“It’s all done by IT,” the mercury man told him equably. “It’s easy enough to operate the switch in the hypothalamus which prevents instructions to the motor nerves generated in dreams getting through to the body, while preserving the illusionthat you’re acting and reacting as you would in everyday life. Sensory information is filtered through a similar junction whose functions can be just as easily usurped. It doesn’t require millions of nanomachines to colonize the entire structure of the brain—it only requires a few thousand to stand in for the neuronal gatekeepers that are already in place. The whole set up isn’t that much more complicated than a synthesuit—but it’s so much neater to wear the suit inside instead of out, and it saves a small fortune on your electricity bill. As you can see, it gives the VE a texture much more like reality, even if the information is incredible. It also allows the programmers to build in facilities which reproduce things you can sometimes do in dreams but never in real life. As I told you earlier, the realtest of your psychological adaptability is whether you can step off that ledge believing that you can fly.”

Damon was uncomfortably aware of the fact that his chosen career—the design of virtual environments for use with ordinary commercial hoods and synthesuits—had just been revealed to be a blind alley. Unless he could adapt his skills to the coming regime of manufactured dreams, everything he’d ever done and everything he currently planned to do would be consigned to the scrap heap of obsolescence.

“When will this hit the market?” he whispered.

“That’s an interesting question,” said the mirror man. “In fact, it’s a question which cuts to the heart of the emergent philosophy of the new world order. For hundreds of years, people have been developing products for the market:for the purposes of getting rich. Even artists got sucked into it, although the motive forces involved in their creativity—as I’m sure you understand very well—usually went far beyond the vulgar necessity of making a living. The sole raison d’être of the so-called mothercorps was to make as much money as possible as rapidly as possible. The defining feature of the Age of Capital was that money became an end instead of a means. The richest of men became so very rich that they couldn’t possibly spend what they had, but that didn’t stop them trying to make more and more. Money ceased to be mere purchasing power and became a measuring device—a way of keeping score of the position and prestige of individuals within the great competition that was the world. Every new discovery was weighed in the balance of the market, assessed according to its power to make money. Do you understand why that age is now over, Damon? Do you understand why everything has changed?”

“Has it changed?” Damon asked sceptically. “Maybe the people you know are so rich they no longer bother keeping score, but everyone I know needs all the money they can lay their hands on, because the purchasing power of money is their only hope of staying one step ahead of the Grim Reaper and riding the escalator to eternity.”

“Exactly,” said the mirror man, as if Damon were agreeing with him rather than disputing what he’d said. “That’s exactly the point. Money has retained its power because the ultimate product isn’t yet on the market. Until we have authentic emortality at a fixed price, the pursuit goes on and on—and while even the richest of men knew full well that he couldn’t take his money with him when he died, all the money in the world could be nothing to him but a means of keeping score. But that’s no longer the case, as Adam Zimmerman was the first to understand and demonstrate.

“Now every rich man—perhaps every man of moderate means—understands perfectly well that if he can only hang around long enough for the appropriate technologies to arrive, he willhave the chance to live forever. Thatbecomes the end, and money merely the means. We’re already living in a postcapitalist society, Damon—it’s just that many of our fellows haven’t yet noticed the fact or fully understood its significance. Your father understood the fundamental point long ago, of course—which makes it all the more frustrating that he doesn’t seem to be able to grasp its corollaries. I suppose it’s because he prides himself on being a scientist, too fine a man to dirty his hands with mere matters of economics. We have to make him take those blinkers off, Damon. We can’t let him go ahead with what he’s doing while he’s still wearing them.”

“What ishe doing?” Damon wanted to know.

“I’d rather not be the one to fill you in on the details,” the mirror man told him blithely. “As long as you’re curious, I know you’ll keep niggling away at Kachellek and Hywood. We might need you to do that if our latest moves don’t do the trick. If Helier stillwon’t come to the conference table we’ll need you to keep nagging away on our behalf until he does.”

“And if I won’t?”

“You won’t be able to help yourself,” the mirror man told him, with insulting confidence. “You can’t kill curiosity—it has nine lives. In any case, your father will have to take you back into the fold. He can’t leave you alone and exposed after all that’s happened. We’ve called attention to you—whatever they believe or don’t believe, the Eliminators are interested in you now. Your worthiness is under examination. We don’t approve of the Eliminators, of course—not officially—but we like the fact that they take things seriously. We like the fact that they raise the important question: whois worthy of immortality? That’s what this is all about, you see. What kind of people ought to inherit the earth, in perpetuity? What kind of people must we become, if we intend to live forever? Eliminator violence is just childish jealousy, of course—but the question remains to be answered. We don’t want to eliminate Conrad Helier, or the Ahasuerus Foundation, but we dowant them to understand that if they want to play games they have to play by the rules. If we’re going to live forever, we all have to play as a team.”

Damon had found it so uncomfortable to stare into the apparition’s reflective face that he had spent most of the conversation staring into space or at his own hands, but now he looked directly at the convex mirrors which were the mercurial man’s robotic eyes.

“You don’t seem to me to be much of a team player,” he said. “You seem to me to be trying to play God, just as you’ve accused Conrad Helier of doing. ‘As flies to wanton boys—’ ”

“We haven’t killed anyone,” the mirror man said, cutting him off in midquote. “Like Conrad Helier, we take a certain pride in that. As for playing God—well, there wasa time when your father could say ‘If we don’t who will?’ but that time is over. This is Olympus, Damon—the place is positively lousy with would-be gods, and that’s why we all have to work together. That’s what your father has to understand. You have to persuade him that it’s true, if no one else will.”

“I can’t.”

The mirror man dismissed his stubbornness with a casual gesture. He stood up, his movement impossibly fluid and graceful. No real body could have moved like that. “Are you ready to fly?” he asked, implying with his tone that Damon wasn’t.

Damon hesitated, but he stood up without taking the helping hand that the mirror man had extended toward him.

“This is just a VE,” he said. “No matter how clever it is, it’s just a VE. I can step over that ledge, if I want to. No harm can come to me, if I do none to myself.”

“That’s right,” the mirror man told him. “In this world, all your dreams can come true. In this world, you can do anythingyou have a mind to do.” His hand was still extended, but Damon still refused to take it. Had he done so, it would have been a gesture of forgiveness, and he wasn’t the forgiving type.

Damon remembered the sermon he’d preached to Lenny Garon, about the danger of believing that all injuries could be mended, and the wisdom of not taking too many risks in life lest one miss the escalator to emortality. He didn’t think of himself as a hypocrite, but he knew full well that he hadn’t ever practiced what he’d preached—and he hoped that his long practice would come to his rescue now. He wasn’t about to let the mirror man’s challenge pass unmet, and he wasn’t about to accept the mockpaternal helping hand. If he were to fly, he would fly alone.

He stepped to the very edge of the abyss, spread his arms wide as if they were wings, and jumped.

Perhaps he could have flown, if he’d only known how, or even if he’d only had enough faith in himself—but he didn’t.

Damon fell into the awful abyss, and terror swallowed him up.

He lost consciousness long before he reached the bottom, and was glad to be received by the merciful darkness.