“Gantz,” Silas told him, watching the bathroom door at which Saul had not yet reappeared. “He’s Leon Gantz’s grandson, nephew of Paul and Ramon—and his other granddaddy was one of the insiders in the Zimmerman coup. He’s one of the last best products of the Old Reproductive System.”
Damon said nothing while he mulled over the possible significance of this revelation.
“How’s Diana?” Silas asked, groping for a topic of conversation more suited to an emotional reunion between a foster father and his estranged child.
“We split up,” Damon told him. By way of retaliation he asked: “How’s Cathy?”
“She thinks I’m dead. I haven’t decided yet whether to let her in on the secret.”
“But you’re going to keep it from the rest of the world?” Damon asked, with one eye on the third party who had just reemerged from the bathroom.
Silas shrugged as he accepted a tumbler of water from Frederick Gantz Saul’s steady hand; his own was trembling slightly. “Between them, PicoCon and Karol haven’t left me a lot of choice, have they? I’m flattered that Eveline wants me back, but it would have been nice to have a less pressured decision to make.”
“Is it just Karol and Eveline?” Damon asked. “Or is there someone else jerking their strings?”
It seemed that Silas couldn’t quite meet Damon’s eye, so he looked sideways at Saul, as if to say that there were secrets that still needed to be kept.
“He’s been told a thousand times,” Saul said, “but he still won’t believe it. He even tried to imply that it was you he was rebelling against, because you were the only real father figure he had. You’re the one who owes it to him to explain that flesh and blood do not a father make.”
“Clever bastard, isn’t he?” Silas said to Damon. Then he sighed theatrically. “We lied to you, Damon. We lied to the world. Conrad’s alive. Not on Earth, mind—but he is alive. I didn’t want to lie to you, but by the time I was ready to break ranks I wasn’t sure I could tell you without also telling the world.”
It was no longer a surprise, but it was a shock of sorts. Damon had to sit down again, and this time he looked into the fire, at the glowing ash flaking from the half-consumed logs.
Silas took the seat next to him: the seat that had been reserved for him all along. “What else do you want to know?” he said quietly. “Saul knows it all by now, I suppose—but he might not have given you a straight account of it. I’m not here to negotiate with him, or to set the seal on any agreements. I’m just here to acknowledge that we’ve taken note of his concerns.”
“So he really is playing God,” Damon said, meaning Conrad Helier. “Even to the extent of moving in mysterious ways.”
“We’re not interested in playing God,” Silas countered. “That’s Saul’s way of looking at the world. The man who taunted me while he made up that fatuous tape mistook the meaning of that quote he flung in my face. We never aimed to occupy the vacant throne of God—we just decided that we had to do our bit to help compensate for its vacancy. We’re not interested in moving into Olympus—we never have been.”
“You’d be happier in the palace of Pandemonium, no doubt?” Damon suggested sarcastically.
“Damon, I don’t want to be a god and I certainly don’t want to be a devil. I’m a man, like other men. So is Conrad.”
“Except that you’re both supposed to be dead. I couldn’t believe that my father had faked his death, even though the Mirror Man seemed so very sure. Even after the Mirror Man had shown me that if anyone in the world had the technical resources to make sure, it was him, I wouldn’t concede. I couldn’t believe that Conrad Helier could be so hypocritical—to preach the gospel of posthumous reproduction as forcefully as he did, and then go into hiding while his friends brought up his own child. If you and he are men like other men, how come there’s one law for the rest and another for you?”
“Conrad did back himself into a corner,” Silas admitted. “Sometimes, when you change your mind, you have to figure out how best to limit the damage. Being men like other men, Conrad and I don’t always get things right. If you live as long as you might, Damon, you’ll make plenty of errors of judgment along the way.”
“Like designing the viruses which caused the Crash? You did that too, I suppose?”
“We designed one of them. To this day, I don’t know for sure who designed the others, although we always suspected that Surinder Nahal must have made at least one—and it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if Frederick G. Saul had a hand in it somewhere, even if the hand in question was only clutching a thick wad of cash. It’s possible that some of the transformers really did arise naturally—in which case we needn’t have bothered—but I always thought the Gaian Mystics were fools to insist beforehand that Ma Nature would find a way, and even bigger fools to insist afterwards that she had. The arguments in the second of my fake confessions were good ones: we didn’t kill anybody; we just took away a power which should never have been claimed as a right. When the multiplication of the species reached the point at which the ecosphere stood in imminent danger of irreversible injury, the increase had to be halted, and the reproduction of individuals had to be limited in the interests of the whole community. The Crash had to happen. Conrad tried to make it as painless as possible. If you’d been in his place you’d have done it too.”
“So why not take credit for it? Why not admit it, instead of letting the despised Gaian Mystics credit it to the Earth Mother? Why let it hang over your reputation like the sword of Damocles, waiting for a rival megacorp or a maverick Eliminator to cut it loose?”
“The fallout would have interfered with our work. If Conrad had tangled himself up with the necessity to plead his case in the media, he wouldn’t have been able to get the New Reproductive System up and running so quickly. Sometimes, hypocrisy is unavoidable.”
Damon curled his lip righteously. “And it still is, isn’t it?” he said. “Otherwise, Conrad would be able to stand up and take due credit for his latest parlor trick. He designed para-DNA, didn’t he? Eveline’s so-called discovery is just one more Big Lie—a lie that Mr. Saul’s friends were trying to nip in the bud. That’s what the whole pantomime was intended to do: squash your plan before it had a chance to interfere with theirs.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” Silas said sourly. “As soon as I retired, I was out of it. After that, neither Eveline nor Karol would give me the time of day. You’ll have to ask Saul for recent intelligence of Conrad’s plans.”
Saul had taken his own seat by now. “You’re too modest, Silas,” he said. “You knew the way things were heading. Isn’t that why you left?”
“G for Gantz,” Silas repeated. “Is that really what this has all been about? Keep your sticky hands off my toys?”
“No, it isn’t,” Saul replied sharply. “It isn’t a petty matter at all. I only wish your friends had realized that.”
“You’re losing me,” Damon observed.
Saul said nothing, stubbornly waiting for Silas to take the responsibility. “You’re right, Damon,” Silas said eventually. “Para-DNA is a laboratory product. We worked on it for years: a non-DNA life system capable of forming its own ecospheres in environments more extreme than the ones DNA can readily cope with. At first we were talking in terms of bridging the gap between the organic and the inorganic—a whole new nanotech combining the best features of both. The early talk about applications was all about seeding Mars and the asteroids, perhaps as a step in terraformation but not necessarily. Conrad was disappointed about the failure of our probes to find extraterrestrial life, and doubly disappointed by the fact that all the pre-Crash arks that set out in search of new Ararats seemed to have failed in their quest. It was another little flaw in the universal design which Conrad set out to correct. He didn’t think of it as playing God—merely compensating once again, in a wholly human way, for the vacancy of the divine throne.”
“But that was only the first plan, wasn’t it?” Saul put
in.
“Yes,” Silas admitted. “Eventually, Conrad began considering other possible applications. There were a lot of people who were glad that the probes and the arks hadn’t turned up anything at all: people who’d always thought of alien life in terms of competition and invasion, as a potential threat. Conrad despised that kind of cowardice—but there’s something about the view of Earth you get from Lagrange-Five and all points farther out that gives people a jaundiced view of the people at the bottom of the gravity well. You’ve probably seen it in Eveline, if you’ve talked to her lately—and Mr. Saul is unfortunately correct in judging that Eveline’s not much more than Conrad’s echo.
“Anyway, for whatever reason, Conrad became increasingly disappointed by the development of the utopia which the New Reproductive System was supposed to have produced. He felt that the old world still cast too deep and dark a shadow over the new. He thought he’d put an end to the old patterns of inheritance, but he was overoptimistic—as you can readily judge from the fact that men like Frederick Gantz Saul are now safely ensconced in the uppermost echelons of PicoCon. For a brief while, when the viruses seemed to have the upper hand, everyone was on the same side—or so it appeared to Conrad—but when the menace had been overcome and the NRS was up and running, the old divisions soon reappeared.”
“Remember, though,” Saul put in, “that Conrad Helier was a backslider too. You’re the living proof of it, Damon. Even he couldn’t live up to the highest principles of the utopia he’d sketched out on his drawing board.”
Silas ignored that. “Conrad became convinced that Earth had lost its progressive impetus,” he said dully. “He became very fond of going on and on about new technology being used to preserve and reproduce the past instead of providing a womb for new ambition. It was mostly hot air, I thought—that was one of the reasons why we fell out. He came to believe that the only way to get things moving here on Earth in a way that would give proper support and encouragement to the people out on the frontier—the Lagrangists and their kin—was to get everyone back on the same side, united against a perceived threat. He came to think that Earth was in need of an alien invader: an all-purpose alien invader which could turn its hand to all kinds of tasks.”
Damon shook his head. “Para-DNA,” he said. “Utterly harmless but absolutely fascinating, etcetera, etcetera—until more and more of it turns up and it begins to reveal its true versatility. And what then, Silas? Conrad can’t possibly be backslider enough to start killing people.”
“No,” Silas said unhappily. “But he doesn’t have any compunctions at all about destroying property. That, I assume, is what attracted the attention and fervent interest of Frederick Gantz Saul and the present controllers of the Gantz patents. Hence the warning shots fired across our bows. Hence this meeting, in the course of which Mr. Saul will no doubt commission both of us to explain to Conrad and Eveline that the fun’s over: that Eveline’s preemptive move to established the extraterrestrial credentials of para-DNA has to be our last. I assume he’s about to tell us that if the plan goes forward one more inch he and his friends will come after us hard, with authentically lethal force.”
Damon looked at Saul, who was still looking at Silas. “You shouldn’t have retired, Silas,” Saul remarked. “You should have stayed on the inside, to maintain a bridge to sanity.”
“Conrad’s not mad,” Silas was quick to retort. “His anxieties were real enough. He’s afraid that the earthbound majority of the human race is on the brink of exporting its spirit of adventure to virtual environments, by courtesy of PicoCon’s VE division and all the bright young men of Damon’s generation. The fashionability of VE games, VE dramas, and telephone VEs is already helping to move a substantial part of everyday human existence and everyday communication into a parallel dimension where artifice rules—and the cleverer the VE designers and the AI answering machines become, the more secure that reign will be.
“Conrad thinks that people shouldn’t be living in the ruins of the old world, contentedly huddling together in the better parts of the old cities, binding themselves ever more tightly to their stations in the Web like flies mummified in spider silk. Nor does he think it’s rebellion enough against that kind of a world for the disaffected young to use derelict neighborhoods as adventure playgrounds where they can carve one another up in meaningless ritual duels. He thinks that if we can’t maintain some kind of historical momentum, we’ll stagnate. He thinks that we have to build and keep on building, to grow and keep on growing, to expand the human empire and keep on expanding it, to make progress. If people need a spur to urge them on, he’s more than willing to provide it. I don’t say that’s right, but it’s not mad.
“Like the viruses which caused the Crash, Conrad intends para-DNA to be nonlethal weaponry—nothing more than a nuisance. It’s supposed to attack the structure of the cities and the structure of the Web; it’s supposed to make it impossible for the human race to dig itself a hole and live in manufactured dreams. It wouldn’t attack people, and it certainly wouldn’t murder people wholesale, but it would always be there: a sinister, creeping presence that would keep on cropping up where it’s least expected and where it’s least welcome, to remind people that there’s nothing—nothing, Damon—that can be taken for granted. Long life, the New Reproductive System, Earth, the solar system . . . all these things have to be managed, guarded, and guided. According to Conrad, we ought to be looking toward the real alien worlds instead of—or at least as well as—synthesizing comfortable simulacra. Whatever you or I might think of his methods, he’s not mad.”
“I can see why PicoCon thinks it’s necessary to rein you in, though,” Damon observed. “I can understand why the people who actually own the earth and all the edifices gantzed out of its surface would like the right of veto over schemes like that.”
“Maybe,” said Silas. “But I think Conrad might argue that the current owners of the Gantz patents ought to be down on their bended knees thanking him for introducing an element of built-in obsolescence to their endeavors. Mr. Saul would presumably prefer it if the meek inherited the earth, because he thinks that a meek consumer is a good consumer. He and his kind are interested in what people want, and the more stable and predictable those wants become, the better he’ll like it—but Conrad’s more interested in what people need.”
Damon looked at Saul, who seemed quite untroubled by anything Silas had said.
“At the end of the day, though,” Damon pointed out, “Pico-Con calls the shots, here and in outer space. The secret couldn’t be kept—and now that it’s out, Conrad, Eveline, and Karol have no alternative but to abandon the plan.”
“That’s not for me to decide,” Silas said obdurately. “I’m not here to negotiate.”
“Of course not,” said Saul with a hint of malicious mockery. “But you can carry an olive branch, can’t you? One way or another, now that you’ve joined the ranks of the unsleeping dead, you’ll be able to transmit our offer of a just and permanent peace to Conrad Helier?”
“Just and permanent?” Silas echoed, presumably to avoid giving a straighter answer.
“That’s what we want,” Saul said. “It’s also, in our opinion, what we all need. We don’t want to bludgeon Conrad Helier—or the Ahasuerus Foundation for that matter—into reluctant and resentful capitulation. We really would like them to see things our way. That’s why we’re mortally offended by their refusal even to talk to us. Yes, we do have the power to impose our will—but we’d far rather reach a mutually satisfactory arrangement. I think Conrad Helier has seriously mistaken our position and our goals, and the true logic of the present situation here on Earth.”
All Silas said in reply to that was: “Go on.”
“Your anxiety regarding the possibility of people giving up on the real world in order to live in manufactured dreams is an old one,” Saul said mildly. “The corollary anxiety about the willingness of their effective rulers to meet the demand for comforting dreams is just as old—and so is C
onrad’s facile assumption that the best way to counter the trend is to import new threats to jolt the meek inheritors of Earth out of their meekness and expel them from their utopia of comforts. Frankly, I’m as disappointed by Conrad’s recruitment to such an outmoded way of thinking as I am by the Ahasuerus Foundation’s retention of their equally obsolete attitude of mind.
“I can understand the fact that you don’t approve of me, either personally or in terms of what I represent. One of my grandfathers was part of the consortium which funded Adam Zimmerman’s scheme to take advantage of a worldwide stock-market crash—one of the men who really did steal the world or corner the future, according to your taste in clichés. The other was the man whose pioneering work in biotechnological cementation made it possible to build homes out of desert sand and exhausted soil that were literally dirt cheap, thus giving shelter to millions, but you probably think that the good he did was canceled out by the enormity of the fortune that flowed from the generations of patents generated and managed by his sons—my uncles. I am the old world order personified: one of a double handful of men who really did own the world by the end of the twenty-first century.
“Oddly enough, the fact that we still own it today has a good deal to do with Conrad Helier. Had he not put the New Reproductive System in place so quickly, the devastations of the Crash might have extended even to us; as it was, his efficiency allowed rather more of the old world order to be saved than he might have thought ideal. Nor has he put an end to the ancient system of inheritance, as his own legacy to Damon clearly demonstrates. When I and my fellow owners die—as, alas, we still must, in spite of all the best efforts of the Ahasuerus Foundation—we shall deliver the earth into safe hands, which can be trusted to keep it safe for as long as they may live. Eventually, there will arise a generation who will keep it safe forever.
Inherit the Earth Page 29