Inherit the Earth (26 page)

“The illusion’s magnificent,” Damon conceded. “Far better than anything I ever thought
I
could make—but you’ll spoil it all if you insist on talking nonsense. You went to a great deal of trouble to bring me here. Why not tell me what it is that you want?”

“Fair enough,” said the mirror man agreeably. “I’d like you to get a message to your father. We can’t find him, you see—and while we can’t find him, it’s rather difficult to negotiate with him. We’ve tried talking to his underlings, but they simply aren’t licensed to be
flexible
. We rather hoped he might be hiding out on that artificial island, but he isn’t; all we found was you.”

“Conrad Helier’s dead,” Damon said wearily.

“We’re
almost
ready to believe that,” the apparition conceded, “but not quite. It
is
conceivable that it’s only his spirit that lives on and that Eveline Hywood is pulling the strings herself, but you’ll understand our scepticism. We live in a world of deceptive appearances, Damon. You only have to look at me to realize why we aren’t prepared to take anything on trust.”

Damon didn’t have any ready answer to that.

“It’s the same with the people at Ahasuerus,” the mercury man continued. “They’re obsessed with the continuation of Adam Zimmerman’s plan, and they refuse to see that all plans
have to adapt to changes in the world’s circumstances. That’s why we sent you to them—we figured that we might as well trap both wayward birds with a single net, if we can. There’s always the possibility, of course, that the foundation has your father salted away in the same cold place as Adam Zimmerman, but we don’t think it’s likely. Your father isn’t the kind of man to settle for an easy ride to Ultima Thule via suspended animation.”

By this time, Damon had found his answer. “If Conrad Helier isn’t dead,” he said, “he’s certainly not disposed to let me know it. Karol doesn’t trust me, and neither does Eveline. Even Silas never gave me the slightest reason to think that Conrad Helier is alive. Anyhow, if you think he’s still guiding Eveline and Karol, you only have to leave your message on their answerphones.”

“It’s not as easy as that, as you know very well. When I say that we want you to get a message to him, I mean that we want you to get
through
to him. We want him to listen. We think that you might be the person to do that for us. Karol and Eveline are only his hirelings, and they’ll be dead within thirty or forty years. You’re his son, and he must at least hope, if he doesn’t actually believe, that you might live for a thousand years. I know that he poses as a lover of all mankind, making no discrimination between rich and poor, worthy and unworthy, but he took the trouble to have a son and to deliver that son into the patient care of his most trusted confidants. Doesn’t that suggest to you that the plans he makes for the future of mankind are really plans for
your
future—or at least that he imagines you as a central figure, somehow symbolic of the race as a whole?”

“If he did, and if he
were
alive, I’d be a great disappointment to him,” Damon said shortly. “I’ve my own life to lead. I’m not interested in delivering messages for you.”

“It’s a little late to make that decision,” the mirror man observed.

Damon could see what he meant. What his captors wanted, apparently, was to get through to whoever was running Conrad Helier’s operation—and Damon had obligingly hopped on a plane to Molokai, calling in on the Ahasuerus Foundation en
route. He’d also unleashed Madoc Tamlin—and thus, in all likelihood, every outlaw Webwalker on the West Coast. He’d already collaborated as fully as anyone could have desired in the mission of
getting through
to Karol Kachellek. The only person he hadn’t quite got through to, yet, was Eveline Hywood.

“None of this makes sense,” Damon complained. “None of it was
necessary
. You’re just playing games.”

“Perhaps we are,” the mirror man admitted, “but we aren’t the only ones. Your father started this, Damon—our moves have been made in response to his, and he’s still responding to ours. He should have come to the conference table the night we took Silas Arnett hostage, but he called our bluff. I suppose you realize that the second tape of his supposed confessions was theirs, not ours? It was a move we hadn’t anticipated—a sacrifice we thought he wouldn’t be prepared to make. We didn’t anticipate that Karol Kachellek would send you off to the island either, but that may have worked out to our advantage. Naming you was a rather crude response, but the Operator one-oh-one pseudonym was about to become useless and it seemed politic to increase the general confusion. We’re suitably impressed by your father’s initiative and his fighting spirit, but it doesn’t alter the situation. He shouldn’t try to keep us out. He
mustn’t
try to keep us out, Damon. It’s not that we want to stop what he’s doing—but we can’t let him do it
alone
. The world has changed, Damon. We can’t tolerate loose cannons. The day of
little
conspiracies, like your father’s and Adam Zimmerman’s, is long gone. Now they have to submit to the same discipline as the rest of us.”

“I don’t have the least idea what you’re talking about,” Damon said, “and I still believe that Conrad Helier’s been dead for nearly fifty years.” The latter statement was a straightforward stalling move, intended to slow things down while he tried to fathom the implications of what the mirror man was saying.

“We have confidence in your ability to figure it out,” the apparition told him. “We also have confidence in your ability to see reason. You’re fully entitled to resent the way we’ve used you, but we hope that you might be prepared to forgive us.”

“I’m not the forgiving type,” Damon retorted, although he knew that it wasn’t the diplomatic thing to say.

The mirror man ignored the futile threat. “What do you think of the quality of the VE?” he asked.

“It’s forced me to revise my estimate of what can and can’t be done,” Damon admitted. “I didn’t think
any
kind of bodysuit would ever get this close to reproducing the minutiae of tactile experience. It makes the kind of work I do seem rather childish.”

“It’s next-generation technology. Now that you know it
can
be done, can you guess how?”

“Not exactly. I suppose it has to be done with some kind of new nanotech, using a synthesuit that’s even thinner than a suit-skin.”

“It’s an interesting idea, but it’s headed in the wrong direction. You’re not in any kind of bodysuit. You’re lying down on a perfectly ordinary bed, fast asleep. This is a lucid dream.”

Damon quelled a reflexive response to deny the possibility. He knew that research into the mechanisms of dreaming had been going on for more than a hundred years, attended all the while by speculations about taped dreams that would one day be bought off the supermarket shelf just like VE paks, but he’d always believed the sceptics who said that such speculations were unreasonably wild, and that the plausibility of the notion was just an accountable illusion, like the plausibility of telepathy. “You’re right about one thing,” he said drily. “If you can do that, I ought to be able to work out who you are. There can’t be more than a handful of research teams who’ve got within a light-year of that kind of device.”

“It’s all done by IT,” the mercury man told him equably. “It’s easy enough to operate the switch in the hypothalamus which prevents instructions to the motor nerves generated in dreams getting through to the body, while preserving the
illusion
that you’re acting and reacting as you would in everyday life. Sensory information is filtered through a similar junction whose functions can be just as easily usurped. It doesn’t require millions of nanomachines to colonize the entire structure of the brain—it
only requires a few thousand to stand in for the neuronal gatekeepers that are already in place. The whole set up isn’t that much more complicated than a synthesuit—but it’s so much neater to wear the suit inside instead of out, and it saves a small fortune on your electricity bill. As you can see, it gives the VE a texture much more like reality, even if the information is incredible. It also allows the programmers to build in facilities which reproduce things you can sometimes do in dreams but never in real life. As I told you earlier, the
real
test of your psychological adaptability is whether you can step off that ledge believing that you can fly.”

Damon was uncomfortably aware of the fact that his chosen career—the design of virtual environments for use with ordinary commercial hoods and synthesuits—had just been revealed to be a blind alley. Unless he could adapt his skills to the coming regime of manufactured dreams, everything he’d ever done and everything he currently planned to do would be consigned to the scrap heap of obsolescence.

“When will this hit the market?” he whispered.

“That’s an interesting question,” said the mirror man. “In fact, it’s a question which cuts to the heart of the emergent philosophy of the new world order. For hundreds of years, people have been developing products
for the market:
for the purposes of getting rich. Even artists got sucked into it, although the motive forces involved in their creativity—as I’m sure you understand very well—usually went far beyond the vulgar necessity of making a living. The sole raison d’être of the so-called mothercorps was to make as much money as possible as rapidly as possible. The defining feature of the Age of Capital was that money became an end instead of a means. The richest of men became so very rich that they couldn’t possibly spend what they had, but that didn’t stop them trying to make more and more. Money ceased to be mere purchasing power and became a
measuring device
—a way of keeping score of the position and prestige of individuals within the great competition that was the world. Every new discovery was weighed in the balance of the market, assessed
according to its power to
make money
. Do you understand why that age is now over, Damon? Do you understand why everything has changed?”

“Has it changed?” Damon asked sceptically. “Maybe the people you know are so rich they no longer bother keeping score, but everyone I know needs all the money they can lay their hands on, because the purchasing power of money is their only hope of staying one step ahead of the Grim Reaper and riding the escalator to eternity.”

“Exactly,” said the mirror man, as if Damon were agreeing with him rather than disputing what he’d said. “That’s exactly the point. Money has retained its power because the ultimate product isn’t yet on the market. Until we have authentic emortality at a fixed price, the pursuit goes on and on—and while even the richest of men knew full well that he couldn’t take his money with him when he died, all the money in the world could be nothing to him but a means of keeping score. But that’s no longer the case, as Adam Zimmerman was the first to understand and demonstrate.

“Now every rich man—perhaps every man of moderate means—understands perfectly well that if he can only hang around long enough for the appropriate technologies to arrive, he
will
have the chance to live forever.
That
becomes the end, and money merely the means. We’re already living in a postcapitalist society, Damon—it’s just that many of our fellows haven’t yet noticed the fact or fully understood its significance. Your father understood the fundamental point long ago, of course—which makes it all the more frustrating that he doesn’t seem to be able to grasp its corollaries. I suppose it’s because he prides himself on being a scientist, too fine a man to dirty his hands with mere matters of economics. We have to make him take those blinkers off, Damon. We can’t let him go ahead with what he’s doing while he’s still wearing them.”

“What
is
he doing?” Damon wanted to know.

“I’d rather not be the one to fill you in on the details,” the mirror man told him blithely. “As long as you’re curious, I know
you’ll keep niggling away at Kachellek and Hywood. We might need you to do that if our latest moves don’t do the trick. If Helier
still
won’t come to the conference table we’ll need you to keep nagging away on our behalf until he does.”

“And if I won’t?”

“You won’t be able to help yourself,” the mirror man told him, with insulting confidence. “You can’t kill curiosity—it has nine lives. In any case, your father will have to take you back into the fold. He can’t leave you alone and exposed after all that’s happened. We’ve called attention to you—whatever they believe or don’t believe, the Eliminators are interested in you now. Your worthiness is under examination. We don’t approve of the Eliminators, of course—not
officially
—but we like the fact that they take things seriously. We like the fact that they raise the important question:
who
is worthy of immortality? That’s what this is all about, you see. What kind of people ought to inherit the earth, in perpetuity? What kind of people must we become, if we intend to live forever? Eliminator violence is just childish jealousy, of course—but the question remains to be answered. We don’t want to eliminate Conrad Helier, or the Ahasuerus Foundation, but we
do
want them to understand that if they want to play games they have to play by the rules. If we’re going to live forever, we all have to play
as a team
.”

Damon had found it so uncomfortable to stare into the apparition’s reflective face that he had spent most of the conversation staring into space or at his own hands, but now he looked directly at the convex mirrors which were the mercurial man’s robotic eyes.

“You don’t seem to me to be much of a team player,” he said. “You seem to me to be trying to play God, just as you’ve accused Conrad Helier of doing. ‘As flies to wanton boys—’ ”