Текст книги "Inherit the Earth"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

“I’ve got to get the tape to him,” Madoc said, “and anything else you can give me. Who’s doing this, Harriet? Who’s jerking us all around?”

Harriet shrugged her narrow shoulders. “PicoCon,” she said flatly. “OmicronA might be in it too, but PicoCon’s board likes to keep these little adventures in-house. It’s a matter of style. What I can’t figure out is what they’re so annoyedabout and why they’re tackling it in such a roundabout way. Compared with their irresistible juggernaut, Eveline Hywood’s organization is a mere ant, which could be crushed underfoot on a whim. Ahasuerus might be a flea, but it’s a flea that’s already in their pocket, moneywise. This can’t be everyday commercial competition, and it must be something that they find interesting, or they’d just stamp on it—but if it isn’t about money . . ..” She left the sentence unfinished.

“PicoCon,” Madoc repeated wonderingly. “ PicoConkidnapped Silas Arnett and tried to frame Conrad Helier for causing the Crash? PicoConblew up Kachellek’s boat, torched Surinder Nahal’s body, and strewed forged tapes and Eliminator bulletins all over the Net?”

“They’re also handily placed for pushing messages under people’s doors hereabouts—but for what it’s worth, I don’t think PicoCon did allof that. They just started the ball rolling. This business with the burned body and the VE pak is a counter-punch. I think Hywood’s people did that—and I think they rigged the second confession too. They were supposed to roll over and beg for mercy, but they fought back instead. You have to admire them for it, but it might be unwise. Just because PicoCon used gentler methods first time around it doesn’t mean that they won’t use brute force to settle the matter. That’s why I’m worried about you. If Kachellek really was blown up, you might be next on the list.”

“I can’t believe that cosmicorps play games like this,” Madoc said wonderingly. “PicoCon least of all—they’ve got more than enough real work to occupy them.”

“That’s a matter of perspective,” Harriet told him drily. “You could say that there’s a point at which any successful corporation becomes so big and so powerful that the profits take care of themselves, leaving the strategists with nothing to do butplay games. Serious games, but games nevertheless. Attacking Conrad Helier’s memory seems a trifle unsporting, though—terrible ingratitude.”

“Ingratitude? Why? Helier’s team was always strictly biotech, as far as I can work out. I thought PicoCon’s fortune was based on inorganic nanotech. What did he ever do for them?”

“He gave them the world on a plate. PicoCon may be the engine churning out the best set pieces nowadays, but the New Reproductive System stabilized the board for them. The Crash put a belated end to unpoliced population growth, but Helier’s artificial wombs made certain that the bad old days would never come back again. If Helier hadn’t got the new apparatus up and running in time to become the new status quo, some clown would have engineered a set of transformer viruses to refertilize every woman under the age of sixty-five and we’d have been back to square one. You probably think the Second Plague War was a nasty affair, but that’s because you read about it in the kind of history books which only tell you what happened and skip lightly over all the might-have-beens. If it hadn’t been for Conrad Helier, you’d probably have had to live through the thirdround of the Not-Quite-Emortal Rich versus the Ever-Desperate Poor—and PicoCon would have spent the last half-century pumping out molecular missiles and pinpoint bombs instead of taking giant strides up the escalator to trueemortality.”

Madoc had to think about this for a minute or two, but he soon saw the logic of the case. New technologies of longevity were an unqualified boon in an era in which population had ceased to grow, even though access to them was determined by wealth. In a world whose poorer people were still producing children in vast numbers, those same technologies would inevitably have become bones of fierce contention, catalysts of allout war.

“You don’t suppose,” he mused, “that Hywood and Kachellek might have done just that—engineered a set of viruses to refertilize the female population?”

“No, I don’t,” said Harriet. “Even if they were silly enough to work on the problem, they’d have the sense to bury their results. Anyway, the world now has the advantage of starting from a position of relative sanity instead of rampant insanity—if some such technology did come along I think ninety-nine women in every hundred would have the sense to say no. It would be interesting to know what Hywood and Kachellek havedone—but it might be safer not to try to find out. As I said before, if they really did blow Kachellek’s boat to smithereens with him in it. . . .”

“If?” Madoc queried.

“It really is a game, Madoc. Bluff and counterbluff, lie and counterlie. The one thing of which we can be certain is that nothing is what it seems to be—not just on the surface but way down through the layers. PicoCon is making a big issue out of the possibility that Conrad Helier is only playingdead. Maybe Kachellek’s playing dead too. Maybe Surinder Nahal is only playing dead.”

“If that burned body really was his,” Madoc murmured, “he was putting on a very convincing act.”

“That might be the whole point of the exercise. Do you want me to get a message to Damon for you?”

“Can you do that? Without the cops knowing, I mean.”

“I think so—but you can’t bring him here. I’ve used up so much borrowed time that I’ll be dying way beyond my means whenever I go, but I still like to be careful. It’s a matter of professional pride. You’ll have to figure out a safe place—and he’ll have to figure out how to get there without dragging Interpol in his wake. I’ll set it up for you—but if you want my advice, you’ll tell him to put the rest of his money back in the bank and call it quits, so that you can start playing Three Wise Monkeys. We’re out of our league here. Nobody can fight PicoCon and win.”

If you never play out of your league, Madoc thought, you never get promoted. All he said aloud, though, was: “Okay—I need to get a meeting set up as soon as possible. Damon will want the tape, and everything else I’ve got, whether he intends to fight or not.”

“Don’t be too sure of that,” Harriet advised him soberly. “Things have moved fast—he might not be in the same frame of mind as he was when he sent you off on this wild goose chase. Now that he’s had his little holiday, he might want to play Three Wise Monkeys too, and he might be prepared to cut you adrift and leave you to PicoCon’s tender mercies—or to the LAPD’s.”

Her concern seemed genuine, but Madoc couldn’t imagine that he needed it. You might know PicoCon, Old Lady, he thought, but you don’t know Damon. He’d never change sides on me. Madoc was as certain of that as he needed to be—and even if he hadn’t been, what choice did he have?

Twenty-two

A

fter sitting through the second tape of his “confessions,” Silas Arnett found himself looking out upon a pleasant outdoor scene: a wood, like the ones to the south of his house. A rich carpet of leaf litter was delicately dappled by sunlight streaming through the canopy. The gnarled boughs of the trees offered abundant perches to little songbirds whose melodies filled the air. It was a simulation of an ancient woodland, whose design owed more to nostalgia than historical accuracy.

Unfortunately, the pleasantness of the surroundings found no echo within his body. In the VE he was a mere viewpoint, invisible to himself, but that only served to place more emphasis on his sense of touch, which informed him that the conditions of his confinement were now becoming quite unbearable.

The subtle changes of position he was able to make were no longer adequate to counter the aching in his limbs. The chafing of the straps which bound his wrists and ankles was now a burning agony. It did no good to tell himself that by any objective standard these were very minor pains, no worse than those which constituted the everyday condition of millions in the days before IT. He, Silas Arnett, had grown fully accustomed to being able to control pain, and now that he could no longer do it he felt that he might easily die of sheer frustration.

A human figure came through the trees to stand before him. It was dressed in a monk’s habit, and Silas inferred that it was supposed to be male, but it was a modern secular monk, not a member of any religious order that might have been contemporary with an ancient forest. The ornament the monk wore around his neck was not a cross but a starburst: a symbol of the physicists’ Creation rather than the redemptive sacrifice of the Christ whose veneration was now confined to a handful of antiquarians.

The man pushed the hood back from his forehead and let its fold fall upon his shoulders. Silas didn’t recognize the exposed visage; it was a handsome, serene face which bore the modest signs of aging that most monks considered appropriate to their station.

Silas wasn’t fooled by the appearance. He knew that the mind behind the mask was the mind of his tormentor.

His “tormentor” had not, in the end, resorted to any very violent torture, but in his present condition Silas found it impossible to be grateful for that. Even had he been more comfortable, any gratitude he might have felt would have been tempered by the knowledge that even though he had not been cut or burned he had certainly been imprisoned, maligned, mocked, and misrepresented.

“That one looked even worse than the first one,” he said, gritting his teeth against his discomfort and hoping that talk might distract him from his woe. “It really doesn’t add anything. I can’t see why you bothered.”

“I didn’t,” said the monk. “That was someone else’s work. I presume that your friends did it—you noticed, I dare say, that the underlying message was that what you and Conrad Heller did was both necessary and justified. On the surface, it begged to be identified as a mere lie, a vicious but half-baked slander, but that was double bluff. The subtext said: Even if it were true, it wouldn’t be in the least terrible. Even if Conrad Heller did cause the Crash, he did it for the noblest of reasons, and it desperately needed to be done. He was a hero, not an enemy of mankind. When the original Operator one-oh-one indignantly blew her cover, by the way, she objected strenuously to my use of that particular phrase. She thinks that I should have said ‘enemy of humankind.’ She’s of an age to be sensitive about that sort of thing—and I suppose a man of your age can probably sympathize with her.”

Silas wasn’t in the least interested in the authentic Eliminator’s retention of outdated radfem sensibilities. “I suppose the subtext of that habit and starburst you’re wearing,” he said, “is that what you’re doing to me is being done for the noblest of reasons—even though you won’t deign to explain what they are.”

“Nobility doesn’t come into it,” the monk told him. “I simply want Conrad Helier to come out of hiding. You were the bait. To be perfectly honest, I’m a little disappointed in him. Dumping that tape was a distinctly weak-kneed response to my challenge. The tape I left with the burned body was much cleverer—as we would all have had the chance to appreciate if Damon’s troublesome friend hadn’t got to the scene before the police and removed the evidence. I wish I knew whether your friends’ failure to rescue you is a matter of incompetence, laziness, or a sacrifice move. They might actually have abandoned you to whatever fate I care to decide. Perhaps they think that it might inconvenience me more if nobody actually came to rescue you at all.”

“Fuck this,” Silas said vituperatively. “All this may be just a game to you, but I’m suffering. If you’ve done what you set out to do and don’t intend to kill me, isn’t it about time you simply let me go?”

“It’s certainly time that someone came to get you,” the monk admitted. “I’m truly sorry that Conrad Helier hasn’t bothered to do it. Alas, I can’t simply releaseyou. This VE’s fitted to a telephone, and I’m calling from elsewhere. The mechanical devices holding you in position require manual release.”

“Someone was here earlier—actually in the room. You took care to let me know that when I first woke up.”

“Everything had to be set up, and manually operated devices have to be put in place manually. As soon as you were secure, however, my helpers made themselves scarce. You’ve been alone for some time, excepting virtual encounters. You mustn’t worry, though. I may have overestimated Conrad Helier’s resources or willingness to respond, but if he doesn’t come for you soon Interpol or Ahasuerus will. That wouldn’t suit my purposes nearly as well, but I suppose it might have to do.”

“The reason you overestimated Conrad’s resources and his willingness to respond,” Silas snarled, “is that you simply can’t bring yourself to accept that he’s dead and buried.”

“No,” said the monk, “I can’t. I know how he did it, you see—and I’ve proved it by repeating the trick. He’s not too proud to repeat it himself, it seems. Karol Kachellek’s gone missing, supposedly blown up by a bomb planted on the Kiteby persons unknown. The implication, of course, is that whoever took you has also gone after Kachellek—but I didn’t do it. I dare say a dead body will turn up in a day or two, suitably mangled but incontrovertibly identifiable by means of its DNA. By my count, that makes three men who are supposed to be dead but aren’t. Where will it all end? It’s beginning to look as if Helier is determined to call my bluff and sit tight no matter what.”

It seemed to Silas that the only one who was sitting tightwas him. He wriggled his torso, deliberately pushing against the back of the padded chair in the hope of countering the aches generated within his muscles. He dared not move his arms or legs in the same way because that would have made the restraining cords contract and cut into his raw flesh. It helped a little.

“I’d hoped, of course, that Helier might be hiding out on the artificial island,” the monk went on, “but that was overoptimistic. He’s off-world—probably a lot further from Earth than Hywood. Not that that’s a bad thing, from my point of view. If Kachellek joins them the whole core of the team will be up, up, and away. I’d be prepared to settle for that—always provided that if they ever want to play in mysandpit again they’ll accept myrules. Heaven forbid that we should ever succeed in crushing the spirit of heroic independence, when all we actually need to do is send it into space. If Conrad Helier does eventually come to get you, Silas, tell him that’s the deal: he can follow his own schemes in heaven, but not on Earth. Anything he does down here has to be checked out with the powers that be, and if it isn’t authorized it doesn’t happen. He’ll know who the message is from.”

Silas remained stubbornly silent, although he knew that he was supposed to respond to this instruction. The twittering of virtual birds filled the temporary silence. Their voices seemed oddly insulting; the cycles of their various songs were out of phase, but the programmed nature of the chorus was becoming obvious. Damon Hart, Silas felt sure, would have used an open-ended program with an elementary mutational facility for each individual song, so that the environment would be capable of slow but spontaneous evolution.

As if he were somehow sensitive to Silas’s thoughts, his captor said: “It begins to look as if Damon Hart’s the only worthwhile card I’ve got. You really should have taken better care of that boy, Silas—you’ve let him run so far that you might never get him back. Do you suppose Conrad Helier might be prepared to sacrifice him as well as you?”

“You’re crazy,” Silas said sulkily. “Conrad’s dead.”

“I understand that you feel the need to keep saying that,” the monk reassured him. “After all, you’re still on the record, even if no one’s ever going to play it back but me. You’ll forgive me if I ignore you, though. Helier willhave to come out eventually, if he wants to deal. I really don’t want to foul his operation up. I admire his enterprise. All I want is to ensure that we’re all playing on the same team, planning our ends and means together. We areall on the same side, after all—we’ll get to where we’re going all the sooner if we all pull in the same direction.”

“Where arewe going?” Silas asked. “And who’s supposed to be doing the pulling? Exactly who areyou?” Unable to resist changing the position of his legs he tried to do so without moving his ankles, but he was no contortionist. He gasped as the ankle straps clutched at him.

If the real man behind the image of the monk could hear evidence of Silas’s distress he ignored it. “Please don’t be deliberately obtuse, Silas,” he said in the same bantering tone. “We’re going to the land of Cokaygne, where all is peace and harmony and everybody lives forever. But there can’t be peace unless we find a peaceful way of settling our differences, and there won’t be harmony unless we can establish a proper forum for agreeing on our objectives and our methods. That’s all I want, Silas—just a nice, brightly polished conference table to which we can allbring our little plans and projects, so that they can all receive the blessing of the whole board of directors. As to who’s doing the pulling, it’s everyone who’s making anything new—and those who make the most are pulling the hardest.”

When the flaring pain in his ankles died down of its own accord Silas felt a little better. “Conrad never liked that kind of corpspeak,” he growled, “or the philosophy behind it. If he were alive—which he isn’t—you’d never get him to knuckle under to that kind of system. He always hated the idea of having to take his proposals and projects to panels of businessmen. He did it, when he needed finance—but he stopped doing it the moment he could finance himself. He’d never have gone back to it. Never in a million years.”

“That’s because he was a child of the old world,” the monk said. “Things are different now, and although it’s a little ambitious to start talking in terms of a million years I really do believe that we have to start thinking in terms of thousands. If Conrad Helier hadn’t decided to drop out of sight, he’d be in a better position to see how much things have changed. If he participated in the wider human society even to the limited extent that Hywood and Kachellek do he’d still have his finger on the pulse of progress, but he seems to have lost its measure. I think he’s fallen victim to the rather childish notion that those who desire to plan the future of the human race must remove themselves from it and stand apart from the history they intend to shape. That’s not merely unnecessary, Silas, it’s downright silly—and we can’t tolerate it any longer.”

Silas was busy fighting his anguish and couldn’t comment. The other continued: “We don’t have any objection to vaulting ambition—as I said before, we admire and approve of it—but Helier and his associates have to realize that there are much bigger fish in the pool now. We’re just as determined to shape the future of the world as he is, and we have the power to do it. We don’t want to fight, Silas—we want to work together. Helier is being unreasonable, and he must be made to see that. The simple fact is that if he can’t be a team player, we can’t allow him to play here. That goes for Eveline Hywood and Karol Kachellek too. People can’t make themselves invisible by pretending to die, any more than they can exclude themselves from their social obligations by refusing to answer their phones. We have to make them see that—and in this instance, weincludes you.”

“I don’t want to play,” Silas told the man of many masks flatly. “I’m retired, and I intend to stay that way. All I want is out of here. If you want me to beg, I’m begging. Tell your machine to give me back my IT. At the very least, tell it not to grab me so hard every time I twitch. I couldn’t break free if I tried.”

“It won’t be long now,” the monk said. “If I’d realized in advance that Helier would play it this way I’d have made things easier for you. My people could have found you two days ago, and I didn’t want to make it tooeasy. I really am sorry. I’ll give Helier two more hours, and if nobody’s found you by then I’ll tip off Interpol. They should be able to get the local police to you within twenty minutes—it’s not as if you were way out in the desert.”

“Two fucking hours may seem like nothing to you,” Silas muttered hoarsely, “but you aren’t sitting where I am.”

“Oh, pull yourself together, man. You’re not going to die. You’ve got sore wrists and ankles, not a ruptured ulcer. I’m trying to make you understand something important. I could almost believe that you really haveretired.”

“I have, damn it! I got heartily sick of the whole fucking thing! I’m done working night and day in search of the biotech Holy Grail. I’m a hundred and twenty-six years old, for God’s sake! I need time to rest, time to let the world go by, time without pressure. Eveline and Karol might have been entirely swallowed up by Conrad’s obsessions, but I haven’t. I watched Mary die and I watched Damon grow up, both of them so tightly bound by those obsessions that they were smothered. Damon had a life in front of him, but the only way Mary could break free, in the end, was to die. Not me. I retired.”

“You really don’t see, do you?” said the fake monk patronizingly. “You’ve never been able to break free from the assumptions of the twenty-first century. In spite of all that IT has achieved, you still take death and decay for granted. You think that your stake in the world will end in ten or twenty or fifty years’ time, when the copying errors accumulated in your DNA will have filled out your body with so many incompetent cells that all the nanomachines in the world won’t be able to hold you together.”

“It’s true,” Silas growled, surprising himself with the harshness of his voice. “Even men fifty or a hundred years younger than I am are being willfully blind if they think that advances in IT will keep pushing back the human life span faster than they’re aging. Sure, it’s only a matter of time before rejuve technology will cut a lot deeper than erasing wrinkles. It really will be possible to clear out the greater number of the somatic cells which aren’t functioning properly and replace them with nice fresh ones newly calved from generative tissue—but only the greater number. Even if you really could replace them all, you’d still be up shit creek without a paddle because of the Miller effect. You doknow about the Miller effect, I suppose, even though you’re not a biologist by trade or vocation?”

“I know what the Miller effect is,” the monk assured him. “I’m thoroughly familiar with allthe brave attempts that have been made to produce a biotech fountain of youth—even those made way back at the dawn of modern history, when Adam Zimmerman was barely cold in his cryonic vault. I know that there’s a fundamental difference between slowing aging down and stopping it, and I know that there’s an element of paradox in every project which aims to reverse the aging process. I’m not claiming that anyonenow alive can become truly emortal no matter how fast the IT escalator moves. I might have to settle for two hundred years, Damon Hart for two-fifty or three hundred. Even embryos engineered in the next generation of Helier wombs for maximum resistance to aging might not be able to live much beyond a thousand years—only time will tell. But that’s not the point.

“The point, Silas, is that even if you and I won’t be able to play parent to that new breed, Damon’s generation will. Conrad Helier and I must be reckoned mortalgods—but the children for whom we hold the world in trust will be an order of magnitude less mortal than we. The world we shape must be shaped for them, not for old men like you. Those who have had the role of planner thrust upon them must plan for a thousand years, not for ten or a hundred.

“Conrad Helier understands that well enough, even if you don’t—but he still thinks that he can play a lone hand, sticking to his own game while others play theirs. We can’t allow that. We aren’t like the corpsmen of old, Silas—we don’t want to tell you and him what to do and we don’t want ownership of everything you and he produce, but we do want you both to join the club. We want you both to play with the team. What you did in the Crash was excusable, and we’re very grateful to you for delivering the stability of the New Reproductive System, but what Conrad Helier is doing now has to be planned and supervised by all of us. We have to fit it into ourschemes.”

“Exactly what isit that you think Conrad’s followers are doing?” Silas asked curiously.

“If you don’t know,” the monk replied tartly, “they must have been so deeply hurt by your decision to retire that they decided to cut you out entirely. Even if that’s so, though, I’d be willing to bet that all you have to do is say you’re sorry and ask to be let back in. You really should. I can understand that you felt the need to take a holiday, but people like us don’t retire. We know that the only way to make life worth living is to play our part in the march of progress. We may not have true emortality, but we have to try to be worthy of it nevertheless.”

“Cut the Eliminator crap,” Silas said tersely. “You’re not one of them.”

“No, I’m not,” the monk admitted, “for which you should be duly thankful. I do like the Eliminators, though. I don’t altogether approve of them—there’s too much madness in their method, and murder can no longer be reckoned a forgivable crime—but I like the way that they’re prepared to raise an issue that too many people are studiously avoiding: who isworthy of immortality? They’re going about it backwards, of course—we’ll never arrive at a population entirely composed of the worthy by a process of quasi-Darwinian selection—but we allneed to think about the myriad ways in which we might strive to be worthy of the gifts of technological progress. We are heirs to fabulous wealth, and the next generation will be heirs to an even greater fortune. We have to make every effort to live up to the responsibilities of our inheritance. That’s what this is all about, Silas. We don’t want to eliminate your estranged family—but they have to acknowledge the responsibilities of their inheritance. The fact that they played a major role in shaping that inheritance doesn’t let them off the hook.”

“And if they won’t?” Silas wanted to know.

“They have to. The position of God isn’t vacant anymore. The privilege of Creation has to be determined by negotiation. Conrad Helier may be a hundred and thirty-seven years old, but he’s still thinking and still learning. Once we get through to him, he’ll understand.”

“You don’t know him as well as I do,” Silas said, having finally become incapable of guarding his tongue so carefully as never to let any implication slip that Conrad Helier might not be dead.

“There’s time,” his captor assured him. “But not, I fear, for any further continuation of this conversation. I don’t know who, for the moment, but somebodyhas finally managed to locate you. I hope we’ll meet again, here or in some other virtual environment.”

“If we ever meet in real space,” Silas hissed with all the hostility and bravado he could muster, “you’d better make sure that your IT is in good shape. You’ll need it.”

The woodland blanked out, leaving him adrift in an abstract holding pattern. He heard a door crash inwards, battered down by brute force, and he heard voices calling out the news that he was here. He felt a sudden pang of embarrassment as he remembered that he was nearly naked, and knew that he must present a horribly undignified appearance.

“Get me out of this fucking chair!” he cried, making no attempt at all to censor the pain and desperation from his voice.

The hood was raised from his eyes and tilted back on a pivot, allowing him to look at his cell and his rescuer. The light dazzled him for a moment, although it wasn’t very bright, and he had to blink tears away from the corners of his eyes.

There was no way to identify the man who stood before him, looking warily from side to side as if he couldn’t believe that there were no defenders here to fight for custody of the prisoner; the newcomer’s suitskin had a hood whose faceplate was an image-distorting mask. He was carrying a huge handgun that didn’t look like a standard police-issue certified-nonlethal weapon.

“I think it’s okay,” Silas told the stranger. “They left some time ago. Just cut me loose, will you?”

The stranger must have been looking him directly in the face, but no eyes were visible behind the distorting mask.

“Who are you?” Silas asked as it dawned on him belatedly that his troubles might not be over.

The masked man didn’t reply. A second man came into the room behind him, equally anonymous and just as intimidatingly armed. Meanwhile, the first man extended his gun—holding its butt in both hands—and fired at point-blank range.

Silas hadn’t time to let out a cry of alarm, let alone to feel the pain of the damage that must have followed the impact or to appreciate the full horror of the fact that without his protective IT even a “certified-nonlethal” shot might easily be the death of him.