Inherit the Earth (7 page)

“I remember,” Damon assured him drily. “I’ll be there in an hour and a half, traffic permitting.”

“No traffic here,” Madoc drawled. “You should never have moved so close to the coast, Damie. World’s still overcrowded,
thanks to you-know-who. Too many people, too many cars, wherever the real estate is in good condition. It’ll be a long time before the gantzers get to
this
neighborhood.”

“Don’t bet on that,” Damon said. “The new generation can turn rubble back into walls with no significant effort at all. Around here you’d never know there was ever an earthquake, let alone two plague wars.”

“Around the alley,” Madoc riposted, “we don’t forget so easily. We’re conservationists, remember? Preserving the legacy of the plague wars and the great quakes, keeping alive
all
the old traditions.”

“I’m on my way,” Damon said shortly. He wasn’t in the mood for banter.

Tamlin laughed, and might have said more, but Damon cut him off and the forest faded into darkness, leaving nothing visible except the customary virtual readouts, limned in crimson against the Stygian gloom.

He didn’t waste any time leaving the apartment and taking the elevator down to the basement. The elevator’s voice was back online but it didn’t have a word of complaint to utter.

The traffic was bad enough to make Damon wonder whether the twenty-first-century mythology of endless gridlock was as fanciful as everyone thought. At the turn of the millennium the world’s population hadn’t been much over five billion; the present day’s seven billion might be distributed a little more evenly in geographical terms, but people only thought of it as “small” by comparison with the fourteen billion peak briefly attained before the Second Plague War. As Madoc had said, the planet could still be considered overcrowded, thanks to Conrad Helier. The rising curve of the birthrate would cross the declining curve of the death rate again within ten or twelve years, and yet another psychologically significant moment would be upon the worrying world. Los Angeles had been so severely depopulated in the plague wars that it still lay half in ruins, but now that PicoCon had the Gantz patents all wrapped up and the last of the ancient antitrust laws had been consigned to the dustbin by the Washington
Rump it was only a matter of time before the deconstructionists started the long march inland.

The further east Damon went the thinner the traffic became. He headed straight into the heart of the badlands, where the Second Plague War had struck hardest once the bugs had moved out of Hollywood, leaving nothing for the ‘77 quake to do but a little minor vandalism—by the time the Crisis arrived some twenty years later there had been no one around these parts to care. Soon enough, he was in a region where all the buildings which hadn’t already collapsed were in permanent danger of so doing: a district which was, in practice if not in theory, beyond the reach of the LAPD.

In truth, little enough of what Madoc Tamlin and his fellows got up to out here was unambiguously illegal. The fights were private affairs, which couldn’t concern the police unless a combatant filed a complaint—which, of course, none ever did—or someone died. Fighters did die, occasionally; a lot of the kids who got involved did so in order to earn the money that would pay for advanced IT, and some of them didn’t advance far enough quickly enough to keep themselves from real harm. Taping the fights wasn’t against the law, nor was selling them—except insofar as the tapes in which someone
did
get killed might be counted as evidence of accessory activity—so Madoc’s reputation as an outlaw was 90 percent myth. His only real crimes arose out of his association with software saboteurs and creative accountants.

Damon’s own record was no dirtier, formally or informally. He had never killed anyone, although he’d come close once or twice. He really had tried to see the fighting as a
sport
, with its own particular skills, its own unique artistry, and its own distinctive spectator appeal. He hadn’t given it up out of disgust, but simply because he’d become more and more interested in the technical side of the business—the way the raw tapes of ham-fisted brawls were turned into scintillating VE experiences for the punters. That, at least, was what he had told himself—and anyone else who cared to ask.

Damon found Madoc easily enough. He hadn’t been down the alley for more than a year, but it was all familiar—almost eerily so. The graffiti on the walls had been renewed but not significantly altered; all the heaps of rubble had been carefully maintained, as if they were markings on a field of play whose proportions were sacred. Madoc was busy wiring up a fighter who didn’t look a day over fourteen, although he had to be a
little
older than that.

“It’s too tight,” the fighter complained. “I can’t move properly.” Damon had no difficulty deducing that it was the boy’s first time.

“No it’s not,” said Madoc, with careful patience, as he knelt to complete the synaptic links in the
reta mirabile
which covered the fighter’s body like a bright spiderweb. “It’s no tighter than the training suit you’ve been using all week. You can move quite freely.”

The novice’s fearful eyes looked over Madoc’s shoulder, lighting on Damon’s face. Damon saw the sudden blaze of dawning recognition. “Hey,” the boy said, “you’re Damon Hart! I got a dozen of your fight tapes. You going to be doctoring the tape for this? That’s great! My name’s Lenny Garon.”

Damon didn’t bother to inform the boy that he hadn’t come to watch the fight and he didn’t deny that he had been brought in to doctor the tapes. He understood how scared the youngster must be, and he didn’t want to say anything that might be construed as a put-down. If he had judged the situation rightly, Lenny Garon was due to be cut up by a skilled knifeman, and he didn’t need any extra damage to his ego. Damon didn’t recognize the boy’s opponent, but he could see that the other wired-up figure was at least three years older and much more comfortable with the pressure and distribution of the
reta mirabile
.

Madoc stood up, already issuing stern instructions as to where the combatants shouldn’t stab one another. He didn’t want the recording apparatus damaged. “The only way you can make real money for this kind of work,” he told the novice, “is to get used to the kit and to make damn sure it doesn’t get damaged. Given
that your chances of long-term survival are directly proportional to your upgrade prospects, you’d better get this right. It’s a good break, if you can carry it off. Brady’s tough, but you’ll have to go up against tougher if you’re to make your mark in this game.”

Lenny nodded dumbly. “I can do it,” he said uneasily. “I got all the feints and jumps. It’ll be okay. I won’t let you down.”

“We don’t want
feints and jumps
,” Madoc said, with a slight contemptuous sneer that might have been intended to wind the boy up. “We want purpose and skill and desperation. Just because we’re making a VR tape. . . . Explain it to him, Damon.”

Madoc turned away to check the other fighter’s equipment, leaving Lenny Garon to look up at Damon with evident awe. Damon was acutely embarrassed by the thought that it might have been using
his
tapes that had filled this idiot with the desire to get into the fight game himself. The cleverer the tapes became as a medium of entertainment, the easier it became for users to forget the highly significant detail that fighters who were doing it for real were not insulated, as VE users were, from the consequences of their mistakes. Even if they had IT enough to blot out their pain, the actual fighters still got stabbed and slashed; the blood they lost was real, and if they were unfortunate enough to take a blade in the eye they lost the sight of it for a very uncomfortable couple of weeks.

“Any advice?” the boy asked eagerly.

Damon was tempted to say: Forget it. Get out now. Make the money some other way. He didn’t, because he knew that he had no right to say any such thing. He hadn’t even needed the money. “Don’t try to
look good
,” he said, instead. “Remember that we aren’t making a straightforward recording that will give a floater the illusion that he’s going through your moves. We’re just making a
template
—raw material. You just concentrate on looking after yourself—leave it to the doctor to please the audience.”

“Shit, Damon!” Madoc complained. “Don’t tell the kid he doesn’t have to give us any help at all. He’s just trying to go easy on you, Lenny, with it being your first time and all. Sure, play-acting doesn’t do it—it reeks of fake—but you have to show us
something
. You have to show us that you have
talent
. If you want to be good at this, you have to go
all the way
. . . but you have to look after the wiring. No record at all is far worse than a bad one.”

The boy nodded respectfully in Damon’s direction before turning to face his opponent. The gesture brought it home to Damon that he still had a big reputation on the streets. He might be out of circulation, but his tapes weren’t; his past was going to be around for a long time. But that, in a sense, was why he was here. Aspects of his past that seemed even more remote than his fighting days were still capable of tormenting him, still capable of
involving
him.

“Just remember,” Madoc Tamlin said as he pushed the boy forward, “it’s a small price to pay for taking one more step toward immortality.”

Like the Eliminators, street slang always spoke of
immortality
rather than
emortality
—which, strictly speaking, was all that even the very best internal technology could ever hope to provide. Not that anyone expected current technology to guarantee them more than a hundred and fifty years—but in a hundred and fifty years’ time, current technology would be way out of date. Those who got the very best out of today’s IT would still be around to get the benefit of tomorrow’s—and might, if all went well, eventually arrive at the golden day when all the processes of aging could be arrested in perpetuity.

According to the ads, today’s young people were solidly set on an escalator that might take them all the way to absolute immunity to aging and disease. As the older generation—who had already aged too badly to be brought back permanently from the brink—gradually died off, the younger would inherit the earth
in perpetuity
. Not that anyone believed the ads implicitly, of course—ads were just ads, when all was said and done.

D
amon watched the two fighters square up. Their kit
was
more than a little cumbersome, but very few artificial organics were as delicate as the real thing and you couldn’t get template precision with thinner webs. As the two moved together, though, he deliberately looked away at the ruined buildings to either side of the street.

His eye was caught by one of the items of graffiti sketched in luminous paint on a smoke-blackened fragment of wall. It read: Live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse. It was an antique, so old that Madoc must have found it in a history book. In fact, he could imagine Madoc chuckling with glee when he discovered it, immediately appropriating it as part of the backcloth for his dramatic productions. No child of today, however dangerously he or she might want to live, would ever have come up with such a ridiculous slogan—although there were plenty of centenarians who might like to believe it of them.

Centenarians loved to see themselves as the survivors of the Second Deluge. Those who had made no effective contribution to the world’s survival were worse than those who had, swelling with absurd pride at the thought that they had endured the worst trial by ordeal that nature had ever devised and proved their worth. Such people could not imagine that anyone who came after them could possibly value the earth, or life itself, as much
as they did—nor could they imagine that anyone who came after them could be as worthy of
life
as they were, let alone of immortality. No one knew for sure, but Damon’s suspicion was that a hundred out of every hundred-and-one Eliminator Operators were in their dotage.

He wondered what the neighborhood must have been like in the bad old days of the early twenty-first century, and what angry words might have been scrawled on the walls by boys and girls who really were condemned to die young. Throughout that century this neighborhood would have been crowded out with the unemployable and the insupportable: one of countless concentration-city powder kegs waiting for a revolutionary spark which had never come, thanks to the two plague wars—the first allegedly launched by the rich against the poor and the second by the poor against the rich. In the short term, of course, the rich had won both of them; it had taken the Crisis to restore a measure of equality and fraternity in the face of disaster. Now the Crisis was over and the New Utopia was here—but the neighborhood was still derelict, still host to darkness and to violence, still beyond the reach of supposedly universal civilization.

When the fight began in earnest, Damon couldn’t help looking back. He couldn’t refuse to watch, so he contented himself with trying to follow every nuance with a scrupulously clinical eye. The other watchers—whose sole raison d’être was to whip the combatants into a frenzy—weighed in with the customary verve and fury, howling out their support for one boy or the other.

Amazingly, Lenny Garon managed to stick Brady in the gut while the experienced fighter was arrogantly playing a teasing game of cat and mouse with him—which made Brady understandably furious. It was immediately clear to Damon that the older boy wasn’t going to settle for some token belly wound as a reprisal; he wanted copious bloodshed. That would be more than okay by Madoc Tamlin, so long as the cuts didn’t do too much damage to the recorders. Lenny Garon would suffer more than he had anticipated, perhaps more than he had thought possible,
and for far longer—but it probably wouldn’t put him off. In all probability, he would be all the more enthusiastic to work his way up to something
really
heavy, in order to pay for the nanotech that would make him as good as new and keep him that way no matter what injuries his frail flesh might sustain.