Текст книги "Inherit the Earth"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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Текущая страница: 20 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

Twenty-five

D

amon never did lose consciousness, but the consciousness he kept had little in reserve for keeping track of what was happening to his paralyzed body. He knew that he had been loaded into the back of a car which roared off at high speed, and he knew that when the car eventually stopped he was taken out again and bundled into a helicopter—but the only part of the journey that really commandedhis attention was the time they tried to force his paralyzed limbs into a different configuration so that they could strap him into one of the helicopter’s seats. He heard a great deal more than he saw, but most of what he heard was curses and oblique complaints from which he wouldn’t have learned anything worth a damn even if he’d been able to concentrate.

What he wasconscious of, to the expense of almost everything else, was the battle inside his body for control of his neurones. He knew that the sensation of being occupied by hundreds of thousands of ants burrowing their way through his tissues wasn’t reallythe movement of his nanomachines, but it was hard to imagine it any other way. It wasn’t especially painful, but it was severely discomfiting, both psychologically and physically. He was reasonably certain that he would come through it safely and sanely, but it was an ordeal nevertheless.

Damon found a little time to wonder whether the two hit men—which was what they presumably were, given that they certainly didn’t seem to be cops—knew what effect the weapons they carried might have on moderately IT-rich victims, and whether they cared, but it wasn’t until he began to recover fully possession of himself that he was able to pay close attention to their conversation. By that time, the thrum of the helicopter’s rotors had bludgeoned them into taciturnity—a taciturnity that might have lasted until they landed had not the man he’d ambushed in the alley noticed that Damon was recovering from the effects of the shot. That was enough to restart the catalogue of complaints; his luckless pursuer obviously had a lot of grievances to air.

“You’ve got a real problem, you know that?” the tall man said. “You hear me? A real problem.”

Damon fought for the composure necessary to move his head from side to side and blink his eyes. When he eventually succeeded in clearing his blurred vision, he was surprised to see that the bruise on the man’s face was in better condition than it had any right to be. Somewhere along the line, he’d slapped some synthetic skin over it to provide his resident nanotech with an extra resource. The expression surrounding the bruise was one of whiney resentment.

Damon was sitting in a seat directly behind the helicopter’s pilot. The shorter man who’d come to Madoc’s apartment with the man with the fading bruise was sitting beside the pilot; the copter only had the four seats. Reflexively, Damon moved his reluctant hand toward the lock on his safety harness, but the tall man reached out to stop him.

“Careful!” he said. “You got me in enough trouble as it is. Anything else happens to you, I’ll be out of a job for sure. Pleasesit tight. None of this was supposed to happen. If you’d just given me time to talk. . . like I said, you got a real problem, lashing out like that all the time. It’s crazy!”

Damon felt an impulse to laugh, but he wasn’t yet in any shape to act on it. He tried to edge sideways so that he could look out of the porthole beside his seat, but the effort proved too much. Beyond the pilot, though, he could see dark green slopes and snow-capped peaks as well as sky. He thought he recognized Cobblestone Mountain directly ahead of the copter’s course, although it was difficult to believe that they’d come so far in what had not seemed to be a long time.

“It isn’t funny,” the tall man complained, having deciphered the attempted laugh. “I guess I might have asked for it, the first time, waiting till you were in the alley before I tried to catch up and not realizing you’d gone in there to jump me—but what was all that stuff at the kid’s apartment? We toldyou we weren’t the police. Stupid kid could have got himself badly hurt.”

By the time this speech was finished Damon had got his head far enough up to take a peep through the porthole, but it didn’t tell him anything he didn’t already know. They were in the hills, heading for the Sespe Wilderness.

“What happened to Madoc?” Damon asked weakly.

“We left him laid out on the kid’s bed, with the VE pak cradled in his arms. The police will have them both by now—and don’t blame us for having to do it that way. All we wanted was to get the tape to where it was always supposed to go. We would have let Tamlin go his own way if you hadn’t practically started a war. The kid’s in hospital again, but he’ll be okay. You’ll have to talk to him about his attitude—he doesn’t have the IT for that kind of action.”

“You didn’t know I was there, did you?” Damon whispered, just to make sure. “I thoughtI left you in no shape to follow me.”

“Damn right. Dirty trick, kicking a guy in the head when he’s down. When I woke up I had to get new instructions. I was told to go get the tape, so that we could deliver it to Interpol, just as we intended when we left it with the burned-out body. You really are a nuisance, you know that? Thanks to you, I am having the worst day of my life. All I wanted to do was talkto you—and now you’ve reallymessed things up.”

“You followed me into the alley because you wanted to talk to me?”

“Sure. Once you’d got rid of Yamanaka’s bugs my employers figured it was safe to have a private word. You could have had it in town and been free and clear by dinnertime, if you hadn’t taken it into your fool head to start a shooting match in a public corridor.”

“ Youstarted a shooting match,” Damon pointed out. “Lenny only started a brawl.”

“Either way,” the tall man said in an aggrieved tone, “the cops will have dug out every bug in the walls by now and run the tapes. Your face, my face . . . and the face of my colleague here, who had no option but to pull his gun before your friend carved him up. All you had to do was let us in, but you had to wade in and we had to defend ourselves any way we could. Violence escalates—and now we’re allin Yamanaka’s file. You could have cost us our jobs.”

“How sad,” Damon muttered. “Who exactly isyour employer?”

“I can’t answer that,” the tall man complained. “All I wanted was a quiet word, and now I’m up for kidnapping. They have my face. They never got my face before, but who knows what’ll happen now? I could be in real trouble.”

“Why?” Damon wanted to know. “How many kidnappings did you do beforethey got a picture of your face?”

His captor wasn’t about to answer that one either.

“Why didn’t your employerhave his quiet word before he turned me loose last time?” Damon demanded, allowing his tone to declare that hewas the one who had the serious grievance, even though he no longer felt as if he were a fleshy ants’ nest. “Why come after me again, after a mere matter of hours?”

“Something else went wrong,” the tall man muttered. “You Heliers are absolute hell to deal with, I’ll give you that.”

“What?”

The man with the bruise shrugged his shoulders impatiently. “We were monitoring an eye at the place we left Arnett,” he said. “We were expecting hugs all round when your people came to get him—but that wasn’t the way it went. They shot him! Can you believe that? They shothim. Next thing we know, he’s been dumped in the road!”

“Are you sure they killedhim?” Damon asked sharply.

The tall man hesitated before he shrugged again, which suggested to Damon that it was a recognized possibility that Silas hadn’t been killed and that the body dumped in the road might have been the same kind of substitute as the body left for Madoc to find. “His nanotech had all been flushed,” the man with the bruise said eventually. “They must have known that if they watched the tape we put out on the Web. Maybe they were just knocking him out—but they had no reason to do that if they were yourpeople. Who’d ever have thought Eliminators could be that smart, that well organized?”

“Who are mypeople supposed to be?” Damon asked him. “You mean Conrad Helier’s people—except that Conrad Helier’s dead. So is Karol Kachellek, except that you probably don’t believe that either. So who’s supposed to be running things, given that Eveline Hywood’s a quarter of a million miles away in lunar orbit? Me?”

The tall man shook his head sadly. “All I wanted was a quiet talk,” he repeated, as if he simply could not believe that such an innocent intention had led to brawling, shooting, and kidnapping—all of it dutifully registered on spy eyes that the police would have debriefed by now.

“Where are we going?” Damon asked.

“Out of town,” the tall man informed him gruffly. “Your fault, not mine. We could have sorted it out back home if you hadn’t blown it. Now, we have to take it somewhere reallyprivate.”

The Sespe and Sequoia Wilderness reserves had supposedly been rendered trackless in the wake of the Second Plague War—by which time its chances of ever getting back to an authentic wilderness state were only a little better than zero—but Damon knew that closure against wheeled vehicles didn’t signify much when helicopters like this one could land in a clearing thirty meters across.

“You can’t get more private than Olympus,” Damon said—but as he looked out again at the nonvirtual mountains which were now surrounding the helicopter he realized that he had actually contrived to force his adversaries to take a step they had not intended. This time, there was a record of his abduction in Interpol’s hands. This time, Interpol could put faces and names to his captors, or at least to their foot soldiers. He knew that he could claim no credit for the coup—it was all the result of a chapter of accidents and misconceptions—but the fact remained that the game players had finally been taken beyond the limits of their game plan. They had been forced to improvise. For the first time, PicoCon—assuming that it wasPicoCon—was losing its grip.

“Your boss is scared,” Damon said, working through the train of thought. “He thinks it really might have been the Eliminators who got to Silas, after the people he expected to collect him never showed up. One minute he was convinced the message Silas was supposed to deliver was home and dry, the next he was unconvinced again. You’re right—if Silas isdead you could be in real trouble, especially now that Interpol has two faces in the frame. Mr. Yamanaka doesn’t like the way you’ve been running rings around him. He’ll come after you with such ferocity that you’ll be very lucky indeed to get away with only losing your job. How much damage could you do to PicoCon, do you think, if you and your partner decided to talk?”

The tall man didn’t react to the mention of PicoCon. “All you had to do was listen,” he complained. “You could have saved us all a hell of a lot of trouble.”

“If you were the ones who took Silas in the first place,” Damon pointed out, “and posted that stupid provocative note under my door, you went to a hell of a lot of trouble yourselves, all because you wouldn’t listenwhen we told you that Conrad Helier is dead.”

“Sure,” said the tall man scornfully. “Helier’s dead, and para-DNA is a kind of extraterrestrial tar, just like Hywood says. All you ever had to do was listen—but now it’s getting ugly and it’s all yourfault.”

“ Whatdoes Eveline say about para-DNA?” Damon wanted to know.

“If you spent more time listening to the news and less playing cloak-and-dagger, you’d know. She made an announcement to the entire world, press conference and all. Para-DNA is extraterrestrial—the first representative of an entirely new life system, utterly harmless but absolutely fascinating. We are not alone, the universe of life awaits us, etcetera, etcetera. Now we know where you got your impulsive nature from, don’t we?”

“Are you saying that para-DNA isn’textraterrestrial—or that it isn’t harmless?”

“I don’t know,” the tall man informed him, as if it were somehow Damon’s fault that he didn’t know. “All I know is that if it’s on the news, it’s more than likely to be lies, and that if the name Hywood’s attached to it then it must have something to do with our little adventure. I may be only the hired help but I’m not stupid. Whatever all this is about, your people aren’t responding sensibly. It doesn’t take a genius to figure that Hywood was supposed to talk to my employers before she started shooting her mouth off to the whole wide world, but she decided to kick off early instead. The whole damn lot of you are so damn touchy. Must be hereditary.”

Damon didn’t bother to point out that Eveline Hywood wasn’t his mother. Conrad Helier washis real father, and Conrad Helier’s closest associates had provided the nurture to complement his nature. It had never occurred to him before that his contentiousness might be a legacy of his genes or his upbringing, but he could see now that someone considering his reactions to this strange affair alongside those of his foster parents might well feel entitled to lump them all together.

The helicopter now began its descent toward a densely wooded slope which, while nowhere near as precipitate as the slope of the virtual mountain where he had talked to the robot man, nevertheless seemed wild enough and remote enough to suit anyone’s idea of perfect privacy.

It was just as well that the helicopter could land in a thirty-meter circle, because the space where it touched down wasn’t significantly bigger. The tall man undid Damon’s safety harness before he could do it himself and said: “Can you get down?”

“I’m fine,” Damon assured him. “No thanks to you. You’re not coming?”

“I’m far from fine—and that’s entirely down to you,” the man with the bruise countered. “ Wehave to disappear. It wasn’t exactly a pleasure meeting you, but at least I’ll never see you again.”

“You know,” said Damon as the pilot reached back to open the door beside him, “you really have a problem. Apart from being an incompetent asshole, you have this moronic compulsion to blame other people for your own mistakes.” He got the distinct impression that the tall man would have hit him, if only he’d dared.

“Thanks,” said Damon to the pilot as he lowered himself to the ground. He ducked down low the way everybody always did on TV, although he knew that he was in no real danger from the whirling rotor blades.

There was a cabin on the edge of the clearing that looked at first glance as if it must have been two hundred years old if it were a day—but Damon saw as soon as he approached it that its “logs” had been gantzed out of wood pulp. He judged that its architect had been a relatively simple-minded AI. The edifice probably hadn’t been there more than a year and shouldn’t have been there at all. Given that the nearest road was halfway to Fillmore, though, it was certainly private; it probably had no electricity supply and no link to the Web. It was a playpen for the kind of people who thought that they could still get back in touch with “nature.”

The man who was waiting for Damon stayed inside until the helicopter had risen from the ground, only showing himself in the doorway of the cabin when no one but Damon could see his face. Damon saw immediately that he was an oldman, well preserved by nanotech without being prettified by rejuve cosmetology. His hair was white and he was wearing silver-rimmed eyeglasses. Nobody had to wear spectacles for corrective purpose anymore, so Damon assumed that he must have become used to wearing them in his youth, way back in the twenty-first century, and had kept them as a badge of antique eccentricity.

“Are you the Mirror Man?” Damon asked as he approached.

The ancient shook his head. “The Mirror Man’s off the project,” he said, evidently untroubled by the admission he was making in recognizing the description. “I’ve been appointed in his stead, to tidy things up—and to calm things down. Come in and make yourself at home.” He pronounced the final phrase with conscientiously lighthearted sarcasm.

“I’m a prisoner,” Damon pointed out as the other stood aside to let him pass, “not a guest.”

“If you’d only paused to listen to what the man had to say,” the old man replied mildly, “we’d have offered you a formal invitation. I think you’d have found it too tempting to refuse. You can call me Saul, by the way.” It wasn’t an invitation to intimacy; Damon guessed that if the man was called Saul at all it would be his surname, not his given name.

“Stay away from the road to Damascus,” Damon muttered as he surveyed the room into which he was being ushered. “Revelations can really screw up your life.”

The cabin’s interior was more luxurious than the exterior had implied, but it had a gloss of calculated primitivism. Authentic logs were burning within the proscenium arch of an inauthentic stone fireplace set upon a polished stone hearth. There were three armchairs arranged in an arc around the hearth, although there was no one waiting in the cabin except the old man.

There was a stick of bread on the table, together with half a dozen plastic storage jars and three bottles: two of wine, one of whiskey. Damon almost expected to see hunting trophies on the wall, but that would have been too silly. Instead there were old photographs mounted in severe black frames: photographs taken in the days when the wilderness had only been half spoiled.

“Are we expecting somebody else?” Damon asked.

“I hope so,” said Saul. “To tell you the truth, I’m rather hoping that your father might drop by. If he’s still on Earth, he’s had time to reach the neighborhood by now. If he’s stranded out in space, though . . . well, we’ll just have to wait and see.”

Damon didn’t bother with any tokenistic assertion of his father’s membership of the ultimate silent majority. Instead, he said: “Nobody came in response to your other invitations. Why should anyone come now?”

“Because the cat’s out of the bag,” the old man told him. “Eveline Hywood hurried the announcement through, in spite of everything. When the grim satisfaction has worn off, though, she’ll remember that this is only the beginning. Your father’s shown us that he won’t be bullied, and that he’s more than willing to fight fire with fire, tape for tape and appearance for appearance—but he can’t move to the next stage of his plan without clearing it with us because he now knows that we know what that next phase will be—and that if we think it’s necessary, we’ll close the whole thing down.”

“Who’s we?” Damon wanted to know—and was optimistic, for once, that he might be told.

“All of us. Not just PicoCon, by any means. Your father may think that he made the world, and we’re prepared to give him due credit for saving it, but we’re the ones who ownit, and we’ve already made ourpeace. If he’s absolutely determined to return to the days when we were all on the same side, that’s fine by us—just so long as it’s ourside that everybody’s on.”

Damon pulled one of the armchairs back from the fire before sitting down in it. He’d thought that he had recovered well enough from the shot in the back, but once he’d taken the weight off his feet he realized that nobody could get shot, even in today’s world, without a considerable legacy of awkwardness and fatigue. He stirred restlessly, unable to find a comfortable posture.

Saul drew back the neighboring chair in the same careful manner, but he went to the table instead of sitting down. “You want food?” he said. “You haven’t eaten in quite a while.”

Damon knew that he was being offered waiter service, but he didn’t want to take it. “I’ll help myself, if you don’t mind,” he said.

“Somehow,” said the old man, peering over the rim of his spectacles, “I just knewyou were going to say that.”

Twenty-six

I

never delivered your message,” Damon said when he’d finished licking his fingers. He was sitting more comfortably now—comfortably enough not to want to get up for anything less than a five-star emergency. Saul was still standing up, hovering beside the table while he finished his own meal.

“Yes, you did,” the old man countered. “Hywood’s more sensitive than you give her credit for. You got through to her, far better than you got through to Kachellek.”

“Is Karol really dead?”

“I honestly don’t know. I doubt it very much. The business with Silas Arnett took us aback a bit, but I sincerely hope that it was merely a matter of playing to the grandstand: tape for tape, as I said, appearance for appearance. Ourfake body’s better than yourfake body andwe got our tape to Interpol while you let yours go astray, so up yours. That hasto be your father, don’t you think? Eveline’s as clever as she’s stubborn, but she isn’t angry or vengeful. But you’dhave done it all, wouldn’t you? You’d have lashed out as soon as you came under attack—and even when you thought you’d won, you’d still have put out one last kick in the head for good measure. You’re Conrad Helier’s son all right.”

“The only father I ever had was Silas Arnett,” Damon said, trying to sound offhanded about it. He sipped from his glass. It was only tap water; he’d thought it best to avoid the whiskey and the wine.

“Was it Silas you ran away from?” Saul countered. “Is it Silas you’re still kicking against? I think he’s just your big brother, who happened to baby-sit a lot. Dead or not, in thathousehold Conrad Helier was always your one and only father. He still is.”

That was too near to the knuckle to warrant any response.

“Why would you send the hired help to invite me up here?” Damon asked. “You already had me not forty-eight hours ago and you threw me back into the pond. You didn’t reallyneed me to get your message across to Eveline.”

Saul smiled. “The Mirror Man thought that we did,” he said. “In any case, we had to let you go before we could invite you to join us in a suitably polite fashion. We areinviting you to join us, by the way. Partly because it would give us a link to the Lagrange-Five biotech cowboys, but mainly because we think you’re good. Now you’ve seen what virtual reality technics can really do, it’s time for you to get properly involved, don’t you think?”

“You’re offering me a job?”

“Yes.”

“With PicoCon?”

“Yes. You could go to OmicronA if you’d prefer—it comes to the same thing in the end.”

“I’m not sure I’m ready for that,” Damon said slowly.

“I think you are,” Saul told him, finally condescending to take the seat opposite Damon’s, leaving the one in between for whoever might turn up to take it. “I think you’re as thoroughly frustrated with a life of petty crime as Hiru Yamanaka is with the business of catching petty criminals. You must understand by now what drew you into that life—and if you understand that, you must understand how pointless it is.”

Damon said nothing to that. Saul didn’t press him for an answer but simply settled back in his chair as if he were preparing for a long heart-to-heart talk.

“We live in a world where crime has become much easier to detect than of old,” Saul observed. “A world so abundantly populated by tiny cameras that hardly anything happens unobserved. These ever present eyes are, of course, unconsulted unless and until the police have reason to believe that they might have recorded something significant, but everyone tempted to commit an antisocial act knows that he’s verylikely to be found out.

“If our New utopia really were a utopia, of course, its citizens wouldn’t want to commit antisocial acts, but the sad fact is that almost all of them do. In many cases, the desire to commit such acts is actually increasedby the awareness that such acts are so readily detectable. In operating as a deterrent, the high probability of detection also acts as a challenge. Everyone knows that spy eyes can be evaded and sometimes deceived—and everyone is ready to do it whenever an opportunity arises. No matter how intensive and efficient Building Security becomes, petty thefts will still occur—not because people need to steal, or because they’re avid to acquire whatever it is that they happen to be stealing, but simply because stealing proves that they’re still freeand that the spy eyes haven’t got the better of them. That’s natural, as an immediate reaction, but it’s no agenda for a lifelong career.”

“Tell that to the Eliminators,” Damon said. “They’re the ones who take it to extremes—extremes you’re not too proud to exploit if it suits you. The Mirror Man likesthe Eliminators.”

“It’s not a view I share,” Saul told him with a slight sigh. “I do understand them, because I’m of the same generation as most of them, but I think they’re foolish as well as wicked. They know that they’ve been condemned by evil fate to die, while some of those who come after them will be spared that necessity, so it’s not entirely surprising that some say to themselves: murderers were once condemned to die for their crime; why should I, who am condemned to die, refrain from murder? Why should I not enjoy the privilege of my fate? Why should I not accept the opportunity to make the only contribution I can to the coming world of immortals– the exclusion of someone who is unworthy of immortality?It’s not surprising—but it iswrong, and ultimately self-destructive.

“Operator one-oh-one, I gather, is rather looking forward to her day in court, in anticipation of being able to plead the Eliminator cause with all due eloquence before a large video audience. Perhaps you ought to watch her—and find a little of your own futility mirrored in hers. It’s time to set bitterness and its corollary hostility aside along with other childish things, Damon. Even present technology will give you a hundred and fifty years of adulthood, if you’ll only condescend to look after yourself. The technology of a hundred years hence might give you three hundred years more. Think what you might do, if you began now; think what you might help to build, if you decide to become one of the builders instead of one of the vandals.”

Damon knew that it all made sense, but he’d had a few thoughts of his own on the matter in spite of the hectic pace of the last few days, and he wasn’t ready to roll over just yet. “A little while ago,” he said, “I talked to a boy named Lenny Garon. You probably taped the conversation. I told him exactly what you’ve just told me: to look after himself, to keep his place on the escalator that might one day give him the chance to live forever. Afterwards, though, I got to wondering whether I might be taking too much for granted.

“We’ve all grown used to the familiar pattern, haven’t we? Every couple of years PicoCon or OmicronA pumps out a new fleet of nanotech miracles, which slow down the aging process just a little bit more or take rejuve engineering just a little bit deeper, chipping away at the Hayflick limit and the Miller effect and all the other little glitches that stand in the way of true emortality. Each new generation of products works its way down through the marketplace from the rich to the not-so-rich, and so on, every expansion of the consumer base adding cash to the megacorp coffers. But what if someone already hasthe secret of true emortality? What if the upper echelons of PicoCon already possess a nanotech suite which, so far as they can judge, will let them live forever? What if they decided, when they first obtained the secret, that it was a gift best reserved for the favored few rather than put on general release? After all, even under the New Reproductive System the stability of the population relies on people dying in significant numbers year after year, and megacorp planning depends on the steady flow of profits feeding a never-ending demand, a never-ending hunger. I could understand the temptation to hoard the gift away, couldn’t you?

“The only trouble is that everyone who was in on the secret—and everyone who subsequently discovered it—would have to be trustworthy. They’d have to be in the club. The men in control couldn’t have loose cannons threatening to go off at any moment, with no way of knowing where the blast would go. If there were a person like that around, the gods would have to silence him—but they’d have to find him first. As you’ve so carefully pointed out, a person like me can easily be exposed to thoroughgoing scrutiny in a world where every wall has eyes and ears . . . but some people really can stay out of sight, if they know where the darkest shadows are.

“It’s interesting to follow these flights of fancy occasionally, isn’t it, Mr. Saul? I still don’t know for sure why PicoCon is so desperate to locate a man who’s been dead for fifty years, do I?”

“That’s an interesting fantasy, Damon,” Saul replied. “Isn’t it a trifle paranoid, though? The idea that big corporations hold back all the best inventions in order to maintain their markets is as old as capitalism itself.”

“We live in a postcapitalist era, Mr. Saul,” Damon said earnestly. “The market isn’t everything—not anymore. We have to start thinking in terms of millennia rather than centuries. Gods have nobler goals in mind than vulgar profits—and you can spell profitsany way you like.”

Saul laughed at that, and there didn’t seem to be anything forced about the laughter. “I suppose that sophisticated biotechnics and clever nanomachinery are so similar to magic that we havebegun behaving rather like the magicians of legend,” he admitted. “We have a tendency to be jealous and secretive; some of us, at least, have learned to love deceit for its own sake. Has your father’s team behaved any differently?”

“I think Eveline would argue that your end is merely her means,” Damon countered. “She’d say that what the Mirror Man told me—and what you’re telling me now—is just advertising, bait on a line to reel me in. She’d argue that you don’t really have any long-term objectives except preserving your advantages and maintaining your comforts—that you’re obsessed about controlling things because you couldn’t bear to be controlled. She sees the megacorps as an anchor holding progress back rather than a cutting edge hastening its progress forward.”