Inherit the Earth

by Brian Stableford

  “No, I don’t,” the inspector said equably. “In fact, I’m certain that you’re not, but I do have reason to think that you have information relevant to an ongoing murder inquiry, and perhaps to the whereabouts of a man we’re currently seeking in that connection.”

  Damon felt horror clutch at his stomach. The mirror man had said that his side in the dispute hadn’t killed anyone—but there was no way to know how many lies the mirror man had told. “Silas is dead?” he said, leaping to what seemed to be the obvious conclusion.

  “We still have no information as to the whereabouts or well-being of Dr. Arnett,” Yamanaka said, taking no satisfaction from his own punctiliousness. “The inquiry in question is into the murder of Surinder Nahal. We are holding your friend Diana Caisson as a possible accomplice, and we are making every effort to locate our chief suspect, Madoc Tamlin—who is, I believe, currently in your employ.”

  Damon was lost for words. He didn’t know whether to be more alarmed by the fact that Diana was in custody or the fact that Madoc—who evidently wasn’t—had somehow been fingered for a murder he surely couldn’t have committed. He had thought himself dazed and confused before, but he was doubly so now. “Oh shit,” he murmured, in lieu of anything meaningful to say.

  Yamanaka was looking at the short length of chain dangling from Damon’s wrist, as if regretting that Rachel Trehaine had taken the trouble to have it cut. “Please come with me, Mr. Hart,” he said. “I think it’s time you told us everything you know about this matter. We’re rather tired of people playing with us.”

  For a fleeting second, Damon wondered whether the man from Interpol might be right—but only for a fleeting second. By the time he consented to be led away, he was already rehearsing the half-truths and evasions he would have to deploy. Whatever kind of game this was, he didn’t think Interpol could possibly win it. He didn’t even think they could be reckoned as serious players, although Inspector Yamanaka obviously didn’t see things that way.

  Damon was taken to one of two waiting cars. Sergeant Rolfe was beside it, holding the rear door open. While Damon climbed in, Hiru Yamanaka went around the other side and took the seat next to him. Rolfe slammed the door shut and walked away, escorting Catherine Praill to the second car.

  “I suppose you got a note pushed under your door too,” Damon said to Yamanaka as the car pulled away.

  “We put Ms. Trehaine under discreet surveillance after you went to see her,” the inspector told him mildly. “We were taking an interest in all your movements, and the call you paid on Ahasuerus stood out as one of the least expected.”

  “Where were you when Steve Grayson kidnapped me?” Damon asked sourly.

  “Again, not as far away as you might have thought. Unfortunately, we lost sight of you temporarily. We feared for your safety, having seen the message which was put out on the Web shortly after you and Mr. Grayson took off—and even more so when Rajuder Singh satisfied us that you really had been taken from the island by force. Do you wish to press charges against Grayson and Singh, by the way? We didn’t have enough evidence to arrest them without your testimony, but we’re still keeping an open file on the matter.”

  “That’s okay,” Damon said drily. “They thought they were acting in my best interests, and perhaps they were. Best to let it alone—Karol is my foster father, after all.” As an afterthought, he added: “They were working for Karol, weren’t they?”

  “I believe so,” the Interpol man confirmed. “We checked their records, of course. Rajuder Singh’s is unblemished to a degree that’s rather remarkable in such an old man. He’s an ecological engineer and has been for well over a century. He knew your father quite well, although that was a long time ago.”

  Damon didn’t respond to that item of delicately trailed bait. When the silence had lasted five or six seconds, Yamanaka spoke again in an awkward manner to which he was plainly unaccustomed. “I ought to inform you that there was an unfortunate incident shortly after you left Molokai—an explosion aboard the Kite. Rescuers picked up a dozen survivors, but there was no sign of Karol Kachellek.”

  Damon turned to look at him, feeling that insult was being heaped upon injury. “Karol?” he said helplessly. Numbly, he noted that the Interpol man had said “incident” rather than “accident.”

  “I’m afraid so,” Yamanaka said. “It seems probable that he’s dead, although no body has been found.”

  “Murdered?”

  “We don’t know that. The investigation is continuing.”

  “Am I a suspect in that investigation too?” Damon asked abrasively. “Do you think I went to Molokai to plant a bomb on my foster father’s boat?” He didn’t expect an answer to that and he didn’t get one, so he quickly changed tack. “Is Eveline okay?”

  “So far as we know,” the man from Interpol said, with a slight sigh that might have been relief at the opportunity to impart some good news. “I’m very concerned, though, for the safety of Silas Arnett. If you have any information regarding the identity of the persons responsible for his abduction I implore you to tell me without delay. We’ve now received several communications from someone who claims to be the real Operator one-oh-one, disowning all the recent notices posted under that alias. It’s difficult to confirm her story, of course, but given that she’s incriminating herself I’m inclined to believe her. It has always seemed to me that this business could not be the work of Eliminators, unless some powerful organization had suddenly decided to commit its resources to the cause of Elimination. I find that hard to believe.”

  “How old is the woman who claims to be the original Operator one-oh-one?” Damon asked curiously.

  “She’s a hundred and five now,” Yamanaka told him, “but that’s a side issue. My most urgent concern is the safety of Silas Arnett. Now that those confessions have been released. . . .”

  “They were fakes,” Damon told him.

  “Painfully obvious fakes,” Yamanaka agreed, “which could easily have been made without Dr. Arnett’s active involvement. That’s what worries me. If his kidnappers didn’t actually need him, but only needed to remove him from the scene, they might have killed him before they removed him from his house. Now that we’ve found Dr. Nahal’s body, there seems to be more than adequate cause for concern.”

  “You don’t really think I had anything to do with that, do you?” Damon asked gruffly.

  “You commissioned Madoc Tamlin to look for Dr. Nahal.

  When the local police discovered Tamlin at the murder scene he attacked them with a crowbar and ran away.”

  “I commissioned Madoc to collect some information,” Damon said defensively. “I can’t believe he’d involve himself in a murder—that’s not his style at all. You can’t be serious about holding Diana as an accomplice.”

  The man from Interpol wouldn’t confirm or deny his seriousness. Instead, he said: “Dr. Arnett’s supposed confession was an interesting statement, wasn’t it? Food for thought for everyone—and food which will be all the more eagerly swallowed for being dressed up that way.”

  “It was rubbish,” Damon said.

  “I dare say that Dr. Arnett was correct about the effect the Crash had, however,” Yamanaka went on. “The way he spoke in his second statement about bringing people together was really quite moving. The idea that for the first and only time in human history all humankind was on the same side, united against the danger of extinction, is rather romantic. The world isn’t like that anymore, alas. That’s a pity, don’t you think?”

  “Not really,” Damon replied, wondering where this was leading. He knew that the Japanese were supposed to have made a fine art of beating around the bush before coming to the point, but the man from Interpol hadn’t previously shown any particular inclination to circumlocution. “A world devoid of conflicts would be a very tedious place to live.”

  “I take your point,” Yamanaka conceded, “but you are a young man, and even I can barely imagine what the world was like before and during the Cras
h. I wonder, sometimes, how different things might seem to the very old: to men like Rajuder Singh, Surinder Nahal, and Karol Kachellek, and women like Eveline Hywood and the real Operator one-oh-one. They might be rather disappointed in the world they made, and the children they produced from their artificial wombs, don’t you think? They were hoping to produce a utopia, but . . . well, no one could convincingly argue that the meek have inherited the world—at least, not yet.”

  Damon didn’t know what the policeman might read into any answer he gave, so he prudently gave none at all.

  “Sometimes,” Yamanaka added, in the same offhandedly philosophical tone, “I wonder whether anyone can inherit the world, now that people who owned it all in the days before the Crash believe that they can live forever. I’m not sure that they’ll ever let go of it deliberately . . . and such fighting as they’ll have to do to keep it will be mostly among themselves.”

  He thinks he’s figured it out, Damon thought, with a twinge of grudging admiration. He’s asking for my help in finding the evidence. And why shouldn’t I cooperate, if people are actually dying? Why shouldn’t I tell him what I know . . . or what I believe? “My father never owned more than the tiniest slice of the world,” he said aloud, by way of procrastination. He was awkwardly conscious of the fact that he had said my father instead of Conrad Helier. “He was never a corpsman, and never wanted to be.”

  “Your father remade and reshaped the world by designing the New Reproductive System,” Yamanaka replied softly. “The corpsmen who thought the world was theirs to make and shape might well have resented that, even if he never disturbed their commercial empire. Men of business always fear and despise utopians, even the ones who pose no direct threat to them. The corpsmen probably resent your father still, almost as much as the Eliminator diehards resent them.”

  “He’s been dead for fifty years,” Damon pointed out. “Why would corpsmen want to waste their time demonizing the dead?” He hoped that Yamanaka might be able to answer that one; he certainly had no answer himself.

  “His collaborators are still alive,” Yamanaka countered—and then, after a carefully weighed pause, added: “or were, until this plague of evil circumstance began.”

  Twenty

  B

  y the time the two cars reached the local Interpol headquarters Damon had decided to continue the strategy that he had reflexively undertaken while chatting informally to Hiru Yamanaka, and which he had employed in all his previous dealings with the police. He proceeded to deny everything. He told himself that his purpose was to conserve all the relevant information he had for his own future use, but he was uncomfortably conscious of his own inability to decide exactly what was relevant.

  The strategy was not without its costs. For one thing, Yamanaka refused to let him speak to Diana Caisson—although Damon wasn’t certain that he needed to rush into a confrontation as awkward as that one would inevitably prove to be. For another, it intensified Yamanaka’s annoyance with him—which would be bound to result in an intensification of the scrutiny to which his life and actions were currently being subjected.

  Yamanaka had obviously anticipated that Damon would not respond to his subtle overtures, although he put on a show of sorrow. He soon reverted to straightforward interrogation, although his pursuit of information seemed rather halfhearted. At first Damon took this to be a gracious acceptance of defeat, but by the time the interview was over he had begun to wonder whether Yamanaka might actually prefer it if he were out on the street inviting disaster rather than sitting snugly and safely in protective custody while Interpol chased wild geese.

  “The claims made by the so-called real Operator one-oh-one are, of course, receiving a full measure of publicity,” Yamanaka told him, with a dutiful concern that might well have been counterfeit. “They have not gone uncontradicted, but would-be assassins might not be inclined to believe the contradictions. Were you to return to your apartment right away, trouble might follow you. Were you to attempt to disappear into the so-called badlands in the east of the city, you might easily deliver yourself into danger.”

  “I can make my own risk assessments and responses,” Damon told him. The fog was lifting now, and he was becoming more articulate by the minute. “You don’t have any evidence at all to connect me to Surinder Nahal’s death. As far as I can tell, you have nothing to connect Madoc and Diana to it either, except that they found the body before the local police. Maybe Madoc got a bit excited when the cops burst in on him, but that’s understandable. It’s not as if they did any real damage. Even if you press ahead with the assault charges, the fact that they might have gone to the place where they found the body on my behalf doesn’t make me an accessory to the assault. Given that you don’t have any charges to bring against me, I think you ought to let me go now.”

  “I can hold you overnight if I have reason to believe that you’re withholding relevant information,” Yamanaka pointed out, strictly for form’s sake.

  “How could I possibly know anything relevant to the assault?”

  “Apparently,” Yamanaka observed serenely, “you don’t even know anything relevant to your own kidnapping. Given that you were unlucky enough to be kidnapped twice in a matter of hours, that seems a little careless.”

  “Karol’s error of judgment wasn’t a kidnapping at all,” Damon said. “It was just a domestic misunderstanding. As for the second incident, I was asleep the whole time, from the moment I was gassed until the moment I woke up where Rachel Trehaine found me.”

  “Even so, Mr. Hart,” Yamanaka observed, as a parting shot, “you seem to have become extraordinarily accident-prone lately. It might be unwise to trust your luck too far.”

  Damon didn’t want to extend the conversation any further. He accepted a ride back to his apartment building, but the uniformed officer who drove the car didn’t attempt to continue the interrogation.

  When he’d taken time out to visit the bathroom and order some decent cooked food from the kitchen dispenser, Damon checked his mail. He wasn’t unduly surprised or alarmed to find that there was nothing from Madoc Tamlin, although there were three messages from Diana Caisson, all dispatched from the building he’d just come from. There was nothing from Molokai, but there was, at long last, a curt note from Lagrange-5, saying that Eveline Hywood would be available to take his call after nineteen hundred hours Greenwich Mean Time.

  Damon subtracted eight hours and checked the clock, which informed him that he had half an hour still in hand. He double-checked the date to make sure that he had the right one—he’d lost an entire day between the time he’d been snatched from Karol Kachellek’s secret hideaway and the morning he’d been picked up in Venice Beach.

  By the time he’d changed and eaten a makeshift meal the half hour was almost up. He decided that he couldn’t be bothered twiddling his thumbs until the hour struck, so he slipped inside his hood.

  It would have been typical of Eveline to refuse the call until the appointed hour actually arrived, but she didn’t. It wasn’t an AI sim that answered the phone, but that didn’t mean that the conversation would be eye-to-eye. The image floating in the familiar VE environment was being directly animated by Eveline Hywood, but it still had to be synthesized to edit out the hood she was wearing. Damon knew that Eveline would be giving no secrets away, in what she said or the way she looked, but he still wanted to hear what she had to say.

  “Damon,” she said pleasantly. “It’s good to see you. I’ve been very worried about you. Is there any news of Karol or Silas?” Eveline knew perfectly well that if there had been any news it would have been relayed to her instantly, but she was putting on a show of concern. Damon noticed that the last time she had undergone somatic adjustment for her progressive myopia she had had her irises retinted. Her natural eye color was dark brown, but her irises were now lightened almost to orange. Given that the melanin content of her skin had been carefully maintained, the modified eyes gave her stare a curiously feline quality. It was easy enough to bel
ieve that she might be the prime mover in whatever plot had caused such intense annoyance to the recently self-appointed overlords of Earth.

  “They’re still missing,” Damon confirmed. “I expect they’ll turn up eventually, dead or alive. That’s out of our hands, alas. Do you have any idea what’s going on, Eveline?” He knew that he’d have to wait a little while for her answer; their words and gestures had a quarter of a million miles to traverse. The time delay wasn’t sufficient to cause any real difficulties, and Eveline must be thoroughly accustomed to it, but Damon knew that he would find it disconcerting to begin with. While he waited, he looked at her appraisingly, trying to figure out exactly what kind of person she was. He had never managed to do that while they were living under the same roof.

  He wondered why Eveline had designed the VE as a duplicate of her actual environment. Was she underlining the fact that she lived in deep space: the only foreign country left where things had to be done differently? In L-5, even a room decked out as simply as possible had to have all kinds of special devices to contain its trivial personal possessions and petty decorations. In space, nothing could be relied upon to stay where you put it, even in a colony which retained a ghost of gravity by virtue of its spin.

  “Someone is evidently intent on blackening your father’s name,” Eveline told him, with an airy wave of her slender hand. “I can’t imagine why. These self-appointed Eliminators seem to be getting completely out of hand. There are none up here, mercifully; L-Five isn’t perfect, but it’s a haven of sanity compared to Earth. I think it’s because we’re building a new society from scratch, without nations or corporations; because we have no history we feel no compulsion to maintain such ancient traditions as rebellion, hatred, and murder.”

  Damon didn’t bother to question her certainty as to whether L-5 was really Eliminator-free, or corporation-free. It had taken so long to get through to her that he didn’t want to waste any time. He knew perfectly well that he wasn’t going to get any straight answers, but he wanted to know where he stood, if she was prepared to tell him.