Текст книги "Inherit the Earth"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

Four

D

amon knew that there was no point searching the apartment for the bugs that Sergeant Rolfe had planted while he was wandering around. Interpol undoubtedly had nanomachines clever enough to evade detection by his antique sweeper. Nor was he about to ask for help—Building Security had better sweepers but they also had a rather flexible view of the right to privacy that they were supposedly there to guarantee. He had enough demerits on his account already without giving formal notification of the fact that he was under investigation by a high-level law enforcement agency.

Instead, he donned his phone hood and started making calls.

It was, as he’d anticipated, a waste of time. Everybody in the world—not to mention everybody off-world—had a beltpack and a personal call-number, but that didn’t mean that anybody in the world was accessible twenty-four hours a day. Everybody in the world also had an AI answering machine, which functioned for most people as a primary status symbol as well as a protector of privacy, and which needed to be shown off if they were to perform that function adequately. The higher a man’s social profile was the cleverer his AI needed to be at fielding and filtering calls. Damon usually had no cause to regret the trend—customizing virtual environments for the AI simulacra to inhabit provided nearly 40 percent of his business—but whenever he actually wanted to make urgent contact with some people he found the endless routine of stagy reply sequences just as frustrating as anyone else.

Karol Kachellek’s simulacrum was standing on a photo-derived Hawaiian beach with muted breakers rolling in behind him. The unsmiling simulacrum brusquely reported that Karol was busy operating a deep-sea dredger by remote control and couldn’t be disturbed. It warned Damon that his call was unlikely to be returned for several hours, and perhaps not until the next day.

Damon told the sim that the matter was urgent, but the assurances he received in return were patently hollow.

Eveline Hywood’s simulacrum wasn’t even full length; it was just a detached head floating in what Damon took to be a straightforward replication of her lab. The room’s only decoration—if even that could be reckoned a mere ornament—was a window looking out upon a rich star field. It was the kind of panorama which people who lived with five miles of atmosphere above their heavy heads only ever got to see in virtual form, and it therefore functioned as a status symbol, even though Lagrangists were supposed to be above that sort of thing. The sim’s gray hair was trimmed to a mere fuzz, according to the prevailing minimalist philosophy of the microgee colonists, but its features were slightly more naturalistic than those Karol had contrived for his alter ego.

The sim told Damon that Eveline was working on a delicate series of experiments and wouldn’t be returning any calls for at least twenty-four hours. Again, Damon told the sim that the matter was urgent—but the sim looked back at him with a cold hauteur which silently informed him that nothinghappening on Earth could possibly be urgent by comparison with the labor of a dedicated Lagrangist.

Damon doubted that the news about Silas and the strange declaration of Operator 101 had reached either of his foster parents as yet; unless Interpol had sent someone to see them face-to-face the information would be stuck in the same queue as his own calls, probably assigned an equally low priority by the two AI filtering devices.

Madoc Tamlin’s simulacrum had a lot more style, as did the surreal backcloth which Damon had designed for it, with a liquid clock whose ripples told the right time and a very plausible phoenix that rose afresh from its pyre every time the sim accepted a call. The sim gave no reason for Madoc’s unavailability, although the expression in its eyes carefully implied that being the kind of rakehell he was he was probably up to no good. Damon knew, though, that its promise that Madoc would get back to him within the hour was trustworthy.

When he lifted the hood again the one thing on Damon’s mind was getting to the bathroom, so it wasn’t until he’d done what he had to do and emerged again that he saw the envelope lying on the floor just inside the apartment door. The absurdity of it stopped him dead in his tracks and almost made him laugh. Nobodypushed envelopes under apartment doors—not, at any rate, in buildings as well supplied with spy eyes as this one.

Damon picked the envelope up. It wasn’t sealed.

He drew the enclosed piece of paper out and unfolded it curiously. The words printed on it might have been put there by any of a million near identical machines. They read:

DAMON

IT IS TRUE

CONRAD HELIER IS ALIVE

ARNETT WILL BE RELEASED WHEN HE HAS TESTIFIED

AHASUERUS AND HYWOOD HAVE THE REMAINING ANSWERS

OPERATOR 101

This time, Damon didlaugh. This made the whole affair seem suddenly childish, like a silly game. He remembered the way Yamanaka had carefully called his attention to the unusual features of the original message, implying that it wasn’t reallyan Eliminator who had posted it. This was surely confirmation of the fact—no authentic Eliminator would post personal messages under someone’s door. This had to be a joke.

Damon slipped back under the hood and called Building Security.

The call was answered by a real person, just as the lease specifications promised. “This is thirteen four seven,” he said reflexively, although she could have read that from the automatic display.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Hart?” said the real person gravely. She had a broad halo of honey blond hair, a superabundance of facial jewelry, and an anxious expression, none of which were properly coordinated with her sober gray uniform.

“Somebody just slipped something under my door—within the last thirty minutes. Could you decant me the spy-eye tape that gives the clearest picture?”

He took her assent so much for granted that he almost severed the connection before she said: “I’m sorry, Mr. Hart, but that won’t be possible. We’ve suffered a slight system failure.” She sounded very embarrassed, as well she might. Setting aside such routine antisocial behavior as jamming the elevator open for a couple of minutes, the misdemeanor rate within the building was so low that Security was having a hard time justifying its proportion of the lease tax.

“What do you mean, a slight system failure?” Damon asked, although he had a pretty good idea.

“Well,” said the blond woman unhappily, “to tell the truth, it’s not that slight. In fact, it’s fairly general.”

Damon considered the implications of this news for a few moments before saying: “General enough to allow someone to walk into the building, take the elevator to the thirteenth, push something under a door, take the elevator back down again, and walk out undetected?”

“It’s possible,” she conceded, quickly adding: “It’s a veryunusual situation, Mr. Hart. I’ve never known anything like it.”

Damon judged from her tone that she had encountered similar situations several times before, but had been instructed not to admit the fact to the tenants. This wasn’t the kind of building that software saboteurs would target, but it wasn’t the kind they’d leave alone either. Damon had crashed similar systems in the days when he’d been in training to be an all-around juvenile delinquent and taken pride in it. The only authentically unusual thing about this particular act of sabotage was that someone had taken advantage of it to pay a personal call. The blond woman, who was waiting impatiently for him to break the connection and let her get on with her work, obviously hadn’t cottoned on to that.

“Thanks,” he said reflexively. He didn’t give her time to say “You’re welcome,” although she probably wouldn’t have bothered.

When he’d slipped off the hood, Damon devoted a few moments to wondering who might want to make a joke at his expense, and why. Diana hadn’t had time to set it up, and it wasn’t her style—although she certainly knew enough amateur saboteurs capable of crashing Building Security. Madoc Tamlin knew many more, and he was one of the few people to whom he’d confided his original surname and his reasons for changing it, but Madoc wouldn’t stoop so low.

Eventually, he came around full circle. What if it weren’ta joke? Interpol seemed to be taking it seriously enough, even though they didn’t think it was authentic Eliminator action—and something hadhappened to Silas Arnett.

He wondered whether he ought to tell the police about the note. He had no particular reason to conceal it, although its sender presumably intended it for his eyes only. He decided to keep his options open, at least for the time being, and tackle the matter himself. That had always been his natural inclination—an inclination which, if it was hereditary, had very probably been gifted to him by his long-dead father. He put the envelope in a drawer and the note into the inside pocket of his suitskin. Then he went to get something to eat.

Just as Damon finished his meal the alarm he’d set to notify him of any response to his various calls began beeping. He ducked under the phone hood and displaced his AI answering machine, which was in the middle of telling Madoc Tamlin that he was on his way. The VE which surrounded them was a lush forest scene whose colorful birds and butterflies were the product of a spontaneous ecology rather than a simple tape loop; it was unnecessarily elaborate but it served as an ad for his VE engineering skills.

“Is this about Diana?” Madoc said—which at least solved the minor mystery of where Diana had gone after storming out of Damon’s life. It made sense; she had known Tamlin a good deal longer than she had known Damon, and she was on no better terms with her foster parents than Damon was with his.

“No, it’s not,” he said. “It’s business. Have you heard anything about a kidnap up the coast?”

Madoc raised a quizzical eyebrow. His eyebrows were as black as his hair and as neatly shaped; they made an interesting contrast with his pale eyes, which had been tinted a remarkably delicate shade of green. “Haven’t seen the news,” he said. “Anyone you know?”

“My foster father. There may be an Eliminator connection.”

The quizzical expression disappeared. “Not good,” Madoc said—then waited, expecting more.

“I’ve got a proposition that might interest you,” Damon said carefully.

“Yeah?” Madoc knew better than to ask for details over the phone. “Well, I won’t be back at the apartment for quite a while, and that might not be a good place, all things considered. You can find me in the alley where we shot your second-to-last fight. You remember where that is, I suppose?”

“I remember,” Damon assured him drily. “I’ll be there in an hour and a half, traffic permitting.”

“No traffic here,” Madoc drawled. “You should never have moved so close to the coast, Damie. World’s still overcrowded, thanks to you-know-who. Too many people, too many cars, wherever the real estate is in good condition. It’ll be a long time before the gantzers get to thisneighborhood.”

“Don’t bet on that,” Damon said. “The new generation can turn rubble back into walls with no significant effort at all. Around here you’d never know there was ever an earthquake, let alone two plague wars.”

“Around the alley,” Madoc riposted, “we don’t forget so easily. We’re conservationists, remember? Preserving the legacy of the plague wars and the great quakes, keeping alive allthe old traditions.”

“I’m on my way,” Damon said shortly. He wasn’t in the mood for banter.

Tamlin laughed, and might have said more, but Damon cut him off and the forest faded into darkness, leaving nothing visible except the customary virtual readouts, limned in crimson against the Stygian gloom.

He didn’t waste any time leaving the apartment and taking the elevator down to the basement. The elevator’s voice was back online but it didn’t have a word of complaint to utter.

The traffic was bad enough to make Damon wonder whether the twenty-first-century mythology of endless gridlock was as fanciful as everyone thought. At the turn of the millennium the world’s population hadn’t been much over five billion; the present day’s seven billion might be distributed a little more evenly in geographical terms, but people only thought of it as “small” by comparison with the fourteen billion peak briefly attained before the Second Plague War. As Madoc had said, the planet could still be considered overcrowded, thanks to Conrad Helier. The rising curve of the birthrate would cross the declining curve of the death rate again within ten or twelve years, and yet another psychologically significant moment would be upon the worrying world. Los Angeles had been so severely depopulated in the plague wars that it still lay half in ruins, but now that PicoCon had the Gantz patents all wrapped up and the last of the ancient antitrust laws had been consigned to the dustbin by the Washington Rump it was only a matter of time before the deconstructionists started the long march inland.

The further east Damon went the thinner the traffic became. He headed straight into the heart of the badlands, where the Second Plague War had struck hardest once the bugs had moved out of Hollywood, leaving nothing for the ‘77 quake to do but a little minor vandalism—by the time the Crisis arrived some twenty years later there had been no one around these parts to care. Soon enough, he was in a region where all the buildings which hadn’t already collapsed were in permanent danger of so doing: a district which was, in practice if not in theory, beyond the reach of the LAPD.

In truth, little enough of what Madoc Tamlin and his fellows got up to out here was unambiguously illegal. The fights were private affairs, which couldn’t concern the police unless a combatant filed a complaint—which, of course, none ever did—or someone died. Fighters did die, occasionally; a lot of the kids who got involved did so in order to earn the money that would pay for advanced IT, and some of them didn’t advance far enough quickly enough to keep themselves from real harm. Taping the fights wasn’t against the law, nor was selling them—except insofar as the tapes in which someone didget killed might be counted as evidence of accessory activity—so Madoc’s reputation as an outlaw was 90 percent myth. His only real crimes arose out of his association with software saboteurs and creative accountants.

Damon’s own record was no dirtier, formally or informally. He had never killed anyone, although he’d come close once or twice. He really had tried to see the fighting as a sport, with its own particular skills, its own unique artistry, and its own distinctive spectator appeal. He hadn’t given it up out of disgust, but simply because he’d become more and more interested in the technical side of the business—the way the raw tapes of ham-fisted brawls were turned into scintillating VE experiences for the punters. That, at least, was what he had told himself—and anyone else who cared to ask.

Damon found Madoc easily enough. He hadn’t been down the alley for more than a year, but it was all familiar—almost eerily so. The graffiti on the walls had been renewed but not significantly altered; all the heaps of rubble had been carefully maintained, as if they were markings on a field of play whose proportions were sacred. Madoc was busy wiring up a fighter who didn’t look a day over fourteen, although he had to be a littleolder than that.

“It’s too tight,” the fighter complained. “I can’t move properly.” Damon had no difficulty deducing that it was the boy’s first time.

“No it’s not,” said Madoc, with careful patience, as he knelt to complete the synaptic links in the reta mirabilewhich covered the fighter’s body like a bright spiderweb. “It’s no tighter than the training suit you’ve been using all week. You can move quite freely.”

The novice’s fearful eyes looked over Madoc’s shoulder, lighting on Damon’s face. Damon saw the sudden blaze of dawning recognition. “Hey,” the boy said, “you’re Damon Hart! I got a dozen of your fight tapes. You going to be doctoring the tape for this? That’s great! My name’s Lenny Garon.”

Damon didn’t bother to inform the boy that he hadn’t come to watch the fight and he didn’t deny that he had been brought in to doctor the tapes. He understood how scared the youngster must be, and he didn’t want to say anything that might be construed as a put-down. If he had judged the situation rightly, Lenny Garon was due to be cut up by a skilled knifeman, and he didn’t need any extra damage to his ego. Damon didn’t recognize the boy’s opponent, but he could see that the other wired-up figure was at least three years older and much more comfortable with the pressure and distribution of the reta mirabile.

Madoc stood up, already issuing stern instructions as to where the combatants shouldn’t stab one another. He didn’t want the recording apparatus damaged. “The only way you can make real money for this kind of work,” he told the novice, “is to get used to the kit and to make damn sure it doesn’t get damaged. Given that your chances of long-term survival are directly proportional to your upgrade prospects, you’d better get this right. It’s a good break, if you can carry it off. Brady’s tough, but you’ll have to go up against tougher if you’re to make your mark in this game.”

Lenny nodded dumbly. “I can do it,” he said uneasily. “I got all the feints and jumps. It’ll be okay. I won’t let you down.”

“We don’t want feints and jumps,” Madoc said, with a slight contemptuous sneer that might have been intended to wind the boy up. “We want purpose and skill and desperation. Just because we’re making a VR tape. . . . Explain it to him, Damon.”

Madoc turned away to check the other fighter’s equipment, leaving Lenny Garon to look up at Damon with evident awe. Damon was acutely embarrassed by the thought that it might have been using histapes that had filled this idiot with the desire to get into the fight game himself. The cleverer the tapes became as a medium of entertainment, the easier it became for users to forget the highly significant detail that fighters who were doing it for real were not insulated, as VE users were, from the consequences of their mistakes. Even if they had IT enough to blot out their pain, the actual fighters still got stabbed and slashed; the blood they lost was real, and if they were unfortunate enough to take a blade in the eye they lost the sight of it for a very uncomfortable couple of weeks.

“Any advice?” the boy asked eagerly.

Damon was tempted to say: Forget it. Get out now. Make the money some other way. He didn’t, because he knew that he had no right to say any such thing. He hadn’t even needed the money. “Don’t try to look good,” he said, instead. “Remember that we aren’t making a straightforward recording that will give a floater the illusion that he’s going through your moves. We’re just making a template—raw material. You just concentrate on looking after yourself—leave it to the doctor to please the audience.”

“Shit, Damon!” Madoc complained. “Don’t tell the kid he doesn’t have to give us any help at all. He’s just trying to go easy on you, Lenny, with it being your first time and all. Sure, play-acting doesn’t do it—it reeks of fake—but you have to show us something. You have to show us that you have talent. If you want to be good at this, you have to go all the way. . . but you have to look after the wiring. No record at all is far worse than a bad one.”

The boy nodded respectfully in Damon’s direction before turning to face his opponent. The gesture brought it home to Damon that he still had a big reputation on the streets. He might be out of circulation, but his tapes weren’t; his past was going to be around for a long time. But that, in a sense, was why he was here. Aspects of his past that seemed even more remote than his fighting days were still capable of tormenting him, still capable of involvinghim.

“Just remember,” Madoc Tamlin said as he pushed the boy forward, “it’s a small price to pay for taking one more step toward immortality.”

Like the Eliminators, street slang always spoke of immortalityrather than emortality—which, strictly speaking, was all that even the very best internal technology could ever hope to provide. Not that anyone expected current technology to guarantee them more than a hundred and fifty years—but in a hundred and fifty years’ time, current technology would be way out of date. Those who got the very best out of today’s IT would still be around to get the benefit of tomorrow’s—and might, if all went well, eventually arrive at the golden day when all the processes of aging could be arrested in perpetuity.

According to the ads, today’s young people were solidly set on an escalator that might take them all the way to absolute immunity to aging and disease. As the older generation—who had already aged too badly to be brought back permanently from the brink—gradually died off, the younger would inherit the earth in perpetuity. Not that anyone believed the ads implicitly, of course—ads were just ads, when all was said and done.