Inherit the Earth (27 page)

“We haven’t killed anyone,” the mirror man said, cutting him off in midquote. “Like Conrad Helier, we take a certain pride in that. As for playing God—well, there
was
a time when your father could say ‘If we don’t who will?’ but that time is over. This is Olympus, Damon—the place is positively lousy with would-be
gods, and that’s why we all have to work
together
. That’s what your father has to understand. You have to persuade him that it’s true, if no one else will.”

“I can’t.”

The mirror man dismissed his stubbornness with a casual gesture. He stood up, his movement impossibly fluid and graceful. No real body could have moved like that. “Are you ready to fly?” he asked, implying with his tone that Damon wasn’t.

Damon hesitated, but he stood up without taking the helping hand that the mirror man had extended toward him.

“This is just a VE,” he said. “No matter how clever it is, it’s just a VE. I can step over that ledge, if I want to. No harm can come to me, if I do none to myself.”

“That’s right,” the mirror man told him. “In this world, all your dreams can come true. In this world, you can do
anything
you have a mind to do.” His hand was still extended, but Damon still refused to take it. Had he done so, it would have been a gesture of forgiveness, and he wasn’t the forgiving type.

Damon remembered the sermon he’d preached to Lenny Garon, about the danger of believing that all injuries could be mended, and the wisdom of not taking too many risks in life lest one miss the escalator to emortality. He didn’t think of himself as a hypocrite, but he knew full well that he hadn’t ever practiced what he’d preached—and he hoped that his long practice would come to his rescue now. He wasn’t about to let the mirror man’s challenge pass unmet, and he wasn’t about to accept the mockpaternal helping hand. If he were to fly, he would fly alone.

He stepped to the very edge of the abyss, spread his arms wide as if they were wings, and jumped.

Perhaps he could have flown, if he’d only known how, or even if he’d only had enough faith in himself—but he didn’t.

Damon fell into the awful abyss, and terror swallowed him up.

He lost consciousness long before he reached the bottom, and was glad to be received by the merciful darkness.

W
hen Damon awoke he was not in pain, but his mind seemed clouded, as if his brain were afflicted by a warm and clammy mist. He had endured such sensations before, when his internal technology had been required to deal with the aftermath of drink or drugs. In such circumstances, even the most vivid dream should easily have drifted into oblivion, but the unnaturally lucid dream of the mirror man clung tight to memory, and the legacy of that final fall was with him still.

When he finally forced his eyes open he found that he was, as the mirror man had insisted, lying on a bed, wearing neither a hood nor a bodysuit. He looked down at himself to find that he was dressed in the same suitskin he had been wearing when he stepped into the elevator with Rajuder Singh. It was not noticeably dirtier than it had been then, but there was a ragged tear in the middle of his chest that hadn’t had time to heal.

He sat up. The bed on which he was lying had a heavy iron frame that gave it the appearance of a genuine antique, although it was presumably there for utility’s rather than art’s sake. His right wrist was handcuffed to one of the uprights.

It took him a few seconds to realize that his was not the only bed in the room, and that he was not the only prisoner it held. He blinked away the mucus that was still obscuring his vision
slightly and met the inquisitive gaze of his companion. She was not as tall as recent fashion prescribed, but he judged that she was nevertheless authentically young. Her blond hair was in some disarray, and she was handcuffed just as he was, but she didn’t seem to be in dire distress.

“Who are you?” he asked dully.

“Catherine Praill,” she told him. “Who are you?”

“Damon Hart,” he replied reflexively—a second or two before the significance of what she had said sunk in. He reached up with his free hand to rub the sleep from his eyes. His hand was trembling slightly.

“Are you all right?” the girl asked. She seemed a little tremulous herself—understandably, if she too had been kidnapped by the man of mercury and his associates.

“Just confused,” he assured her. “Do you know where we are?”

“No,” she answered. Then, as if fearing that her bluntness might seem impolite, she added: “I’ve heard of you. Silas mentioned your name.”

Damon inferred that she hadn’t been in a position to keep tabs on the Eliminator boards, or she’d surely have mentioned Operator 101’s last message before recalling that Silas Arnett had “mentioned his name.”

“I’ve heard of you too,” he said. “Lenny Garon told me you’d disappeared.”

“Lenny?” She was genuinely astonished by the introduction of
that
name. “How did he know? I hardly know him. Didn’t he leave home or something?”

“He asked after you when your name came up in connection with Silas Arnett’s kidnapping. How long have you been here? Who brought you?”

She recoiled slightly under the pressure of the doubled-up questions. “I don’t know anything,” she protested defensively. “I was in a car—the police were taking me home after questioning me. I must have dozed off. I’ve been awake for about an hour but I haven’t seen anyone except you. I don’t feel hungry or thirsty,
so I can’t have been asleep very long—but if you think
you’re
confused. . . .” She left it at that.

“So you’ve no idea what day it is, I suppose, or where we might be?” Damon looked around the room for clues, but there were no obvious ones to be seen. There was nothing visible through the room’s only window but a patch of blue sky. The patterned carpet that covered the floor looked as old as the bedstead, but it was probably modern. It was faded but quite free of dust and crumbs—which suggested that it had a suitskin capacity to digest waste. A closet door that stood ajar showed nothing but bare boards and empty hangers. There was a small table beside Damon’s bed on which his beltpack and sidepouch had been placed, and the only item there which had not been on his person when he succumbed to the gas was a glass of clear liquid. It was easy enough to reach, and he picked it up in both hands so that he could take a sip. It was water.

“I don’t know anything at all,” Catherine Praill repeated, her voice increasing its note of alarm. “I don’t understand why they brought me here. Are they holding us to
ransom?
”

She pronounced the word as if the possibility were almost unthinkable—a revenant crime from a more primitive world. Was it unthinkable, though? Was
anything
unthinkable now? In a world where every child had eight or ten parents, might not the potential rewards of kidnapping-for-cash come to outweigh the risks, especially given the awesome powers which these kidnappers seemed to possess?

“I don’t think so,” Damon told her. “It wouldn’t make much sense. But then—I don’t know anything either. It’s not for lack of information—I simply can’t separate the truth from the lies. I don’t know what to believe.”

“My foster parents will be worried. I didn’t have anything to do with Silas being kidnapped. The men from Interpol seemed to think that I did, but I didn’t. I would have helped them if I could.”

“It’s okay,” Damon told her. “Whoever brought us here, I don’t think they mean to do us any harm.”

“How do you know?” she demanded. “You said you didn’t know
anything
.”

“I don’t—but I
think
they took Silas because they were trying to force two of my other foster parents to abandon some plan they’ve cooked up, or at least to let them in on it. They thought that if they could attract enough public attention my foster parents would be intimidated—but my foster parents aren’t the kind to bend with the wind. I can’t figure out who did what, or why, and I can’t trust anything that anyone says to me, but . . . well, it wouldn’t make sense for them to harm us. I think they want me to do something for them, and I suspect that they only took you to add to the confusion.”

“I don’t understand,” said the blond girl, growing more distraught in spite of Damon’s attempt to soothe her fears. “Silas doesn’t have anything to do with his old friends—and I certainly don’t.”

“Nor do I,” Damon said, while he tested the handcuffs to make certain that there was no way of slipping out of them. “Unfortunately, the people who’ve imprisoned us refuse to believe that, of Silas or of me. I really don’t think they have anything against
you
, though. You just got caught up in it by accident.”

Damon believed what he’d told the girl, but he couldn’t help feeling a slight twinge of doubt as to whether all this was actually happening at all. It
could
be another VE, similar to the last although far more modest. How could he ever be sure, now, that he’d really woken up? How could he ever know whether there really had been a mirror man and a miraculous new VE technology, or whether it had all been a product of his own fertile imagination?

Even if this were real, he realized as he pursued the discomfiting thought, he might be snatched back into some such VE without a moment’s notice if clever nanomachines really had been implanted in his hindbrain, and if they were
still there
. In today’s world, it wasn’t only walls and phone links that couldn’t be trusted. How could any man know what kind of burden he was carrying around in the depths of his own being? He was carrying
his own cargo of watchful nanomachines, charged with the duty of keeping his flesh free from invaders, but who could stand watch over the watchmen? In PicoCon’s empire, there could be no ultimate security, no ultimate secrecy—and it appeared that PicoCon’s empire was closer to its final conquest than he had ever imagined. What could now stand in its way, save for confusion? In a world where nothing could be sealed away in any kind of vault, everything that was to be hidden had to be hidden in plain view, camouflaged by a riot of illusions.

If Conrad Helier really had faked his death, Damon thought, he really might have returned to public life by pretending to be his own son—but Conrad Helier’s son was very definitely, and very defiantly, his own man. Unfortunately, Conrad Helier’s son had a brain shrouded in mist, and he felt further away from understanding now than he had been before.

“Did you have any unnaturally vivid dreams while you were asleep?” he asked the young woman.

“No dreams at all,” she replied, “so far as I can remember. Why?” Her voice cracked on the last word, as fear broke through. She looked as if she were about to cry. She was immune to the worst effects of pain, but IT couldn’t immunize anyone against the purely psychological component of fear.

“Please don’t worry,” he begged her, although the plea sounded foolish even to him. “I really don’t think we’re in any danger.” He wasn’t at all certain that
he
was out of danger. When he had tried to fly, he had only fallen. Either the mirror man had tricked him and mocked him—for no reason Damon could fathom—or the fault had been in himself, in his skill or his courage. Which was worse?

“It’s
crazy
,” Catherine Praill insisted. “Why would anyone want to kidnap someone like me? What kind of—”

Before she could finish the sentence the door of the room was kicked open and thrust violently back against the wall. A head peered around the jamb, while the barrel of an obscenely heavy gun, clutched in two unfashionably hairy hands, swept the enclosed area from side to side with crude threat.

Once the gunman was sure that the two prisoners were helpless, and unaccompanied by anyone more menacing, he said: “All clear.” He didn’t come into the room itself, being content to hover in the corridor while a woman stepped past him, pausing on the threshold to survey the scene with calm disdain.

“Oh,” she said as her eyes met Damon’s. “It’s
you
.” Her disappointment was palpable.

“Rachel Trehaine,” Damon said as lightly as he could. He shook his head but the fog wouldn’t clear. “I thought you were just a scientific analyst,” he added, knowing that he was only a pale imitation of his old smart-ass self. “I didn’t expect to see you in charge of a hit squad.”

The expression of disgust on the red-headed woman’s face was something to be seen. “I’m not
in charge of a hit squad
,” she said. “I’m just. . . .” She hesitated, obviously unsure as to how her present occupation ought to be characterized.

“They didn’t shove a note under your door, by any chance?” Damon meant it as a feeble joke, but when he saw the disgusted expression turn to one of puzzlement he realized that it might have been a lucky guess. He resisted the temptation to giggle and took advantage of his luck to hazard another guess. “You were expecting Silas Arnett, weren’t you?”

Rachel Trehaine wasn’t in the least amused by his perspicacity. “Call Hiru Yamanaka at Interpol,” she said to one of the men waiting in the corridor. “Tell him we’ve found one of his missing persons. And try to find something in the van that we can use to cut through the chains of those handcuffs.”

“How long have I been a missing person?” Damon asked, still fighting the fog.

“I wasn’t talking about
you
,” the woman from Ahasuerus said. “I was referring to Miss Praill.”

Damon grimaced slightly as he realized that he should have known that. So far as Interpol knew, he was probably still safe and sound on Rajuder Singh’s private island. “Where are we?” he asked as mildly as he could. He didn’t want to add any further fuel to Rachel Trehaine’s understandable annoyance.