Inherit the Earth (19 page)

“Sorry, son,” he said. “Just take it easy—when there’s nothing to be done, that’s what you might as well do.”

The homespun philosophy was a further annoyance, but Damon still couldn’t unfasten the seat belt. Like Silas Arnett before
him—and possibly Surinder Nahal, not to mention Catherine Praill—he was being kidnapped. But why? And by whom? The mystery briefly overwhelmed the enormity of the realization, but the brute fact of what was happening soon fought back, insistently informing him that whoever was responsible, he was
in danger
. Whether he was in the hands of Eliminators or not, he was being carried off into the unknown, where any fate at all might be waiting for him.

His years of experience on the streets were supposed to have hardened him against fear and dread, but all that seemed futile now. However mean the streets were—and however one might try to dignify them with titles like “the badlands”—they were only a half hour away from the nearest hospital. As he had explained to Lenny Garon, people did die in knife fights—but if one drew back to consider life less narrow-mindedly, there were still a thousand
other
ways a man might die, even in the New Utopia. It didn’t require a bullet or a bomb, or any act of violence at all. A man might drown, or choke, or. . . .

He abandoned the train of thought abruptly. What did it matter what
might
happen to him? The real question was what he intended to
do
about the ugly turn of events.

“Who are you working for?” he called to the pilot.

“Just doing a job,” Grayson called back. “Delivering a package. You want explanations, I don’t have them—I dare say the man on the ground will have plenty.”

“Where are you taking me?”

Grayson laughed, as if he were taking what pleasure he could in holding on to his petty secrets. “You’ll see soon enough,” he promised.

Damon abandoned the fruitless inquisition for the time being, instructing himself to take more careful stock of his situation.

He could see Maui away to port, and he assumed that if he were seated on the other side of the plane he’d be able to see Lanai as well, but there was nothing directly below but the Pacific. Damon’s knowledge of the local geography was annoyingly
vague, but he figured that on their present heading—which seemed to be slightly east of south—they’d be over Kahoolawe at much the same time that they ought to have been coming down at Honolulu. If they kept going twice as long they might eventually hit the west coast of Hawaii. How many other islands there might be to which they might be headed Damon had no idea, but there were probably several tiny ones and the plane was small enough to land on any kind of strip.

He tried to make a list of the possibilities. Who might want him out of the way badly enough to bribe Grayson? Surely not Operator 101, who had sent him a note inviting him to investigate—nor Rachel Trehaine, who presumably thought of him as an irrelevance. There was, of course, another and more obvious possibility. Karol Kachellek had hired the pilot—it was most probable, therefore, that
he
had decided that Damon ought to be removed from the field of play until the game was over. Grayson might well have been instructed to take Damon to a place of safety, not merely to keep him from harm but also to keep him from asking any more awkward and embarrassing questions.

Damon had to admit that this was not an unattractive hypothesis, insofar as it suggested that no one was intending to flush out his IT and force him to confess that he was an enemy of humankind, but he felt no relief. To the contrary, as soon as he had convinced himself of its likelihood he felt exceedingly annoyed. The fact that his foster father might think that he had the right, and also the responsibility, to do such a thing was a terrible slur on his adulthood and his ability to look after himself.

“Whatever Karol’s paying you,” he shouted to Grayson, “I’ll double it if you take me to Honolulu.”

“Too late, mate,” Grayson shouted back. “I’m on the wrong side of the law now—once you cross the border you have to keep on going. Don’t worry—nobody’s going to hurt you.”

“This is for my own good, is it?”

“We all have to lend one another a helping hand,” Grayson told him, perhaps faking his malicious cheerfulness in order to
cover up his anxiety at the thought that he was indeed beyond the bounds of the law. “If things work out with the IT fountain of youth, we could all be neighbors for a long, long time.”

It was difficult to be patient, or even to try, but Damon had no alternative.

It turned out that the journey wasn’t that much longer than it would have been had Grayson actually gone to Honolulu, but the plane eventually passed beyond the southern tip of Lanai and missed Kahoolawe too. The pilot headed for a much smaller and more densely forested island top to the west of Kahoolawe. It was dominated by what appeared to be a single volcanic peak, but Damon wasn’t convinced that it was genuine.

Back in the early twenty-first century the precursors of today’s self-styled continental engineers had enjoyed a honeymoon of fashionability by virtue of the greenhouse effect and the perceived threat of a significant rise in the world’s sea level. When global warming hadn’t produced a new Deluge, even in Shanghai and the South Seas, they’d deflected the results of their research into building artificial islands aimed at the tourist trade. Such islands had initially had to be anchored to subsurface structures by mechanical holdfasts because Leon Gantz’s techniques of biotech cementation hadn’t been around in those days, but anyone who cared to employ gantzers on a sufficiently lavish scale could now make better provision. Building mountains underwater was just as easy as building them anywhere else. The ocean hereabouts was full of deep trenches but it wasn’t uniformly deep, and even if it were it would only make the task of securing new land more expensive, not more difficult in technical terms.

Even natural islands, Damon knew, had often been personal property back in the buccaneering days of classical capitalism—but
all
the artificial islands had been owned by the corps or individuals who had put them in place, and probably still were. That didn’t exclude them from the Net, and hence from the global village, but it made them relatively easy to protect from
spy eyes and the like. If there was anywhere on Earth that secrets could be kept in reasonable safety, this was probably one of them.

The plane came down on an airstrip even tinier than the one from which it had taken off, gantzed out of dark earth in a narrow clearing between dense tropical thickets.

When Steve Grayson came back to release Damon from the trick harness he was carrying a gun: a wide-barreled pepperbox. If it was loaded with orthodox shot it would be capable of inflicting widespread but superficial injuries, but it couldn’t be classed as a lethal weapon. Were it to go off, Damon would lose a lot of blood very quickly, and it would certainly put him out of action for a while, but his nanomachines would be able to seal off the wounds without any mortal damage being done.

“No need to worry, Mr. Hart,” the stout man said. “You’ll be safe here until the carnival’s over.”

“Safe from whom?” Damon asked as politely as he could. “What exactly is
the carnival?
Who’s doing all this?”

He wasn’t surprised when he received no answers to any of these questions—but the expression which flitted across Grayson’s face suggested that the pilot wasn’t just tormenting him. Damon wondered whether Grayson had any more idea than he did why he had been paid to bring his prisoner here, or what might be going on.

Damon wondered whether his streetfighting skills might be up to the task of knocking the gun out of the Australian’s hand and then kicking the shit out of his corpulent form, but he decided not to try. He didn’t know how to activate and instruct the plane’s automatic systems, let alone fly it himself, so he had no way of escaping the island even if he could disarm and disable the man.

The air outside the plane was oppressively humid. Damon allowed himself to be guided across the landing strip. A jeep, very similar to the one Karol had used to drive him to the airstrip on Molokai, was parked in the shadow of a thick clump of trees.

A man was waiting in the driving seat of the jeep. He was as
short as the pilot but he was much slimmer and—if appearances could be trusted—much older. His skin was the kind of dark coffee color which most people who lived in tropical regions preferred. He didn’t have a gun in his hand, but Damon wasn’t prepared to assume that he didn’t have one at all.

“I’m truly sorry about this, Mr. Hart,” the man in the jeep said, in what seemed to Damon to be an overly punctilious English accent, “but we weren’t sure that we could persuade you to come here of your own accord and the matter is urgent. Until we can get to the people who have Arnett everyone connected with your family may be in danger.” Turning to the pilot he added: “You’d better go quickly, Mr. Grayson. Take the plane to Hilo—then make yourself scarce, just in case.”

“Who are you?” Damon demanded as the Australian obediently turned away and headed back to his cockpit.

“Get in, Mr. Hart,” the thin man said. “My name is Rajuder Singh. I’ve known your foster parents for a long time, but I doubt that any of them ever mentioned me. I’m only support staff.”

“Did Karol Kachellek arrange this?”

“It’s for your own protection. I know how you must feel about it, but it really is a necessary precaution. Please get in, Mr. Hart.”

Damon climbed into the passenger seat of the vehicle and settled himself, suppressing his reflexive urge to offer violent resistance to what was being done to him. The jeep glided into a narrow gap in the trees and was soon deep in a ragged forest of neocycads, thin-boled mock conifers, and a dozen other species that Damon couldn’t classify at all. The road was narrow but it didn’t seem to have any potholes. The island was presumably equipped with a ready supply of men with shovels and buckets, although none was in evidence now.

The forest was quiet, after the fashion of artificially regenerated forests everywhere; the trees, genetically engineered for rapid growth in the unhelpful soil, were not fitted as yet to play host to the overelaborate fauna which ancient tropical forests had entertained before the logger holocaust. A few tiny insects
splashed on the windshield of the jeep as it moved through the gathering night, but the only birds whose cries could be heard were seabirds.

“You mustn’t blame Dr. Kachellek, Mr. Hart,” Rajuder Singh told him blandly. “He had to make a decision in a hurry. He didn’t expect you to come to Molokai. Our people should be able to bring the situation under control, given time, but we don’t yet know who we’re up against and things have moved a little too fast for comfort. He
was
right to do what he did—I’m afraid that you’re in more danger than you know, and it might not have been a good idea for you to arrive in Los Angeles on a scheduled flight. I’ll show you why in a few minutes’ time.”

“Who, exactly, are
our people?
” Damon wanted to know.

Rajuder Singh smiled. “Friends and allies,” he said unhelpfully. “There aren’t so many of us left, nowadays, but we still keep the faith.”

“Conrad Helier’s faith?”

“That’s right, Mr. Hart. You’d be one of us yourself, I suppose, if you hadn’t chosen to digress.”

“To
digress?
That assumes that I’ll be back on track, someday.”

Rajuder Singh’s only answer to that was a gleaming smile.

“Are you saying that there’s some kind of conspiracy involving my foster parents?” Damon asked, unable to keep the aggression from filtering back into his voice. “Some kind of grand plan in which you and Karol and Eveline are all involved?”

“We’re just a group of friends and coworkers,” the dark-skinned man replied lightly. “No more than that—but someone seems to be attacking us, and we have to protect our interests.”

“Might Surinder Nahal be involved with the people attacking you?”

“It’s difficult to believe that, but we really don’t know yet. Until we do know, it’s necessary to be careful. This is a very bad time—but that’s presumably why our unknown adversaries chose this particular moment for their assault.”

Damon remembered that Karol Kachellek had been equally
insistent that this was a “very bad time.” Why, he wondered again, was the present moment any worse than any other time?

The sun had climbed high into the clear blue sky and Damon was finding its heat horribly oppressive by the time the vehicle reached its destination. The destination in question was a sizable bungalow surrounded by a flower garden. Damon was oddly relieved to observe that the roof was topped by an unusually large satellite dish. However remote this place might be it was an integral part of the Web; all human civilization was its neighborhood. The flowers were reassuring too, by virtue of the orderly layout of their beds and the sweet odors they secreted. There were insects aplenty here, including domestic bees.

Rajuder Singh showed Damon through the double door of the bungalow into a spacious living room. When Damon opened his mouth to speak, though, the slim man held up his hand. He swiftly crossed the room to a wall-mounted display screen, beckoning Damon to follow.

“This is the same netboard which carried Operator one-oh-one’s earlier messages,” Rajuder Singh said while his nimble fingers brought the screen to life.

Damon stared dumbly at the crimson words which appeared there, reading them three times before he accepted, reluctantly, that they really did say what they seemed to say.