Inherit the Earth (15 page)

Damon glanced sideways at Karol, whose face had set like stone. Damon didn’t doubt that this was, indeed, Silas Arnett; nor did he doubt that Arnett had been stripped of the apparatus that normally protected him against injury, aging, and the effects of torture.

But if they intend to force some kind of confession out of him, Damon thought, everyone will know that it’s worthless. Take away a man’s ability to control pain and he can be made to say anything at all. What kind of “absolute proof” is that?

The image abruptly shifted to display a crude cartoon of a virtual courtroom. The accused man who stood in a wooden dock topped with spikes like spearheads was a caricature, but Damon had no difficulty in recognizing him as Silas Arnett. The twelve jurors who were positioned to his left were mere sketches, and the person whose position was directly opposite the camera’s—presumably the prosecutor—had features no better defined than theirs. The black-robed judge who faced Arnett was drawn in greater detail, although his profile was subtly exaggerated.

“Please state your name for the record,” said the judge. His voice was deep and obviously synthetic.

“I’ll do no such thing,” said the figure in the dock. Damon recognized Silas Arnett’s voice, but in the circumstances he couldn’t be sure that the words hadn’t been synthesized by a program that had analyzed recordings and isolated the differentiating features of the original.

“Let the name Silas Arnett be entered in the record,” said the judge. “I am obliged to point out, Dr. Arnett, that there really
is
a record. Every moment of this trial will be preserved for posterity. Any and all of your testimony may be broadcast, so you should conduct yourself as though the whole world were watching.
Given the nature of the charges which will be brought against you, that may well be the case.”

“I didn’t think you people bothered with interrogations and trials,” Arnett said. It seemed to Damon that Silas—or the software speaking in his stead—was injecting as much contempt into his voice as he could. “I thought you operated strictly on a sentence first, verdict afterwards basis.”

“It sometimes happens,” said the judge, “that we are certain of one man’s guilt, but do not know the extent to which his collaborators and accomplices were involved in his crime. In such cases we are obliged to undertake further inquiries.”

“Like the witch-hunters of old,” said Arnett grimly. “I suppose it would make it easier to select future victims if the people you select out for murder were forced to denounce others before they die. Any testimony you get by such means is worse than worthless; this is a farce, and you know it.”

“We know the truth,” said the judge flatly. “Your role is merely to confirm what we know.”

“Fuck you,” Arnett said with apparent feeling. The obsolete expletive sounded curiously old-fashioned.

“The charges laid against you are these,” the judge recited portentously. “First, that between 2095 and 2120 you conspired with Eveline Hywood, Karol Kachellek, Mary Hallam, and others, under the supervision of Conrad Helier, to cause actual bodily harm to some seven billion individuals, that actual bodily harm consisting of the irreversible disabling of their reproductive organs. Second, that you collaborated with Eveline Hywood, Karol Kachellek, Mary Hallam, and others, under the supervision of Conrad Helier, in the design, manufacture, and distribution of the agents of that actual bodily harm, namely the various virus species collectively known as meiotic disrupters or chiasmalytic transformers. You are now formally invited to make a statement in response to these charges.”

Damon was astonished by his own reaction, which was more extreme than he could have anticipated. He was seized by an actual physical shock which jolted him and left him trembling. He
turned to look at Karol Kachellek, but the blond man wouldn’t meet his eye. Karol seemed remarkably unperturbed, considering that he had just been accused of manufacturing and spreading the great plague of sterility whose dire effects he and his collaborators had so magnificently subverted.

“Karol . . .?”

Karol cut Damon off with a swift gesture. “Listen!” he hissed “If you had any
real
evidence,” the cartoon Arnett said, while the face of his simulacrum took on a strangely haunted look, “you’d have brought these charges in a
real
court of law. The simple fact that I’m here demonstrates the absurdity and falseness of any charges you might bring.”

“You’ve had seventy years to surrender yourself to judgment by another court,” said the judge sourly. “This court is the one which has found the means to bring you to trial; it is the one which will judge you now. You will be given every opportunity to enter a defense before sentence is passed upon you.”

“I refuse to pander to your delusions. I’ve nothing to say.” Damon found it easy enough to believe that it was Silas Arnett speaking; the crudely drawn figure had his attitude as well as his voice.

“Our investigations will be scrupulous nevertheless,” the judge said. “They must be, given that the charges, if true, require sentence of death to be passed upon you.”

“You have no right to do that!”

“On the contrary. We hold that what society bestows upon the individual, through the medium of technology, society has every right to withdraw from those who betray their obligations to the commonweal. This court intends to investigate the charges laid against you as fully as it can, and when they are proven it will invite any and all interested parties to pursue those who ought to be standing beside you in the dock. None will escape, no matter what lengths they may have gone to in the hope of evading judgment. There is no station of civilization distant enough, no hiding place buried deeply enough, no deception clever enough, to place a suspect beyond our reach.”

What’s that supposed to mean? Damon wondered. Where do they think Conrad Helier is, if he’s still alive? Living under the farside of the moon? Or are they talking about Eveline? Are there Eliminators in the Lagrange colonies too?

“The people you’ve named are entirely innocent of any crime,” Arnett said anxiously. “You’re insane if you think otherwise.”

Damon tried to judge from the timbre of the voice the extent to which Silas’s pain-control system might have been dismantled. So far, he gave no real indication of having been forced to suffer dire distress. If there were indeed a reality behind this charade Silas Arnett’s body must by now be an empire at war, and he must be feeling all the violence of the conflict. The tireless molecular agents which benignly regulated the cellular commerce of his emortality must have gone down beneath the onslaught of custom-designed assassins: Eliminators in miniature, which had exterminated his careful symbiotes and left their detritus to be flushed out by his kidneys. Even if Silas had not yet been subjected to actual torture he must have felt the returning grip of his own mortality, and the deadly cargo of terror which came with it. Had the terror been carefully expurgated from his voice—or was all this mere sham?

The picture dissolved and was replaced by an image of Conrad Helier, which Damon immediately recognized as a famous section of archive footage.

“We must regard this new plague not as a catastrophe but as a challenge,” Helier stated in ringing tones. “It is not, as the Gaian Mystics would have us believe, the vengeance of Mother Earth upon her rapists and polluters, and no matter how fast and how far it spreads it cannot and will not destroy the species. Its advent requires a monumental effort from us, but we are capable of making that effort. We have, at least in their early stages, technologies which are capable of rendering us immune to aging, and we are rapidly developing technologies which will allow us to achieve in the laboratory what fewer and fewer women are capable of doing outside it: conceive and bear children. Within twenty or thirty years we will have what our ancestors never
achieved: democratic control over human fertility, based in a new reproductive system. We have been forced to this pass by evil circumstance, but let us not undervalue it; it is a crucial step forward in the evolution of the species, without which the gifts of longevity and perpetual youth might have proved a double-edged sword. . . .”

The speech faded out. It was easy enough for Damon to figure out why the clip had been inserted. Recontextualized by the accusations which the anonymous judge had brought against Silas Arnett, it implied that Conrad Helier had thought of the transformer plagues as a good thing: an opportunity rather than a curse.

Damon had no alternative but to ask himself the questions demanded by the mysterious Operator. Had Conrad Helier been capable of designing the agents of the plague as well as the instruments which had blunted its effects? If capable, might he have been of a mind to do it?

The answer to the first question, he was certain in his own mind, was
yes
. He was not nearly as certain that the answer to the second question was
no
—but he remained uncomfortably aware of the fact that he had never actually
known
his biological father; all he had ever known was the oppressive force of his father’s plans for him and his father’s hopes for him. He had rebelled against those, but his rebellion couldn’t possibly commit him to believing
this
. In any case, he
did
know the other people named by the judge. Karol was awkward and diffident, Eveline haughty and high-handed, but Silas and Mary had been everything he could have required of them. Surely it was unimaginable that they could have done what they now stood accused of doing?

The image cut back to the courtroom, but the moment Damon heard Silas Arnett speak he knew that a lot of time had elapsed. The alteration in the quality of the prisoner’s voice left no doubt that a substantial section had been cut from the tape.

“What do you
want
from me?” Arnett hissed, in a voice full of pain and exhaustion. “What the fuck do you
want?
”

It was not the virtual judge who replied this time, although there was no reason to think that the second synthesized voice issued from a different source. “We want to know whose idea it was to launch the Third Plague War,” said the figure to Silas Arnett’s right—the figure who had always occupied center stage but had never claimed it. “We want to know where we can find incontrovertible evidence of the extent of the conspiracy. We want to know the names of everyone who was involved. We want to know where Conrad Helier is now, and what name he is currently using.”

“Conrad’s dead.
I saw him die!
It’s all on tape. All you have to do is look it up!” Silas’s voice was almost hysterical, but he seemed to be making Herculean efforts to control himself. Damon had to remind himself that
everything
on the tape could be the product of clever artifice. He could have forged this confrontation himself, without ever requiring Silas Arnett to be present.

“You did not see Conrad Helier die,” said the accusing voice, without the slightest hint of doubt. “The tape entered into the public record is a forgery, and someone switched the DNA samples in order to confuse the medical examiner who carried out the postmortem. Was that you, Dr. Arnett?”

There was no immediate reply. The tape was interrupted again; there was no attempt to conceal the cut. When it resumed, Silas looked even more haggard; he was silent now, but he gave the impression of having exhausted his capacity for protest. Damon could imagine the sound of Silas’s excised screams easily enough. Only the day before he had listened to poor Lenny Garon recording a tape which it might yet be his privilege to edit and doctor and convert into a peculiar kind of art. Were he to offer to take on that job Lenny Garon would probably be delighted—and would probably be equally delighted to hear his own screams, carefully intensified, on the final cut.

“It was my idea,” Silas said in a hollow, grating voice saturated with defeat. “Mine. I did it. The others never knew. I used them, but they never knew.”

“They
all
knew,” said the inquisitor firmly.

“No they didn’t,” Silas insisted. “They trusted me, absolutely. They never knew. They still don’t—the ones who are still alive, that is. I did it on my own. I designed the plague and set it free, so that Conrad could do what he had to do. He never knew that the transformers weren’t natural. He died not knowing. He really did die
not knowing
.”

“It’s very noble of you to take all the guilt upon yourself,” said the other in a voice dripping with sarcasm. “But it’s not true, is it?”

“Yes,” said Silas Arnett.

This time, the editor left in the sound of screaming. Damon shivered, even though he knew that he and everyone else who had managed to download the tape before Interpol deleted it was being manipulated for effect. This was melodrama, not news—but how many people, in today’s world, could tell the difference? How many people would be able to say: It’s just some third-rate pornotape stitched together by an engineer. It’s just a sequence of ones and zeros, like any other cataract of code. It doesn’t mean a thing.

Suddenly, Diana Caisson’s reaction to the discovery that Damon was using her template as a base for the sex tape he had been commissioned to make didn’t seem quite so unreasonable. In using Silas Arnett as the basis of this elaborate fiction the people behind the cartoon judge were not merely exploiting him but destroying him. Silas would never be the same, even if they restored his internal technology. Even if all of this were shown to be a pack of lies, he would never be the same in the eyes of other men—which was where everyone had to live in the world of the Net, no matter how reclusive they chose to be.