Inherit the Earth (23 page)

T
he message was dumped shortly after you boarded the plane at Kaunakakai,” Rajuder Singh told Damon, when the import of the words displayed on the screen had had time to sink in. “When Karol decided to send you here instead of Los Angeles he couldn’t have foreseen anything as outrageous as this, but it’s better proof than any he
could
have imagined that his instincts were right.”

“If he had such faith in his instincts,” Damon said sourly, “why didn’t he do me the courtesy of explaining what he wanted me to do, and why?”

“He thought that telling you his plan would make it impossible to carry through. He seems to be of the opinion that you always do the opposite of anything he suggests, simply because it’s his suggestion.”

Damon could understand how Karol Kachellek might have formed that impression over the years, but he felt that it was an injustice nevertheless. The matters on which he had habitually defied Karol in his younger days had all been trivial; he was now an adult and this was
not
a trivial matter. “It’s crazy,” he said, referring to the message. “It’s completely crazy.”

“Yes it is,” said the dark-skinned man. “Denials are going out, of course—not just from our people but from Interpol and the doctors who attended the womb in which your embryo developed.
Your progress from egg to adult has been mapped as scrupulously as that of any individual in the history of the world. The lie is astonishingly blatant—but that only makes it all the more peculiar. It’s attracting public attention and public discussion, I’m afraid. Together with Silas Arnett’s supposed confession, it’s getting coverage on the worst kinds of current affairs and talk shows. I suppose any man who lives a hundred and twenty years might expect to make a few enemies, but I can’t understand why anyone would want to attack
you
in this bizarre way. Can you?”

It occurred to Damon that some of the people he had ordered Madoc Tamlin to investigate might have resented the fact—and might possibly be anxious that the buying-power of Conrad Helier’s inheritance might pose as great a threat to their plan as Interpol or the friends and allies of Silas Arnett. All he said to Rajuder Singh, however, was: “No, I can’t.”

“It’ll be a nine-day wonder, of course,” Singh observed, “if it even lasts that long. Unfortunately, such slanders sometimes linger in the mind even after convincing rebuttals have been put forward. It really was the best course of action to remove you from harm’s way as quickly as possible. We’re truly sorry that you’ve been caught up in all this—it really has nothing to do with you.”

“What
has
it to do with?” Damon asked, his voice taut with frustration. “What are you people up to and who wants to stop you? Why is this such a
bad time
for all this to blow up?”

“I can’t tell you what we’re doing,” Singh said, with a note of apology in his voice that almost sounded sincere, “and we honestly don’t know why we’re being attacked in this fashion. All I can say is that we’re doing everything we can to calm the situation. It can only be a matter of time before Silas is found, and then. . . .”

“I’m not so sure of that,” Damon said, cutting short the string of platitudes. “Maybe he will be found and maybe he won’t, but finding him and catching the people who took him are two different things. This whole thing may look amateurish and stupid
—just typical Eliminator nonsense taken to a new extreme—but it’s not. That tape of Silas could have been edited to look real but it was edited to
look fake
. All the artlessness in this seems to have much subtler thought behind it—and real power too. The kidnapping itself is a case in point—a confusing compound of the brutal and the clever. The same is true of my involvement: one day I’m getting sly messages pushed under my door, the next I’m being publicly denounced in an incredible fashion. In between times, the girl Silas was entertaining is spirited away—but not until
after
the police have questioned her, investigated her thoroughly, and decided that she’s not involved. To add even further to the sum of dissimulation, while Karol Kachellek is busy insisting that there’s absolutely nothing for me to worry about he’s actually planning to have me bundled up and sent to some stupid mock-volcanic island in the middle of nowhere where even the local ecology is a blatant fake.”

“I really am sorry,” Rajuder Singh assured him. “Alas, it’s not for me to explain matters even if I could. I think that Eveline Hywood might be willing to take your call, though, once we’ve gone down.”

“Down where?”

Damon had so far been under the impression that the room he was in had only three doors, one of them part of a pair. Singh had closed the double doors through which they had entered but two others stood half-open, one offering a glimpse of a bedroom while the other gave access to a narrow corridor leading to a kitchen. Singh now demonstrated the error of Damon’s assumption by going to the wall alongside the kitchen door and pressing a hidden switch of some kind. A section of “wall” slid aside to reveal an empty space—presumably an elevator.

“So the mountain’s hollow as well as fake,” Damon said incredulously. “Down where the magma ought to be there’s some kind of secret laboratory, where my father’s old research team is laboring away on some project too delicate to be divulged to the world.”

“It’s not a laboratory,” Singh told him. “It’s just a hiding place.
There isn’t any legion of white-coated workers conducting secret experiments—although I suppose it’s possible that someone thinks there’s more going on here than there is. The original setup was built more than a hundred and fifty years ago—long before we acquired it, of course—as a nuclear bunker. It was a rich man’s fantasy: a hidey-hole where he and a few friends could wait out the coming holocaust. The plague wars were running riot at the time and the fear of escalation was acute. A hundred years after the bunker was built—still some little time before the island came into
our
hands—someone equally rich and equally paranoid expanded it with the aid of primitive gantzers. I presume that he was more anxious about an asteroid strike or some other natural disaster than about nuclear war, but I don’t know for sure. I suppose it would still be capable of fulfilling any of those functions, were the need to arise.”

“But
you
aren’t interested in anything as absurdly melodramatic as that, of course,” Damon said sarcastically.

Singh was standing beside the open door, politely indicating that Damon should precede him into the empty space. Damon stayed where he was, waiting for more answers.

“We’re interested in privacy,” Singh told him brusquely. “It’s an increasingly rare commodity in a world of rampant nano-technology. We’re interested in independence—not political independence, just creative independence.”

“And this
we
, I suppose, comprises Karol Kachellek and Eveline Hywood—if she should ever return to Earth—and other old chums of Conrad Helier. Maybe you even have Conrad Helier himself hidden away down there, dead to the world but still slaving away at all the labor of creation that God somehow left undone? Perhaps that’s what Operator one-oh-one believes, at any rate.”

“Please, Mr. Hart,” the thin man said plaintively.

“I’ll find out what this is all about eventually,” Damon told him, “one way or another.” He was wary enough not to let bravado lead him to give too much away, though. It might be inadvisable to boast about Madoc Tamlin’s capabilities to people
who might be just as reluctant to be found out as the mysterious Operator 101 was.

The words displayed on Singh’s screen suddenly disappeared, to be replaced by an urgently flashing message which simply said: READ NOW. The system had presumably been programmed with nets set to trawl the cyberspatial sea for items of a particular kind, and one of them had just made contact.

“You’d better come look at this,” Damon said.

Singh was reluctant to come away from the open elevator, but he did come. When he saw the message, though, his suspicious expression cleared. “Excuse me,” he murmured, as he moved to obey the flashing injunction.

When the thin man’s skeletal fingers brushed the keypad beneath the screen the flashing words were replaced by an image of a man sitting on a perfectly ordinary chair. Damon was not in the least surprised to recognize Silas Arnett. Silas was no longer under any obvious restraint, but there was a curious expression in his eyes, and both of his hands were heavily bandaged. He began speaking in a flat monotone.

Damon knew immediately that the image and the voice were both fakes, derived with calculated crudity from the kind of template he used routinely in his own work.

“The situation was out of hand,” the false Arnett said dully. “All attempts to limit environmental spoliation by legislation had failed, and all hope that the population would stabilize or begin to decline as a result of individual choice was gone. We were still winning the battle to provide enough food for everyone, even though the distribution system left seven or eight billions lacking, but we couldn’t cope with the sheer physical
presence
of so many people in the world. Internal technology was developing so rapidly that it was obvious to anyone with half a brain that off-the-shelf emortality was less than a lifetime away, and that it would revolutionize the economics of medicine. Wars over lebensraum were being fought on every continent, with all kinds of weapons, including
real
plagues: killing plagues.

“When Conrad first put it to us that what the world needed
more desperately than anything else was a full stop to reproduction—an end to the whole question of individual choice in matters of fecundity—nobody said ‘No! That’s horrible!’ We all said ‘Yes, of course—but can it be done?’ When Conrad said ‘There’s always a way,’ no one challenged him on the grounds of propriety.

“I couldn’t see how we might go about designing a plague of sterility, because there were no appropriate models in nature—how could there be, when the logic of natural selection demands fertility and fecundity?—and I couldn’t envisage a plausible physiology, let alone a plausible biochemistry, but Conrad’s way of thinking was quite different from mine. Even in those days, all but a few of the genes we claimed to have ‘manufactured’ were actually simple modifications of existing genes or the chance products of lab-assisted mutation. We had little or no idea how to go about creating genes from scratch which would have entirely novel effects—but Conrad had a weird kind of genius for that kind of thing. He
knew
that he could figure out a way, using the somatic transformer packages that were then routinely used to treat genetic deficiency diseases.

“I wonder, sometimes, how many other groups must have had conversations very like ours. ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could design a virus that would sterilize almost everyone on earth without the kinds of side effects that accompany pollution-induced sterility?’ . . . ‘Yes, wouldn’t it—what a shame there’s no obvious place to start.’ Was there anywhere in the world in the 2070s where bioengineers gathered where such conversations
didn’t
take place? Maybe some of the others took it further; maybe they even followed the same thread of possibility that Conrad pointed out to us. Maybe Conrad wasn’t the only one who could have done it, merely the one who hit the target first. I don’t know—but I do know that if you’d put that kind of loaded pistol into the hand of any bioengineer of the period the overwhelming probability is that the trigger would have been squeezed.

“We had no desire to discriminate: we set out to sterilize
everybody
in the world—and we succeeded. That’s what saved the world from irredeemable ecocatastrophe. If the population had continued to increase, so that nanotech emortality spread like wildfire through a world which was still vomiting babies from billions of wombs, nothing could have restrained the negative Malthusian checks. The so-called plague wars had already proved themselves inadequate to cut population drastically in a world of advanced medical care, but there were plenty more and even nastier weapons to hand. The world really was set to go bad in a big way; all that remained for sane men to do was exercise the least worst option, and that’s what Conrad Helier did.

“What happened in the last decade of the twenty-first century and the first decades of the twenty-second wasn’t a tragedy at all—but the fact that it was
seen
as a tragedy, and a terrible threat to the future of the species, increased its beneficial effects. The Crash was a common enemy, and it created such a sense of common cause, focused on the development of artificial wombs and the securing of adequate supplies of sperms and ova, that for the first time in history the members of the human race were all on the same side.

“We’re still living on the legacy of that break in history, in spite of attempts made by madmen like the Eliminators to set us all at one another’s throats again. We’re still all on the same side, all engaged in the same ongoing quest—and we have Conrad Helier to thank for that. You have no conception of the debt which the world owes to that man.”

“You don’t regret what you did, then?” asked a whispery voice from off-stage.

“No,” said Arnett’s simulacrum dispiritedly. “If you’re looking for some sign of repentance, forget it. What we did was necessary, and
right
.”

“And yet you’ve kept it secret all these years,” the voice observed. “When you were first accused of having done this, you denied it. When you realized that further denial was useless, you attempted to take sole responsibility—not out of pride, but out of a desire to protect your collaborators. The truth had, in the
end, to be extracted from you. Why is that, if you aren’t ashamed of what you did?”