Текст книги "Inherit the Earth"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

“And she’d be echoing Conrad Helier every inch of the way—but she’d be wrong. The point is, what do youthink?”

“I think that you and the Mirror Man really do believe that you’re the new gods and I think you’re as jealous as any god of old. You want to plan the future, and you want to make sure that everyone will play his allotted part in the plan—or at least that no one’s in a position to put a spoke in your wheel.”

“I didn’t ask you what you think I believe. I asked you what youthink.”

Damon had known exactly what he was being asked—but he wasn’t sure that he’d made up his mind about that. “I doubt that you’ll ever get everyoneto agree about the objectives of the game,” he ventured. “I think it might be healthier if you didn’t even try. After the last couple of days, though, I think one thing you doneed to get settled is that the game shouldn’t be played with real bullets—even certified-nonlethal ones. There’s a lot to be said for conflict, if it maintains the dynamic tension that generates social change. There’s even something to be said for combat, so long as it isn’t mortal, but the distinction between cuts that heal and cuts that don’t isn’t as easy to make as some people imagine. I don’t approve of Elimination either, but I don’t want a two-tier system. Everybody should get a chance at real life, whether they’re team players or not.”

Damon never found out what Saul’s reply to that would have been, and he wasn’t sorry when the interruption came. He needed time to think about the offer Saul had made him, and he knew that there was vital information that he still didn’t have. When the cabin door opened behind him, he was grateful for the respite.

The newcomer looked very tired—as well he might, given that there had been no sound of rotor blades. He’d come on foot, at least for the last kilometer or so.

Damon figured that Saul would be disappointed not to see Conrad Helier, but on his own account he was profoundly glad that the man standing in the doorway was Silas Arnett, very much alive.

“It’s very good of you to come, Silas,” Saul said with only a hint of mocking irony. “Do join us.”

As Silas came forward Damon jumped to his feet and ran to meet him. It wasn’t a five-star emergency, but it was a five-star opportunity. Silas seemed slightly surprised, but he accepted the hug before wincing under its pressure.

“Mind my stigmata,” he muttered. The wound in his chest was overlaid by his suitskin, but the cloth clung so tightly to the contours of his chest that Damon could see the outlines of the swelling.

“I thought it really might have been the Eliminators who got to you first,” Damon said.

“It really might have been,” Silas agreed sourly. “As it was, they came too close for comfort to being accidentalEliminators. It seems that Karol thought it would be a good idea to declare me dead, just in case I decided to deny that heartfelt confession he put together on my behalf when I returned to public life. As you’ve probably found out, leaving the group means that they’re veryreluctant to trust you in future. Is this the piece of shit who was judge and prosecutor at my trial?”

Damon could feel the tension in Silas’s arms, and he knew that an affirmative answer was likely to call forth an immediate and violent response. He was sorely tempted to say yes, but Saul had softened him up just enough to make him hesitate. “He says not,” he said in the end. “He says we can call him Saul, but he didn’t say whether it’s his first name or his last.”

Silas obviously wasn’t immediately convinced by the first item of information, but he extricated himself from Damon’s embrace and looked hard at the seated man. “Oh shit!” he said eventually. “It really is you, isn’t it?”

“It’s been a long time, Silas,” Saul said evenly, “but everyone remembers the spectacles. You really didn’t know the man who conducted your interrogation, in spite of that teasing coda he tacked onto the broadcast tape. That was just to prepare the way for the VE pak that went astray—the one that falsely implied that the supposedly late Surinder Nahal was your captor.”

“Whereas, in fact,” Damon put in, “Surinder Nahal is presumably heading up PicoCon’s own zombie biotech team, in direct opposition to yours. Who is this guy, Silas?”

“His name really is Saul,” Silas admitted. “Frederick G. Saul was his favored signature way back when—but that was in the days when everybody knew what the G stood for without having it spelled out. I thought he was long dead, but I should have known better.”

“I never pretended to die,” the bespectacled man observed drily. “I just faded out of view. Would you like something to eat, Silas?”

“I’ve eaten,” Silas replied brusquely.

“To drink?”

Silas looked at Damon’s glass. “Just water,” he said. He let Saul go to the bathroom to get it while he studied Damon. Saul didn’t hurry.

“You all right?” Silas said. “I heard they shot you too.”

“Twice,” said Damon. “My own fault—the first time I wouldn’t lie down for the gas and the second time I wouldn’t wait for a polite invitation. I’m fine—and still alive by everyone’s reckoning, including the Eliminators who have me down as an enemy of mankind. What doesthe G stand for?”

“Gantz,” Silas told him, watching the bathroom door at which Saul had not yet reappeared. “He’s Leon Gantz’s grandson, nephew of Paul and Ramon—and his other granddaddy was one of the insiders in the Zimmerman coup. He’s one of the last best products of the Old Reproductive System.”

Damon said nothing while he mulled over the possible significance of this revelation.

“How’s Diana?” Silas asked, groping for a topic of conversation more suited to an emotional reunion between a foster father and his estranged child.

“We split up,” Damon told him. By way of retaliation he asked: “How’s Cathy?”

“She thinks I’m dead. I haven’t decided yet whether to let her in on the secret.”

“But you’re going to keep it from the rest of the world?” Damon asked, with one eye on the third party who had just reemerged from the bathroom.

Silas shrugged as he accepted a tumbler of water from Frederick Gantz Saul’s steady hand; his own was trembling slightly. “Between them, PicoCon and Karol haven’t left me a lot of choice, have they? I’m flattered that Eveline wants me back, but it would have been nice to have a less pressured decision to make.”

“ Isit just Karol and Eveline?” Damon asked. “Or is there someone else jerking theirstrings?”

It seemed that Silas couldn’t quite meet Damon’s eye, so he looked sideways at Saul, as if to say that there were secrets that still needed to be kept.

“He’s been told a thousand times,” Saul said, “but he still won’t believe it. He even tried to imply that it was youhe was rebelling against, because you were the only real father figure he had. You’re the one who owes it to him to explain that flesh and blood do not a father make.”

“Clever bastard, isn’t he?” Silas said to Damon. Then he sighed theatrically. “We lied to you, Damon. We lied to the world. Conrad’s alive. Not on Earth, mind—but he isalive. I didn’t want to lie to you, but by the time I was ready to break ranks I wasn’t sure I could tell you without also telling the world.”

It was no longer a surprise, but it wasa shock of sorts. Damon had to sit down again, and this time he looked into the fire, at the glowing ash flaking from the half-consumed logs.

Silas took the seat next to him: the seat that had been reserved for him all along. “What else do you want to know?” he said quietly. “Saul knows it all by now, I suppose—but he might not have given you a straight account of it. I’m not here to negotiate with him, or to set the seal on any agreements. I’m just here to acknowledge that we’ve taken note of his concerns.”

“So he really is playing God,” Damon said, meaning Conrad Helier. “Even to the extent of moving in mysterious ways.”

“We’re not interested in playing God,” Silas countered. “That’s Saul’sway of looking at the world. The man who taunted me while he made up that fatuous tape mistook the meaning of that quote he flung in my face. We never aimed to occupythe vacant throne of God—we just decided that we had to do our bit to help compensate for its vacancy. We’re not interested in moving into Olympus—we never have been.”

“You’d be happier in the palace of Pandemonium, no doubt?” Damon suggested sarcastically.

“Damon, I don’t want to be a god and I certainlydon’t want to be a devil. I’m a man, like other men. So is Conrad.”

“Except that you’re both supposed to be dead. I couldn’t believe that my father had faked his death, even though the Mirror Man seemed so very sure. Even after the Mirror Man had shown me that if anyone in the world had the technical resources to makesure, it was him, I wouldn’t concede. I couldn’t believe that Conrad Helier could be so hypocritical—to preach the gospel of posthumous reproduction as forcefully as he did, and then go into hiding while his friends brought up his own child. If you and he are men like other men, how come there’s one law for the rest and another for you?”

“Conrad did back himself into a corner,” Silas admitted. “Sometimes, when you change your mind, you have to figure out how best to limit the damage. Being men like other men, Conrad and I don’t always get things right. If you live as long as you might, Damon, you’ll make plenty of errors of judgment along the way.”

“Like designing the viruses which caused the Crash? You did that too, I suppose?”

“We designed one of them. To this day, I don’t know for sure who designed the others, although we always suspected that Surinder Nahal must have made at least one—and it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if Frederick G. Saul had a hand in it somewhere, even if the hand in question was only clutching a thick wad of cash. It’s possible that some of the transformers really did arise naturally—in which case we needn’t have bothered—but I always thought the Gaian Mystics were fools to insist beforehand that Ma Nature would find a way, and even bigger fools to insist afterwards that she had. The arguments in the second of my fake confessions were good ones: we didn’t kill anybody; we just took away a power which should never have been claimed as a right. When the multiplication of the species reached the point at which the ecosphere stood in imminent danger of irreversible injury, the increase had to be halted, and the reproduction of individuals had to be limited in the interests of the whole community. The Crash had to happen. Conrad tried to make it as painless as possible. If you’d been in his place you’d have done it too.”

“So why not take credit for it? Why not admit it, instead of letting the despised Gaian Mystics credit it to the Earth Mother? Why let it hang over your reputation like the sword of Damocles, waiting for a rival megacorp or a maverick Eliminator to cut it loose?”

“The fallout would have interfered with our work. If Conrad had tangled himself up with the necessity to plead his case in the media, he wouldn’t have been able to get the New Reproductive System up and running so quickly. Sometimes, hypocrisy is unavoidable.”

Damon curled his lip righteously. “And it still is, isn’t it?” he said. “Otherwise, Conrad would be able to stand up and take due credit for his latest parlor trick. Hedesigned para-DNA, didn’t he? Eveline’s so-called discovery is just one more Big Lie—a lie that Mr. Saul’s friends were trying to nip in the bud. That’s what the whole pantomime was intended to do: squash yourplan before it had a chance to interfere with theirs.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Silas said sourly. “As soon as I retired, I was out of it. After that, neither Eveline nor Karol would give me the time of day. You’ll have to ask Saul for recentintelligence of Conrad’s plans.”

Saul had taken his own seat by now. “You’re too modest, Silas,” he said. “You knew the way things were heading. Isn’t that why you left?”

“G for Gantz,” Silas repeated. “Is that reallywhat this has all been about? Keep your sticky hands off mytoys?”

“No, it isn’t,” Saul replied sharply. “It isn’t a pettymatter at all. I only wish your friends had realized that.”

“You’re losing me,” Damon observed.

Saul said nothing, stubbornly waiting for Silas to take the responsibility. “You’re right, Damon,” Silas said eventually. “Para-DNA is a laboratory product. We worked on it for years: a non-DNA life system capable of forming its own ecospheres in environments more extreme than the ones DNA can readily cope with. At first we were talking in terms of bridging the gap between the organic and the inorganic—a whole new nanotech combining the best features of both. The early talk about applications was all about seeding Mars and the asteroids, perhaps as a step in terraformation but not necessarily. Conrad was disappointed about the failure of our probes to find extraterrestrial life, and doubly disappointed by the fact that all the pre-Crash arks that set out in search of new Ararats seemed to have failed in their quest. It was another little flaw in the universal design which Conrad set out to correct. He didn’t think of it as playing God—merely compensating once again, in a wholly humanway, for the vacancy of the divine throne.”

“But that was only the firstplan, wasn’t it?” Saul put in.

“Yes,” Silas admitted. “Eventually, Conrad began considering other possible applications. There were a lot of people who were glad that the probes and the arks hadn’t turned up anything at all: people who’d always thought of alien life in terms of competition and invasion, as a potential threat. Conrad despised that kind of cowardice—but there’s something about the view of Earth you get from Lagrange-Five and all points farther out that gives people a jaundiced view of the people at the bottom of the gravity well. You’ve probably seen it in Eveline, if you’ve talked to her lately—and Mr. Saul is unfortunately correct in judging that Eveline’s not much more than Conrad’s echo.

“Anyway, for whatever reason, Conrad became increasingly disappointed by the development of the utopia which the New Reproductive System was supposed to have produced. He felt that the old world still cast too deep and dark a shadow over the new. He thought he’d put an end to the old patterns of inheritance, but he was overoptimistic—as you can readily judge from the fact that men like Frederick Gantz Saul are now safely ensconced in the uppermost echelons of PicoCon. For a brief while, when the viruses seemed to have the upper hand, everyone was on the same side—or so it appeared to Conrad—but when the menace had been overcome and the NRS was up and running, the old divisions soon reappeared.”

“Remember, though,” Saul put in, “that Conrad Helier was a backslider too. You’re the living proof of it, Damon. Even he couldn’t live up to the highest principles of the utopia he’d sketched out on his drawing board.”

Silas ignored that. “Conrad became convinced that Earth had lost its progressive impetus,” he said dully. “He became very fond of going on and on about new technology being used to preserve and reproduce the past instead of providing a womb for new ambition. It was mostly hot air, I thought—that was one of the reasons why we fell out. He came to believe that the only way to get things moving here on Earth in a way that would give proper support and encouragement to the people out on the frontier—the Lagrangists and their kin—was to get everyone back on the same side, united against a perceived threat. He came to think that Earth was in need of an alien invader: an all-purpose alien invader which could turn its hand to all kinds of tasks.”

Damon shook his head. “Para-DNA,” he said. “Utterly harmless but absolutely fascinating, etcetera, etcetera—until more and more of it turns up and it begins to reveal its true versatility. And what then, Silas? Conrad can’t possibly be backslider enough to start killing people.”

“No,” Silas said unhappily. “But he doesn’t have any compunctions at all about destroying property. That, I assume, is what attracted the attention and fervent interest of Frederick GantzSaul and the present controllers of the Gantz patents. Hence the warning shots fired across our bows. Hence this meeting, in the course of which Mr. Saul will no doubt commission both of us to explain to Conrad and Eveline that the fun’s over: that Eveline’s preemptive move to established the extraterrestrial credentials of para-DNA has to be our last. I assume he’s about to tell us that if the plan goes forward one more inch he and his friends will come after us hard, with authentically lethal force.”

Damon looked at Saul, who was still looking at Silas. “You shouldn’t have retired, Silas,” Saul remarked. “You should have stayed on the inside, to maintain a bridge to sanity.”

“Conrad’s not mad,” Silas was quick to retort. “His anxieties were real enough. He’s afraid that the earthbound majority of the human race is on the brink of exporting its spirit of adventure to virtual environments, by courtesy of PicoCon’s VE division and all the bright young men of Damon’s generation. The fashionability of VE games, VE dramas, and telephone VEs is already helping to move a substantial part of everyday human existence and everyday communication into a parallel dimension where artifice rules—and the cleverer the VE designers and the AI answering machines become, the more secure that reign will be.

“Conrad thinks that people shouldn’t be living in the ruins of the old world, contentedly huddling together in the better parts of the old cities, binding themselves ever more tightly to their stations in the Web like flies mummified in spider silk. Nor does he think it’s rebellion enough against that kind of a world for the disaffected young to use derelict neighborhoods as adventure playgrounds where they can carve one another up in meaningless ritual duels. He thinks that if we can’t maintain some kind of historical momentum, we’ll stagnate. He thinks that we have to build and keep on building, to grow and keep on growing, to expand the human empire and keep on expanding it, to make progress. If people need a spur to urge them on, he’s more than willing to provide it. I don’t say that’s right, but it’s not mad.

“Like the viruses which caused the Crash, Conrad intends para-DNA to be nonlethal weaponry—nothing more than a nuisance. It’s supposed to attack the structure of the cities and the structure of the Web; it’s supposed to make it impossible for the human race to dig itself a hole and live in manufactured dreams. It wouldn’t attack people, and it certainly wouldn’t murder people wholesale, but it would always be there:a sinister, creeping presence that would keep on cropping up where it’s least expected and where it’s least welcome, to remind people that there’s nothing– nothing, Damon—that can be taken for granted. Long life, the New Reproductive System, Earth, the solar system . . . all these things have to be managed, guarded, and guided. According to Conrad, we ought to be looking toward the realalien worlds instead of—or at least as well as—synthesizing comfortable simulacra. Whatever you or I might think of his methods, he’s not mad.”

“I can see why PicoCon thinks it’s necessary to rein you in, though,” Damon observed. “I can understand why the people who actually ownthe earth and all the edifices gantzed out of its surface would like the right of veto over schemes like that.”

“Maybe,” said Silas. “But I think Conrad mightargue that the current owners of the Gantz patents ought to be down on their bended knees thanking him for introducing an element of built-in obsolescence to their endeavors. Mr. Saul would presumably prefer it if the meek inherited the earth, because he thinks that a meek consumer is a good consumer. He and his kind are interested in what people want, and the more stable and predictable those wants become, the better he’ll like it—but Conrad’s more interested in what people need.”

Damon looked at Saul, who seemed quite untroubled by anything Silas had said.

“At the end of the day, though,” Damon pointed out, “Pico-Con calls the shots, here andin outer space. The secret couldn’t be kept—and now that it’s out, Conrad, Eveline, and Karol have no alternative but to abandon the plan.”

“That’s not for me to decide,” Silas said obdurately. “I’m not here to negotiate.”

“Of course not,” said Saul with a hint of malicious mockery. “But you can carry an olive branch, can’t you? One way or another, now that you’ve joined the ranks of the unsleeping dead, you’ll be able to transmit our offer of a just and permanent peace to Conrad Helier?”

“Just and permanent?” Silas echoed, presumably to avoid giving a straighter answer.

“That’s what we want,” Saul said. “It’s also, in our opinion, what we all need. We don’t want to bludgeon Conrad Helier—or the Ahasuerus Foundation for that matter—into reluctant and resentful capitulation. We really would like them to see things our way. That’s why we’re mortally offended by their refusal even to talkto us. Yes, we do have the power to impose our will—but we’d far rather reach a mutually satisfactory arrangement. I think Conrad Helier has seriously mistaken our position and our goals, and the true logic of the present situation here on Earth.”

All Silas said in reply to that was: “Go on.”

“Your anxiety regarding the possibility of people giving up on the real world in order to live in manufactured dreams is an old one,” Saul said mildly. “The corollary anxiety about the willingness of their effective rulers to meet the demand for comforting dreams is just as old—and so is Conrad’s facile assumption that the best way to counter the trend is to import new threats to jolt the meek inheritors of Earth out of their meekness and expel them from their utopia of comforts. Frankly, I’m as disappointed by Conrad’s recruitment to such an outmoded way of thinking as I am by the Ahasuerus Foundation’s retention of theirequally obsolete attitude of mind.

“I can understand the fact that you don’t approve of me, either personally or in terms of what I represent. One of my grandfathers was part of the consortium which funded Adam Zimmerman’s scheme to take advantage of a worldwide stock-market crash—one of the men who really did steal the worldor corner the future, according to your taste in clichés. The other was the man whose pioneering work in biotechnological cementation made it possible to build homes out of desert sand and exhausted soil that were literally dirtcheap, thus giving shelter to millions, but you probably think that the good he did was canceled out by the enormity of the fortune that flowed from the generations of patents generated and managed by his sons—my uncles. I am the old world order personified: one of a double handful of men who really did own the world by the end of the twenty-first century.

“Oddly enough, the fact that we still own it today has a good deal to do with Conrad Helier. Had he not put the New Reproductive System in place so quickly, the devastations of the Crash might have extended even to us; as it was, his efficiency allowed rather more of the old world order to be saved than he might have thought ideal. Nor has he put an end to the ancient system of inheritance, as his own legacy to Damon clearly demonstrates. When I and my fellow owners die—as, alas, we still must, in spite of all the best efforts of the Ahasuerus Foundation—we shall deliver the earth into safe hands, which can be trusted to keep it safe for as long as they may live. Eventually, there will arise a generation who will keep it safe forever.

“You may think it terrible that effective ownership of the entire earth should remain forever in the hands of a tiny Olympian elite, but ownership is also stewardship. While the earth was effectively common land it was in the interest of every individual to increase his own exploitation of it at the expense of others—and the result was an ecocatastrophe which would have rendered the planet uninhabitable if the Crash had not been precipitated in the nick of time.

“We cannot and will not tolerate further threats to the security of Earth, because Earth is too precious to be put at the smallest risk. Our news of the arks is old, and the news sent back by our more ambitious probes is hardly less recent, but the fact is that we have so far found no sign of any authenticextraterrestrial life. There is no threat in that discovery, but there is no promiseeither: no promise of any safe refuge should any extreme misfortune befall Earth. The pre-Crash ecocatastrophe might well have caused the extinction of the human species, and nothing like it can ever be permitted to happen again. If our outward expansion into the universe is to continue—and I agree with Conrad Helier that it ought not to be the exclusive prerogative of clever machinery—then it must continue in response to opportunity, not to threat.

“True progress cannot be generated by fear; it has to be generated by ambition. You may well dread the prospect of a wholesale retreat into artificial worlds of custom-designed illusion, but it’s pointless to try to drive people from their chosen refuges with whips and scorpions; they’ll only try all the harder to return. The realtask is to offer them real-world opportunities that will easily outweigh the rewards of synthetic experience.”

“When your new nanotech VEs hit the marketplace, that isn’t going to be easy,” Damon observed. “Or did the Mirror Man’s little lecture about products not being made for the market mean that you intend to bury the technology?”

“What my colleague was trying to explain,” Saul said, “is that we’re not developing such technologies solely with a view to putting new products in the marketplace. We have much broader horizons in mind, but we’re not going to bury anything—not even para-DNA. We have more faith in humankind than Conrad Helier does. We don’t believe that the people of Earth, however meek they may become, will want to retreat into manufactured dreams twenty-four hours a day. We don’t believe that people will settle for cut-price contentment when they still have the prospect of real achievement before them—and we dobelieve that they still have the prospect of real achievement. We think Conrad Helier’s aims can better be served by a carrot than a stick—and that’swhy we’re so very anxious to bring him to the conference table. We never wanted to bury para-DNA; what we’d really like to do is to investigate the contribution it might make to our own methods of breaking down the distinction between the organic and the inorganic.”

“You want to buyit?” Silas said in a tone which implied that he didn’t believe that a man like Conrad Helier—unlike the inheritors of the Gantz patents—would ever sell out to PicoCon.

“Not necessarily,” said Saul wearily. “In fact, I have grave doubts as to whether it has any potential at all that our own people don’t already have covered—but I do want to talk about its potential, and its appropriate uses. It’s not impossible that we might actually be able to assist in Conrad’s great crusade. In fact, I think it’s more than likely that we can. If only he would condescend to listen, I think we can show him a future far brighter and infinitely more promising than the one he presently has in mind.”

Damon could see that this was not what Silas had expected. He had had no clear idea what to expect on his own account, but he had to admit that Saul’s line of argument had taken him by surprise. Like Silas, he had been thinking entirely in terms of threats—who could blame either of them, after the violent farce of the last few days?—and he was not quite willing to believe, as yet, that there was nothing within the iron glove but a velvet fist. He was, however, prepared to listen—and so, it appeared, was Silas, both on his own behalf and that of Conrad Helier.

“All right,” said Silas, flushing slightly as he glanced at Damon—as if he were in search of approval, or at least of understanding. “Tell me what you’re offering. If it seems worthwhile, I’ll do everything within my power to make sure that Conrad, Eveline, and Karol pay proper attention—but it had better be good.”

“It is,” said Frederick Gantz Saul. “It certainly is.”