Inherit the Earth

by Brian Stableford

  As if he were somehow sensitive to Silas’s thoughts, his captor said: “It begins to look as if Damon Hart’s the only worthwhile card I’ve got. You really should have taken better care of that boy, Silas—you’ve let him run so far that you might never get him back. Do you suppose Conrad Helier might be prepared to sacrifice him as well as you?”

  “You’re crazy,” Silas said sulkily. “Conrad’s dead.”

  “I understand that you feel the need to keep saying that,” the monk reassured him. “After all, you’re still on the record, even if no one’s ever going to play it back but me. You’ll forgive me if I ignore you, though. Helier will have to come out eventually, if he wants to deal. I really don’t want to foul his operation up. I admire his enterprise. All I want is to ensure that we’re all playing on the same team, planning our ends and means together. We are all on the same side, after all—we’ll get to where we’re going all the sooner if we all pull in the same direction.”

  “Where are we going?” Silas asked. “And who’s supposed to be doing the pulling? Exactly who are you?” Unable to resist changing the position of his legs he tried to do so without moving his ankles, but he was no contortionist. He gasped as the ankle straps clutched at him.

  If the real man behind the image of the monk could hear evidence of Silas’s distress he ignored it. “Please don’t be deliberately obtuse, Silas,” he said in the same bantering tone. “We’re going to the land of Cokaygne, where all is peace and harmony and everybody lives forever. But there can’t be peace unless we find a peaceful way of settling our differences, and there won’t be harmony unless we can establish a proper forum for agreeing on our objectives and our methods. That’s all I want, Silas—just a nice, brightly polished conference table to which we can all bring our little plans and projects, so that they can all receive the blessing of the whole board of directors. As to who’s doing the pulling, it’s everyone who’s making anything new—and those who make the most are pulling the hardest.”

  When the flaring pain in his ankles died down of its own accord Silas felt a little better. “Conrad never liked that kind of corpspeak,” he growled, “or the philosophy behind it. If he were alive—which he isn’t—you’d never get him to knuckle under to that kind of system. He always hated the idea of having to take his proposals and projects to panels of businessmen. He did it, when he needed finance—but he stopped doing it the moment he could finance himself. He’d never have gone back to it. Never in a million years.”

  “That’s because he was a child of the old world,” the monk said. “Things are different now, and although it’s a little ambitious to start talking in terms of a million years I really do believe that we have to start thinking in terms of thousands. If Conrad Helier hadn’t decided to drop out of sight, he’d be in a better position to see how much things have changed. If he participated in the wider human society even to the limited extent that Hywood and Kachellek do he’d still have his finger on the pulse of progress, but he seems to have lost its measure. I think he’s fallen victim to the rather childish notion that those who desire to plan the future of the human race must remove themselves from it and stand apart from the history they intend to shape. That’s not merely unnecessary, Silas, it’s downright silly—and we can’t tolerate it any longer.”

  Silas was busy fighting his anguish and couldn’t comment. The other continued: “We don’t have any objection to vaulting ambition—as I said before, we admire and approve of it—but Helier and his associates have to realize that there are much bigger fish in the pool now. We’re just as determined to shape the future of the world as he is, and we have the power to do it. We don’t want to fight, Silas—we want to work together. Helier is being unreasonable, and he must be made to see that. The simple fact is that if he can’t be a team player, we can’t allow him to play here. That goes for Eveline Hywood and Karol Kachellek too. People can’t make themselves invisible by pretending to die, any more than they can exclude themselves from their social obligations by refusing to answer their phones. We have to make them see that—and in this instance, we includes you.”

  “I don’t want to play,” Silas told the man of many masks flatly. “I’m retired, and I intend to stay that way. All I want is out of here. If you want me to beg, I’m begging. Tell your machine to give me back my IT. At the very least, tell it not to grab me so hard every time I twitch. I couldn’t break free if I tried.”

  “It won’t be long now,” the monk said. “If I’d realized in advance that Helier would play it this way I’d have made things easier for you. My people could have found you two days ago, and I didn’t want to make it too easy. I really am sorry. I’ll give Helier two more hours, and if nobody’s found you by then I’ll tip off Interpol. They should be able to get the local police to you within twenty minutes—it’s not as if you were way out in the desert.”

  “Two fucking hours may seem like nothing to you,” Silas muttered hoarsely, “but you aren’t sitting where I am.”

  “Oh, pull yourself together, man. You’re not going to die. You’ve got sore wrists and ankles, not a ruptured ulcer. I’m trying to make you understand something important. I could almost believe that you really have retired.”

  “I have, damn it! I got heartily sick of the whole fucking thing! I’m done working night and day in search of the biotech Holy Grail. I’m a hundred and twenty-six years old, for God’s sake! I need time to rest, time to let the world go by, time without pressure. Eveline and Karol might have been entirely swallowed up by Conrad’s obsessions, but I haven’t. I watched Mary die and I watched Damon grow up, both of them so tightly bound by those obsessions that they were smothered. Damon had a life in front of him, but the only way Mary could break free, in the end, was to die. Not me. I retired.”

  “You really don’t see, do you?” said the fake monk patronizingly. “You’ve never been able to break free from the assumptions of the twenty-first century. In spite of all that IT has achieved, you still take death and decay for granted. You think that your stake in the world will end in ten or twenty or fifty years’ time, when the copying errors accumulated in your DNA will have filled out your body with so many incompetent cells that all the nanomachines in the world won’t be able to hold you together.”

  “It’s true,” Silas growled, surprising himself with the harshness of his voice. “Even men fifty or a hundred years younger than I am are being willfully blind if they think that advances in IT will keep pushing back the human life span faster than they’re aging. Sure, it’s only a matter of time before rejuve technology will cut a lot deeper than erasing wrinkles. It really will be possible to clear out the greater number of the somatic cells which aren’t functioning properly and replace them with nice fresh ones newly calved from generative tissue—but only the greater number. Even if you really could replace them all, you’d still be up shit creek without a paddle because of the Miller effect. You do know about the Miller effect, I suppose, even though you’re not a biologist by trade or vocation?”

  “I know what the Miller effect is,” the monk assured him. “I’m thoroughly familiar with all the brave attempts that have been made to produce a biotech fountain of youth—even those made way back at the dawn of modern history, when Adam Zimmerman was barely cold in his cryonic vault. I know that there’s a fundamental difference between slowing aging down and stopping it, and I know that there’s an element of paradox in every project which aims to reverse the aging process. I’m not claiming that anyone now alive can become truly emortal no matter how fast the IT escalator moves. I might have to settle for two hundred years, Damon Hart for two-fifty or three hundred. Even embryos engineered in the next generation of Helier wombs for maximum resistance to aging might not be able to live much beyond a thousand years—only time will tell. But that’s not the point.

  “The point, Silas, is that even if you and I won’t be able to play parent to that new breed, Damon’s generation will. Conrad Helier and I must be reckoned mortal go
ds—but the children for whom we hold the world in trust will be an order of magnitude less mortal than we. The world we shape must be shaped for them, not for old men like you. Those who have had the role of planner thrust upon them must plan for a thousand years, not for ten or a hundred.

  “Conrad Helier understands that well enough, even if you don’t—but he still thinks that he can play a lone hand, sticking to his own game while others play theirs. We can’t allow that. We aren’t like the corpsmen of old, Silas—we don’t want to tell you and him what to do and we don’t want ownership of everything you and he produce, but we do want you both to join the club. We want you both to play with the team. What you did in the Crash was excusable, and we’re very grateful to you for delivering the stability of the New Reproductive System, but what Conrad Helier is doing now has to be planned and supervised by all of us. We have to fit it into our schemes.”

  “Exactly what is it that you think Conrad’s followers are doing?” Silas asked curiously.

  “If you don’t know,” the monk replied tartly, “they must have been so deeply hurt by your decision to retire that they decided to cut you out entirely. Even if that’s so, though, I’d be willing to bet that all you have to do is say you’re sorry and ask to be let back in. You really should. I can understand that you felt the need to take a holiday, but people like us don’t retire. We know that the only way to make life worth living is to play our part in the march of progress. We may not have true emortality, but we have to try to be worthy of it nevertheless.”

  “Cut the Eliminator crap,” Silas said tersely. “You’re not one of them.”

  “No, I’m not,” the monk admitted, “for which you should be duly thankful. I do like the Eliminators, though. I don’t altogether approve of them—there’s too much madness in their method, and murder can no longer be reckoned a forgivable crime—but I like the way that they’re prepared to raise an issue that too many people are studiously avoiding: who is worthy of immortality? They’re going about it backwards, of course—we’ll never arrive at a population entirely composed of the worthy by a process of quasi-Darwinian selection—but we all need to think about the myriad ways in which we might strive to be worthy of the gifts of technological progress. We are heirs to fabulous wealth, and the next generation will be heirs to an even greater fortune. We have to make every effort to live up to the responsibilities of our inheritance. That’s what this is all about, Silas. We don’t want to eliminate your estranged family—but they have to acknowledge the responsibilities of their inheritance. The fact that they played a major role in shaping that inheritance doesn’t let them off the hook.”

  “And if they won’t?” Silas wanted to know.

  “They have to. The position of God isn’t vacant anymore. The privilege of Creation has to be determined by negotiation. Conrad Helier may be a hundred and thirty-seven years old, but he’s still thinking and still learning. Once we get through to him, he’ll understand.”

  “You don’t know him as well as I do,” Silas said, having finally become incapable of guarding his tongue so carefully as never to let any implication slip that Conrad Helier might not be dead.

  “There’s time,” his captor assured him. “But not, I fear, for any further continuation of this conversation. I don’t know who, for the moment, but somebody has finally managed to locate you. I hope we’ll meet again, here or in some other virtual environment.”

  “If we ever meet in real space,” Silas hissed with all the hostility and bravado he could muster, “you’d better make sure that your IT is in good shape. You’ll need it.”

  The woodland blanked out, leaving him adrift in an abstract holding pattern. He heard a door crash inwards, battered down by brute force, and he heard voices calling out the news that he was here. He felt a sudden pang of embarrassment as he remembered that he was nearly naked, and knew that he must present a horribly undignified appearance.

  “Get me out of this fucking chair!” he cried, making no attempt at all to censor the pain and desperation from his voice.

  The hood was raised from his eyes and tilted back on a pivot, allowing him to look at his cell and his rescuer. The light dazzled him for a moment, although it wasn’t very bright, and he had to blink tears away from the corners of his eyes.

  There was no way to identify the man who stood before him, looking warily from side to side as if he couldn’t believe that there were no defenders here to fight for custody of the prisoner; the newcomer’s suitskin had a hood whose faceplate was an image-distorting mask. He was carrying a huge handgun that didn’t look like a standard police-issue certified-nonlethal weapon.

  “I think it’s okay,” Silas told the stranger. “They left some time ago. Just cut me loose, will you?”

  The stranger must have been looking him directly in the face, but no eyes were visible behind the distorting mask.

  “Who are you?” Silas asked as it dawned on him belatedly that his troubles might not be over.

  The masked man didn’t reply. A second man came into the room behind him, equally anonymous and just as intimidatingly armed. Meanwhile, the first man extended his gun—holding its butt in both hands—and fired at point-blank range.

  Silas hadn’t time to let out a cry of alarm, let alone to feel the pain of the damage that must have followed the impact or to appreciate the full horror of the fact that without his protective IT even a “certified-nonlethal” shot might easily be the death of him.

  Twenty-three

  D

  amon was intending to call Interpol anyway, so the fact that his phone hood lit up like a firework display commanding him to do exactly that didn’t even make a dent in his schedule. It did worry him, though; no one got a five-star summons like that unless there was something far more important on the agenda than his ex-girlfriend’s bail bond.

  Hiru Yamanaka took Damon’s incoming call personally. Interpol’s phone VE was stern and spare but more elaborate than Damon had expected. Mr. Yamanaka was reproduced in full, in an unnaturally neat suitskin uniform, sitting behind an imposing desk. The scene radiated calm, impersonal efficiency—which meant, Damon thought, that it was as inaccurate in its implications as the most blithely absurd of his own concoctions.

  “What’s happened?” Damon asked without preamble.

  “Thank you for calling, Mr. Hart,” the inspector said with a determined formality that only served to emphasize the falseness of his carefully contrived inscrutability. “There are several matters I’d like to discuss with you.” The inspector’s eyes were bleak, and Damon knew that things must have taken a turn for the worse—but he also knew that Yamanaka would want to work to a carefully ordered script. The inspector knew that Damon was holding out on him, and he didn’t like it.

  “Go on,” Damon said, meekly enough.

  “Firstly, we’ve received the medical examiner’s final report on the body discovered in the house where Miss Caisson was arrested. DNA analysis confirms that it’s the body of Surinder Nahal. The ME estimates that the time of death was at least two hours before Miss Caisson and Madoc Tamlin arrived on the scene, so we’re certain that they didn’t kill him, but it has become a matter of great urgency that we see the VE pak which your friend removed from the scene. We have reason to believe that it might contain valuable evidence as to the identity of the real killer and the motive for the crime.”

  What reason? Damon wondered. “I’d be very interested to see it myself,” he countered warily. “Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to contact Madoc. I presume, then, that you’ll be releasing Diana immediately?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Yamanaka told him. “The local police are still considering the possibility of charging her with illegal entry—and she was of course an accessory to the assault.”

  “So charge her and bail her out.”

  “I’m reluctant to do that until I’ve talked to Madoc Tamlin,” the inspector told him.

  “You can’t hold her hostage, Mr. Yamanaka.”

/>   “I wouldn’t dream of it,” Yamanaka assured him, “but until Tamlin and the VE pak are safely in my hands, I can’t be sure of the exact extent of her culpability.” The virtual atmosphere was still heavily pregnant with some vital item of information that Yamanaka was carefully withholding.

  Damon fought to suppress his annoyance, but it wasn’t easy. “You must know as well as I do that the VE pak is an ill-wrapped parcel of red herring that’s already begun to stink,” he told the inspector waspishly. “The same is probably true of its resting place.”

  Yamanaka didn’t raise an eyebrow, but it seemed to Damon that the policeman’s synthesized gaze became more tightly focused. “Do you have any evidence to support the conjecture that the body is not that of Surinder Nahal?” the inspector asked sharply.

  “No, I don’t,” Damon admitted, “but the evidence that it is could have been cooked up by a biotech team with the necessary expertise just as easily as a fake VE tape. If whoever is behind the kidnapping really is convinced for some reason that Conrad Helier faked his own death, it would be only natural for him to hire a bioengineer with a similar background to repeat the trick. Ask yourself, Inspector Yamanaka—if you were in that position, who would you have hired to do the job?”

  “I’m a policeman, Mr. Hart,” Yamanaka reminded him. “However difficult it may be, my job is to collect evidence and build cases. You, on the other hand, are a citizen. Your duty, however you might resent it, is to obey the law and give what assistance you can to my investigation. That VE pak was taken from a crime scene, which makes it evidence—and I’d be very annoyed if anyone tampered with it before handing it in.”