Inherit the Earth (22 page)

“So what?”

The fake Conrad Helier was already standing at ease, but now he put his hands into his pockets. In the sixty years that he had known him, Silas had
never
seen Conrad Helier put his hands into his pockets.

“It used to be reckoned that people inevitably became more conservative as they got older,” the man in the white coat said, with only the faintest hint of irony in his earnest expression. “Young men with virile bodies and idealistic minds, it was said, easily embraced utopian schemes for the radical transformation of society. Old men, by contrast, only wanted to hang on to the things they already had; even those who hadn’t made fortunes wanted to hang on to the things they were used to, because they were creatures of habit. The people who spoke out against technologies of longevity—and there
were
people like that, as I’m sure you can remember—often argued that a world ruled by the very old would become stagnant and sterile, fearful of further change. They prophesied that a society of old people would be utterly lacking in potency and progressive zeal, devoid of any sense of adventure.

“They were wrong, of course. Their mistake was to equate
getting older
with
nearing the end
. The old became conservative not because of the increasing number of the years they’d lived but because of the dwindling number of the years that still lay before them. The young, whose futures were still to be made, had a strong vested interest in trying to make the world better as quickly as was humanly possible; the old, who had little or no future left, only wanted to preserve what they could of their old and comfortable selves. Things are very different now. Now, the prospect of true emortality lies before us, like the light at the end of a long dark tunnel. Not everyone will make it all the way to the light, but many of us will and we
all
live in hope. The old, in fact, understand that far better than the young.

“The young used to outnumber the old, but they don’t now and never will again; the young are
rare
now, a protected species. Although the future which stretches before them seems limitless,
it doesn’t seem to them to be
theirs
. Even if they can still envisage themselves as the inevitable inheritors of the earth, the age at which they will come into their inheritance seems a very long way off and likely to be subject to further delays. It’s hardly surprising, therefore, that the young are more resentful now than they have ever been before. It is the old who now have the more enthusiastic and more constructive attitude to the future; they expect not only to live in it, but also to
own
it, to be masters of its infinite estates.”

“I know all this,” Silas said sullenly, wishing that his itches were not so defiantly unscratchable.

“You know it,” said the man masked as Conrad Helier, “but you haven’t
understood
it. How, if you understood it, could you ever have thought of
retirement?
How, if you understood it, could you waste your time in pointless and undignified sexual encounters with the authentically young?”

“I can live my own life any way I choose,” Silas told his accuser coldly. “I’m not just old—I’m also free.”

“That’s the point,” said the ersatz Helier. “That’s why you’re here. You’re
not
free. Nobody is, who hopes and wants to live forever. Because, you see, if we’re to live forever, we have to live
together
. We’re dependent on one another, not just in the vulgar sense that the division of labor makes it possible to produce all the necessities of life but in the higher sense that
human
life consists primarily of communication with others, augmented, organized, and made artful by all the media we can devise. We’re social beings, Silas—not because we have some kind of inbuilt gregarious instinct but because we simply can’t do anything worthwhile or be anything worthwhile outside of society. That’s why our one and only objective in life—all the more so for everyone who’s a hundred and fifty going on a hundred and fifty thousand—ought to be the Herculean task of making a society as rich and as complex and as
rewarding
as we possibly can.”

“The only reason I’m not free,” Silas replied tersely, “is that I’ve been strapped to a fucking chair by a fucking maniac.”

Conrad Helier’s face registered great disappointment. “Your
attitude is as stupidly anachronistic as your language,” he said—and went out like a switched-off light, along with the virtual environment of which he was a part. Silas was left entirely to himself.

Silas was stubbornly glad that he had had an effect on his interrogator, but the effect itself was far from rewarding. In the darkness and the silence he was alone with his discomforts, and his discomforts were further magnified by lack of distraction. He was also acutely aware of the fact that he had failed to obtain answers to any of the questions which confronted him—most urgently of all, what would happen to him now that Operator 101 had released his slanders onto the Web?

Mercifully—although mercy may not have been the motive—he was not left in the dark and the silence for long.

His senses of sight and hearing were now engaged by a kaleidoscopic patchwork of fragments excerpted from old and nearly new VE tapes, both documentary and drama. If there was any pattern of relevance in the order in which they were presented to him, he could not discern it—but he became interested in spite of that, not merely in the individual snatches that had been edited together but in the aesthetic experience of the sequence.

He “walked” on the surface of Mars, surveying the roseate desert and looking up into the tinted sky at the glaring daystars. He saw the rounded domes where the human Martians lived and watched the glass facets sparkle and glint as he changed his position. Then, on the horizon, he “saw” the crazy-tale castles of the Mars of obsolete dreams, the skycars riding the imagination-thickened air—and dramatic music crashed through the brief, golden silence. . . .

He saw earth-moving machines on the fringe of the Australian superdesert, laying out the great green starter plane which would begin the business of soil manufacture, bridging the desiccation gap which had deadened the land in spite of all life’s earlier attempts to reclaim it. A sonorous voice-over pumped out relentless adspeak about the technical expertise behind the project: glory, glory, glory to the heroes of the genetic revolution . . ..

He saw a gang fight in the derelict suburban wasteland of a city he couldn’t name: young men costumed and painted like crazy fetishists, wielding knives and razors, eyes wild with adrenalin and synthetic ecstasy, living on and by the edge. He watched the vivid blood spurt from wounds, and he winced with sympathy because he knew full well that these would-be savages must be equipped with relatively primitive internal technology, which provided elementary protection against permanent injury but left them horribly vulnerable to pain and the risk of death. He heard their bestial cries, their wordless celebration of their defiance of civilization and all its comforts, all its protective guarantees . . ..

It was as if the virtual aspect of the life of modern man were being condensed into a stream of images. Silas couldn’t help but feel annoyed about the fact that his captors seemed hell-bent on
educating
him, but the process had a curious fascination of its own. Much of the imagery was, of course, “reality-based”—videotapes of actual events reformatted for VE playback, sometimes in 2-D, sometimes in 3-D—but even in the documentary material, reformatted footage was juxtaposed and mingled with synthesized material produced by programmers. Today’s programmers were almost good enough to synthesize lifelike fictions, especially when they used templates borrowed from reality-based footage which could be mechanically animated and subtly changed without losing their photographic appearance.

With only a hood at his disposal, Silas couldn’t obtain the full benefit of such illusions, most of which were designed to provide tactile sensations with the aid of a full-body synthesis suit, but the detachment that was heir to limitation made it all the more difficult to tell the reformatted real from the ersatz.

Silas saw himself standing by Conrad Helier’s side, listening to the older man saying: “We must regard this new plague not as a catastrophe but as a challenge. 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. . . .”

He saw two women, naked and oiled, caressing one another sinuously, engaged in carefully choreographed mutual masturbation, first with fingers and then with tongues, moving ceaselessly, putting on an ingeniously artful and tantalizing display for voyeurs. The soundtrack was soft music, overlaid by heavy breathing and gasps of simulated ecstasy, and the flesh of the two women seemed to be taking on a life of its own, a strange glow. Their faces were changing, exchanging features; they seemed to flow and merge, as though the two were becoming one as the carefully faked climax approached. . . .

Silas recognized this as one of his foster son’s compositions, as crudely and garishly libidinous as one might expect of a
young
man’s imagination. He was glad when it was replaced by scenes from a food factory, where tissue cultures were harvested and processed with mechanical efficiency and hygiene by robot knives and robot packagers.

After that there was more Conrad Helier, this time in closeup—which meant that it was probably faked. “We must be sure,” the probably fake Conrad was saying, “that our motives are pure. We must do this not to secure an advantage for ourselves, but for the sake of the world. It is time to set aside, for the last time, the logic of the selfish gene, and to proclaim the triumph of altruistic self-awareness. The first children of the New Utopia must be not the children of an elite; they must be the children of everyman. If we ourselves are to have children we must allocate ourselves the lowest priority, not the highest.”

The viewpoint swung around to bring Eveline Hywood’s face into embarrassingly intimate focus. “It’s the privilege of gods to move in mysterious ways,” she said laconically. “Let’s not tie ourselves down with self-administered commandments that we’ll surely have occasion to break and break again.”

Conrad Helier’s disciples had, in fact, bound themselves with edicts and promises—and had kept them, after a fashion. Silas believed that he had kept them better than most, in spite of the
heresies which had crept upon his mind and condemned him, in the end, to confusion. He had kept almost all his promises, if only in order to ensure that whatever else he lost, he would have
clean hands
.

Now he was looking out at the factory again, at the robot butchers working clinically, tirelessly, and altruistically for the greater good of ambitious humankind. He presumed that the image was meant to be symbolic, but he refused to try to figure out exactly what it was symbolic of, and why it had been laid before him now.

The robot butchers tirelessly plied their gleaming instruments for a few seconds more, and then dissolved into a vision of cars racing through city streets, speeded up until they were little more than colored blurs, racing ceaselessly past.

But it is true, he reflected, that some of those of us who are left over from the old world remain anchored to that world by our habits of mind. Some of the old haven’t yet become accustomed to the new outlook, and perhaps I’m one of them—but we can’t be expected to shed the superficialities of our heritage as easily as a snake sheds its skin. We do evolve—but we can’t do it overnight. Conrad would have understood that. Whoever is using his face must be younger than Conrad, and younger than me—but not as young as Damon. He surely belongs to the new old, not to the true old.

The scene changed again; this time it was an episode of some popular soap opera, but the characters were mercifully silent. As they exchanged insults and bared their overwrought souls they were rendered impotent and absurd by silence. A girl slapped a man across the face; without the sound track there was no telling why, but the blow wasn’t halfhearted. These days, blows rarely were. Nobody pulled their punches for fear of hurting people, because everybody knew that people couldn’t be hurt—even “primitives” had some degree of artificial insulation from actual bodily harm. Hardly anyone went entirely unaugmented in the world, and the prevailing view was that if they wanted to do so, they had to accept the risks.

All the old inhibitions were dying, Silas reminded himself, in an appropriately grim fashion. A radically different spectrum of dos and don’ts was establishing itself in the cities of what would soon be the twenty-third century.

Silas’s head, isolated within its own private pocket universe, took off from the cape, mounted atop a huge sleek rocket. His eyes were looking up into the deepening sky, and the sound which filled his ears was a vast, angry, undeniable roar of pure power, pure
might
.

It went on, and on, and on. . . .

In the end, Silas couldn’t help but call out to his tormentors, to beg them to answer his questions, even to lecture him like a recalcitrant schoolboy if they felt the need. He knew as he did it that he was proving them right, demonstrating that the limits of his freedom extended far beyond the straps binding him to his ignominy, but he no longer cared. He wanted and needed to know what they were doing to him, and why, and how long it would last.

He wanted, and needed, to
understand
, no matter what price he had to pay in patience and humility and craven politeness.