Inherit the Earth (13 page)

“Who are you?” he asked, unable any longer to resist the temptation, although he knew that it would be a pointless admission of weakness. “Why are you doing this?”

“I’m a judge,” said the voice flatly. “I’m doing this because
someone
has to do it. If humankind is to be worthy of immortality, it ought to begin with a clean slate, don’t you think? Our sins must be admitted, and expiated, if they are not to spoil our new adventure.”

“Who appointed
you
my judge and executioner?” Silas retorted, miserably aware of the fact that he was still displaying weakness and terror, even though he had not yet been stripped of all his protective armor.

“The post was vacant,” the judge said. “No one else seemed to be interested in taking it up.”

Silas recognized the words and felt their parodic force. “Fuck off,” he said, with feeling. It seemed, suddenly, to be a direly old-fashioned curse: a verbal formula he had brought with him out of Conrad Helier’s ark; a spell which could not have any force at all in the modern world. The existential significance of sexual intercourse had altered since the old world died, and the dirty words connected with it had lost their warrant of obscenity.
Shit
and its derivatives still retained their repulsive connotations, but the expletives which had once been strongest of all had lost their fashionability along with their force. Habit might preserve them awhile longer, at least in the language of centenarians like himself, but for all the effect they had one might as well make reference to God’s wounds or the Prophet’s beard.

“The charges laid against you are these,” said the machine-enhanced voice as the lips of the caricature face moved in perfect sync. “First, that between 2095 and 2120 you conspired with Eveline Hywood, Karol Kachellek, Mary Hallam, and others, under the supervision of Conrad Helier, to cause actual bodily harm to some seven billion individuals, that actual bodily harm consisting of the irreversible disabling of their reproductive organs. Second, that you collaborated with Eveline Hywood, Karol Kachellek, Mary Hallam, and others, under the supervision
of Conrad Helier, in the design, manufacture, and distribution of the agents of that actual bodily harm, namely the various virus species collectively known as meiotic disrupters or chiasmalytic transformers. You are now formally invited to make a statement in response to these charges.”

“If you had any real evidence,” Silas said stiffly, “you could bring the charges in a real court of law. I don’t have to answer any charges brought by a caricature judge in a cartoon court.”

“You’ve had seventy years to submit yourself to trial by a legitimately constituted court,” said the judge, his mechanical voice dripping acid. “Those who prefer to evade the courts whose legitimacy they acknowledge ought not to protest too loudly when justice catches up with them. This court is the one which has found the means to bring you to trial; it is the one which will determine your fate. You will be given the opportunity to enter your defense before sentence is passed upon you.”

“But you’ve already delivered your verdict, and I doubt that you have it in your power to determine any sentence but immediate execution—which will make you guilty of murder in the eyes of any authentic court in the world.”

“Death is not such a harsh sentence for a man of your kind,” opined the man behind the mask, “when one considers that you—like the vast majority of those previously condemned as unworthy of immortality—have already lived far longer than the natural human life span. One of the principles on which this court is founded is that whatever society bestows upon the individual through the medium of technology, society has every right to withdraw from those who betray their obligations to the commonweal.”

“Eliminators aren’t part of society. They’re just an ill-assorted bunch of murderous maniacs. But you’re no run-of-the-mill Eliminator, are you? You’re something new, or something worse. Psychologically you’re the same—in perfect harmony with the solitary spiders who get their kicks out of dumping malevolent garbage into the data stream in the hope that some other shithead
will take it into his head to start blasting—but you’ve got an extra twist in you.”

It was all bluster, but Silas took what comfort he could from its insincerity. Whoever had come to seize him had come well equipped, and however ridiculous this virtual court might be on the surface it was no joke, no merely amateur affair. Someone was taking this business very seriously—whatever the business in question really was. He had to try to figure that out, even if figuring it out couldn’t save him from pain and death. If his sentence were already fixed, and if the police were unable to find him, the only meaningful thing he could do with what remained of his life was to find out who was doing this to him and why—and why
now
, when it had all happened so long ago.

“You still have time to make a clean breast of it,” the voice informed him, refusing to respond to his insults. “No one can save you, Dr. Arnett, except yourself. Even if your trial were to be interrupted, you would still stand condemned. We are an idea and an ideal rather than an organization, and we can neither be defeated nor frustrated. When human beings live forever, no one will be able to evade justice, because there will be all the time in the world for their sins to find them out. We really do have to be
worthy
of immortality, Dr. Arnett. You, of all people, should understand that. This is, after all, a world which
you
helped to design—a world which could not have come into being had you not collaborated in the careful murder of the world which came before.”

Silas didn’t want to engage in philosophical argument. He wanted to stick to matters of fact. “Will you answer me one question?” he asked sharply.

“Of course I will,” the judge replied, with silky insincerity. “
We
have no secrets to conceal.”

“Did Catherine set me up? Did she rig the house’s systems to let your people in?” He didn’t imagine that he would be able to trust the answer, but he knew that it was a question that would gnaw away at him if he didn’t voice it.

“As a matter of fact,” the other replied, taking obvious pleasure in the reply, “she had no idea at all that she was carrying the centipedes which insinuated themselves into your domestic systems. We used her, but she is innocent of any responsibility. If anyone betrayed you, Dr. Arnett, it was someone who knew you far better than she.”

Silas hoped that he would be able to resist the lure offered by that answer, but he knew that he wouldn’t.
Someone
had set him up for this, and he had to consider everyone a candidate—at least until the time came for him to play the traitor in his turn, when his trial by ordeal began in earnest.

D
amon stood on the quay in Kaunakakai’s main harbor and watched the oceanographic research vessel
Kite
sail smoothly toward the shore. The wind was light and her engines were silent but she was making good headway. Her sleek sails were patterned in red and yellow, shining brightly in the warm subtropical sunlight. The sun was so low in the western sky that the whole world, including the surface of the sea, seemed to be painted in shades of crimson and ocher.

Karol Kachellek didn’t come up to the deck until the boat was coming about, carefully shedding speed so that she could drift to the quay under the gentle tutelage of her steersman. Kachellek saw Damon waiting but he didn’t wave a greeting—and he took care to keep his unwelcome visitor waiting even longer while he supervised the unloading of a series of cases which presumably held samples or specimens.

Two battered trucks with low-grade organic engines had already limped down to the quayside to pick up whatever the boat had brought in. Kachellek ostentatiously helped the brightly clad laborers load the cases onto the trucks. He was the kind of man who took pride in always doing his fair share of whatever labor needed to be done.

Eventually, though, Karol had no alternative but to condescend to come to his foster son and offer his hand to be shaken.
Damon took the hand readily enough and tried as best he could to import some real enthusiasm into the gesture. Karol Kachellek had always been distant; Silas Arnett had been the real foster father of the group to whose care Damon had been delivered in accordance with his father’s will, just as poor Mary Hallam had been the real foster mother. If Silas was gone forever, leaving Damon no living parents except Karol and Eveline, then he had probably left it too late to restore any meaningful family relationships.

“This isn’t a good time for visiting, Damon,” Karol said. “We’re very busy.” At least he had the grace to look slightly guilty as he said it. He raised a hand to smooth back his unruly blond hair. “Let’s walk along the shore while the light lasts,” he went on awkwardly. “It’ll be some time before the mud samples are ready for examination, and there won’t be any more coming in today. Things might be easier in three or four weeks, if I can get more staff, but until then. . . .”

“You’re very busy,” Damon finished for him. “You’re not worried, then, by the news?”

“I haven’t time to waste in worrying about Silas. I’m concerned for him, of course, but there’s nothing I can do to help and I don’t feel that I’m under any obligation to fret or to mourn. I understand that you’re bound to think of us as a pair, but he and I were never close.”

“You worked together for more than eighty years,” Damon pointed out, falling into step as the blond man settled into his long and economical stride.

“We certainly did,” agreed the blond man, with a conspicuous lack of enthusiasm. “When you’re my age you’ll understand that close company can breed antipathy as easily as friendship, and that the passage of time smothers either with insulating layers of habit and indifference.”

“I’m afraid I haven’t formed those insulating layers yet,” Damon said. “You’re not worried about yourself either, then? If the Eliminators took Silas they might come after you next.”

“Same thing—no time to waste. If we let Eliminators and
their kin drive us to trepidation, they’ve won. I can’t see why Interpol is so excited about a stupid message cooked up by some sick mind. It should be ignored, treated with the contempt it deserves. Even to acknowledge its existence is an encouragement to further idiocies of the same kind.” While he talked Karol’s stride echoed his sermon in becoming more positive and purposeful, but Damon had no difficulty keeping up. Damon remembered that Karol
always
acted as if he had an end firmly in mind and no time to spare in getting there—it was sometimes difficult to believe that he was a hundred and twenty-two years old. Perhaps, Damon thought, he had to maintain his sense of purpose at a high pitch lest he lose it completely—as Silas seemed to have lost his once Damon had flown the nest.

They quickly passed beyond the limits of the harbor and headed toward the outskirts of the port, with the red orb of the setting sun almost directly ahead of them.

Mauna Loa was visible in the distance, looming over the precipitous landscape, but the town itself was oddly and uncomfortably reminiscent of the parts of Los Angeles where Damon had spent the greater part of his adolescence. Molokai had been one of numerous bolt-holes whose inhabitants had successfully imposed quarantine during the Second Plague War, but when it had tried to repeat the trick in the Crisis it had failed. The new pestilence had arrived here as surely as it had arrived everywhere else. Artificial wombs had been imported on the scale which the islanders could afford, but the population of the whole chain had been dwindling ever since. The internal technologies which guaranteed longevity to those who could afford them would have to become even cheaper before that trend went into reverse, unless there was a sudden saving influx of immigrants. In the meantime, that part of the port which remained alive and active was surrounded by a ragged halo of concrete wastelands.

Because there was so little to see on the landward side save for the lingering legacy of human profligacy, Damon looked out to sea while he walked on Karol Kachellek’s right-hand side. The ocean gave the impression of having always been the way it was:
huge and serene. Where its waves lapped the shore they created their own dominion, shaping the sandy strand and discarding their own litter of wrack and rot-misshapen wood. He could just make out the shore of Lanai on the horizon, on the far side of the Kaiohi Channel.

“Why did you come out here, Damon?” Karol asked. “Are
you
scared of the Eliminators?”

“Should I be?” Damon countered—but his fosterer had no intention of rising to that one. “You wouldn’t talk to me on the phone,” Damon said after a pause. “Eveline hasn’t replied in any way at all—as if it would somehow pollute her glorious isolation in the wilderness of space even to tap out a few words on a keyplate.”

“She’s working. She gets very engrossed, and this is a difficult time for her. She’ll get back to you in her own time.”

“Sure. Unfortunately, the Eliminators seem to be keeping to their own timetable. Would it inconvenience her that much to take my call while Silas may still be alive?”

“She’ll talk to you,” Karol assured him. “I would have too, when I could find the time—no matter how much I hate that fancy VE you’ve got hooked up to your phone.”

“If you’d taken the call,” Damon pointed out, “we could have met in your VE instead of mine. That’s
not
one of my designs. Even if you’d called me, we could have fixed that at a keystroke.”

VEs weren’t really an issue, and Karol didn’t press the point. “Look, Damon,” he said, “the long and the short of it is that I didn’t call you back because I simply don’t have anything to tell you. Your father’s dead. He wasn’t an enemy of mankind. I have no idea why Eliminators or anyone else should want to kidnap or murder Silas. Eveline would say exactly the same—and she probably hasn’t called you because she doesn’t see any real need. I think you should let the police take care of this. I don’t think it serves any useful purpose for you to start stirring things up.”