Inherit the Earth (25 page)

“It’s impossible,” Singh croaked, although it clearly wasn’t.

“Is there anyone down below at all?” Damon asked, abruptly revising his opinion as to the desirability of finding a reception committee awaiting his arrival.

“No,” said Singh. “It’s just . . .”

“A safe place to hide,” Damon finished for him. “Apparently, it isn’t.”

“But the systems are secure! They’re supposed to be tamperproof!”

“They might have been tamperproof when they were put in,” Damon pointed out, belatedly realizing the obvious, “but this is the age of rampant nanotechnology. PicoCon’s current products can get into nooks and crannies nobody would even have noticed twenty years ago. They got to Silas, remember—this is mere child’s play to people who could do that. The only question worth asking is how they knew I was here—if it
is
me they’ve come for. If they have a ship, it must have been here or hereabouts before Grayson took off from Molokai.”

The lights came back on again, and the elevator lurched into motion. Unfortunately, it began to rise. Damon immediately began to regret the delay caused by his stubborn perversity. If he’d only come into the elevator when Singh had first invited him, they’d surely have been able to get all the way to the bottom
before his pursuers could stop them. Whether that would have qualified as safety or not he couldn’t tell, but he was certain that he was anything
but
safe now.

Rajuder Singh must have reached the same conclusion, but he didn’t bother to complain, or even to say “I told you so.”

Damon ostentatiously turned the gun away from Rajuder Singh, pointing it at what would soon be the open space left by the sliding door. He knew that the room would still be filled with poisonous smoke, and that anyone who had got to the console in the middle of the room in order to send a return signal to the elevator would have to be wearing a gas mask, but that didn’t mean that they’d be armored against darts. One shot might be enough, if only he could see a target—and even the larger helicopter which had followed the two miniatures couldn’t have been carrying more than a couple of men. If he could hold his breath long enough, there might still be a chance of getting outside and into the welcoming jungle. It was a one in a million chance, but a chance nevertheless.

“They must have been waiting,” he muttered to Rajuder Singh. “But they couldn’t have known what Karol would do, even if they figured that I’d fly to Molokai. They must have been here because they were keeping watch on
you
, waiting to take action against
you
.”

“That’s impossible,” Rajuder Singh said again. “I’m just support staff.”

“But you’re sitting on a secret hidey-hole,” Damon pointed out. “Maybe there isn’t anything down there to interest them—but they don’t know that. Maybe they really do think that Conrad Helier’s there, directing Karol’s operation. Maybe this was always part of their plan, and my presence here is just an unfortunate coincidence. Maybe they don’t give a damn about you
or
me, and only want access to the bunker. . . .”

Damon could have gone on. His imagination hadn’t even come near to the limit of its inventiveness—but he didn’t have time.

The elevator stopped again, although the lights stayed on this time.

Bitter experience had told Damon to take a long deep breath, and that was what he did. As the doors began to open, before the gas could flood in, he filled his lungs to capacity. Then he threw himself out into the smoky room, diving and rolling as he did so but keeping his stinging eyes wide open while he searched for a target to shoot at.

There was no target waiting; the room was devoid of human presence.

His ill-formed plan was to get to the doors that led outside, and get through them with all possible expedition. He managed to make it to the inner door easily enough and brought himself upright without difficulty—but the door was locked tight. He seized the grip and hauled with all his might, but it wouldn’t budge. He was fairly certain that Singh hadn’t locked it, and he knew that it wouldn’t matter whether the thin man was carrying a swipecard capable of releasing the lock. There wouldn’t have been time, even if the other had been right behind him—which he wasn’t.

Damon immediately turned for the window, even though he knew full well that it wouldn’t be easy to exit past the jagged shards of glass that still clung to the frame. His long stride carried him across the room with the least possible delay, but his eyes wouldn’t stay open any longer and his nose was stinging too. By the time he reached the window he felt that he couldn’t hold on any longer—but he knew that there was fresh air outside.

Damon grasped the window frame with his free hand, steadying himself as he let out his breath explosively. Then he stuck his head out into the open, in the hope of gathering in a double lungful of untainted air, while the hand that held the gun groped for a resting place on the outer sill.

Someone standing outside plucked the dart gun neatly out of his hand. Damon tried his utmost to force his stinging eyes open, but his reflexes wouldn’t let go. He never saw who it was that turned the darter against him and shot him in the chest.

The impact would probably have hurt a good deal worse if Damon hadn’t sucked in just enough smoke to make him gag
and befuddle his senses. As it was, he felt almost completely numb as he reeled backward.

The next breath he took was so fully impregnated with smoke that he must have passed out immediately—or so, at least, it seemed when he woke up with a sick headache and found himself lying prone on a ledge, looking down the sheer slope of an incredibly high mountain.

D
amon was no more sensitive to heights than the average man, but the sight confronting him would have shocked anyone into instant acrophobia. He looked downward at a face of bare gray rock that plummeted for miles. The bottom of the chasm was visible because it was lit up like the face of a full moon on a clear night, but it seemed so very far away that the notion of it’s being connected to his present station by an actual wall of rock was so incredible as to be horrible.

He felt cold sweat break out on his face as terror grabbed him, and he recoiled convulsively, squeezing his eyes shut and pulling his head back from the rim. He rolled over without even caring what might be behind him, but when he was supine he opened his eyes again to look up, and gasped once again in alarm.

The steep slope extending upward from the left-hand edge of the narrow ledge on which he lay was not as extensive as the chasm that lay to his right, and it posed no threat, but there was a certain sinister malignity in its frank impossibility. The mountain was topped by a building that was lit as brightly and as strangely as the chasm floor, so that every detail of its construction stood out sharp and clear against a cloudless and starless sky.

It was a castle of sorts, with clustered towers and winding battlements, but it was compounded out of crystals, as if it had
been gantzed from tiny shards of glass and the litter of a jeweler’s workshop. The walls were not transparent, nor were they even straightforwardly translucent; they were shining brightly, but the manner of their shining was an outrage to logic which played tricks with his mind’s procedures of visual analysis. As he stared at the amazing structure he saw that its towers were linked by crisscrossing bridges whose spans were impossibly knotted, and that its ramparts were decorated with ascending and descending staircases which faded into one another in perspective-defying fashion. It was magnificent—all the more so because it was so far above him, separated by a slope so sheer and forbidding.

There was no path up the mountain—no way the castle could be approached without climbing several kilometers of hostile rock face. Its existence was no more plausible than that awful abyss, which would have plunged halfway to Earth’s molten core had it been in the world he knew: the
real
world.

Damon shut his eyes again. Safe in that darkness, he pulled himself together.

It’s just a VE, he assured himself. It’s clever, but it’s just a VE full of optical illusions.

Carefully, he began to run his fingers over his limbs. His fingers registered the texture of his suitskinned flesh; the muscles of his belly and his thighs registered the passage of his fingers. He assumed that the suitskin must be an illusion and that he must really be wearing a synthesuit delicately wired to reproduce the sensations of touch. It was obviously state-of-the-art, given that the movement of his fingers seemed so very natural, but all such suits had limitations of which he was very well aware.

He put his right forefinger into his mouth, running it back and forth over his teeth and tongue. Then he touched his closed eye and gently depressed the eyeball. Then he passed his hand back over the crown of his head, feeling the texture of his hair and the vertebrae of his neck. Finally, he put his hand inside the collar of the virtual suitskin and shoved his hand into his armpit; when he withdrew it he sniffed his fingers.

None of these sensations were capable of synthesuit duplication,
at least in theory. Taste and odor were beyond the present limits of synthesuit sensoria; eyeballs were reserved for confrontation with the screen and couldn’t be touched; every synthesuit required input cabling, which was usually situated at the rear of the head or the back of the neck. All four tests had failed to reveal any deception; according to their verdict, everything he had seen was real.

And yet, he told himself, it must be a virtual environment, because no such real environment exists. However improbable it seems, this is a charade. I don’t know who has the equipment to play such a trick, or how they’re doing it, or why, but it’s a trick and nothing more. It’s just a trick.

“You can open your eyes, Damon. It’s perfectly safe.” Damon didn’t recognize the voice.

He opened his eyes, hoping that the VE into which he’d woken might have changed into something far more accommodating.

It hadn’t. The impossible building still sat atop the impossible mountain, against the backdrop of the impossible sky. He
knew
that he was safe, but it was extremely difficult to believe it. Damon’s reflexes fought to shut his eyes again, but his consciousness fought to keep them open. It was a hard fight, but reason won.

During the last five years Damon had spent a great deal of time in VEs of every marketed and marketable kind, searching for better illusions of reality in order that he might become a better architect of artificial spaces. He needed to be able to cope with this—indeed, he needed to come to terms with it, to master it, and, if possible, to find out how it was done and how he could do likewise.

When he was sure that he could keep his eyes open he deliberately moved back to the rim of the ledge and extended his head into the position it had been in when he first opened his eyes. He wanted to look down again. He
needed
to look down again, in order to sustain his credentials as an artist in virtual realities, a virtuoso of illusion.

Vertigo seized him like a vice, but he fought it. Knowledge conquered sensation. He looked into the abyss and knew that he would not fall.

Only then did he move again, coming back from the rim and scrambling into a sitting position. He set his back against the upper cliff face and extended his legs so that his ankles were balanced on the lip he had just vacated.
Then
he turned, to look at the person who had spoken to him.

The figure was as strange as the world which contained him. His shape was human, and recognizably male, but his body was literally mercurial, formed as if from liquid metal. He shone with reflected radiance, but the light which flowed across his contours as he moved was as deceptive as the light which flowed through the walls and spires of the crystal castle, defying all the experience of Damon’s educated eyes.

For a moment or two, Damon wondered whether this gleaming silver exterior might be a new kind of synthesuit—a kind which extended into the mouth and nasal cavities as well as covering the eyeball, and which needed no input cable. Could it be a monomolecular film of some kind, as perfectly reflective as a mirror or chrome-plated steel? It was just about plausible, although meetings in VEs usually hid the equipment required to produce and perpetuate the illusion. When he worked on his illusions from within, Damon typed his instructions on a virtual keyplate.

He looked down at his own body, half expecting to see that he too had turned to mercury, but he hadn’t. He recognized the blue-and-gray suitskin he seemed to be wearing as one of his own, but it was not the one he had been wearing when Steve Grayson had carried him away to Rajuder Singh’s island.

“Who are you?” Damon demanded of the mercury man. The shape of the apparition’s face did not seem familiar, although he was not sure that he could have recognized someone he knew reasonably well were their features to be transformed to a fluid mirror in this remarkable fashion.

“I think you can probably figure that out,” the other replied.
“My name doesn’t matter. It’s what I am and where we are that counts. You did very well. Not everyone can learn to cope with worlds like this, and few can adapt so quickly—but the real test will come when you try to fly. That requires genuine artistry and limitless self-confidence.”

“So
what
are you?” Damon demanded, determined to take matters one at a time and to follow his own agenda.

“I like to think of this as Mount Olympus,” the mercury man told him, ignoring the question. “Up there, the palace of Zeus—impossible, of course, for mere human eyes to figure—where Apollo, Aphrodite, Ares, and Athena have their separate apartments. Down there, the earth, unquiet even by night with the artificially-lit labor and the radiant dreams of billions of men.”