Inherit the Earth (31 page)

Madoc stared at her. “Do you know who’s behind all this?” he asked sharply.

“I don’t
know
anything,” she told him, “but I’m absolutely certain that I can make the right guess.”

“Is that why you called it an
interesting
problem?”

“Yes it is—but what interests me is
why
, not who. It’s the
why
that I can’t fathom. The how has its intriguing features too, but I think I understand pretty well how the moves came to be played the way they were—I just can’t figure out why the game’s being played at all.”

“Well,” said Madoc a little impatiently, “what interests
me
at present is that Damon has disappeared. When I first got you involved, I admit, it was mainly a matter of money—Damon’s money. I was just doing a job for him. I don’t really care about Arnett, or Nahal, or Kachellek—but I
do
care about Damon.”

“Damon’s back,” Harriet replied, raising her white eyebrows a fraction, as if she had only just realized that he didn’t know. Maybe it hadn’t occurred to her that a young man on the run couldn’t keep his fingers on the pulse of things quite as easily as an old lady in hiding.

“Since when?” Madoc asked.

“Since this morning. That tap I put into Ahasuerus told me—not that they were trying to keep it a secret. As soon as Trehaine found out that it was Damon she’d been sent out to find she called Interpol. Catherine Praill was with him. She’s probably irrelevant, but the people who took Damon clearly wanted him back in play as soon as possible. That’s why I’m fairly sure they won’t hurt him. It’s possible that he now knows far more than I do. Interpol will have him under a microscope, of course—it won’t be easy for you to get to him without being picked up.”

“I’ve got to get the tape to him,” Madoc said, “and anything else you can give me. Who’s doing this, Harriet? Who’s jerking us all around?”

Harriet shrugged her narrow shoulders. “PicoCon,” she said flatly. “OmicronA might be in it too, but PicoCon’s board likes to keep these little adventures in-house. It’s a matter of style. What I can’t figure out is what they’re so
annoyed
about and why they’re tackling it in such a roundabout way. Compared with their irresistible juggernaut, Eveline Hywood’s organization is a mere ant, which could be crushed underfoot on a whim. Ahasuerus might be a flea, but it’s a flea that’s already in their pocket, moneywise. This can’t be everyday commercial competition, and it must be something that they find
interesting
, or they’d just stamp on it—but if it isn’t about money . . ..” She left the sentence unfinished.

“PicoCon,” Madoc repeated wonderingly. “
PicoCon
kidnapped Silas Arnett and tried to frame Conrad Helier for causing the Crash?
PicoCon
blew up Kachellek’s boat, torched Surinder Nahal’s body, and strewed forged tapes and Eliminator bulletins all over the Net?”

“They’re also handily placed for pushing messages under people’s doors hereabouts—but for what it’s worth, I don’t think PicoCon did
all
of that. They just started the ball rolling. This business with the burned body and the VE pak is a counter-punch. I think Hywood’s people did that—and I think they rigged the second confession too. They were supposed to roll over and beg for mercy, but they fought back instead. You have to admire them for it, but it might be unwise. Just because PicoCon used gentler methods first time around it doesn’t mean that they won’t use brute force to settle the matter. That’s why I’m worried about you. If Kachellek really was blown up, you might be next on the list.”

“I can’t believe that cosmicorps play games like this,” Madoc said wonderingly. “PicoCon least of all—they’ve got more than enough real work to occupy them.”

“That’s a matter of perspective,” Harriet told him drily. “You could say that there’s a point at which any successful corporation becomes so big and so powerful that the profits take care of themselves, leaving the strategists with nothing to do
but
play
games. Serious games, but games nevertheless. Attacking Conrad Helier’s memory seems a trifle unsporting, though—terrible ingratitude.”

“Ingratitude? Why? Helier’s team was always strictly biotech, as far as I can work out. I thought PicoCon’s fortune was based on inorganic nanotech. What did he ever do for them?”

“He gave them the world on a plate. PicoCon may be the engine churning out the best set pieces nowadays, but the New Reproductive System stabilized the board for them. The Crash put a belated end to unpoliced population growth, but Helier’s artificial wombs made certain that the bad old days would never come back again. If Helier hadn’t got the new apparatus up and running in time to become the new status quo, some clown would have engineered a set of transformer viruses to refertilize every woman under the age of sixty-five and we’d have been back to square one. You probably think the Second Plague War was a nasty affair, but that’s because you read about it in the kind of history books which only tell you what happened and skip lightly over all the might-have-beens. If it hadn’t been for Conrad Helier, you’d probably have had to live through the
third
round of the Not-Quite-Emortal Rich versus the Ever-Desperate Poor—and PicoCon would have spent the last half-century pumping out molecular missiles and pinpoint bombs instead of taking giant strides up the escalator to
true
emortality.”

Madoc had to think about this for a minute or two, but he soon saw the logic of the case. New technologies of longevity were an unqualified boon in an era in which population had ceased to grow, even though access to them was determined by wealth. In a world whose poorer people were still producing children in vast numbers, those same technologies would inevitably have become bones of fierce contention, catalysts of allout war.

“You don’t suppose,” he mused, “that Hywood and Kachellek might have done just that—engineered a set of viruses to refertilize the female population?”

“No, I don’t,” said Harriet. “Even if they were silly enough to
work on the problem, they’d have the sense to bury their results. Anyway, the world now has the advantage of starting from a position of relative sanity instead of rampant insanity—if some such technology did come along I think ninety-nine women in every hundred would have the sense to say no. It would be interesting to know what Hywood and Kachellek
have
done—but it might be safer not to try to find out. As I said before, if they really did blow Kachellek’s boat to smithereens with him in it. . . .”

“If?” Madoc queried.

“It really is a
game
, Madoc. Bluff and counterbluff, lie and counterlie. The one thing of which we can be certain is that nothing is what it seems to be—not just on the surface but way down through the layers. PicoCon is making a big issue out of the possibility that Conrad Helier is only
playing
dead. Maybe Kachellek’s playing dead too. Maybe Surinder Nahal is only playing dead.”

“If that burned body really was his,” Madoc murmured, “he was putting on a very convincing act.”

“That might be the whole point of the exercise. Do you want me to get a message to Damon for you?”

“Can you do that? Without the cops knowing, I mean.”

“I think so—but you can’t bring him here. I’ve used up so much borrowed time that I’ll be dying way beyond my means whenever I go, but I still like to be careful. It’s a matter of professional pride. You’ll have to figure out a safe place—and he’ll have to figure out how to get there without dragging Interpol in his wake. I’ll set it up for you—but if you want my advice, you’ll tell him to put the rest of his money back in the bank and call it quits, so that you can start playing Three Wise Monkeys. We’re out of our league here. Nobody can fight PicoCon and win.”

If you never play out of your league, Madoc thought, you never get promoted. All he said aloud, though, was: “Okay—I need to get a meeting set up as soon as possible. Damon will want the tape, and everything else I’ve got, whether he intends to fight or not.”

“Don’t be too sure of that,” Harriet advised him soberly. “Things have moved fast—he might not be in the same frame of mind as he was when he sent you off on this wild goose chase. Now that he’s had his little holiday, he might want to play Three Wise Monkeys too, and he might be prepared to cut you adrift and leave you to PicoCon’s tender mercies—or to the LAPD’s.”

Her concern seemed genuine, but Madoc couldn’t imagine that he needed it. You might know PicoCon, Old Lady, he thought, but you don’t know Damon. He’d never change sides on me. Madoc was as certain of that as he needed to be—and even if he hadn’t been, what choice did he have?

A
fter sitting through the second tape of his “confessions,” Silas Arnett found himself looking out upon a pleasant outdoor scene: a wood, like the ones to the south of his house. A rich carpet of leaf litter was delicately dappled by sunlight streaming through the canopy. The gnarled boughs of the trees offered abundant perches to little songbirds whose melodies filled the air. It was a simulation of an ancient woodland, whose design owed more to nostalgia than historical accuracy.

Unfortunately, the pleasantness of the surroundings found no echo within his body. In the VE he was a mere viewpoint, invisible to himself, but that only served to place more emphasis on his sense of touch, which informed him that the conditions of his confinement were now becoming quite unbearable.

The subtle changes of position he was able to make were no longer adequate to counter the aching in his limbs. The chafing of the straps which bound his wrists and ankles was now a burning agony. It did no good to tell himself that by any objective standard these were very minor pains, no worse than those which constituted the everyday condition of millions in the days before IT. He, Silas Arnett, had grown fully accustomed to being able to control pain, and now that he could no longer do it he felt that he might easily die of sheer frustration.

A human figure came through the trees to stand before him.
It was dressed in a monk’s habit, and Silas inferred that it was supposed to be male, but it was a modern secular monk, not a member of any religious order that might have been contemporary with an ancient forest. The ornament the monk wore around his neck was not a cross but a starburst: a symbol of the physicists’ Creation rather than the redemptive sacrifice of the Christ whose veneration was now confined to a handful of antiquarians.

The man pushed the hood back from his forehead and let its fold fall upon his shoulders. Silas didn’t recognize the exposed visage; it was a handsome, serene face which bore the modest signs of aging that most monks considered appropriate to their station.

Silas wasn’t fooled by the appearance. He knew that the mind behind the mask was the mind of his tormentor.

His “tormentor” had not, in the end, resorted to any very violent torture, but in his present condition Silas found it impossible to be grateful for that. Even had he been more comfortable, any gratitude he might have felt would have been tempered by the knowledge that even though he had not been cut or burned he had certainly been imprisoned, maligned, mocked, and misrepresented.

“That one looked even worse than the first one,” he said, gritting his teeth against his discomfort and hoping that talk might distract him from his woe. “It really doesn’t add anything. I can’t see why you bothered.”

“I didn’t,” said the monk. “That was someone else’s work. I presume that your friends did it—you noticed, I dare say, that the underlying message was that what you and Conrad Heller did was both necessary and justified. On the surface, it begged to be identified as a mere lie, a vicious but half-baked slander, but that was double bluff. The subtext said:
Even if it were true, it wouldn’t be in the least terrible. Even if Conrad Heller did cause the Crash, he did it for the noblest of reasons, and it desperately needed to be done. He was a hero, not an enemy of mankind
. When the original Operator one-oh-one indignantly blew her
cover, by the way, she objected strenuously to my use of that particular phrase. She thinks that I should have said ‘enemy of
hu
mankind.’ She’s of an age to be sensitive about that sort of thing—and I suppose a man of your age can probably sympathize with her.”

Silas wasn’t in the least interested in the authentic Eliminator’s retention of outdated radfem sensibilities. “I suppose the subtext of that habit and starburst you’re wearing,” he said, “is that what you’re doing to me is being done for the noblest of reasons—even though you won’t deign to explain what they are.”