Текст книги "Inherit the Earth"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

Five

D

amon watched the two fighters square up. Their kit wasmore than a little cumbersome, but very few artificial organics were as delicate as the real thing and you couldn’t get template precision with thinner webs. As the two moved together, though, he deliberately looked away at the ruined buildings to either side of the street.

His eye was caught by one of the items of graffiti sketched in luminous paint on a smoke-blackened fragment of wall. It read: Live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse. It was an antique, so old that Madoc must have found it in a history book. In fact, he could imagine Madoc chuckling with glee when he discovered it, immediately appropriating it as part of the backcloth for his dramatic productions. No child of today, however dangerously he or she might want to live, would ever have come up with such a ridiculous slogan—although there were plenty of centenarians who might like to believe it of them.

Centenarians loved to see themselves as the survivors of the Second Deluge. Those who had made no effective contribution to the world’s survival were worse than those who had, swelling with absurd pride at the thought that they had endured the worst trial by ordeal that nature had ever devised and proved their worth. Such people could not imagine that anyone who came after them could possibly value the earth, or life itself, as much as they did—nor could they imagine that anyone who came after them could be as worthy of lifeas they were, let alone of immortality. No one knew for sure, but Damon’s suspicion was that a hundred out of every hundred-and-one Eliminator Operators were in their dotage.

He wondered what the neighborhood must have been like in the bad old days of the early twenty-first century, and what angry words might have been scrawled on the walls by boys and girls who really were condemned to die young. Throughout that century this neighborhood would have been crowded out with the unemployable and the insupportable: one of countless concentration-city powder kegs waiting for a revolutionary spark which had never come, thanks to the two plague wars—the first allegedly launched by the rich against the poor and the second by the poor against the rich. In the short term, of course, the rich had won both of them; it had taken the Crisis to restore a measure of equality and fraternity in the face of disaster. Now the Crisis was over and the New Utopia was here—but the neighborhood was still derelict, still host to darkness and to violence, still beyond the reach of supposedly universal civilization.

When the fight began in earnest, Damon couldn’t help looking back. He couldn’t refuse to watch, so he contented himself with trying to follow every nuance with a scrupulously clinical eye. The other watchers—whose sole raison d’être was to whip the combatants into a frenzy—weighed in with the customary verve and fury, howling out their support for one boy or the other.

Amazingly, Lenny Garon managed to stick Brady in the gut while the experienced fighter was arrogantly playing a teasing game of cat and mouse with him—which made Brady understandably furious. It was immediately clear to Damon that the older boy wasn’t going to settle for some token belly wound as a reprisal; he wanted copious bloodshed. That would be more than okay by Madoc Tamlin, so long as the cuts didn’t do too much damage to the recorders. Lenny Garon would suffer more than he had anticipated, perhaps more than he had thought possible, and for far longer—but it probably wouldn’t put him off. In all probability, he would be all the more enthusiastic to work his way up to something reallyheavy, in order to pay for the nanotech that would make him as good as new and keep him that way no matter what injuries his frail flesh might sustain.

Madoc had, of course, taken note of Damon’s reluctance to join in the loud exhortations of the crowd. “Don’t get all stiff on me, Damon,” he said. “You may be in the Big World now, but you’re still too young to get rigor mortis. Are you worried about splitting with Diana? She’s at my place now, but it isn’t permanent. I could help fix things up if you want me to.” Damon took the inference that Madoc had found Diana’s sudden reintroduction into his life burdensome.

“Interpol paid a call on me yesterday,” Damon told him, thinking that it was time to get down to business. No one was likely to be listening to them while the fight was on. “Silas Arnett has been snatched by persons unknown. They seem to think that I might be a target too.”

Madoc put on a show of astonishment. “I can’t believe that,” he said. “Eliminators only go after the older generation—and they use bombs and bullets. They’re all loners, and losers too. If they had any real organization they’d have been busted long ago. A snatch takes planning—not their style at all. What’s it got to do with you, anyhow? I thought you didn’t talk to your family.”

“I don’t, but it isSilas—the nearly human one. I don’t suppose you know anything at all about a particular loner who calls himself Operator one-oh-one? He’s said to be local.”

“Not my territory,” Madoc said with a shrug. “You want me to ask around, right?”

“It’s more complicated than that. The Operator in question named Conrad Helier as an enemy of mankind. When you’re through, okay?”

Madoc looked at him sharply before nodding. Even Diana Caisson didn’t know that Damon Hart had once been Damon Helier, and Madoc knew how privileged he was to have been let in on the secret. He’d probably have found out anyway—Madoc knew some very light-footed Webwalkers, first-rate poachers who had not yet turned gamekeeper—but he hadn’t had to go digging. Damon had trusted him, and obviously trusted him still. Damon knew that he could rely on Madoc to do everything he could to help, for pride’s sake as well as anything else he might be offered.

Lenny Garon was in real trouble now. The crowd were baying for blood, and getting it. Damon kept his own eyes slightly averted as Madoc turned back to concentrate fully on the business in hand, but he couldn’t turn away. He could feel the stir and surge of his own adrenalin, and his muscles were tensing as he put himself in the shoes of the younger fighter, trying to urge the boy on with his body language.

It didn’t work, of course.

A roar went up from the watchers as Brady finally rammed home his advantage. Poor Lenny was on the ground, screaming. The blade had gone deep, but the wound wasn’t mortal.

Damon knew that it would all be feeding into the template: the reflexes and convulsions of pain; the physical dimensions of the shock and the horror. It would all be ready digitized, ripe for manipulation and refinement. The tape doctor would take a little longer to tease it into proper shape than the real doctor would take to stitch up the fighters, but once the tape was made it would be fixed and finished. Lenny Garon might never be the same. His wounds would mend, leaving no obvious scars, but. . . .

He abandoned the train of thought. This affair seemed to be feeding an unhealthy tendency to melodrama. He reminded himself of what he’d told Diana about the porn tape. By the time the doctor had finished with the recordings there’d be nothing of Lennyleft at all; there’d only be the actions and the reactions, dissected out and purified as a marketable commodity. The fighter on the tape might have Lenny’s face and Lenny’s pain, but it wouldn’t be him. It would be an artifact, less than a shadow and nothing like a soul.

The whole thing was in rank bad taste, of course, but it was a living for all concerned. For the first few months after he had quit fighting, it had been his ownliving, and it had been based in talents that were entirely and exclusivelyhis own, using nothing that Conrad Helier had left to him—in his will, at least.

Damon had wanted then, and he wanted still, to be his own man.

Madoc Tamlin had moved forward to help the stricken street-fighter, not because he was overly concerned for the boy’s health but because he wanted to make certain that the equipment was still in good order. Not until the silvery web had been stripped away were the two fighters handed over to the amateur ambulance drivers waiting nearby. Brady got in under his own steam but Lenny Garon had to be carried.

The crowd drifted away, evaporating into the concrete wilderness.

Damon waited patiently until Madoc’s gear was all packed up and the produce of the day had been handed on to the next phase of its development.

“Your place or mine?” Madoc said, waving his hand in a lazy arc which took in both their cars. Damon led the way to his own vehicle and the older man followed. Damon waited until both doors had closed before starting to set out his proposition.

“If this thing turns out to be serious,” Damon said, stressing the if, “I’d be willing to lay out serious credit to pursue it.”

“How serious?” Madoc asked, for form’s sake.

“I’ve got some put away,” Damon said, knowing that his friend would understand exactly what he meant. He fished a smartcard out of his pocket and held it out. “I’ll call the bank in the morning and authorize it for cash withdrawals,” he said. “Everything’s aboveboard—there’s no need to hide the transactions. I’ll fix it so that you can draw ten thousand with no questions asked. If you need more, call me—but it had better be worth paying for.”

“What am I looking for?” Madoc asked mildly. “Apart from Operator one-oh-one, that is.”

“Silas was with a girl named Catherine Praill when he was snatched. The police don’t think she was involved, but you’d better check her out. Interpol also mentioned the name of another biotechnologist by the name of Surinder Nahal, recently resident in San Diego. That might also be irrelevant, but it has to be checked. If you can find Silas, or identify the people who took him, I’ll pay a suitable finder’s fee.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Madoc said equably. “Are you going to tell me what Operator one-oh-one has posted, or do I have to go trawling through the Eliminators’ favorite netboards?”

“He posted a message saying that Conrad Helier is still alive and calling him an enemy of mankind. He also sent me a personal message, which Interpol might not know about.”

Damon took the piece of paper from his suitskin’s inner pocket and handed it to Madoc Tamlin. Madoc read it and gave it back. “Could be from anybody,” he observed.

“Could be,” admitted Damon, “but whoever carried it up to the thirteenth floor took the trouble to crash Building Security. A playful move—but sometimes playful is serious in disguise. Somebody’s trying to jerk my strings, and I’d like to know who—and why.”

Madoc nodded, carefully furrowing his remarkable eyebrows. “Hywood’s another of your foster parents, right?”

“Right. Eveline Hywood. Currently resident in Lagrange-Five, allegedly very busy with important experiments of an unspecified nature. I doubt that she’ll return my call.”

“It won’t be easy to check her out. The Lagrangists don’t play by our rules, and they have their own playspace way out on the lunatic fringe of the Web.”

“Don’t worry too much about that. I can’t imagine that Eveline’s involved in the kidnapping or the Eliminator messages, even if she does have some relevant information. What do you know about Ahasuerus?”

“The original guy or the foundation?”

“I presume that the reference is to the foundation, rather than the legend,” Damon said, refusing to treat the issue as a joke.

“Not much,” Madoc admitted. “Been around for the best part of two hundred years. Major players in the longevity game, funding research here, there, and probably everywhere. Reputation ever-so-slightly shady because of a certain bad odor attached to their start-up capital, although it beats me why anybody should care after all this time. Every fortune in the world can be traced back to some initial act of piracy, isn’t that what they say? What was it they used to call the Ahasuerus guy, way back when?”

“The Man Who Stole the World,” Damon said.

“Yeah—that’s right. Zimmer, was it? Or Zimmerman?”

“Zimmerman.”

“Right.” Madoc nodded, as if he were the one answering instead of the one who’d asked. “Well, if he didsteal the world, we seem to have got it back again, don’t we?”

Damon didn’t want to get sidetracked. “I’ll dig up what I can about connections between Ahasuerus and my father,” he said, “although it’d be no surprise at all to find that they’d had extensive dealings. Ahasuerus must have had dealings with every biotech team in the world if they’ve been handing out cash to longevity researchers since the days before the Crash.

Madoc stroked his chin pensively. It seemed that his green eyes now glowed a little more powerfully than they had before. “What that note implies,” he said, “is that Arnett was taken because he knows something about Conrad Helier—something dirty. I don’t suppose you have any idea what that is, do you?”

“If I did,” Damon told him, “I’d probably want to sit on it awhile longer, just in case this business can be wrapped up quickly and quietly—but as it happens, I don’t. I was only ever told about Saint Conrad the Savior, in whose holy footsteps I was supposed to follow.”

“Were you ever given any cause to think that he might not be dead?”

“Quite the reverse,” Damon said. “According to his disciples, it was a major point of principle with Saint Conrad that an overcrowded world of long-lived individuals had to develop an etiquette, if not an actual legal requirement, whereby a dutiful citizen of the New Utopia would postpone the exercise of his—or her—right of reproduction until after death. If my foster parents are to be believed, my very existence is proof of Conrad Helier’s demise; if he were still alive, he’d be guilty of an awkward hypocrisy.”

“It’s Conrad Helier you’re really interested in, isn’t it?” Madoc suggested, running his neatly manicured fingernails speculatively back and forth along the edge of the smartcard that Damon had given him. “This Arnett guy is a side issue. You want to know if your natural father really is alive, and if the Eliminators really have grounds for resenting his continued presence in the world.”

“Concentrate on finding Silas Arnett, for the time being,” Damon said flatly.

Madoc nodded meekly. “I’ll put the Old Lady herself onto it,” he said. “She doesn’t take this kind of work normally, but she likes me. I can talk her into it.”

“I don’t want you hiring someone just because she’s a living legend,” Damon told him sharply. “I want someone who can get the job done.”

“Trust me,” Madoc advised him, with the casual air of a man who was as trustworthy as his own artificial graffiti. “Harriet’s the best. I knowthese things. Have I ever let you down?”

“Once or twice.”

Madoc only grinned at that, refusing to take the complaint seriously. “How are things otherwise?” he asked as he put the smartcard away. “Honest toil living up to your expectations?” Damon knew that what Madoc really wanted to know was whether he and Diana were washed up for good and all—but it wasn’t a topic he wanted to discuss.

“I’m thinking of taking a little break,” Damon told him. “I have some digging of my own to do tonight, but if I don’t get answers to a couple of calls I might have to take a brief excursion to Hawaii tomorrow.”

“What for?”

“Karol Kachellek is there, working out of Molokai. Like Eveline, he’s pointedly refusing to get back to me. He won’t want to tell me anything, even if he knows what all this is about, but if I go in person I might get somethingout of him. At the very least, I might unsettle him a bit.”

Madoc grinned. “You always were good at unsettling people. Is that it?” When Damon nodded, he let himself out of the car.

“Give my regards to Diana,” Damon said as Madoc began to walk away. “Tell her I’m sorry, but that it’ll all work out for the best.”

Madoc nearly turned back in order to follow that up, but he must have judged Damon’s mood more accurately than he’d let on. After a moment’s hesitation he kept going, answering the instruction with a calculatedly negligent wave.

As soon as the other car had pulled away Damon began to ask himself whether he’d done the right thing. Taking money from the legacy to bankroll Madoc’s investigations wasn’t really a betrayal of his determination to make his own way in the world—it was surely wholly appropriate that Conrad Helier’s money should be used in an attempt to find out what had happened to Silas, especially if it was Silas’s association with Conrad Helier that had given his kidnappers their motive. The real problem was whether Madoc’s involvement would actually help to solve the mystery, or merely add a further layer of complication. If he found anything damning, he would certainly offer it to Damon first . . . but what might he do with it thereafter? Even if Operator 101 could be thwarted, he might only be the first of many—and if Conrad Helier really had been an enemy of mankind, why should the secret be kept, even if it could be?

Damon checked the alarms on the car’s console, just to make sure that their inactivity really was testimony to the fact that neither Karol nor Eveline had replied to his calls.

They were in perfect working order; the silence was real. In fact, now that he was alone at the end of the alley the silence was positively oppressive. The night was clear and the stars were out, but they seemed few and very faint by comparison with the starscape he’d glimpsed in Eveline’s phone VE. Each one seemed set in splendid isolation against the cloth of black oblivion—and he had never felt as keenly as he did now that he was alone himself, a mere atom of soul stuff lost in a desert void.

“You’re going soft,” he told himself, unashamed of speaking the words aloud. “It was what you wanted, after all. No parents, no girlfriend, no opponents wielding knives. Just you, magnificently alone in the infinite wilderness of virtual space.”

It was true. The sense of relief he felt as he raced away from the gloomy badlands toward the welcoming city lights seemed far less ambiguous than what he’d felt when Diana had driven off and left him to his own devices.

Six

F

irst thing next morning, Damon obtained a reservation on the two o’clock flight to Honolulu. There was no point in taking the earlier flight because he’d only have had to spend an extra two hours in Honolulu waiting for the shuttle to take him on to Molokai.

He called Karol again, to warn him of his imminent arrival; the sim accepted the news impassively, as any AI would have done, but Damon took some small comfort from the fact that Karol would now have cause to regret not having taken the trouble to return his earlier call. Damon reset his own answerphone to make sure that if Karol chose to call back nowhe’d be conclusively stalled. He also put in a second call to Eveline Hywood, but he got the same response as before. In Lagrange-5 no one had to worry about frustrated callers deciding to put in a personal appearance.

It only took his search engine forty seconds to sort through the news tapes and Eliminator netboards for any mention of Silas Arnett, Conrad Helier, Surinder Nahal, or Operator 101, but it took Damon a further hour and a half to check through its findings, making absolutely sure that there was no authentic news. No one of any importance was issuing serious speculations about a possible connection between the Operator 101 posting and Arnett’s kidnapping, although a couple of newswriters had been alerted to Surinder Nahal’s unavailability by their search-engine synthesizers. So far, everyone in the public arena was whistling in the dark—just like Interpol.

Damon knew that he ought to do some work, but he hadn’t the heart to start the tawdry business of recovering Diana’s vital stats for the pornypop tape and the only other worthwhile commission he had on hand was an action/adventure game scenario which required him to develop an entire alien ecosphere. It wasn’t the sort of job he wanted to start when he knew he’d have to break off in three hours to go to the airport—especially when he had another option. He knew that it was just as likely to turn into a blind alley as trying to place a call to Eveline Hywood, but he figured that it had to be explored, just in case.

He packed his overnight bag and deposited it in the trunk of his car. Then he instructed the automatic pilot to find out where the nearest offices of the Ahasuerus Foundation were located and offer him an ETA. Given the size of the world—or even the USNA—he could easily have got an ETA that was the day after tomorrow, but the display assured him that he could be there long before noon.

The offices in question were close enough, and in territory familiar enough, for him to take the controls himself, but driving in downtown traffic was bad for his stress level at the best of times, and these were definitely not the best of times. He told the machine to set a course, but he didn’t retreat into the safe haven of the VE hood the way most nondrivers did. He just sat back with eyes front, rehearsing the questions he intended to ask, if it turned out that there was anyone prepared to give him some answers. He tilted his seat back slightly so that the traffic wouldn’t be too distracting.

The effect of the slight tilt was to fix his eyes on the shifting skyline way ahead of the traffic stream. At first, while the car seemed to be turning at every second intersection, the skyline kept changing, but once the pilot had found a reasonably straight route by which to follow its heading the Two Towers stuck out like a pair of sore thumbs—or a gateway to which the vehicle was being inexorably drawn.

The symbolism of the illusory gateway was not lost on Damon. The whole world was steering a course into the future with OmicronA on the left and PicoCon on the right. Ostensibly archrivals, the two megacorps and their various satellites were an effective cartel controlling at least 70 percent of the domestic nanotech business and 65 percent of the world’s. Now that PicoCon had the Gantz patents stitched up, its masters probably had 70 percent of the domestic biotech business too, insofar as it made any sense to separate biotech from nanotech when the distinction between organic and inorganic molecular machines was becoming more and more blurred with every year that went by.

Possession of the Gantz patents entitled PicoCon to the slightly higher tower, so the edifice that reared up on the right was just a little more massive than the one to the left, but both had been forged out of ocean-refined sand and both architects had done their utmost to take advantage of sparkling salt in catching and reflecting the sun’s bright light. Although PicoCon was the larger, it wasn’t necessarily the brighter. There was a curious defiance about the glow of OmicronA which refused to accept the metaphorical shade—but Damon knew that it was only an optical illusion. As a beacon signaling the advent of tomorrow the two corps were flames of the same furious fire.

Needless to say, the offices of the Ahasuerus Foundation weren’t in the same league. Ahasuerus didn’t even have its own building—just a couple of floors in one of the humbler structures right across the road from the PicoCon tower. By comparison with its taller neighbor the building looked as if it had been gantzed out of an unusually objectionable mudslide; there was not a glimmer of sea salt about its stern exterior and its windows were tinted brown. Most of its neighbors were equipped for a measure of continuing accretion, so that salt from windblown spray hadaccumulated on their slightly blurred surfaces, giving each of them a curious glittering sheen, but the building housing Ahasuerus had been comprehensively finished, and it seemed utterly self-satisfied in its relative dullness—although some observers might have reckoned it sinister as well as stern. Its car park was certainly dimmer and dingier than fashion prescribed.

Damon had already decided that the best course of action was to throw the burden of secrecy onto the foundation’s own security, so he simply marched up to the reception desk and summoned a human contact. When a smartly dressed young man eventually emerged from the inner offices Damon gave him the folded note.

“My name’s Damon Hart,” he said. “I’m the biological son of Conrad Helier and the foster son of Silas Arnett and Eveline Hywood. It might be to the advantage of the foundation if someone in authority were to read this document. It might also be to the advantage of the foundation if lesser mortals—including yourself—refrained from reading it. Personally, I don’t care at all; if you or anyone else wants to take the risk of looking at it, you’re welcome.”

That, he figured, should get the item as far up the chain of command as was feasible without the contents of the enigmatic message becoming common knowledge.

The fetcher-and-carrier disappeared into the inner offices again, leaving Damon to his own devices for a further ten minutes.

Eventually, a woman came to collect him. She had silky red hair and bright blue eyes. For a moment Damon thought that she was genuinely young, and his jaw tightened as he concluded that he was about to be fobbed off, but the hair and eye colors were a little too contrived and a slight constriction in her practiced smile reassured him that she had undergone recent somatic reconstruction of the kind that was misleadingly advertised as “rejuvenation.” Her real age was likely to be at least seventy, if not in three figures.

“Mr. Hart,” she said, offering him the piece of paper, still folded, in lieu of a handshake. “I’m Rachel Trehaine. Won’t you come through.”

The corridors behind the security wall were bare; the doors had no nameplates. The office into which Rachel Trehaine eventually led Damon was liberally equipped with flat screens and fitted with shelves full of discs and digitapes, but it had no VE hood. “Perhaps I’d better warn you that I’m only a senior reader,” she said as she waved him to a chair. “I don’t have any executive authority. I’ve had an encrypted version of your document relayed to New York, but it may take some time to get a response from them. In the meantime, I’d like to thank you for bringing the matter to our attention—we had not been independently informed.”

“You’re welcome,” Damon assured her insincerely. “I hope you’ll show me the same courtesy of bringing to my attention any pertinent matters of which I might not have been independently informed.” He winced slightly as he heard the pomposity in his tone, realizing that he might have overrehearsed his opening speech.

“Of course,” said Rachel Trehaine, with the charming ease of a practiced dissembler. “I don’t suppose you have any idea—if only the merest suspicion—who this mysterious Operator might be, or why this attack on your family has been launched?”

“I thought you might know more about that than I do,” Damon said. “You’ll have complete records of any dealings between Ahasuerus and Conrad Helier’s research team.”

“When I say that I’m a senior reader,” she told him mildly, “I don’t mean that I have free access to the foundation’s own records. My job is to keep watch on other data streams, selecting out data of interest, collating and reporting. I’m a scientific analyst, not a historian.”

“I meant you plural, not you singular,” Damon told her. “Someone in your organization must be able to figure out which particular closeted skeleton Operator one-oh-one intends to bring out into the open. Why else would he have sent me to you?”

“Why would he—or she—have sent you anywhere at all, Mr. Hart? Why send you a personal message? It seems very odd—not at all the way that Eliminators usually operate.”

The delicate suggestion was, of course, that Damon was the source of the message—that he himself was Operator 101. As a scientific analyst Rachel Trehaine would naturally have considerable respect for Occam’s razor.

“That’s an interesting question,” Damon said agreeably. “When Inspector Yamanaka referred to the situation as a puzzle he was speaking metaphorically, but that message implies that the instigator of this series of incidents really iscreating a puzzle, dangling it before me as a kind of lure—just as I, in my turn, am dangling it before you. Operator one-oh-one wants me to go digging, and he’s offering suggestions as to where I might profitably dig. Given that Conrad Helier is dead, he can’t possibly be the Eliminators’ real target—and if their promise that Silas Arnett will be released after he’s given them what they want is honest, he isn’t the real target either. If the note is to be taken at face value, Operator one-oh-one might be building a file on Eveline Hywood, with particular reference to her past dealings with your foundation.”

Rachel Trehaine took a few moments to weigh that up, presumably employing all her skills as a senior reader. Anyone but a scientific analyst might have challenged his conclusions, or at least pointed out the tentative nature of his inferences, but she was content merely to observe and record.

“Have you spoken to Eveline Hywood?” she asked.

“I’ve tried,” Damon told her. “She isn’t accepting calls at the moment. There’s nothing sinister in that—she tends to get engrossed in her work. She never liked being interrupted. I’ll get through eventually, but she’ll probably tell me that it isn’t my business anymore—that I forfeited any right I might have had to be told what’s going on when I walked out on the Great Crusade to run with the gangs.”

The red-haired woman pondered that information too. Damon judged that she was under real pressure to make sense of this, or thought she was. However lowly her position within the organization might be she was obviously in charge of the Los Angeles office, at least for the moment. She knew that she might have decisions to make, as well as orders to follow from New York.

“The Ahasuerus Foundation’s sole purpose is to conduct research into technologies of longevity,” she said sententiously. “It’s entirely probable that we provided funding to Conrad Helier’s research team if they were involved in projects connected with longevity research. I can’t imagine that there was anything in our dealings to attract the interest of the so-called Eliminators.”