Inherit the Earth (9 page)

“You’re going soft,” he told himself, unashamed of speaking the words aloud. “It was what you wanted, after all. No parents, no girlfriend, no opponents wielding knives. Just you, magnificently alone in the infinite wilderness of virtual space.”

It was true. The sense of relief he felt as he raced away from the gloomy badlands toward the welcoming city lights seemed far less ambiguous than what he’d felt when Diana had driven off and left him to his own devices.

F
irst thing next morning, Damon obtained a reservation on the two o’clock flight to Honolulu. There was no point in taking the earlier flight because he’d only have had to spend an extra two hours in Honolulu waiting for the shuttle to take him on to Molokai.

He called Karol again, to warn him of his imminent arrival; the sim accepted the news impassively, as any AI would have done, but Damon took some small comfort from the fact that Karol would now have cause to regret not having taken the trouble to return his earlier call. Damon reset his own answerphone to make sure that if Karol chose to call back
now
he’d be conclusively stalled. He also put in a second call to Eveline Hywood, but he got the same response as before. In Lagrange-5 no one had to worry about frustrated callers deciding to put in a personal appearance.

It only took his search engine forty seconds to sort through the news tapes and Eliminator netboards for any mention of Silas Arnett, Conrad Helier, Surinder Nahal, or Operator 101, but it took Damon a further hour and a half to check through its findings, making absolutely sure that there was no authentic news. No one of any importance was issuing serious speculations about a possible connection between the Operator 101 posting and
Arnett’s kidnapping, although a couple of newswriters had been alerted to Surinder Nahal’s unavailability by their search-engine synthesizers. So far, everyone in the public arena was whistling in the dark—just like Interpol.

Damon knew that he ought to do some work, but he hadn’t the heart to start the tawdry business of recovering Diana’s vital stats for the pornypop tape and the only other worthwhile commission he had on hand was an action/adventure game scenario which required him to develop an entire alien ecosphere. It wasn’t the sort of job he wanted to start when he knew he’d have to break off in three hours to go to the airport—especially when he had another option. He knew that it was just as likely to turn into a blind alley as trying to place a call to Eveline Hywood, but he figured that it had to be explored, just in case.

He packed his overnight bag and deposited it in the trunk of his car. Then he instructed the automatic pilot to find out where the nearest offices of the Ahasuerus Foundation were located and offer him an ETA. Given the size of the world—or even the USNA—he could easily have got an ETA that was the day after tomorrow, but the display assured him that he could be there long before noon.

The offices in question were close enough, and in territory familiar enough, for him to take the controls himself, but driving in downtown traffic was bad for his stress level at the best of times, and these were definitely not the best of times. He told the machine to set a course, but he didn’t retreat into the safe haven of the VE hood the way most nondrivers did. He just sat back with eyes front, rehearsing the questions he intended to ask, if it turned out that there was anyone prepared to give him some answers. He tilted his seat back slightly so that the traffic wouldn’t be too distracting.

The effect of the slight tilt was to fix his eyes on the shifting skyline way ahead of the traffic stream. At first, while the car seemed to be turning at every second intersection, the skyline kept changing, but once the pilot had found a reasonably straight
route by which to follow its heading the Two Towers stuck out like a pair of sore thumbs—or a gateway to which the vehicle was being inexorably drawn.

The symbolism of the illusory gateway was not lost on Damon. The whole world was steering a course into the future with OmicronA on the left and PicoCon on the right. Ostensibly archrivals, the two megacorps and their various satellites were an effective cartel controlling at least 70 percent of the domestic nanotech business and 65 percent of the world’s. Now that PicoCon had the Gantz patents stitched up, its masters probably had 70 percent of the domestic biotech business too, insofar as it made any sense to separate biotech from nanotech when the distinction between organic and inorganic molecular machines was becoming more and more blurred with every year that went by.

Possession of the Gantz patents entitled PicoCon to the slightly higher tower, so the edifice that reared up on the right was just a little more massive than the one to the left, but both had been forged out of ocean-refined sand and both architects had done their utmost to take advantage of sparkling salt in catching and reflecting the sun’s bright light. Although PicoCon was the larger, it wasn’t necessarily the brighter. There was a curious defiance about the glow of OmicronA which refused to accept the metaphorical shade—but Damon knew that it was only an optical illusion. As a beacon signaling the advent of tomorrow the two corps were flames of the same furious fire.

Needless to say, the offices of the Ahasuerus Foundation weren’t in the same league. Ahasuerus didn’t even have its own building—just a couple of floors in one of the humbler structures right across the road from the PicoCon tower. By comparison with its taller neighbor the building looked as if it had been gantzed out of an unusually objectionable mudslide; there was not a glimmer of sea salt about its stern exterior and its windows were tinted brown. Most of its neighbors were equipped for a measure of continuing accretion, so that salt from windblown
spray
had
accumulated on their slightly blurred surfaces, giving each of them a curious glittering sheen, but the building housing Ahasuerus had been comprehensively
finished
, and it seemed utterly self-satisfied in its relative dullness—although some observers might have reckoned it sinister as well as stern. Its car park was certainly dimmer and dingier than fashion prescribed.

Damon had already decided that the best course of action was to throw the burden of secrecy onto the foundation’s own security, so he simply marched up to the reception desk and summoned a human contact. When a smartly dressed young man eventually emerged from the inner offices Damon gave him the folded note.

“My name’s Damon Hart,” he said. “I’m the biological son of Conrad Helier and the foster son of Silas Arnett and Eveline Hywood. It might be to the advantage of the foundation if someone in authority were to read this document. It might also be to the advantage of the foundation if lesser mortals—including yourself—refrained from reading it. Personally, I don’t care at all; if you or anyone else wants to take the risk of looking at it, you’re welcome.”

That, he figured, should get the item as far up the chain of command as was feasible without the contents of the enigmatic message becoming common knowledge.

The fetcher-and-carrier disappeared into the inner offices again, leaving Damon to his own devices for a further ten minutes.

Eventually, a woman came to collect him. She had silky red hair and bright blue eyes. For a moment Damon thought that she was genuinely young, and his jaw tightened as he concluded that he was about to be fobbed off, but the hair and eye colors were a little too contrived and a slight constriction in her practiced smile reassured him that she had undergone recent somatic reconstruction of the kind that was misleadingly advertised as “rejuvenation.” Her real age was likely to be at least seventy, if not in three figures.

“Mr. Hart,” she said, offering him the piece of paper, still folded, in lieu of a handshake. “I’m Rachel Trehaine. Won’t you come through.”

The corridors behind the security wall were bare; the doors had no nameplates. The office into which Rachel Trehaine eventually led Damon was liberally equipped with flat screens and fitted with shelves full of discs and digitapes, but it had no VE hood. “Perhaps I’d better warn you that I’m only a senior reader,” she said as she waved him to a chair. “I don’t have any executive authority. I’ve had an encrypted version of your document relayed to New York, but it may take some time to get a response from them. In the meantime, I’d like to thank you for bringing the matter to our attention—we had not been independently informed.”

“You’re welcome,” Damon assured her insincerely. “I hope you’ll show me the same courtesy of bringing to my attention any pertinent matters of which I might not have been independently informed.” He winced slightly as he heard the pomposity in his tone, realizing that he might have overrehearsed his opening speech.

“Of course,” said Rachel Trehaine, with the charming ease of a practiced dissembler. “I don’t suppose you have any idea—if only the merest suspicion—who this mysterious Operator might be, or why this attack on your family has been launched?”

“I thought you might know more about that than I do,” Damon said. “You’ll have complete records of any dealings between Ahasuerus and Conrad Helier’s research team.”

“When I say that I’m a senior reader,” she told him mildly, “I don’t mean that I have free access to the foundation’s own records. My job is to keep watch on other data streams, selecting out data of interest, collating and reporting. I’m a scientific analyst, not a historian.”

“I meant you plural, not you singular,” Damon told her. “Someone in your organization must be able to figure out which particular closeted skeleton Operator one-oh-one intends to bring out into the open. Why else would he have sent me to you?”

“Why would he—or she—have sent you anywhere at all, Mr. Hart? Why send you a personal message? It seems very odd—not at all the way that Eliminators usually operate.”

The delicate suggestion was, of course, that Damon was the source of the message—that he himself was Operator 101. As a scientific analyst Rachel Trehaine would naturally have considerable respect for Occam’s razor.

“That’s an interesting question,” Damon said agreeably. “When Inspector Yamanaka referred to the situation as a puzzle he was speaking metaphorically, but that message implies that the instigator of this series of incidents really
is
creating a puzzle, dangling it before me as a kind of lure—just as I, in my turn, am dangling it before you. Operator one-oh-one wants me to go digging, and he’s offering suggestions as to where I might profitably dig. Given that Conrad Helier is dead, he can’t possibly be the Eliminators’ real target—and if their promise that Silas Arnett will be released after he’s given them what they want is honest, he isn’t the real target either. If the note is to be taken at face value, Operator one-oh-one might be building a file on Eveline Hywood, with particular reference to her past dealings with your foundation.”

Rachel Trehaine took a few moments to weigh that up, presumably employing all her skills as a senior reader. Anyone but a scientific analyst might have challenged his conclusions, or at least pointed out the tentative nature of his inferences, but she was content merely to observe and record.

“Have you spoken to Eveline Hywood?” she asked.

“I’ve tried,” Damon told her. “She isn’t accepting calls at the moment. There’s nothing sinister in that—she tends to get engrossed in her work. She never liked being interrupted. I’ll get through eventually, but she’ll probably tell me that it isn’t my business anymore—that I forfeited any right I might have had to be told what’s going on when I walked out on the Great Crusade to run with the gangs.”

The red-haired woman pondered that information too. Damon judged that she was under real pressure to make sense
of this, or thought she was. However lowly her position within the organization might be she was obviously in charge of the Los Angeles office, at least for the moment. She knew that she might have decisions to make, as well as orders to follow from New York.

“The Ahasuerus Foundation’s sole purpose is to conduct research into technologies of longevity,” she said sententiously. “It’s entirely probable that we provided funding to Conrad Helier’s research team if they were involved in projects connected with longevity research. I can’t imagine that there was anything in our dealings to attract the interest of the so-called Eliminators.”

“That is strange, isn’t it?” Damon said, trying to sound insouciant. “The usual Eliminator jargon charges people with being
unworthy of immortality
—a formula which takes it for granted that your researchers will eventually hit the jackpot. In a way, you and the Eliminators represent different sides of the same coin. If and when you come up with an authentic fountain of youth you’ll be forced into the position of deciding who should drink from it.”

“We’re a nonprofit organization, Mr. Hart. Our constitution requires us to make the fruits of our labor available to everyone.”

“I looked up your constitution last night,” Damon admitted. “It’s an interesting commitment. But I also glanced at the way in which you’ve operated in the past. It’s true that Ahasuerus has always placed its research findings in the public domain, but that’s not the same thing as ensuring equal access to the consequent technologies. Consider PicoCon’s new rejuvenation procedures, for example: there’s no secret about the manner in which the reconstructive transformations are done, but it’s still an expensive process to carry out because it requires such a high level of technical expertise and so much hospital time. Effectively, it’s available only to the rich. It seems highly likely to me that the next breakthrough in longevity research will be a more wide-ranging kind of somatic transformation which will achieve an
authentic
rejuvenation rather than a merely cosmetic one.