Inherit the Earth (8 page)

Madoc had, of course, taken note of Damon’s reluctance to join in the loud exhortations of the crowd. “Don’t get all stiff on me, Damon,” he said. “You may be in the Big World now, but you’re still too young to get rigor mortis. Are you worried about splitting with Diana? She’s at my place now, but it isn’t permanent. I could help fix things up if you want me to.” Damon took the inference that Madoc had found Diana’s sudden reintroduction into his life burdensome.

“Interpol paid a call on me yesterday,” Damon told him, thinking that it was time to get down to business. No one was likely to be listening to them while the fight was on. “Silas Arnett has been snatched by persons unknown. They seem to think that I might be a target too.”

Madoc put on a show of astonishment. “I can’t believe that,” he said. “Eliminators only go after the older generation—and they use bombs and bullets. They’re all loners, and losers too. If they had any real organization they’d have been busted long ago. A snatch takes planning—not their style at all. What’s it got to do with you, anyhow? I thought you didn’t talk to your family.”

“I don’t, but it
is
Silas—the nearly human one. I don’t suppose you know anything at all about a particular loner who calls himself Operator one-oh-one? He’s said to be local.”

“Not my territory,” Madoc said with a shrug. “You want me to ask around, right?”

“It’s more complicated than that. The Operator in question named Conrad Helier as an enemy of mankind. When you’re through, okay?”

Madoc looked at him sharply before nodding. Even Diana Caisson didn’t know that Damon Hart had once been Damon Helier, and Madoc knew how privileged he was to have been let in on the secret. He’d probably have found out anyway—Madoc
knew some very light-footed Webwalkers, first-rate poachers who had not yet turned gamekeeper—but he hadn’t had to go digging. Damon had trusted him, and obviously trusted him still. Damon knew that he could rely on Madoc to do everything he could to help, for pride’s sake as well as anything else he might be offered.

Lenny Garon was in real trouble now. The crowd were baying for blood, and getting it. Damon kept his own eyes slightly averted as Madoc turned back to concentrate fully on the business in hand, but he couldn’t turn away. He could feel the stir and surge of his own adrenalin, and his muscles were tensing as he put himself in the shoes of the younger fighter, trying to urge the boy on with his body language.

It didn’t work, of course.

A roar went up from the watchers as Brady finally rammed home his advantage. Poor Lenny was on the ground, screaming. The blade had gone deep, but the wound wasn’t mortal.

Damon knew that it would all be feeding into the template: the reflexes and convulsions of pain; the physical dimensions of the shock and the horror. It would all be ready digitized, ripe for manipulation and refinement. The tape doctor would take a little longer to tease it into proper shape than the real doctor would take to stitch up the fighters, but once the tape was made it would be fixed and finished. Lenny Garon might never be the same. His wounds would mend, leaving no obvious scars, but. . . .

He abandoned the train of thought. This affair seemed to be feeding an unhealthy tendency to melodrama. He reminded himself of what he’d told Diana about the porn tape. By the time the doctor had finished with the recordings there’d be nothing of
Lenny
left at all; there’d only be the actions and the reactions, dissected out and purified as a marketable commodity. The fighter on the tape might have Lenny’s face and Lenny’s pain, but it wouldn’t be
him
. It would be an artifact, less than a shadow and nothing like a soul.

The whole thing was in rank bad taste, of course, but it was a
living for all concerned. For the first few months after he had quit fighting, it had been
his own
living, and it had been based in talents that were entirely and
exclusively
his own, using nothing that Conrad Helier had left to him—in his will, at least.

Damon had wanted then, and he wanted still, to be his own man.

Madoc Tamlin had moved forward to help the stricken street-fighter, not because he was overly concerned for the boy’s health but because he wanted to make certain that the equipment was still in good order. Not until the silvery web had been stripped away were the two fighters handed over to the amateur ambulance drivers waiting nearby. Brady got in under his own steam but Lenny Garon had to be carried.

The crowd drifted away, evaporating into the concrete wilderness.

Damon waited patiently until Madoc’s gear was all packed up and the produce of the day had been handed on to the next phase of its development.

“Your place or mine?” Madoc said, waving his hand in a lazy arc which took in both their cars. Damon led the way to his own vehicle and the older man followed. Damon waited until both doors had closed before starting to set out his proposition.

“If this thing turns out to be serious,” Damon said, stressing the
if
, “I’d be willing to lay out serious credit to pursue it.”

“How serious?” Madoc asked, for form’s sake.

“I’ve got some put away,” Damon said, knowing that his friend would understand exactly what he meant. He fished a smartcard out of his pocket and held it out. “I’ll call the bank in the morning and authorize it for cash withdrawals,” he said. “Everything’s aboveboard—there’s no need to hide the transactions. I’ll fix it so that you can draw ten thousand with no questions asked. If you need more, call me—but it had better be worth paying for.”

“What am I looking for?” Madoc asked mildly. “Apart from Operator one-oh-one, that is.”

“Silas was with a girl named Catherine Praill when he was
snatched. The police don’t think she was involved, but you’d better check her out. Interpol also mentioned the name of another biotechnologist by the name of Surinder Nahal, recently resident in San Diego. That might also be irrelevant, but it has to be checked. If you can find Silas, or identify the people who took him, I’ll pay a suitable finder’s fee.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Madoc said equably. “Are you going to tell me what Operator one-oh-one has posted, or do I have to go trawling through the Eliminators’ favorite netboards?”

“He posted a message saying that Conrad Helier is still alive and calling him an enemy of mankind. He also sent me a personal message, which Interpol might not know about.”

Damon took the piece of paper from his suitskin’s inner pocket and handed it to Madoc Tamlin. Madoc read it and gave it back. “Could be from anybody,” he observed.

“Could be,” admitted Damon, “but whoever carried it up to the thirteenth floor took the trouble to crash Building Security. A playful move—but sometimes playful is serious in disguise. Somebody’s trying to jerk my strings, and I’d like to know who—and why.”

Madoc nodded, carefully furrowing his remarkable eyebrows. “Hywood’s another of your foster parents, right?”

“Right. Eveline Hywood. Currently resident in Lagrange-Five, allegedly very busy with important experiments of an unspecified nature. I doubt that she’ll return my call.”

“It won’t be easy to check her out. The Lagrangists don’t play by our rules, and they have their own playspace way out on the lunatic fringe of the Web.”

“Don’t worry too much about that. I can’t imagine that Eveline’s involved in the kidnapping or the Eliminator messages, even if she does have some relevant information. What do you know about Ahasuerus?”

“The original guy or the foundation?”

“I presume that the reference is to the foundation, rather than the legend,” Damon said, refusing to treat the issue as a joke.

“Not much,” Madoc admitted. “Been around for the best part
of two hundred years. Major players in the longevity game, funding research here, there, and probably everywhere. Reputation ever-so-slightly shady because of a certain bad odor attached to their start-up capital, although it beats me why anybody should care after all this time. Every fortune in the world can be traced back to some initial act of piracy, isn’t that what they say? What was it they used to call the Ahasuerus guy, way back when?”

“The Man Who Stole the World,” Damon said.

“Yeah—that’s right. Zimmer, was it? Or Zimmerman?”

“Zimmerman.”

“Right.” Madoc nodded, as if he were the one answering instead of the one who’d asked. “Well, if he
did
steal the world, we seem to have got it back again, don’t we?”

Damon didn’t want to get sidetracked. “I’ll dig up what I can about connections between Ahasuerus and my father,” he said, “although it’d be no surprise at all to find that they’d had extensive dealings. Ahasuerus must have had dealings with every biotech team in the world if they’ve been handing out cash to longevity researchers since the days before the Crash.

Madoc stroked his chin pensively. It seemed that his green eyes now glowed a little more powerfully than they had before. “What that note implies,” he said, “is that Arnett was taken because he knows something about Conrad Helier—something dirty. I don’t suppose you have any idea what that is, do you?”

“If I did,” Damon told him, “I’d probably want to sit on it awhile longer, just in case this business can be wrapped up quickly and quietly—but as it happens, I don’t. I was only ever told about Saint Conrad the Savior, in whose holy footsteps I was supposed to follow.”

“Were you ever given any cause to think that he might not be dead?”

“Quite the reverse,” Damon said. “According to his disciples, it was a major point of principle with Saint Conrad that an overcrowded world of long-lived individuals had to develop an etiquette, if not an actual legal requirement, whereby a dutiful citizen of the New Utopia would postpone the exercise of his—
or her—right of reproduction until after death. If my foster parents are to be believed, my very existence is proof of Conrad Helier’s demise; if he were still alive, he’d be guilty of an awkward hypocrisy.”

“It’s Conrad Helier you’re really interested in, isn’t it?” Madoc suggested, running his neatly manicured fingernails speculatively back and forth along the edge of the smartcard that Damon had given him. “This Arnett guy is a side issue. You want to know if your natural father really is alive, and if the Eliminators really have grounds for resenting his continued presence in the world.”

“Concentrate on finding Silas Arnett, for the time being,” Damon said flatly.

Madoc nodded meekly. “I’ll put the Old Lady herself onto it,” he said. “She doesn’t take this kind of work normally, but she likes me. I can talk her into it.”

“I don’t want you hiring someone just because she’s a living legend,” Damon told him sharply. “I want someone who can get the job done.”

“Trust me,” Madoc advised him, with the casual air of a man who was as trustworthy as his own artificial graffiti. “Harriet’s the best. I
know
these things. Have I ever let you down?”

“Once or twice.”

Madoc only grinned at that, refusing to take the complaint seriously. “How are things otherwise?” he asked as he put the smartcard away. “Honest toil living up to your expectations?” Damon knew that what Madoc really wanted to know was whether he and Diana were washed up for good and all—but it wasn’t a topic he wanted to discuss.

“I’m thinking of taking a little break,” Damon told him. “I have some digging of my own to do tonight, but if I don’t get answers to a couple of calls I might have to take a brief excursion to Hawaii tomorrow.”

“What for?”

“Karol Kachellek is there, working out of Molokai. Like Eveline, he’s pointedly refusing to get back to me. He won’t want to tell me anything, even if he knows what all this is about, but if I
go in person I might get
something
out of him. At the very least, I might unsettle him a bit.”

Madoc grinned. “You always were good at unsettling people. Is that it?” When Damon nodded, he let himself out of the car.

“Give my regards to Diana,” Damon said as Madoc began to walk away. “Tell her I’m sorry, but that it’ll all work out for the best.”

Madoc nearly turned back in order to follow that up, but he must have judged Damon’s mood more accurately than he’d let on. After a moment’s hesitation he kept going, answering the instruction with a calculatedly negligent wave.

As soon as the other car had pulled away Damon began to ask himself whether he’d done the right thing. Taking money from the legacy to bankroll Madoc’s investigations wasn’t really a betrayal of his determination to make his own way in the world—it was surely wholly appropriate that Conrad Helier’s money should be used in an attempt to find out what had happened to Silas, especially if it was Silas’s association with Conrad Helier that had given his kidnappers their motive. The real problem was whether Madoc’s involvement would actually help to solve the mystery, or merely add a further layer of complication. If he found anything damning, he would certainly offer it to Damon first . . . but what might he do with it thereafter? Even if Operator 101 could be thwarted, he might only be the first of many—and if Conrad Helier really had been an enemy of mankind, why should the secret be kept, even if it could be?

Damon checked the alarms on the car’s console, just to make sure that their inactivity really was testimony to the fact that neither Karol nor Eveline had replied to his calls.

They were in perfect working order; the silence was real. In fact, now that he was alone at the end of the alley the silence was positively oppressive. The night was clear and the stars were out, but they seemed few and very faint by comparison with the starscape he’d glimpsed in Eveline’s phone VE. Each one seemed set in splendid isolation against the cloth of black oblivion—
and he had never felt as keenly as he did now that he was alone himself, a mere atom of soul stuff lost in a desert void.