Текст книги "Inherit the Earth"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

Three

D

amon knew that it couldn’t be a trivial matter. Cops didn’t make house calls to conduct routine interviews. In all probability they’d soon be conducting all their interrogations in suitably tricked-out VEs; if the LAPD contract ever came up for tender he’d go for it like a shot. For the time being, though, the hardened pros who had been in the job for fifty years and more were sticking hard to the theory that meeting a man eye-to-eye made it just a little more difficult for their suspects to tell convincing lies.

One of the waiting men was tall and black, the other short and Japanese. Cops always seemed to work in ill-matched pairs, observing some mysterious sense of propriety carried over from the most ancient movies to the most recent VE dramas, but these two didn’t seem to be in dogged pursuit of the cliché. Damon knew even before the short man held out a smartcard for his inspection that they were big-league players, not humble LAPD.

The hologram portrait of Inspector Hiru Yamanaka was blurred but recognizable. Although Damon had never seen an Interpol ID before he was prepared to assume that it was authentic; he handed it back without even switching it through his beltpack.

“This is Sergeant Rolfe,” said Yamanaka, obviously assuming that once his own identity had been established his word was authority enough to establish the ID of his companion.

“Whatever it is,” Damon said, as he unlocked the door, “I’m not involved. I don’t run with the gangs anymore and I don’t have any idea what they’re up to. These days, I only go out to fetch the groceries and help my girlfriend move out.”

The men from Interpol followed Damon into the apartment, ignoring the stream of denials. Inspector Yamanaka showed not a flicker of interest as his heavy-lidded gaze took in the knife stuck into the doorjamb, but his sidekick took silently ostentatious offense at the untidy state of the living room. Even Damon had to admit that Diana’s decampment had left it looking a frightful mess.

As soon as the door was shut Yamanaka said, “What do you know about the Eliminators, Mr. Hart?”

“I was never that kind of crazy,” Damon told him affrontedly. “I was a serious streetfighter, not a hobbyist assassin.”

“No one’s accusing you of anything,” said Sergeant Rolfe, in the unreliably casual way cops had. Damon’s extensive experience of LAPD methods of insinuation encouraged him to infer that although they didn’t have an atom of evidence they nevertheless thought he was guilty of something. Long-serving cops always had a naive trust in their powers of intuition.

“You only want me to help with your inquiries, right?”

“That’s right, Mr. Hart,” said Yamanaka smoothly.

“Well, I can’t. I’m not an Eliminator. I don’t know anyone who is an Eliminator. I don’t keep tabs on Eliminator netboards. I have no interest at all in the philosophy and politics of Elimination.”

It was all true. Damon knew no more about the Eliminators than anyone else—probably far less, given that he was no passionate follower of the kind of news tape which followed their activities with avid fascination. He was not entirely unsympathetic to those who thought it direly unjust that longevity, pain control, immunity to disease, and resistance to injury were simply commodities to be bought off the nanotech shelf, possessed in the fullest measure only by the rich, but he certainly wasn’t sufficiently hung up about it to become a terrorist crusader on behalf of “equality and social justice for all.”

The Eliminators were on the lunatic fringe of the many disparate and disorganized communities of interest fostered by the Web; they were devoted to the business of giving earnest consideration to the question of who might actually deserveto live forever. Some of their so-called Operators were in the habit of naming those whom they considered “unworthy of eternity,” via messages dispatched to netboards from public phones or illicit temporary linkpoints. Such messages were usually accompanied by downloadable packages of “evidence” which put the case for elimination. Damon had scanned a few such packages in his time; they were mostly badly composed exercises in hysteria devoid of any real substance. The first few freelance executions had unleased a tide of media alarm back in the seventies—a blaze of publicity whose inevitable effect had been to glamorize the entire enterprise and conjure into being a veritable legion of amateur assassins. Things had quieted down in recent years, but only because the Operators had become more careful and the amateur assassins more cunning. Being named by a well-known Operator wasn’t a cast-iron guarantee that a man would be attacked—and perhaps killed, in spite of all that his internal technology could contrive—but it was something that had to be taken seriously. It didn’t require much imagination on Damon’s part to figure out that Interpol must be keen to nail some guilty parties and impose some severe punitive sanctions, pour encourager les autres—but he couldn’t begin to figure out why their suspicions might have turned in his direction.

“There’s really no need to be so defensive,” Yamanaka told him. “We find ourselves confronted by a puzzle, and we hope that you might be able to help us to understand what’s going on.”

The sergeant, meanwhile, had begun to drift around the apartment, looking at the pictures on the wall, scanning the discs on the shelves and eyeing Damon’s VE equipment as if its abundance and complexity were a calculated affront to his stubborn fleshiness.

“A puzzle?” Damon echoed sceptically. “Crossword or jigsaw?”

“May I?” Yamanaka asked, refusing to echo Damon’s sarcasm. His neatly manicured finger was pointing to the main windowscreen.

“Be my guest,” Damon said sourly.

Yamanaka’s fingers did a brief dance on the windowscreen’s keyboard. The resting display gave way to a pattern of words etched in blue on a black background:

CONRAD HELIER IS NAMED AN ENEMY OF MANKIND

CONRAD HELIER IS NOT DEAD

FIND AND IDENTIFY THE MAN WHO WAS CONRAD HELIER

PROOFS WILL FOLLOW

OPERATOR 101

Damon felt a sinking sensation in his belly. He knew that he ought to have been able to regard the message with complete indifference, but the simple fact was that he couldn’t.

“What has that to do with me?” he asked combatively.

“According to the official record,” Yamanaka said smoothly, “you didn’t adopt your present name until ten years ago, when you were sixteen. Before that, you were known as Damon Helier. You’re Conrad Helier’s natural son.”

“So what? He died twenty years before I was born, no matter what that crazy says. Under the New Reproductive System it doesn’t matter a damn who anybody’s natural father was.”

“To most people,” Yamanaka agreed, “it’s a matter of complete indifference—but not to you, Mr. Hart. You were given your father’s surname. Your four foster parents were all close colleagues of your father. Your father left a great deal of money in trust for you—an inheritance which came under your control two years after you changed your name. I know that you’ve never touched the money and that you haven’t seen any of your foster parents for some years, apparently doing your utmost to distance yourself from the destiny which your father had planned out for you—but that doesn’t signify indifference, Mr. Hart. It suggests that you took a strong dislike to your father and everything he stood for.”

“So you think I might do something like this? I’m not that stupid, and I’m certainly not that crazy. Who told you I might know something about this? Was it Eveline?”

“No one has named you as a possible suspect,” the inspector said soothingly. “Your name came up in a routine data trawl. We know that Operator one-oh-one always transmits his denunciations from the Los Angeles area, and you’ve been living hereabouts throughout the time he’s been active, but—”

Damon cut him off in midsentence. “I told you—I’m not that kind of lunatic, and I try never to think about Conrad Helier and the plans he had for me. I’m my own man, and I have my own life to lead. Why are you so interested in a message that’s so patently false? You can’t possibly believe that Conrad Helier is still alive—or that he was an enemy of mankind, whatever that’s supposed to mean.”

“If you had let me finish,” Yamanaka said, his voice still scrupulously even although he was obviously becoming impatient, “I’d have emphasized yet again that you’re not under suspicion. Although the local police have an extensive file on your past activities there’s nothing in it to suggest any involvement with the Eliminators. I’m afraid this is a more complicated matter than it seems.”

Now Damon wondered whether Yamanaka might want to recruit him as an informant—to use his contacts as a means of furthering their investigation. He wanted to interrupt again, to say that he wasn’t about to do that, but he knew that the conclusions he’d jumped to had so far only served to slow things down. He figured that if he held his tongue, this might be over much sooner.

“Before going on to the other aspect of our inquiry, however,” Yamanaka continued, when he realized that he still had the floor, “it might be worth my pointing out that this message has some unusual features. No Operator, including one-oh-one, has ever used the phrase enemy of mankindbefore; unworthy of immortalityis the customary formula. Nor is it usual for Operators to appeal to kindred spirits to find and identifysomeone. It might be a hoax, of course; one of the nastiest aspects of the Eliminators’ game is that anyone can play. Code number one-oh-one has been used a dozen times, and the relative coherency of the attached files has allowed it to build up a certain reputation, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that all the messages came from one source. In any case, the message was only the first piece of the puzzle. You know, I suppose, that you’re not the only person connected with Conrad Helier living on the Pacific Coast.”

“One of my foster parents, Silas Arnett, lives near San Francisco,” Damon admitted warily. “Some stupid resort area landscaped to look like the south coast of Old England—or some so-called continental engineer’s notion of what the south coast of England used to look like. I haven’t seen Silas in years. We don’t communicate.”

Actually, Silas Arnett was the only one of his foster parents with whom Damon might have communicated, had he been a little less rigorous in his determination to carve out his own destiny. Silas had been far more of a father to him than Karol Kachellek or Conrad Helier ever had, and had made his own escape from the tight-knit group shortly after Damon—but Damon had always had other things on his mind, and Silas hadn’t contacted him except for sending dutiful messages of goodwill on his birthdays and at each year’s end.

“Silas Arnett has disappeared from his home,” Yamanaka said. “According to a witness, he was forcibly removed—kidnapped—the night before last.”

Damon felt a stab of resentment. Why hadn’t the Interpol man told him this first, instead of teasing him with all that crap about the Eliminators? He knew, though, that it was mostly his own fault that the discussion had got bogged down.

“What witness?” he asked.

“A young woman named Catherine Praill. She was an overnight guest at Arnett’s house. She was asleep when the abduction took place—she heard the struggle but she didn’t see anything.”

“Is she involved?”

“We have no reason to think so. There’s no evidence of any untoward activity on her part, and no indication of a possible motive.” Yamanaka was being very careful, and Damon could understand why. Silas Arnett’s house must have had all the standard security systems; it would have been very much easier to bypass them if the intruders had someone inside with direct access to the controls. The police must have gone through Catherine Praill’s records very carefully indeed.

“Was she a veryyoung woman?” Damon asked.

“There is little to distinguish her from dozens of other guests Mr. Arnett had entertained during the last few years,” Yamanaka replied diplomatically—perhaps meaning that if the kidnappers knew Arnett’s tastes and habits well enough, it would have been easy enough to get someone inside to facilitate their work.

“You think the people who took Silas also posted that message?” Damon said, pointing at the windowscreen.

“We think that it’s an interesting coincidence,” Yamanaka admitted. “There’s more. Another of your father’s contemporaries has an address in San Diego, but he’s proving equally difficult to trace.”

“Who?”

“A man named Surinder Nahal.”

Damon could understand why the pedantic inspector has chosen the word contemporaries. Conrad Helier and Surinder Nahal had been in the same line of work, but they’d never been colleagues. They’d been rivals—and there had been a certain amount of bad blood between them. Damon didn’t know exactly why; it hadn’t been an acceptable topic of conversation among his foster parents.

“Has he been abducted too?” Damon asked.

“Not as far as we know,” said Yamanaka, careful as ever.

The inspector’s associate had now drifted back to his side, having completed his superficial inspection of the apartment. “Karol Kachellek also claimed that he hadn’t seen Silas Arnett for many years,” Rolfe put in. “Eveline Hywood said the same. It seems that your surviving foster parents fell out with one another as well as with you.”

Damon realized that it would be foolish to swing from one extreme to the other—from taking it for granted that he was a suspect to taking it for granted that he wasn’t. The Interpol men were undoubtedly fishing for anything they could catch. “I dare say it’s true,” he said cautiously. “Silas’s decision to retire must have seemed to Karol and Eveline to be a failure of vocation almost as scandalous as my own: yet another betrayal of Conrad Helier’s sacred cause.”

Yamanaka nodded as if he understood—but Damon knew that he almost certainly didn’t. It was difficult to guess Yamanaka’s true age, because a man of his standing would have the kind of internal technology which was capable of slowing down the aging process to a minimum, as well as PicoCon’s latest cosmetic engineering, but he was probably no more than sixty. To the inspector, as to Damon, the glittering peak of Conrad Helier’s career would be the stuff of history. At school the young Hiru Yamanaka would have been dutifully informed that the artificial wombs which Conrad Helier had perfected, and the techniques which allowed such wombs to produce legions of healthy infants while the plague of sterility spread like wildfire across the globe, were the salvation of the species—but that didn’t mean that he could understand the appalling reverencein which Conrad Helier had been held by his closest coworkers.

“Do you have any idea why anyone would want to kidnap Silas Arnett?” Yamanaka asked Damon with unaccustomed bluntness.

“None at all,” Damon replied, perhaps too reflexively.

“Do you have any idea why anyone would want to blacken your father’s name?” The follow-up seemed as bland as it was blunt, but Damon knew that if Yamanaka was right in his estimation of the interesting coincidencethis might be the key that tied everything together. A brusque none at allwould not serve as an adequate answer. “I was encouraged in every possible way to see my father as the greatest hero and saint the twenty-second century produced,” Damon said judiciously, “but I know that there were some who had a very different opinion of him. I never knew him, of course, but I know there were people who resented the strength of his views and his high media profile. Some thought him unbearably arrogant, others thought he got more credit for the solution to the Crisis than was due to him. On the other hand, although I couldn’t follow in his footsteps—and never wanted to—I don’t disapprove of anything he did, or anything my foster parents did in pursuit of his ambitions. If you want my opinion, whoever posted this notice is sick as well as stupid. It certainly wasn’t Silas Arnett, and I find it difficult to believe that it might have been anyone who understood the nature and extent of Conrad Helier’s achievements. That includes Surinder Nahal.”

Sergeant Rolfe curled his lip, evidently thinking that this eye-to-eye interview was turning out to be a waste of valuable time.

“There were several witnesses to the death of Conrad Helier,” the inspector said matter-of-factly, “and his last days were recorded, without apparent interruption, on videotape which can still be accessed by anyone who cares to download it. The doctor who was in attendance and the embalmer who prepared the body for the funeral both confirm that they carried out DNA checks on the corpse, and that the gene map matched Conrad Helier’s records. If the man whose body was cremated on 27 January 2147 wasn’t Conrad Helier then the gene map on file in the Central Directory must have been substituted.” He paused briefly, then said: “You don’t look at all like your father. Is that deliberate, or is it simply that you resemble your mother?”

“I’ve never gone in for cosmetic reconstruction,” Damon told him warily. “I have no idea what my mother looked like; I don’t even know her name. I understand that her ova were stripped and frozen at the height of the Crisis, when they were afraid that the world’s entire stock might be wiped out by the plague. There’s no surviving record of her. At that time, according to my foster parents, nobody was overly particular about where healthy ova came from; they just wanted to get as many as they could in the bank. They were stripping them from anyone more than five years old, so it’s possible that my mother was a mere infant.”

“It’s possible, then, that your natural mother is still alive,” Yamanaka commented, with a casualness that was probably feigned.

“If she is,” Damon pointed out, “she can’t possibly know that one of her ova was inseminated by Conrad Helier’s sperm and that I was the result.”

“I suppose Eveline Hywood and Mary Hallam must both have been infected before their wombs could be stripped,” Yamanaka said, disregarding the taboos that would presumably continue to inhibit free conversation regarding the legacy of the plague until the last survivors of the Crisis had retired from public life. “Or was it just that Conrad Helier was reluctant to select one of your foster parents as a natural mother in case it affected the partnership?”

“I don’t think any of this is relevant to the matters you’re investigating,” Damon said. “The kidnapping is the important thing—the other thing was probably posted simply to confuse the matter.”

“I can’t tell as yet what might be relevant and what might not,” Yamanaka said unapologetically. “The message supposedly deposited by Operator one-oh-one might be pure froth, and there might be nothing sinister in the fact that I can’t contact Surinder Nahal—but if Silas Arnett really has been seized by Eliminators this could represent the beginning of a new and nastier phase of that particular species of terrorism. Eliminators already attract far too much media attention, and this story might well become headline news. I’d like to stay one step ahead of the dozens of newsmen who must have been commissioned to start digging—in fact, I needto stay at least one step ahead of them because they’ll certainly confuse the issue once they begin stirring things up. I’m sorry to have troubled you, Mr. Hart, but I thought it best that I contact you directly to inform you of what had happened. If you think of anything that might help us, it might be to your own advantage to let us know immediately.”

He’s implying that I might be in danger too, Damon thought. If he’s right, and the message is connected to Silas’s disappearance, this really might be the beginning of something nasty—even if it’s only a news-tape hatchet job. “I’ll ask around,” he said carefully. “If I discover anything that might help you, I’ll be sure to let you know.”

“Thank you, Mr. Hart,” the man from Interpol said, offering no clue as to exactly what he understood by Damon’s promise to ask around. “I’m grateful for your cooperation.”

When he had closed the door behind his unwelcome visitors Damon pulled the carving knife out of the jamb, wondering what Sergeant Rolfe had made of it. Would Interpol be checking Diana’s record as carefully as they had checked his? Would they find anything there to connect her to the Eliminators? Probably not—but how well did heknow her? How well had he everknown her? And where would she go, now that she was homeless again? Might she too become “untraceable,” like Silas Arnett and Surinder Nahal? Suddenly, he felt an urgent need of someone to talk to—and realized belatedly that since he had quit the fight game he had gradually transferred all his conversational eggs to one basket. Now that Diana was gone, there was no one who regularly passed the time of day with him except the censorious elevator, which didn’t even qualify as a worm-level AI.

All I want is a chance to work, he thought. All I need is the space to get on with my own projects. None of this is anything to do with me. But he knew, even as he voiced the thought within the virtual environment of his mind, that he didn’t have the authority to decide that he was uninvolved in this affair. Nor, he realized—slightly to his surprise—was he able to attain the level of indifference that would allow him simply to turn his back on the mystery. In spite of everything that had happened to spoil the relationship between himself and his foster parents, he still cared—about Silas Arnett, at least.

Oh, Silas, he thought, what on earth have you done? Who can you possibly have annoyed sufficiently to get yourself kidnapped? And why have the Eliminators turned their attention to a saint who’s been dead for nearly fifty years?