Inherit the Earth

by Brian Stableford

  “That’s an interesting question,” Harriet said.

  “I know it is,” Madoc said, trying not to let his exasperation show. “What’s the answer?”

  “I’ll be honest with you, Madoc,” Harriet said. “The tape’s a fake. It’s not a crude fake, but it’s definitely a fake. Even Interpol could have determined that—probably. The fact that Silas Arnett still hasn’t turned up would have alerted them to the same stink that reached your sensitive nostrils.”

  “So why the hesitation?” Madoc wanted to know.

  “The thing is,” the Old Lady said, “that I’m not sure how much deeper we ought to dig into this. You see, if Arnett’s friends didn’t kill the man whose body you found, then someone else did—and it certainly wasn’t some dilettante Eliminator.”

  “I don’t get it,” Madoc said. “You’re supposed to be the only ace Webwalker in the world who doesn’t give a damn what she gets involved with. You’re supposed to be utterly fearless.”

  “I am,” she told him coldly. “This isn’t a matter of watching my back, Madoc—it’s you I’m worried about. Nobody’s going to come after me, and I doubt that they intend to harm Damon Hart, but you’re not part of the game plan. You might easily be seen as a minor irritation best removed from the field of play with the minimum of fuss. If this tape was really intended to fall into Interpol’s hands rather than yours the people who left it might be a trifle miffed, and they’re not the kind of people you want to have as enemies. It’s one thing to set yourself up as an outlaw, quite another to become a thorn in the side of people who are above the law.”

  Madoc stared at her. “Do you know who’s behind all this?” he asked sharply.

  “I don’t know anything,” she told him, “but I’m absolutely certain that I can make the right guess.”

  “Is that why you called it an interesting problem?”

  “Yes it is—but what interests me is why, not who. It’s the why that I can’t fathom. The how has its intriguing features too, but I think I understand pretty well how the moves came to be played the way they were—I just can’t figure out why the game’s being played at all.”

  “Well,” said Madoc a little impatiently, “what interests me at present is that Damon has disappeared. When I first got you involved, I admit, it was mainly a matter of money—Damon’s money. I was just doing a job for him. I don’t really care about Arnett, or Nahal, or Kachellek—but I do care about Damon.”

  “Damon’s back,” Harriet replied, raising her white eyebrows a fraction, as if she had only just realized that he didn’t know. Maybe it hadn’t occurred to her that a young man on the run couldn’t keep his fingers on the pulse of things quite as easily as an old lady in hiding.

  “Since when?” Madoc asked.

  “Since this morning. That tap I put into Ahasuerus told me—not that they were trying to keep it a secret. As soon as Trehaine found out that it was Damon she’d been sent out to find she called Interpol. Catherine Praill was with him. She’s probably irrelevant, but the people who took Damon clearly wanted him back in play as soon as possible. That’s why I’m fairly sure they won’t hurt him. It’s possible that he now knows far more than I do. Interpol will have him under a microscope, of course—it won’t be easy for you to get to him without being picked up.”

  “I’ve got to get the tape to him,” Madoc said, “and anything else you can give me. Who’s doing this, Harriet? Who’s jerking us all around?”

  Harriet shrugged her narrow shoulders. “PicoCon,” she said flatly. “OmicronA might be in it too, but PicoCon’s board likes to keep these little adventures in-house. It’s a matter of style. What I can’t figure out is what they’re so annoyed about and why they’re tackling it in such a roundabout way. Compared with their irresistible juggernaut, Eveline Hywood’s organization is a mere ant, which could be crushed underfoot on a whim. Ahasuerus might be a flea, but it’s a flea that’s already in their pocket, moneywise. This can’t be everyday commercial competition, and it must be something that they find interesting, or they’d just stamp on it—but if it isn’t about money . . ..” She left the sentence unfinished.

  “PicoCon,” Madoc repeated wonderingly. “PicoCon kidnapped Silas Arnett and tried to frame Conrad Helier for causing the Crash? PicoCon blew up Kachellek’s boat, torched Surinder Nahal’s body, and strewed forged tapes and Eliminator bulletins all over the Net?”

  “They’re also handily placed for pushing messages under people’s doors hereabouts—but for what it’s worth, I don’t think PicoCon did all of that. They just started the ball rolling. This business with the burned body and the VE pak is a counter-punch. I think Hywood’s people did that—and I think they rigged the second confession too. They were supposed to roll over and beg for mercy, but they fought back instead. You have to admire them for it, but it might be unwise. Just because PicoCon used gentler methods first time around it doesn’t mean that they won’t use brute force to settle the matter. That’s why I’m worried about you. If Kachellek really was blown up, you might be next on the list.”

  “I can’t believe that cosmicorps play games like this,” Madoc said wonderingly. “PicoCon least of all—they’ve got more than enough real work to occupy them.”

  “That’s a matter of perspective,” Harriet told him drily. “You could say that there’s a point at which any successful corporation becomes so big and so powerful that the profits take care of themselves, leaving the strategists with nothing to do but play games. Serious games, but games nevertheless. Attacking Conrad Helier’s memory seems a trifle unsporting, though—terrible ingratitude.”

  “Ingratitude? Why? Helier’s team was always strictly biotech, as far as I can work out. I thought PicoCon’s fortune was based on inorganic nanotech. What did he ever do for them?”

  “He gave them the world on a plate. PicoCon may be the engine churning out the best set pieces nowadays, but the New Reproductive System stabilized the board for them. The Crash put a belated end to unpoliced population growth, but Helier’s artificial wombs made certain that the bad old days would never come back again. If Helier hadn’t got the new apparatus up and running in time to become the new status quo, some clown would have engineered a set of transformer viruses to refertilize every woman under the age of sixty-five and we’d have been back to square one. You probably think the Second Plague War was a nasty affair, but that’s because you read about it in the kind of history books which only tell you what happened and skip lightly over all the might-have-beens. If it hadn’t been for Conrad Helier, you’d probably have had to live through the third round of the Not-Quite-Emortal Rich versus the Ever-Desperate Poor—and PicoCon would have spent the last half-century pumping out molecular missiles and pinpoint bombs instead of taking giant strides up the escalator to true emortality.”

  Madoc had to think about this for a minute or two, but he soon saw the logic of the case. New technologies of longevity were an unqualified boon in an era in which population had ceased to grow, even though access to them was determined by wealth. In a world whose poorer people were still producing children in vast numbers, those same technologies would inevitably have become bones of fierce contention, catalysts of allout war.

  “You don’t suppose,” he mused, “that Hywood and Kachellek might have done just that—engineered a set of viruses to refertilize the female population?”

  “No, I don’t,” said Harriet. “Even if they were silly enough to work on the problem, they’d have the sense to bury their results. Anyway, the world now has the advantage of starting from a position of relative sanity instead of rampant insanity—if some such technology did come along I think ninety-nine women in every hundred would have the sense to say no. It would be interesting to know what Hywood and Kachellek have done—but it might be safer not to try to find out. As I said before, if they really did blow Kachellek’s boat to smithereens with him in it. . . .”

  “If?” Madoc queried.

  “It really is a game, Madoc. Bl
uff and counterbluff, lie and counterlie. The one thing of which we can be certain is that nothing is what it seems to be—not just on the surface but way down through the layers. PicoCon is making a big issue out of the possibility that Conrad Helier is only playing dead. Maybe Kachellek’s playing dead too. Maybe Surinder Nahal is only playing dead.”

  “If that burned body really was his,” Madoc murmured, “he was putting on a very convincing act.”

  “That might be the whole point of the exercise. Do you want me to get a message to Damon for you?”

  “Can you do that? Without the cops knowing, I mean.”

  “I think so—but you can’t bring him here. I’ve used up so much borrowed time that I’ll be dying way beyond my means whenever I go, but I still like to be careful. It’s a matter of professional pride. You’ll have to figure out a safe place—and he’ll have to figure out how to get there without dragging Interpol in his wake. I’ll set it up for you—but if you want my advice, you’ll tell him to put the rest of his money back in the bank and call it quits, so that you can start playing Three Wise Monkeys. We’re out of our league here. Nobody can fight PicoCon and win.”

  If you never play out of your league, Madoc thought, you never get promoted. All he said aloud, though, was: “Okay—I need to get a meeting set up as soon as possible. Damon will want the tape, and everything else I’ve got, whether he intends to fight or not.”

  “Don’t be too sure of that,” Harriet advised him soberly. “Things have moved fast—he might not be in the same frame of mind as he was when he sent you off on this wild goose chase. Now that he’s had his little holiday, he might want to play Three Wise Monkeys too, and he might be prepared to cut you adrift and leave you to PicoCon’s tender mercies—or to the LAPD’s.”

  Her concern seemed genuine, but Madoc couldn’t imagine that he needed it. You might know PicoCon, Old Lady, he thought, but you don’t know Damon. He’d never change sides on me. Madoc was as certain of that as he needed to be—and even if he hadn’t been, what choice did he have?

  Twenty-two

  A

  fter sitting through the second tape of his “confessions,” Silas Arnett found himself looking out upon a pleasant outdoor scene: a wood, like the ones to the south of his house. A rich carpet of leaf litter was delicately dappled by sunlight streaming through the canopy. The gnarled boughs of the trees offered abundant perches to little songbirds whose melodies filled the air. It was a simulation of an ancient woodland, whose design owed more to nostalgia than historical accuracy.

  Unfortunately, the pleasantness of the surroundings found no echo within his body. In the VE he was a mere viewpoint, invisible to himself, but that only served to place more emphasis on his sense of touch, which informed him that the conditions of his confinement were now becoming quite unbearable.

  The subtle changes of position he was able to make were no longer adequate to counter the aching in his limbs. The chafing of the straps which bound his wrists and ankles was now a burning agony. It did no good to tell himself that by any objective standard these were very minor pains, no worse than those which constituted the everyday condition of millions in the days before IT. He, Silas Arnett, had grown fully accustomed to being able to control pain, and now that he could no longer do it he felt that he might easily die of sheer frustration.

  A human figure came through the trees to stand before him. It was dressed in a monk’s habit, and Silas inferred that it was supposed to be male, but it was a modern secular monk, not a member of any religious order that might have been contemporary with an ancient forest. The ornament the monk wore around his neck was not a cross but a starburst: a symbol of the physicists’ Creation rather than the redemptive sacrifice of the Christ whose veneration was now confined to a handful of antiquarians.

  The man pushed the hood back from his forehead and let its fold fall upon his shoulders. Silas didn’t recognize the exposed visage; it was a handsome, serene face which bore the modest signs of aging that most monks considered appropriate to their station.

  Silas wasn’t fooled by the appearance. He knew that the mind behind the mask was the mind of his tormentor.

  His “tormentor” had not, in the end, resorted to any very violent torture, but in his present condition Silas found it impossible to be grateful for that. Even had he been more comfortable, any gratitude he might have felt would have been tempered by the knowledge that even though he had not been cut or burned he had certainly been imprisoned, maligned, mocked, and misrepresented.

  “That one looked even worse than the first one,” he said, gritting his teeth against his discomfort and hoping that talk might distract him from his woe. “It really doesn’t add anything. I can’t see why you bothered.”

  “I didn’t,” said the monk. “That was someone else’s work. I presume that your friends did it—you noticed, I dare say, that the underlying message was that what you and Conrad Heller did was both necessary and justified. On the surface, it begged to be identified as a mere lie, a vicious but half-baked slander, but that was double bluff. The subtext said: Even if it were true, it wouldn’t be in the least terrible. Even if Conrad Heller did cause the Crash, he did it for the noblest of reasons, and it desperately needed to be done. He was a hero, not an enemy of mankind. When the original Operator one-oh-one indignantly blew her cover, by the way, she objected strenuously to my use of that particular phrase. She thinks that I should have said ‘enemy of humankind.’ She’s of an age to be sensitive about that sort of thing—and I suppose a man of your age can probably sympathize with her.”

  Silas wasn’t in the least interested in the authentic Eliminator’s retention of outdated radfem sensibilities. “I suppose the subtext of that habit and starburst you’re wearing,” he said, “is that what you’re doing to me is being done for the noblest of reasons—even though you won’t deign to explain what they are.”

  “Nobility doesn’t come into it,” the monk told him. “I simply want Conrad Helier to come out of hiding. You were the bait. To be perfectly honest, I’m a little disappointed in him. Dumping that tape was a distinctly weak-kneed response to my challenge. The tape I left with the burned body was much cleverer—as we would all have had the chance to appreciate if Damon’s troublesome friend hadn’t got to the scene before the police and removed the evidence. I wish I knew whether your friends’ failure to rescue you is a matter of incompetence, laziness, or a sacrifice move. They might actually have abandoned you to whatever fate I care to decide. Perhaps they think that it might inconvenience me more if nobody actually came to rescue you at all.”

  “Fuck this,” Silas said vituperatively. “All this may be just a game to you, but I’m suffering. If you’ve done what you set out to do and don’t intend to kill me, isn’t it about time you simply let me go?”

  “It’s certainly time that someone came to get you,” the monk admitted. “I’m truly sorry that Conrad Helier hasn’t bothered to do it. Alas, I can’t simply release you. This VE’s fitted to a telephone, and I’m calling from elsewhere. The mechanical devices holding you in position require manual release.”

  “Someone was here earlier—actually in the room. You took care to let me know that when I first woke up.”

  “Everything had to be set up, and manually operated devices have to be put in place manually. As soon as you were secure, however, my helpers made themselves scarce. You’ve been alone for some time, excepting virtual encounters. You mustn’t worry, though. I may have overestimated Conrad Helier’s resources or willingness to respond, but if he doesn’t come for you soon Interpol or Ahasuerus will. That wouldn’t suit my purposes nearly as well, but I suppose it might have to do.”

  “The reason you overestimated Conrad’s resources and his willingness to respond,” Silas snarled, “is that you simply can’t bring yourself to accept that he’s dead and buried.”

  “No,” said the monk, “I can’t. I know how he did it, you see—and I’ve proved it by repeating the trick. He’
s not too proud to repeat it himself, it seems. Karol Kachellek’s gone missing, supposedly blown up by a bomb planted on the Kite by persons unknown. The implication, of course, is that whoever took you has also gone after Kachellek—but I didn’t do it. I dare say a dead body will turn up in a day or two, suitably mangled but incontrovertibly identifiable by means of its DNA. By my count, that makes three men who are supposed to be dead but aren’t. Where will it all end? It’s beginning to look as if Helier is determined to call my bluff and sit tight no matter what.”

  It seemed to Silas that the only one who was sitting tight was him. He wriggled his torso, deliberately pushing against the back of the padded chair in the hope of countering the aches generated within his muscles. He dared not move his arms or legs in the same way because that would have made the restraining cords contract and cut into his raw flesh. It helped a little.

  “I’d hoped, of course, that Helier might be hiding out on the artificial island,” the monk went on, “but that was overoptimistic. He’s off-world—probably a lot further from Earth than Hywood. Not that that’s a bad thing, from my point of view. If Kachellek joins them the whole core of the team will be up, up, and away. I’d be prepared to settle for that—always provided that if they ever want to play in my sandpit again they’ll accept my rules. Heaven forbid that we should ever succeed in crushing the spirit of heroic independence, when all we actually need to do is send it into space. If Conrad Helier does eventually come to get you, Silas, tell him that’s the deal: he can follow his own schemes in heaven, but not on Earth. Anything he does down here has to be checked out with the powers that be, and if it isn’t authorized it doesn’t happen. He’ll know who the message is from.”

  Silas remained stubbornly silent, although he knew that he was supposed to respond to this instruction. The twittering of virtual birds filled the temporary silence. Their voices seemed oddly insulting; the cycles of their various songs were out of phase, but the programmed nature of the chorus was becoming obvious. Damon Hart, Silas felt sure, would have used an open-ended program with an elementary mutational facility for each individual song, so that the environment would be capable of slow but spontaneous evolution.