Текст книги "Inherit the Earth"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

Twenty

B

y the time the two cars reached the local Interpol headquarters Damon had decided to continue the strategy that he had reflexively undertaken while chatting informally to Hiru Yamanaka, and which he had employed in all his previous dealings with the police. He proceeded to deny everything. He told himself that his purpose was to conserve all the relevant information he had for his own future use, but he was uncomfortably conscious of his own inability to decide exactly what was relevant.

The strategy was not without its costs. For one thing, Yamanaka refused to let him speak to Diana Caisson—although Damon wasn’t certain that he needed to rush into a confrontation as awkward as that one would inevitably prove to be. For another, it intensified Yamanaka’s annoyance with him—which would be bound to result in an intensification of the scrutiny to which his life and actions were currently being subjected.

Yamanaka had obviously anticipated that Damon would not respond to his subtle overtures, although he put on a show of sorrow. He soon reverted to straightforward interrogation, although his pursuit of information seemed rather halfhearted. At first Damon took this to be a gracious acceptance of defeat, but by the time the interview was over he had begun to wonder whether Yamanaka might actually prefer it if he were out on the street inviting disaster rather than sitting snugly and safely in protective custody while Interpol chased wild geese.

“The claims made by the so-called real Operator one-oh-one are, of course, receiving a full measure of publicity,” Yamanaka told him, with a dutiful concern that might well have been counterfeit. “They have not gone uncontradicted, but would-be assassins might not be inclined to believe the contradictions. Were you to return to your apartment right away, trouble might follow you. Were you to attempt to disappear into the so-called badlands in the east of the city, you might easily deliver yourself into danger.”

“I can make my own risk assessments and responses,” Damon told him. The fog was lifting now, and he was becoming more articulate by the minute. “You don’t have any evidence at all to connect me to Surinder Nahal’s death. As far as I can tell, you have nothing to connect Madoc and Diana to it either, except that they found the body before the local police. Maybe Madoc got a bit excited when the cops burst in on him, but that’s understandable. It’s not as if they did any real damage. Even if you press ahead with the assault charges, the fact that they might have gone to the place where they found the body on my behalf doesn’t make me an accessory to the assault. Given that you don’t have any charges to bring against me, I think you ought to let me go now.”

“I can hold you overnight if I have reason to believe that you’re withholding relevant information,” Yamanaka pointed out, strictly for form’s sake.

“How could I possibly know anything relevant to the assault?”

“Apparently,” Yamanaka observed serenely, “you don’t even know anything relevant to your own kidnapping. Given that you were unlucky enough to be kidnapped twice in a matter of hours, that seems a little careless.”

“Karol’s error of judgment wasn’t a kidnapping at all,” Damon said. “It was just a domestic misunderstanding. As for the second incident, I was asleep the whole time, from the moment I was gassed until the moment I woke up where Rachel Trehaine found me.”

“Even so, Mr. Hart,” Yamanaka observed, as a parting shot, “you seem to have become extraordinarily accident-prone lately. It might be unwise to trust your luck too far.”

Damon didn’t want to extend the conversation any further. He accepted a ride back to his apartment building, but the uniformed officer who drove the car didn’t attempt to continue the interrogation.

When he’d taken time out to visit the bathroom and order some decent cooked food from the kitchen dispenser, Damon checked his mail. He wasn’t unduly surprised or alarmed to find that there was nothing from Madoc Tamlin, although there were three messages from Diana Caisson, all dispatched from the building he’d just come from. There was nothing from Molokai, but there was, at long last, a curt note from Lagrange-5, saying that Eveline Hywood would be available to take his call after nineteen hundred hours Greenwich Mean Time.

Damon subtracted eight hours and checked the clock, which informed him that he had half an hour still in hand. He double-checked the date to make sure that he had the right one—he’d lost an entire day between the time he’d been snatched from Karol Kachellek’s secret hideaway and the morning he’d been picked up in Venice Beach.

By the time he’d changed and eaten a makeshift meal the half hour was almost up. He decided that he couldn’t be bothered twiddling his thumbs until the hour struck, so he slipped inside his hood.

It would have been typical of Eveline to refuse the call until the appointed hour actually arrived, but she didn’t. It wasn’t an AI sim that answered the phone, but that didn’t mean that the conversation would be eye-to-eye. The image floating in the familiar VE environment was being directly animated by Eveline Hywood, but it still had to be synthesized to edit out the hood she was wearing. Damon knew that Eveline would be giving no secrets away, in what she said or the way she looked, but he still wanted to hear what she had to say.

“Damon,” she said pleasantly. “It’s good to see you. I’ve been very worried about you. Is there any news of Karol or Silas?” Eveline knew perfectly well that if there had been any news it would have been relayed to her instantly, but she was putting on a show of concern. Damon noticed that the last time she had undergone somatic adjustment for her progressive myopia she had had her irises retinted. Her natural eye color was dark brown, but her irises were now lightened almost to orange. Given that the melanin content of her skin had been carefully maintained, the modified eyes gave her stare a curiously feline quality. It was easy enough to believe that she might be the prime mover in whatever plot had caused such intense annoyance to the recently self-appointed overlords of Earth.

“They’re still missing,” Damon confirmed. “I expect they’ll turn up eventually, dead or alive. That’s out of our hands, alas. Do you have any idea what’s going on, Eveline?” He knew that he’d have to wait a little while for her answer; their words and gestures had a quarter of a million miles to traverse. The time delay wasn’t sufficient to cause any real difficulties, and Eveline must be thoroughly accustomed to it, but Damon knew that he would find it disconcerting to begin with. While he waited, he looked at her appraisingly, trying to figure out exactly what kind of person she was. He had never managed to do that while they were living under the same roof.

He wondered why Eveline had designed the VE as a duplicate of her actual environment. Was she underlining the fact that she lived in deep space: the only foreign country left where things hadto be done differently? In L-5, even a room decked out as simply as possible had to have all kinds of special devices to contain its trivial personal possessions and petty decorations. In space, nothing could be relied upon to stay where you put it, even in a colony which retained a ghost of gravity by virtue of its spin.

“Someone is evidently intent on blackening your father’s name,” Eveline told him, with an airy wave of her slender hand. “I can’t imagine why. These self-appointed Eliminators seem to be getting completely out of hand. There are none up here, mercifully; L-Five isn’t perfect, but it’s a haven of sanity compared to Earth. I think it’s because we’re building a new society from scratch, without nations or corporations; because we have no history we feel no compulsion to maintain such ancient traditions as rebellion, hatred, and murder.”

Damon didn’t bother to question her certainty as to whether L-5 was really Eliminator-free, or corporation-free. It had taken so long to get through to her that he didn’t want to waste any time. He knew perfectly well that he wasn’t going to get any straight answers, but he wanted to know where he stood, if she was prepared to tell him.

“Why is it happening now, Eveline?” he asked softly. “What brought your adversaries crawling out of the woodwork after all this time?”

“I have no idea,” she said. Damon had to presume that she was lying, but that was only to be expected, given that this was far from being a secure call. They both had to proceed on the assumption that anyone with any interest in this convoluted affair might be listening in. If she wanted to give him any clues, she would have to do it very subtly indeed. Unfortunately, he and Eveline had been virtual strangers even while they were living under the same roof; they had no resources of common understanding to draw on.

Damon had opened his mouth to ask the next question before he realized that Eveline had only paused momentarily. “You might be better able to guess than I am,” she added. “After all, this whole affair is really an attack on you, isn’t it?”

“It seems to have turned out that way,” he admitted. But it didn’t start like that, he thought. That’s a deflection, a diversionary tactic—for which you and my father’s other so-called friends are partly responsible. You called the bet and raised the stakes. I’m just caught in the crossfire.

“Please be careful, Damon,” Eveline said. “I know that we’ve had our differences, but I really do care about you a great deal.”

Damon was glad to hear it. It was an encouragement to continue. Eveline could have shut him out completely, but it seemed that she didn’t want to do that—or didn’t dare to. “Could it have something to do with this stuff that you and Karol are investigating—these para-DNA life-forms?” he asked, biting the bullet. He expected her spoken answer to be a denial, of course, but he also expected it to be a lie. So far as he could judge, Karol’s dabbling with the black deposit on the rocks of Molokai’s shoreline was the only thing which could possibly make this a “very bad time.”

“How could it have anything to do with that?” Eveline asked, frowning as if in puzzlement—but her synthesized stare was gimlet sharp. A flat denial would have instructed him to let the matter lie; the question was actively inviting further inquiry. Damon knew that he had to select his words very carefully, but he felt slightly reassured by the fact that his foster mother mightbe making a vital concession.

“I’m not sure,” he said, in a calculatedly pensive manner. “Karol said there were two possibilities regarding its origins: up and down. He was looking at the bottom of the sea while you’re looking for evidence of its arrival from elsewhere in the solar system.” But he had a third alternative in mind when he said it, Damon left unsaid, and there is a third alternative, isn’t there? The third alternative was sideways, and he searched Eveline’s steady gaze for some confirmatory sign that she knew what he was driving at.

“That’s right,” Eveline said conversationally. “We’re expecting two of our probes to start relaying valuable information back from the outer solar system within a matter of days. Karol’s people will continue to work on the seabed samples, of course, but my own estimate of the probabilities is that they’re unlikely to find anything. I think the Oort Cloud is the likelier source—but I’ve always had panspermist leanings, as you know. It’s very difficult to be perfectly objective, even when you’ve been a scientist for more than a hundred years.”

“It would be more interesting, in a way, if it had come from one of the black smokers,” Damon said, hoping that she would not mind being challenged. “For one planet to be able to produce two different forms of life suggests an authentic creative verve. I always thought panspermia was a rather dull hypothesis, with its suggestion that wherever we might go in the universe we’ll only find more of the same.”

“Sometimes,” Eveline said, “the truth isdull. You can design virtual environments as gaudy and as weird as you like, but the real world will always be the way the real world is.” She looked around as she said it at the scrupulously dull and slavishly imitative VE with which she had surrounded herself.

“Speaking of dull truths,” Damon said, “I suppose you and my late father didn’t really cause the Crash?”

“No, we didn’t,” she answered predictably. “When they find Silas, he’ll put the record straight. He didn’t really say any of those things—it’s all faked. Just another virtual reality, as fantastic and ridiculous as any other. It’s all lies—you know it is.” Her eyes weren’t fixed on his now; if he was reading her correctly, she was dismissing this topic and asking him to move on.

“Do you think there might be a new plague?” he asked mildly. “Might this para-DNA invader throw up something just as nasty as the old meiotic disrupters and chiasmalytic transformers?”

“That’s extremely unlikely,” she answered, just as mildly. “So far as we can tell, para-DNA is entirely harmless. Organisms of this kind will inevitably compete for resources with life as we know it, but there’s no evidence at all of any other kind of dangerous interaction and it would be surprising if there were. Para-DNA is just something which happened to drift into the biosphere from elsewhere—almost certainly from the outer solar system, in my opinion. It’s fascinating, but it’s unlikely to pose any serious threat.”

“Are you absolutely sure of that?” Damon asked, watching the luminous eyes.

“You know perfectly well that there’s no absolute certainty in science, Damon,” Eveline answered equably. “Investigations of this kind have to be carried out very carefully, and we have to wait until we have all the data in place before we draw our ultimate conclusions. All I can say is that there’s no reason at present to believe that para-DNA is or could be dangerous.”

“Of course,” Damon said in a neutral tone. “I do understand that. It’s interesting, though, isn’t it? A whole new basis of life. Who knows what it might have produced, out there in the vast wilderness of space? I asked Karol whether it might be the gateway to a whole set of new biotech tools. Have you had much interest from the corps?”

“A little,” Eveline said, “but I really can’t concern myself with that sort of thing. This isn’t a matter of commerce, Damon—it’s far more important than that. It’s a matter of enlightenment. I really wish you understood that—but you never did care much for enlightenment, did you?”

There had been a time when a dig like that would have stung him, but Damon felt that she was fully entitled. He was even prepared to consider the possibility that she might be right.

“A lot of people will be interested,” he predicted, “even if there are no fortunes to be made. The corps will want to investigate the possibilities themselves. Para-DNA doesn’t actually belongto you, after all. If you’re right about its origins, it’s just one more aspect of the universe—everybody’s business.”

“Yes it is,” she agreed, looking sideways at the window which offered them both a view of the magnificent starfield. “ Everybody’sbusiness. Anything we discover will be freely available to anyone and everyone. We’re not profit minded.”

“Nor is the Ahasuerus Foundation,” Damon observed. “You and they have that in common—but I met a corpsman not long ago who contended that even the corps aren’t really profit motivated anymore. He suggested to me that the Age of Capital was dead, and that the New Utopia’s megacorps have a new agenda.”

“The problem with corporation people,” Eveline said, with the firmness of committed belief, “is that you can never believe a word they say. It’s all advertising and attention seeking. Science is different. Science is interested in the truth, however prosaic it might be.” Again she looked sideways at the star field, which was not in the least prosaic, even in the context of the virtual environment.

“You would say that, wouldn’t you?” Damon pointed out. “After all, you’ve given a lifetime to the pursuit of scientific truth, dull and otherwise. But I will try to understand, Eveline. I think I’m beginning to see the light. I wish you luck with your inquiries—and I hope that the kind of misfortune which seems so rife down here can’t reach out as far as Lagrange-Five.”

“I hope so too,” Eveline assured him. “Take care, Damon. In spite of our past disagreements, we all loved you and we still do. We’d really like to have you back one day, when you’ve got all the nonsense out of your system.” Her eyes were still uncommonly bright. They shone more vividly than he’d ever seen them shine before, or ever thought likely—but they didn’t shine as brightly or as implacably as the stars that she could always look out upon, whether she were in her actual laboratory or its virtual simulation.

I know you’d like to have me back, Damon thought. I only wish you weren’t so certain that there’s nothing else I can do. All he said out loud was: “I’ll be careful. Don’t worry about me, Eveline. I understand that you’ve got more important things to do.”

After he’d broken the connection Damon found that two images still lingered in his mind’s eye: Eveline’s eyes, and the star field at which she’d glanced on more than one occasion. Eveline wasn’t one for idle sidelong glances; he knew that she’d been trying to make a point. He even thought he knew what point it was that she had been trying to make—but it was just a guess. Beset by confusions as he was, there was nothing he could do but guess. Unfortunately, he had no idea what reward there might be in guessing correctly, nor what penalty there might be if he jumped to the wrong conclusion.

In a way, the most horrible thought of all was that it might not matter in the least what he came to believe, or what he tried to do about it. The one thing he wanted more than to be safe and sound was to be relevant. He wanted to be something more than Catherine Praill; he wanted a part to play that might make a difference, not merely to his own ambitions but to those of his foster parents and those of the stubbornly mysterious kidnappers. If there were people in the world who thought it possible, reasonable, and desirable to play God, how could any young man who was genuinely ambitious be content to play a lesser role?

Twenty-one

M

adoc Tamlin waited patiently while Harriet, alias Tithonia, alias the Old Lady, watched the VE tape that he’d found on the badly burned body. She sat perfectly still except for her hands, which made very slight movements, as if she were a pianist responding reflexively to some inordinately complicated nocturne that she had to memorize.

Madoc knew that the Old Lady was concentrating very intently, because she wasn’t just watching the recording; she was also watching the code that reproduced it, whizzing past in a virtual display-within-the-display. Over the years, Harriet had built up a strange kind of sensitivity to code patterns which allegedly allowed her to detect the artificial bridges used to link, fill in, and distort the “natural” sequences generated by digitizing camera work.

Madoc had never been admitted into Harriet’s lair before; on the rare occasions when they’d met they’d done so on neutral ground. She’d made an exception this time, but not because he was on the run from the LAPD after clobbering one of their finest with a crowbar. She’d let him in because she was interestedin the business he’d got mixed up in.

That was quite a compliment, although Madoc knew that it was a compliment to Damon rather than to him. It was Damon’s mystery, after all; he was only the legman.

In order to get into the Old Lady’s lair he’d had to undergo all the old pulp-fiction rituals: a blindfold ride in a car, followed by a blindfold descent into the depths of some ancient ruin in the Hollywood hills. Most people still avoided Hollywood, associating it with the spectacular outbreak of the Second Plague War rather than the long-extinct film industry, but Harriet wasn’t like most people. There were hundreds of thousands—maybe millions—of centenarians in the USNA, but she was nevertheless unique.

Most people who lived to be a hundred had bought into IT in the early days; the brake had been put on their aging processes when they were in their thirties or forties, way back in the 2120s. No one knew exactly what Harriet had been doing in those days, but it certainly hadn’t been honest or profitable. She’d been part of the underclass that had absorbed all the shit flying off the fan of the genetic revolution. In the previous century her kind had provided both plague wars with the greater part of their virus fodder, but Harriet had been born just late enough to miss the longest-delayed effects of those conflicts. Circumstances had dictated, however, that she continue to age at what used to be the natural rate until she was well into her seventies and the calendar was well into the 2150s. Apart from the usual wear and tear she’d had multiple cancers of an unusually obdurate kind—the kind that didn’t respond to all the usual treatments. Then she’d been picked up by PicoCon as a worst-case guinea pig for the field trials of a brand-new fleet of nanomachines.

PicoCon’s molecular knights-errant had gobbled up the Old Lady’s cancers and stopped her biological clock ticking. They had snatched her back from the very threshold of death, and made her as fit and well as anyone could be who’d suffered seventy-odd years of more-than-usual deterioration. Nine hundred out of a thousand people in her situation would have been irredeemably set on the road to premature senility, and ninety-nine out of the remaining hundred would have keeled over as a result of some physical cause that the nanomech hadn’t entirely set aside, but Harriet was the thousandth. Gifted with the poisoned chalice of eternal old age, she’d gone on and on and on—and she was still going on, nearly forty years later. She was a walking miracle.

In a world full of old ladies who looked anywhere between forty and seventy years younger than they actually were, Harriet was theOld Lady, Tithonia herself. Madoc knew, although most of her acquaintances did not, that her second nickname came from some ancient Greek myth about a man made immortal by a careless god, who’d forgotten to specify that he also had to stay young.

Even as a walking miracle, of course, Harriet aliasTithonia would have been no great shakes in a world lousy with miracles. PicoCon had a new one every day, all wrapped up and ready for the morning news, with abundant “human interest” built in by the PR department. Harriet had taken it upon herself to become more than a mere miracle, though; she’d become an honest-to-goodness legend. Almost as soon as she was pronounced free of tumors she’d reembarked on a life of crime, mending her ways just sufficiently to move into a better class of felonies.

“If Ican’t live every day as if it were my last, who can?” she was famous for saying. “I’m already dead, and this is heaven—what can they do to me that would make a difference?”

Madoc supposed that if the LAPD had reallywanted to put Harriet out of business, lock her up, and throw away the key, they could probably have done it twenty years ago—but they never had. Some said that it was because she had powerful friends among the corps for whom she undertook heroic missions of industrial espionage, but Madoc didn’t believe that. He knew full well that any powerful friends a mercenary happened to acquire were apt to be out of the office whenever trouble came to call, while the powerful enemies on the other side of the coin were always on the job. Madoc’s theory was that the LAPD let Harriet alone out of respect for her legendary status, and because a few notorious adversaries on the loose were invaluable when it came to budget negotiations with the city.

Either way, Madoc and everyone else figured that it was a privilege to work with the Old Lady. That, as much as her efficiency, was why she was so expensive.

Harriet finally finished her scrutiny of the VE tape and ducked out from under the hood. Her face was richly grooved with the deepest wrinkles Madoc had ever seen and her hair was reduced to the merest wisps of white, but her dark eyes were sharp and her gaze could cut like a knife.

“The body had been burned, you say?” she questioned him—not because she didn’t remember what he’d said but because she wanted it all set out in neat array while she put the puzzle together.

“Thoroughly,” he confirmed. “It must have been covered in something that burned even hotter than gasoline, then torched.” It was easy enough to see what Harriet was getting at. Whoever had committed the murder had had time. They could have torched the VE pack along with the body if they’d wanted to, or they could simply have picked it up and put it in a pocket. If they’d left it behind they had done so deliberately, in order that it would be found. The only hitch in that plan, Madoc assumed, had been that it was he and Diana who had found it instead of the police. Madoc, naturally enough, had brought it to the Old Lady instead of to Interpol.

“We’re supposed to believe that the tape explains why the guy was killed,” Harriet concluded.

“That’s the way I figure it,” Madoc admitted. “If that really is the original tape that was used as a base to synthesize Silas Arnett’s confessions—or the first of them, at any rate, it identifies Surinder Nahal as the kidnapper in chief.”

Madoc had inspected the tape himself before giving it to Harriet for more expert analysis. It contained a taped conversation between the captive Silas Arnett and another man, easily identifiable in the raw footage by voice as well as appearance as Surinder Nahal. Various phrases spoken by both men—but especially those spoken by Nahal, carefully distorted to make recognition difficult—had been used in the first of Arnett’s two “confessions,” but nothing Arnett had said on thistape amounted to an admission of guilt regarding anycrime, past or present. On the other hand, there was no evidence on thistape that he had been tortured, or even fiercely interrogated.

“Insofar as the discovery points a finger at anyone,” Harriet went on, “it implies that Arnett’s friends took swift and certain revenge against Surinder Nahal because he tried to set them up, and left the VE pak on his body to explain why they killed him.”

“Thus setting themselves up all over again,” Madoc pointed out. “I think it stinks, but I’m not sure where the odor originates. How about you? Is the tape genuine? Is it really raw footage, or is it just a slightly less transparent lie than the one they dumped on the Web?”

“That’s an interesting question,” Harriet said.

“I know it is,” Madoc said, trying not to let his exasperation show. “What’s the answer?”

“I’ll be honest with you, Madoc,” Harriet said. “The tape’s a fake. It’s not a crude fake, but it’s definitely a fake. Even Interpol could have determined that—probably. The fact that Silas Arnett still hasn’t turned up would have alerted them to the same stink that reached your sensitive nostrils.”

“So why the hesitation?” Madoc wanted to know.

“The thing is,” the Old Lady said, “that I’m not sure how much deeper we ought to dig into this. You see, if Arnett’s friends didn’tkill the man whose body you found, then someone else did—and it certainly wasn’t some dilettante Eliminator.”

“I don’t get it,” Madoc said. “You’re supposed to be the only ace Webwalker in the world who doesn’t give a damn what she gets involved with. You’re supposed to be utterly fearless.”

“I am,” she told him coldly. “This isn’t a matter of watching myback, Madoc—it’s youI’m worried about. Nobody’s going to come after me, and I doubt that they intend to harm Damon Hart, but you’re not part of the game plan. You might easily be seen as a minor irritation best removed from the field of play with the minimum of fuss. If this tape was really intended to fall into Interpol’s hands rather than yours the people who left it might be a trifle miffed, and they’re not the kind of people you want to have as enemies. It’s one thing to set yourself up as an outlaw, quite another to become a thorn in the side of people who are above the law.”

Madoc stared at her. “Do you know who’s behind all this?” he asked sharply.

“I don’t knowanything,” she told him, “but I’m absolutely certain that I can make the right guess.”

“Is that why you called it an interestingproblem?”

“Yes it is—but what interests me is why, not who. It’s the whythat I can’t fathom. The how has its intriguing features too, but I think I understand pretty well how the moves came to be played the way they were—I just can’t figure out why the game’s being played at all.”

“Well,” said Madoc a little impatiently, “what interests meat present is that Damon has disappeared. When I first got you involved, I admit, it was mainly a matter of money—Damon’s money. I was just doing a job for him. I don’t really care about Arnett, or Nahal, or Kachellek—but I docare about Damon.”

“Damon’s back,” Harriet replied, raising her white eyebrows a fraction, as if she had only just realized that he didn’t know. Maybe it hadn’t occurred to her that a young man on the run couldn’t keep his fingers on the pulse of things quite as easily as an old lady in hiding.

“Since when?” Madoc asked.

“Since this morning. That tap I put into Ahasuerus told me—not that they were trying to keep it a secret. As soon as Trehaine found out that it was Damon she’d been sent out to find she called Interpol. Catherine Praill was with him. She’s probably irrelevant, but the people who took Damon clearly wanted him back in play as soon as possible. That’s why I’m fairly sure they won’t hurt him. It’s possible that he now knows far more than I do. Interpol will have him under a microscope, of course—it won’t be easy for you to get to him without being picked up.”