There was a stick of bread on the table, together with half a dozen plastic storage jars and three bottles: two of wine, one of whiskey. Damon almost expected to see hunting trophies on the wall, but that would have been too silly. Instead there were old photographs mounted in severe black frames: photographs taken in the days when the wilderness had only been half spoiled.
“Are we expecting somebody else?” Damon asked.
“I hope so,” said Saul. “To tell you the truth, I’m rather hoping that your father might drop by. If he’s still on Earth, he’s had time to reach the neighborhood by now. If he’s stranded out in space, though . . . well, we’ll just have to wait and see.”
Damon didn’t bother with any tokenistic assertion of his father’s membership of the ultimate silent majority. Instead, he said: “Nobody came in response to your other invitations. Why should anyone come now?”
“Because the cat’s out of the bag,” the old man told him. “Eveline Hywood hurried the announcement through, in spite of everything. When the grim satisfaction has worn off, though, she’ll remember that this is only the beginning. Your father’s shown us that he won’t be bullied, and that he’s more than willing to fight fire with fire, tape for tape and appearance for appearance—but he can’t move to the next stage of his plan without clearing it with us because he now knows that we know what that next phase will be—and that if we think it’s necessary, we’ll close the whole thing down.”
“Who’s we?” Damon wanted to know—and was optimistic, for once, that he might be told.
“All of us. Not just PicoCon, by any means. Your father may think that he made the world, and we’re prepared to give him due credit for saving it, but we’re the ones who own it, and we’ve already made our peace. If he’s absolutely determined to return to the days when we were all on the same side, that’s fine by us—just so long as it’s our side that everybody’s on.”
Damon pulled one of the armchairs back from the fire before sitting down in it. He’d thought that he had recovered well enough from the shot in the back, but once he’d taken the weight off his feet he realized that nobody could get shot, even in today’s world, without a considerable legacy of awkwardness and fatigue. He stirred restlessly, unable to find a comfortable posture.
Saul drew back the neighboring chair in the same careful manner, but he went to the table instead of sitting down. “You want food?” he said. “You haven’t eaten in quite a while.”
Damon knew that he was being offered waiter service, but he didn’t want to take it. “I’ll help myself, if you don’t mind,” he said.
“Somehow,” said the old man, peering over the rim of his spectacles, “I just knew you were going to say that.”
Twenty-six
I
never delivered your message,” Damon said when he’d finished licking his fingers. He was sitting more comfortably now—comfortably enough not to want to get up for anything less than a five-star emergency. Saul was still standing up, hovering beside the table while he finished his own meal.
“Yes, you did,” the old man countered. “Hywood’s more sensitive than you give her credit for. You got through to her, far better than you got through to Kachellek.”
“Is Karol really dead?”
“I honestly don’t know. I doubt it very much. The business with Silas Arnett took us aback a bit, but I sincerely hope that it was merely a matter of playing to the grandstand: tape for tape, as I said, appearance for appearance. Our fake body’s better than your fake body and we got our tape to Interpol while you let yours go astray, so up yours. That has to be your father, don’t you think? Eveline’s as clever as she’s stubborn, but she isn’t angry or vengeful. But you’d have done it all, wouldn’t you? You’d have lashed out as soon as you came under attack—and even when you thought you’d won, you’d still have put out one last kick in the head for good measure. You’re Conrad Helier’s son all right.”
“The only father I ever had was Silas Arnett,” Damon said, trying to sound offhanded about it. He sipped from his glass. It was only tap water; he’d thought it best to avoid the whiskey and the wine.
“Was it Silas you ran away from?” Saul countered. “Is it Silas you’re still kicking against? I think he’s just your big brother, who happened to baby-sit a lot. Dead or not, in that household Conrad Helier was always your one and only father. He still is.”
That was too near to the knuckle to warrant any response.
“Why would you send the hired help to invite me up here?” Damon asked. “You already had me not forty-eight hours ago and you threw me back into the pond. You didn’t really need me to get your message across to Eveline.”
Saul smiled. “The Mirror Man thought that we did,” he said. “In any case, we had to let you go before we could invite you to join us in a suitably polite fashion. We are inviting you to join us, by the way. Partly because it would give us a link to the Lagrange-Five biotech cowboys, but mainly because we think you’re good. Now you’ve seen what virtual reality technics can really do, it’s time for you to get properly involved, don’t you think?”
“You’re offering me a job?”
“Yes.”
“With PicoCon?”
“Yes. You could go to OmicronA if you’d prefer—it comes to the same thing in the end.”
“I’m not sure I’m ready for that,” Damon said slowly.
“I think you are,” Saul told him, finally condescending to take the seat opposite Damon’s, leaving the one in between for whoever might turn up to take it. “I think you’re as thoroughly frustrated with a life of petty crime as Hiru Yamanaka is with the business of catching petty criminals. You must understand by now what drew you into that life—and if you understand that, you must understand how pointless it is.”
Damon said nothing to that. Saul didn’t press him for an answer but simply settled back in his chair as if he were preparing for a long heart-to-heart talk.
“We live in a world where crime has become much easier to detect than of old,” Saul observed. “A world so abundantly populated by tiny cameras that hardly anything happens unobserved. These ever present eyes are, of course, unconsulted unless and until the police have reason to believe that they might have recorded something significant, but everyone tempted to commit an antisocial act knows that he’s very likely to be found out.
“If our New utopia really were a utopia, of course, its citizens wouldn’t want to commit antisocial acts, but the sad fact is that almost all of them do. In many cases, the desire to commit such acts is actually increased by the awareness that such acts are so readily detectable. In operating as a deterrent, the high probability of detection also acts as a challenge. Everyone knows that spy eyes can be evaded and sometimes deceived—and everyone is ready to do it whenever an opportunity arises. No matter how intensive and efficient Building Security becomes, petty thefts will still occur—not because people need to steal, or because they’re avid to acquire whatever it is that they happen to be stealing, but simply because stealing proves that they’re still free and that the spy eyes haven’t got the better of them. That’s natural, as an immediate reaction, but it’s no agenda for a lifelong career.”
“Tell that to the Eliminators,” Damon said. “They’re the ones who take it to extremes—extremes you’re not too proud to exploit if it suits you. The Mirror Man likes the Eliminators.”
“It’s not a view I share,” Saul told him with a slight sigh. “I do understand them, because I’m of the same generation as most of them, but I think they’re foolish as well as wicked. They know that they’ve been condemned by evil fate to die, while some of those who come after them will be spared that necessity, so it’s not entirely surprising that some say to themselves: murderers were once condemned to die for their crime; why should I, who am condemned to die, refrain from murder? Why should I not enjoy the privilege of my fate? Why should I not accept the opportunity to make the only contribution I can to the coming world of immor
tals—the exclusion of someone who is unworthy of immortality? It’s not surprising—but it is wrong, and ultimately self-destructive.
“Operator one-oh-one, I gather, is rather looking forward to her day in court, in anticipation of being able to plead the Eliminator cause with all due eloquence before a large video audience. Perhaps you ought to watch her—and find a little of your own futility mirrored in hers. It’s time to set bitterness and its corollary hostility aside along with other childish things, Damon. Even present technology will give you a hundred and fifty years of adulthood, if you’ll only condescend to look after yourself. The technology of a hundred years hence might give you three hundred years more. Think what you might do, if you began now; think what you might help to build, if you decide to become one of the builders instead of one of the vandals.”
Damon knew that it all made sense, but he’d had a few thoughts of his own on the matter in spite of the hectic pace of the last few days, and he wasn’t ready to roll over just yet. “A little while ago,” he said, “I talked to a boy named Lenny Garon. You probably taped the conversation. I told him exactly what you’ve just told me: to look after himself, to keep his place on the escalator that might one day give him the chance to live forever. Afterwards, though, I got to wondering whether I might be taking too much for granted.
“We’ve all grown used to the familiar pattern, haven’t we? Every couple of years PicoCon or OmicronA pumps out a new fleet of nanotech miracles, which slow down the aging process just a little bit more or take rejuve engineering just a little bit deeper, chipping away at the Hayflick limit and the Miller effect and all the other little glitches that stand in the way of true emortality. Each new generation of products works its way down through the marketplace from the rich to the not-so-rich, and so on, every expansion of the consumer base adding cash to the megacorp coffers. But what if someone already has the secret of true emortality? What if the upper echelons of PicoCon already possess a nanotech suite which, so far as they can judge, will let them live forever? What if they decided, when they first obtained the secret, that it was a gift best reserved for the favored few rather than put on general release? After all, even under the New Reproductive System the stability of the population relies on people dying in significant numbers year after year, and megacorp planning depends on the steady flow of profits feeding a never-ending demand, a never-ending hunger. I could understand the temptation to hoard the gift away, couldn’t you?
“The only trouble is that everyone who was in on the secret—and everyone who subsequently discovered it—would have to be trustworthy. They’d have to be in the club. The men in control couldn’t have loose cannons threatening to go off at any moment, with no way of knowing where the blast would go. If there were a person like that around, the gods would have to silence him—but they’d have to find him first. As you’ve so carefully pointed out, a person like me can easily be exposed to thoroughgoing scrutiny in a world where every wall has eyes and ears . . . but some people really can stay out of sight, if they know where the darkest shadows are.
“It’s interesting to follow these flights of fancy occasionally, isn’t it, Mr. Saul? I still don’t know for sure why PicoCon is so desperate to locate a man who’s been dead for fifty years, do I?”
“That’s an interesting fantasy, Damon,” Saul replied. “Isn’t it a trifle paranoid, though? The idea that big corporations hold back all the best inventions in order to maintain their markets is as old as capitalism itself.”
“We live in a postcapitalist era, Mr. Saul,” Damon said earnestly. “The market isn’t everything—not anymore. We have to start thinking in terms of millennia rather than centuries. Gods have nobler goals in mind than vulgar profits—and you can spell profits any way you like.”
Saul laughed at that, and there didn’t seem to be anything forced about the laughter. “I suppose that sophisticated biotechnics and clever nanomachinery are so similar to magic that we have begun behaving rather like the magicians of legend,” he admitted. “We have a tendency to be jealous and secretive; some of us, at least, have learned to love deceit for its own sake. Has your father’s team behaved any differently?”
“I think Eveline would argue that your end is merely her means,” Damon countered. “She’d say that what the Mirror Man told me—and what you’re telling me now—is just advertising, bait on a line to reel me in. She’d argue that you don’t really have any long-term objectives except preserving your advantages and maintaining your comforts—that you’re obsessed about controlling things because you couldn’t bear to be controlled. She sees the megacorps as an anchor holding progress back rather than a cutting edge hastening its progress forward.”
“And she’d be echoing Conrad Helier every inch of the way—but she’d be wrong. The point is, what do you think?”
“I think that you and the Mirror Man really do believe that you’re the new gods and I think you’re as jealous as any god of old. You want to plan the future, and you want to make sure that everyone will play his allotted part in the plan—or at least that no one’s in a position to put a spoke in your wheel.”
“I didn’t ask you what you think I believe. I asked you what you think.”
Damon had known exactly what he was being asked—but he wasn’t sure that he’d made up his mind about that. “I doubt that you’ll ever get everyone to agree about the objectives of the game,” he ventured. “I think it might be healthier if you didn’t even try. After the last couple of days, though, I think one thing you do need to get settled is that the game shouldn’t be played with real bullets—even certified-nonlethal ones. There’s a lot to be said for conflict, if it maintains the dynamic tension that generates social change. There’s even something to be said for combat, so long as it isn’t mortal, but the distinction between cuts that heal and cuts that don’t isn’t as easy to make as some people imagine. I don’t approve of Elimination either, but I don’t want a two-tier system. Everybody should get a chance at real life, whether they’re team players or not.”
Damon never found out what Saul’s reply to that would have been, and he wasn’t sorry when the interruption came. He needed time to think about the offer Saul had made him, and he knew that there was vital information that he still didn’t have. When the cabin door opened behind him, he was grateful for the respite.
The newcomer looked very tired—as well he might, given that there had been no sound of rotor blades. He’d come on foot, at least for the last kilometer or so.
Damon figured that Saul would be disappointed not to see Conrad Helier, but on his own account he was profoundly glad that the man standing in the doorway was Silas Arnett, very much alive.
“It’s very good of you to come, Silas,” Saul said with only a hint of mocking irony. “Do join us.”
As Silas came forward Damon jumped to his feet and ran to meet him. It wasn’t a five-star emergency, but it was a five-star opportunity. Silas seemed slightly surprised, but he accepted the hug before wincing under its pressure.
“Mind my stigmata,” he muttered. The wound in his chest was overlaid by his suitskin, but the cloth clung so tightly to the contours of his chest that Damon could see the outlines of the swelling.
“I thought it really might have been the Eliminators who got to you first,” Damon said.
“It really might have been,” Silas agreed sourly. “As it was, they came too close for comfort to being accidental Eliminators. It seems that Karol thought it would be a good idea to declare me dead, just in case I decided to deny that heartfelt confession he put together on my behalf when I returned to public life. As you’ve probably found out, leaving the group means that they’re very reluctant to trust you in future. Is this the piece of shit who was judge and prosecutor at my trial?”
Damon could feel the tension in Silas’s arms, and he knew that an affirmative answer was likely to call forth an immediate and violent response. He was sorely tempted to say yes, but Saul had softened him up just enough to
make him hesitate. “He says not,” he said in the end. “He says we can call him Saul, but he didn’t say whether it’s his first name or his last.”
Silas obviously wasn’t immediately convinced by the first item of information, but he extricated himself from Damon’s embrace and looked hard at the seated man. “Oh shit!” he said eventually. “It really is you, isn’t it?”
“It’s been a long time, Silas,” Saul said evenly, “but everyone remembers the spectacles. You really didn’t know the man who conducted your interrogation, in spite of that teasing coda he tacked onto the broadcast tape. That was just to prepare the way for the VE pak that went astray—the one that falsely implied that the supposedly late Surinder Nahal was your captor.”
“Whereas, in fact,” Damon put in, “Surinder Nahal is presumably heading up PicoCon’s own zombie biotech team, in direct opposition to yours. Who is this guy, Silas?”
“His name really is Saul,” Silas admitted. “Frederick G. Saul was his favored signature way back when—but that was in the days when everybody knew what the G stood for without having it spelled out. I thought he was long dead, but I should have known better.”
“I never pretended to die,” the bespectacled man observed drily. “I just faded out of view. Would you like something to eat, Silas?”
“I’ve eaten,” Silas replied brusquely.
“To drink?”
Silas looked at Damon’s glass. “Just water,” he said. He let Saul go to the bathroom to get it while he studied Damon. Saul didn’t hurry.
“You all right?” Silas said. “I heard they shot you too.”
“Twice,” said Damon. “My own fault—the first time I wouldn’t lie down for the gas and the second time I wouldn’t wait for a polite invitation. I’m fine—and still alive by everyone’s reckoning, including the Eliminators who have me down as an enemy of mankind. What does the G stand for?”
Inherit the Earth Page 28