Текст книги "Inherit the Earth"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

Twenty-seven

D

amon eased his car through the midmorning traffic, which was flowing normally through well-behaved control lights. He couldn’t help feeling a slightly exaggerated sense of his own mortality, in spite of the profuse official denials that had been issued to confirm that he was notConrad Helier, enemy of mankind. While there were people around who worked on the assumption that everything on the news was likely to be a lie, such denials were likely to be less effective than sly denunciations of the kind that Saul’s people had put out while they were still playing rough.

He knew that it was well within the capability of any twelve-year-old or hundred-and-twelve-year-old Webwalker to discover his address and car registration. He knew too that one of the problems of longevity was that it preserved a substantial fraction of the madness to which people were subject alongside the sanity which only the majority achieved. The downside of efficient IT was that it did a far better job preserving the body than it did preserving the mind—and some kinds of madness, albeit not the nastiest kinds, really were allin the mind.

At present, that downside was limited; the most powerful nanotechnologies were so recent in their provenance that even under the New Reproductive System less than a sixth of the population of California consisted of centenarians. In fifty years’ time, however, that percentage would have trebled, and most of the 15 percent of current centarians would still be alive. Nobody knew how many of those would still be compos mentis; Morgan Miller had been dead for nearly a hundred and eighty years, but the effect named after him had not yet revealed the full extent of its horror. True emortality required more than the continual revitalization of somatic cells; it required the continued revitalization of the idiosyncratic neuronal pathways that were the foundation of every individual self, every unique personality.

According to Frederick Gantz Saul, there would be crazy people around for some time yet—but not forever. In time, according to Saul, sanity would prevail; foolishness, criminal behavior, and disaffection would fade into oblivion and everyone would be safe. Damon still had not made up his mind whether to believe that, let alone whether to believe Saul’s further assertion that the sanity and safety in question would not be a kind of stagnation.

The heightened sense of mortality should have worn off once he was off the street, but it didn’t. It accompanied him in the elevator and didn’t let up when he stepped out into the LA offices of the Ahasuerus Foundation. Damon hadn’t made an appointment, and he wouldn’t have felt utterly crushed if he’d been told to go away by the AI receptionist, but Rachel Trehaine didn’t even keep him kicking his heels for the customary ten minutes of insult time. He had expected to find her in a frosty mood, but she was positively welcoming—presumably because she was curious.

“How can I help you, Mr. Hart?” she asked.

“I hoped that you might be able to offer me an expert opinion,” he said. “I’m not sure that I have anything to offer in trade, but you might be interested in some of what I have to say.”

“I can’t speak on behalf of the foundation,” she was quick to say. “I’m only . . .”

“A humble data analyst,” Damon finished for her. “That’s okay. You’ve heard, I suppose, that the three men Yamanaka arrested have pleaded guilty to all the charges—kidnapping, illegal imprisonment, conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, etcetera. They’ll be put away for at least twenty years—but I dare say that when they come out of suspended animation they’ll walk straight into jobs with PicoCon, who’ll bear the full responsibility and cost of their rehabilitation. There won’t be a full trial, of course—just a formal hearing to determine the sentence.”

“I’m sure that Inspector Yamanaka is very grateful to you,” the red-haired woman said. “If you hadn’t resisted so valiantly when they came after you a second time. . . .”

“Actually, it was all Lenny Garon’s doing. When he heard them say that they weren’t police, he leaped to the conclusion that they were Eliminators enthusiastic to execute an enemy of mankind. Hero worship eclipsed his sense of probability for a few vital moments. I’m grateful to him, of course, but I think Inspector Yamanaka still has a lurking suspicion that he’s been fobbed off with a few disposable scapegoats. He doesn’t believe that it was all their own idea. On the other hand, he doesn’t really want to look toohard for evidence of the involvement of a man like Frederick Saul, in case his career runs onto the rocks.”

“People who havecareers do have to be careful, Mr. Hart,” she pointed out.

“True—and I certainly don’t want to jeopardize yours. In fact, I rather hoped that you might be able to help me out with my own career decisions. I seem to have reached something of a crossroads.”

“The Ahasuerus Foundation isn’t interested in employing you,” she told him.

“PicoCon is.”

“In that case,” she said, “you should count yourself very fortunate.”

“I’ve heard that they have a great future ahead of them,” Damon admitted, “but I’m not sure that their optimism would be shared—at least not wholeheartedly—by an unbiased observer.”

“I’m flattered that you consider me an unbiased observer,” she assured him, “but I’m not sure that I have enough facts at my disposal to make a reasoned analysis of your career prospects with PicoCon or any other company.”

“But you do know something about the Saul family, don’t you? One of the men who financed the foundation was a Saul, wasn’t he?”

“The Ahasuerus Foundation was set up by Adam Zimmerman, entirely funded from his own resources.”

“Resources which he earned, if earnedis the right word, by masterminding a coup which turned a stock-market crash into an economic holocaust—and left a few dozen men with effective possession of two-thirds of the earth’s surface. The possession in question then made inexorable progress to the point at which those men’s heirs—who are even fewer in number than they were—are now the effective owners of the whole earth.”

“That’s a slight exaggeration,” Rachel Trehaine protested.

“I know,” Damon said. “But the point is that it’s only slight. As long as they’re united, and as long as they can keep buying up innovators like PicoCon and OmicronA, the gods of New Olympus really do own the earth—and they’re busy reinventing the laws of trespass.”

No reply was forthcoming to that observation, but Damon hadn’t expected one. “I looked at the background material Madoc dredged up for me,” he said. “Adam Zimmerman’s so-called confession is a remarkable document—as remarkable, in its way, as the charter he set up for the foundation. His penultimate will and testamentposes an interesting philosophical question, though. You’re supposed to bring him out of suspended animation when you have the technology available to make him young again and keep him that way forever—barring the usual accidents, of course—but what would qualify as reasonable grounds for believing that the latter criterion had been achieved? Some might argue that a man of his age—he was forty-eight, wasn’t he, when he was consigned to the freezer?—already has a good chance of riding the escalator all the way, but you’d undoubtedly take the view that he’d want the benefit of muchbetter rejuve technology than the current market standard—technology that could be guaranteedto beat the Hayflick limit and the Miller effect.”

“With all due respect,” said the red-haired woman, “the internal affairs of the foundation are none of your concern.”

“I understand that. I’m only talking hypothetically. I’m intrigued by the question of how we could ever knowthat we were in possession of a technology of rejuvenation that would stop aging permanently, preserving the mind as well as the body. How could we ever know that a particular IT suite was good for, say, two thousand years, without actually waiting two thousand years for the results of the field tests to come in? What sort of data analysis would allow us to reach a conclusion regarding the efficacy of the technology ahead of time?”

“It wouldn’t be easy,” Rachel Trehaine admitted warily. “But we now have a very detailed knowledge of the biochemistry of all the degenerative processes we lump together as aging. At present, we arrive at estimates of projected life spans by monitoring those processes over the short term in such a way as to produce an extrapolatable curve. That curve has to be adjusted for rejuvenative interruptions, but we can do medium-term experiments to monitor the effects of repeated rejuvenative treatments.”

“Do you still use mice for those experiments?” Damon asked.

“We use live animals in some trials,” she countered rather stiffly, “but most of the preliminary work can be done with tissue cultures. I assume that what you’re driving at is the impossibility of getting rid of the margin of uncertainty which arises from dealing with any kind of substitute for human subjects. You’re right, of course—we’ll never be sure that a treatment which multiplies the lifetime of a cell or a mouse by a thousand will do the same for a human being, until we’ve actually tried it.”

“As I see it,” Damon said, “we’ll neverbe able to tell the difference between a technological suite that will allow us to live for a long time and one which really will allow us to live forever. Most people, of course, don’t give a damn about that—they only want the best there is—but youhave to decide when to wake Adam Zimmerman up. You have to decide, day by day and year by year, exactly how to balance the equation of potential gain against potential risk—because you can’t leave him in there indefinitely, can you? Nor can you keep waking him up to ask his advice, because every journey in or out of susan multiplies the risks considerably, and even the nanotech you pump into him while he’s still down and out can’t fully compensate for the fact that the first susan technology he used was pre-ark.”

“You’re right,” she admitted. “For us, if for no one else, nice statistical distinctions are important. What’s your point?”

“For a long time, Ahasuerus must have been field leaders in longevity research. Your heavy investment in biotech put you on the crest of the wave—and you presumably had a healthy and mutually supportive relationship with other researchers, all the way from Morgan Miller to Conrad Helier and Surinder Nahal. You were all on the same side, all trading information like good team players. Then PicoCon and OmicronA came at the problem from a different angle, with a different attitude. They’re the field leaders now, aren’t they? While they’ve been forming their own team, yours has broken up. Nowadays, it must require serious industrial espionage to discover what the boys across the street are up to, and exactly how far they’ve got.”

“The Ahasuerus Foundation is not involved in industrial espionage,” she informed him as stiffly and as flatly as she was bound to do.

“It’s not simply a matter of there being a new team in town, is it?” Damon went on softly. “The real problem is that they’re trying to redefine the game. They’re moving the goalposts and rewriting the rules. They’re worried about your willingness to play by the new rules because they’re worried about the terms of your charter—about the responsibility you owe to Adam Zimmerman. Is it possible, do you think, that they’re anxious that letting Adam Zimmerman out of the freezer might be tantamount to letting the cat out of the bag?”

“What’s that supposed to mean, Mr. Hart?”

“Let me put it this way, Dr. Trehaine. It might well be that the people with the very best internal technology would consider it desirable, or even necessary, to play down its power: to maintain the belief that what people insist on calling immortality not only isn’t immortality but isn’t even true emortality. It might well be that the people who control the IT megacorps consider it desirable or necessary to persuade their would-be heirs that patience is still the cardinal virtue—that in order to inherit the earth they only have to wait until their elders lose their memories, their minds, and, in the end, their lives. If that reality were mere appearance and illusion—if all the patience in the world wouldn’t be enough to allow the young to come into their inheritance—what hope would there be for people like me? What is there to wait for, if my generation can neverbecome the inheritors of Earth?”

“If you think that we already have true emortality, Mr. Hart,” Rachel Trehaine said drily, “you’re mistaken. I can say that with certainty.”

“I’m not sure how much your certainty is worth, Dr. Trehaine,” Damon told her bluntly, “but even if you’re right—what about the escalator? If IT really is advancing quickly enough to put true emortality in the hands of people now alive, what will it be worth to the young?While each generation thinks that it has a chance to be the first to the top of the mountain, the philosophy of Elimination will remain the province of outsiders—but as soon as it becomes generally known that the summit has been claimed, and claimed in perpetuity, the Eliminators might become a valuable asset to those whose uneasy heads are only a few funerals away from the crown.

“You’re the professional data analyst, Dr. Trehaine—you’re in a far better position than I am to balance all the variables in the equation. How do youlike the Eliminators? How far away are we, in your estimation, from an undeclared war between the young and the old? And what, if you were a rising star in the Pico-Con/OmicronA constellation, would you want to do about it?”

“I think you’re being ridiculously melodramatic,” said Rachel Trehaine calmly. “We live in a civilized world now. Even if everyone knew that they were truly emortal, they’d have better sense than to go to war for ownership of the world. They’d know perfectly well that any such war might easily end up destroying the prize they were fighting for. Wouldn’t it be better to live forever, happily and comfortably, in a world you didn’t own than to risk death in order to possess a handful of its ashes?”

“You might think that,” Damon said, “and so might I—but we’ve moved in rather different social circles during the last twenty years, and I can assure you that there are plenty of people out there who are willing to kill, even at the risk of being killed. There are plenty of people who value real freedom over comfort and safety—people who would never be content to live in a world they have no power to change.”

“There are other worlds,” Rachel Trehaine said mildly. “Now that we’ve saved Earth, the new frontiers in space are opening up again. The arks launched before the Crash are still en route—and if Eveline Hywood and her panspermist friends are right, the galaxy must be full of worlds that have ecospheres of their own, including many that are ripe for colonization.”

“That’s the optimistic view,” Damon agreed. “As far as we know for sure, though, there isn’t an acre of worthwhile real estate anywhere in the universe outside of Earth. As far as we know for sure, this world is theworld. No matter how many people decide to live in glorified tin cans like the domes of Mars and Lagrange-Five, Earthmight be the only inheritance that has any real market value—the only thing worth fighting for.”

“Perhaps your years as a streetfighter have given you an unduly jaundiced view of your fellow men, Mr. Hart,” said the data analyst. “Perhaps you haven’t yet become sufficiently adult to realize how utterly juvenile such boys’ games are.”

“I realize that you don’t much like playing games, Dr. Trehaine,” Damon countered, “but you must have noticed that not everyone shares your distaste.”

“What, exactly, do you want from me?” she asked.

“An opinion. An honestopinion, if you’re willing to provide it, regarding Frederick Gantz Saul’s argument that no one should fight the world’s present owners for control of the world.”

“What ishis argument?” she countered, although Damon had already judged—on the basis of their eye-to-eye contact—that she knew perfectly well what Saul was offering the independent thinkers who hadn’t yet fallen in line with his plans for the remaking of the world.

“He says that the nanotech revolution has only just begun, and that it can’t be carried forward to its proper conclusion by the forces of commercial competition. He says that the future of the world now needs to be planned, and that too many cooks would undoubtedly spoil the broth. He reckons that the world has always underestimated the true potential of gantzing biotech because of its historical association with the business of building elementary shelters for the poorest people in the world. Cementing mud, sand, and all kinds of other unpromising materials into solid structures may seem crude and vulgar to us, but in Saul’s estimation it’s the foundation stone of a true bridge between the organic and the inorganic.

“We already have biotech which will transform animal egg cells into huge tissue cultures of almost any design the genetweakers can dream up, and modify viable organisms in thousands of interesting and useful ways. If research like yours eventually bears fruit, we’ll be able to modify human beings in exactly the same way, engineering ova in artificial wombs so that they won’t need elaborate IT to provide all the extra features—like emortality—that we consider necessary and desirable. According to Saul, that revolution will be completed by gantzing biotech/nanotech hybrids, which will enable us to work miracles of transformation with any and all inorganicstructures.

“Saul calls himself a true Gaian—not a Gaian Mystic, but someone with a realunderstanding of the implications of the Gaia hypothesis. The whole point of that hypothesis, according to Saul, is that it’s wrong to think of the inorganic environment as something given, as a framework within which life has to operate. Just as Earth’s atmosphere is a product of life, he says, so are its oceans and its rocks: everythingat the surface is part of the same system—and when we take control of that system, as we very soon will, it won’t simply be a matter of juggling Earth’s biomass; we’ll have more transformative power than the so-called continental engineers ever dreamed of. Earth’s crust will be ours to sculpt as we wish—or, rather, as Earth’s ownerswish.

“But that, according to Saul, is only the beginning. As below, he says, so above. Give him gantzers powerful enough and a few hundred years, and he’ll change the faces of Mars and Venus. Every asteroid in the belt will be an egg patiently awaiting gantzing sperms to transform it into a star-traveling monster, bigger than a thousand arks and infinitely more comfortable. Only give them the time, he says, and the owners of Earth will give the whole universe to the rest of us. Only give them time, and they’ll show us what ownershipreally can mean, by demonstrating that there is no matter anywhere which needs to be considered inert or useless. Only give them time, and they will bring the entire universe to life—and all they ask in return is Earth, their own precious corner, their own legitimate heritage.

“That’s what Frederick Gantz Saul offered Conrad Helier, in exchange for effective ownership and control of para-DNA. That’s what he must have offered your employers in order to bring them meekly into line. It’s what he’ll offer everyone who ever looks as if they mightbe getting out of line—but I’d be willing to bet that he’ll always be prepared to show them the stick before offering the carrot, just to make sure that he has their full attention. So what I need to know, Dr. Data Analyst, is: is it true?Or is it, perhaps, just a clever line of patter, intended to defuse all opposition to a state of affairs that puts Saul and his friends in almost total control of what might—so far as we know for sure—be the only world there is or ever will be.”

“And you want an honest opinion?” Rachel Trehaine challenged him. “ Myhonest opinion, as an individual rather than an employee of the Ahasuerus Foundation.”

“If you think I’ve given you enough in exchange,” he said, “I’d be very grateful.”

“Unfortunately,” she said, “you’ve already put your finger on the root of the problem. However expert we may be as data analysts, we can’t possibly know for sure how good our extrapolations are. Only time will tell whether Saul’s promises can be redeemed. In the meantime, they’re pie in the sky. On the other hand, what other choice have you got? If you don’t buy into hisdream, all you have is the prospects of a teenage streetfighter permanently engaged in a rebellion he can’t win. If you don’t want to work directly for PicoCon you can always join Eveline Hywood in Lagrange-Five, or make your way to whichever far-flung hidey-hole your father found for himself, but you know better than to think that they can continue to avoid toeing the line. They’re old enough to know better—and so are you.”

Damon had kept his eyes locked on hers while she delivered this speech, but he let them fall now.

“What did you expect me to say?” she asked him not unkindly. “What else couldI say?”

“I thought I ought to make sure,” Damon told her, trying to sound grateful for her effort. “I didn’t know how far out of line Ahasuerus was. I suppose I was wondering whether there was something you knew that I didn’t, or something you might see that I’d missed—something which would put the matter into a less dismal light.”

“If Saul’s right,” she told him, “the light’s not dismal at all. You may not be able to have a substantial share in the earth, but how many people ever could? The point is that you—or your heirs—might still be able to claim a substantial share of the universe. For all his faults, Saul tells a hell of a story—and it mightbe true. Shouldn’t we at least hope that it is?”

“I suppose we should,” Damon admitted grudgingly.