Inherit the Earth (30 page)

“Of course,” Damon said in a neutral tone. “I do understand that. It’s interesting, though, isn’t it? A whole new basis of life. Who knows what it might have produced, out there in the vast wilderness of space? I asked Karol whether it might be the gateway to a whole set of new biotech tools. Have you had much interest from the corps?”

“A little,” Eveline said, “but I really can’t concern myself with that sort of thing. This isn’t a matter of
commerce
, Damon—it’s far more important than that. It’s a matter of
enlightenment
. I really wish you understood that—but you never did care much for enlightenment, did you?”

There had been a time when a dig like that would have stung him, but Damon felt that she was fully entitled. He was even prepared to consider the possibility that she might be right.

“A lot of people will be interested,” he predicted, “even if there are no fortunes to be made. The corps will want to investigate the possibilities themselves. Para-DNA doesn’t actually
belong
to you, after all. If you’re right about its origins, it’s just one more aspect of the universe—everybody’s business.”

“Yes it is,” she agreed, looking sideways at the window which offered them both a view of the magnificent starfield. “
Everybody’s
business. Anything we discover will be freely available to anyone and everyone. We’re not profit minded.”

“Nor is the Ahasuerus Foundation,” Damon observed. “You and they have that in common—but I met a corpsman not long ago who contended that even the corps aren’t really profit motivated anymore. He suggested to me that the Age of Capital was dead, and that the New Utopia’s megacorps have a new agenda.”

“The problem with corporation people,” Eveline said, with the firmness of committed belief, “is that you can never believe a word they say. It’s all advertising and attention seeking. Science is different. Science is interested in the truth, however prosaic it
might be.” Again she looked sideways at the star field, which was not in the least prosaic, even in the context of the virtual environment.

“You would say that, wouldn’t you?” Damon pointed out. “After all, you’ve given a lifetime to the pursuit of scientific truth, dull and otherwise. But I will try to understand, Eveline. I think I’m beginning to see the light. I wish you luck with your inquiries—and I hope that the kind of misfortune which seems so rife down here can’t reach out as far as Lagrange-Five.”

“I hope so too,” Eveline assured him. “Take care, Damon. In spite of our past disagreements, we all loved you and we still do. We’d really like to have you back one day, when you’ve got all the nonsense out of your system.” Her eyes were still uncommonly bright. They shone more vividly than he’d ever seen them shine before, or ever thought likely—but they didn’t shine as brightly or as implacably as the stars that she could always look out upon, whether she were in her actual laboratory or its virtual simulation.

I know you’d like to have me back, Damon thought. I only wish you weren’t so certain that there’s nothing else I can do. All he said out loud was: “I’ll be careful. Don’t worry about me, Eveline. I understand that you’ve got more important things to do.”

After he’d broken the connection Damon found that two images still lingered in his mind’s eye: Eveline’s eyes, and the star field at which she’d glanced on more than one occasion. Eveline wasn’t one for idle sidelong glances; he knew that she’d been trying to make a point. He even thought he knew what point it was that she had been trying to make—but it was just a guess. Beset by confusions as he was, there was nothing he could do but guess. Unfortunately, he had no idea what reward there might be in guessing correctly, nor what penalty there might be if he jumped to the wrong conclusion.

In a way, the most horrible thought of all was that it might not matter in the least what he came to believe, or what he tried to
do about it. The one thing he wanted more than to be safe and sound was to be
relevant
. He wanted to be something more than Catherine Praill; he wanted a part to play that might
make a difference
, not merely to his own ambitions but to those of his foster parents and those of the stubbornly mysterious kidnappers. If there were people in the world who thought it possible, reasonable, and desirable to play God, how could any young man who was genuinely ambitious be content to play a lesser role?

M
adoc Tamlin waited patiently while Harriet, alias Tithonia, alias the Old Lady, watched the VE tape that he’d found on the badly burned body. She sat perfectly still except for her hands, which made very slight movements, as if she were a pianist responding reflexively to some inordinately complicated nocturne that she had to memorize.

Madoc knew that the Old Lady was concentrating very intently, because she wasn’t just watching the recording; she was also watching the code that reproduced it, whizzing past in a virtual display-within-the-display. Over the years, Harriet had built up a strange kind of sensitivity to code patterns which allegedly allowed her to detect the artificial bridges used to link, fill in, and distort the “natural” sequences generated by digitizing camera work.

Madoc had never been admitted into Harriet’s lair before; on the rare occasions when they’d met they’d done so on neutral ground. She’d made an exception this time, but not because he was on the run from the LAPD after clobbering one of their finest with a crowbar. She’d let him in because she was
interested
in the business he’d got mixed up in.

That was quite a compliment, although Madoc knew that it was a compliment to Damon rather than to him. It was Damon’s mystery, after all; he was only the legman.

In order to get into the Old Lady’s lair he’d had to undergo all the old pulp-fiction rituals: a blindfold ride in a car, followed by a blindfold descent into the depths of some ancient ruin in the Hollywood hills. Most people still avoided Hollywood, associating it with the spectacular outbreak of the Second Plague War rather than the long-extinct film industry, but Harriet wasn’t like most people. There were hundreds of thousands—maybe millions—of centenarians in the USNA, but she was nevertheless unique.

Most people who lived to be a hundred had bought into IT in the early days; the brake had been put on their aging processes when they were in their thirties or forties, way back in the 2120s. No one knew exactly what Harriet had been doing in those days, but it certainly hadn’t been honest or profitable. She’d been part of the underclass that had absorbed all the shit flying off the fan of the genetic revolution. In the previous century her kind had provided both plague wars with the greater part of their virus fodder, but Harriet had been born just late enough to miss the longest-delayed effects of those conflicts. Circumstances had dictated, however, that she continue to age at what used to be the natural rate until she was well into her seventies and the calendar was well into the 2150s. Apart from the usual wear and tear she’d had multiple cancers of an unusually obdurate kind—the kind that didn’t respond to all the usual treatments. Then she’d been picked up by PicoCon as a worst-case guinea pig for the field trials of a brand-new fleet of nanomachines.

PicoCon’s molecular knights-errant had gobbled up the Old Lady’s cancers and stopped her biological clock ticking. They had snatched her back from the very threshold of death, and made her as fit and well as anyone could be who’d suffered seventy-odd years of more-than-usual deterioration. Nine hundred out of a thousand people in her situation would have been irredeemably set on the road to premature senility, and ninety-nine out of the remaining hundred would have keeled over as a result of some physical cause that the nanomech hadn’t entirely set aside, but Harriet was the thousandth. Gifted with the poisoned
chalice of eternal old age, she’d gone on and on and on—and she was still going on, nearly forty years later. She was a walking miracle.

In a world full of old ladies who looked anywhere between forty and seventy years younger than they actually were, Harriet was
the
Old Lady, Tithonia herself. Madoc knew, although most of her acquaintances did not, that her second nickname came from some ancient Greek myth about a man made immortal by a careless god, who’d forgotten to specify that he also had to stay young.

Even as a walking miracle, of course, Harriet
alias
Tithonia would have been no great shakes in a world lousy with miracles. PicoCon had a new one every day, all wrapped up and ready for the morning news, with abundant “human interest” built in by the PR department. Harriet had taken it upon herself to become more than a mere miracle, though; she’d become an honest-to-goodness legend. Almost as soon as she was pronounced free of tumors she’d reembarked on a life of crime, mending her ways just sufficiently to move into a better class of felonies.

“If
I
can’t live every day as if it were my last, who can?” she was famous for saying. “I’m already dead, and this is heaven—what can they do to me that would make a difference?”

Madoc supposed that if the LAPD had
really
wanted to put Harriet out of business, lock her up, and throw away the key, they could probably have done it twenty years ago—but they never had. Some said that it was because she had powerful friends among the corps for whom she undertook heroic missions of industrial espionage, but Madoc didn’t believe that. He knew full well that any powerful friends a mercenary happened to acquire were apt to be out of the office whenever trouble came to call, while the powerful enemies on the other side of the coin were always on the job. Madoc’s theory was that the LAPD let Harriet alone out of respect for her legendary status, and because a few notorious adversaries on the loose were invaluable when it came to budget negotiations with the city.

Either way, Madoc and everyone else figured that it was a
privilege to work with the Old Lady. That, as much as her efficiency, was why she was so expensive.

Harriet finally finished her scrutiny of the VE tape and ducked out from under the hood. Her face was richly grooved with the deepest wrinkles Madoc had ever seen and her hair was reduced to the merest wisps of white, but her dark eyes were sharp and her gaze could cut like a knife.

“The body had been burned, you say?” she questioned him—not because she didn’t remember what he’d said but because she wanted it all set out in neat array while she put the puzzle together.

“Thoroughly,” he confirmed. “It must have been covered in something that burned even hotter than gasoline, then torched.” It was easy enough to see what Harriet was getting at. Whoever had committed the murder had had
time
. They could have torched the VE pack along with the body if they’d wanted to, or they could simply have picked it up and put it in a pocket. If they’d left it behind they had done so deliberately, in order that it would be found. The only hitch in that plan, Madoc assumed, had been that it was he and Diana who had found it instead of the police. Madoc, naturally enough, had brought it to the Old Lady instead of to Interpol.

“We’re supposed to believe that the tape explains why the guy was killed,” Harriet concluded.

“That’s the way I figure it,” Madoc admitted. “If that really is the original tape that was used as a base to synthesize Silas Arnett’s confessions—or the first of them, at any rate, it identifies Surinder Nahal as the kidnapper in chief.”

Madoc had inspected the tape himself before giving it to Harriet for more expert analysis. It contained a taped conversation between the captive Silas Arnett and another man, easily identifiable in the raw footage by voice as well as appearance as Surinder Nahal. Various phrases spoken by both men—but especially those spoken by Nahal, carefully distorted to make recognition difficult—had been used in the first of Arnett’s two “confessions,” but nothing Arnett had said on
this
tape
amounted to an admission of guilt regarding
any
crime, past or present. On the other hand, there was no evidence on
this
tape that he had been tortured, or even fiercely interrogated.

“Insofar as the discovery points a finger at anyone,” Harriet went on, “it implies that Arnett’s friends took swift and certain revenge against Surinder Nahal because he tried to set them up, and left the VE pak on his body to explain why they killed him.”

“Thus setting themselves up all over again,” Madoc pointed out. “I think it stinks, but I’m not sure where the odor originates. How about you? Is the tape genuine? Is it really raw footage, or is it just a slightly less transparent lie than the one they dumped on the Web?”

“That’s an interesting question,” Harriet said.

“I know it is,” Madoc said, trying not to let his exasperation show. “What’s the answer?”

“I’ll be honest with you, Madoc,” Harriet said. “The tape’s a fake. It’s not a crude fake, but it’s definitely a fake. Even Interpol could have determined that—probably. The fact that Silas Arnett still hasn’t turned up would have alerted them to the same stink that reached your sensitive nostrils.”

“So why the hesitation?” Madoc wanted to know.

“The thing is,” the Old Lady said, “that I’m not sure how much deeper we ought to dig into this. You see, if Arnett’s friends
didn’t
kill the man whose body you found, then someone else did—and it certainly wasn’t some dilettante Eliminator.”

“I don’t get it,” Madoc said. “You’re supposed to be the only ace Webwalker in the world who doesn’t give a damn what she gets involved with. You’re supposed to be utterly fearless.”

“I am,” she told him coldly. “This isn’t a matter of watching
my
back, Madoc—it’s
you
I’m worried about. Nobody’s going to come after me, and I doubt that they intend to harm Damon Hart, but you’re not part of the game plan. You might easily be seen as a minor irritation best removed from the field of play with the minimum of fuss. If this tape was really intended to fall into Interpol’s hands rather than yours the people who left it might be a trifle miffed, and they’re not the kind of people you
want to have as enemies. It’s one thing to set yourself up as an outlaw, quite another to become a thorn in the side of people who are above the law.”