Inherit the Earth (14 page)

“Am I stirring things up?” Damon asked. “It’s just a social visit.”

“I’m not talking about your coming here. I’m talking about
your unsubtle friend Madoc Tamlin and that stupid note you took to the Ahasuerus Foundation. What on earth possessed you to do something like that?”

Damon was startled by the news that Karol knew about his meeting with Rachel Trehaine, and even more startled by the blond man’s seeming assumption that he had produced the note himself—but he took due note of the fact that Karol knew more about what was going on than his professed indifference had suggested. Was it possible, he wondered, that Karol and Eveline were trying to
protect
him? Were they refusing to talk to him because they were trying to keep him out of this weird affair? Karol had never been entirely at ease with him, so it was difficult for Damon to judge whether the blond man was any more unsettled than usual, but there was something about his manner which smacked of uncomfortable dishonesty.

I must be careful of seeing what I want to see, Damon thought. I must be careful of wanting to find a juicy mystery, or evidence that my paternal idol had feet of tawdry clay.

“Has Ahasuerus contacted you about the note?” he asked. “You weren’t named in it—only Eveline.”

“Eveline and I don’t have any secrets from one another.”

Damon wondered whether that meant that Ahasuerus had contacted Eveline and that Eveline had contacted Karol. “Don’t you feel the same way about Eveline as you do about Silas?” he asked. “Isn’t she just someone you worked with for so long that habit has bound up every last vestige of feeling? Why shouldn’t you have secrets from one another?”

“I’m
still
working with her,” Karol replied, again choosing to evade the real question.

“Not directly. She’s off-planet, in L-Five.”

“Modern communications make it easy enough to work in close association with people anywhere in the solar system. We’re involved with the same problems, constantly exchanging information. In spite of the hundreds of thousands of miles that lie between us, Eveline and I are close in a way that Silas and I never were. We’re in harmony, dedicated to a common cause.”

“A common cause which I deserted,” Damon said, taking up the apparent thread of the argument, “in spite of all the grand plans which Conrad Helier had for me. Is
that
why you and Eveline are trying to freeze me out of this? Is that why you resent my trying to
stir things up?
”

“I’m trying to do what your father would have wanted,” Karol told him awkwardly.

“He’s dead, Karol. In any case, you’re not
him
. You’re your own man now. You and I are perfectly free to build a relationship of our own. Silas could see that—Mary too.”

“Fostering you was a job your father asked me to do,” Karol retorted bluntly. “I’d have continued doing it, if there had been anything more I could do. I
will
continue, if there’s anything I can do in future—but you can’t expect me to forget that what
you
wanted was to get away, to abandon everything your father tried to pass on to you in order to run wild. You ran away from us, Damon, and changed your name; you declared yourself irrelevant to our concerns. Maybe it’s best if you stick to that course and let us stick to ours. I don’t know why you’re so interested in this Eliminator stuff, but I really do think it’s best if you let it alone.”

Damon didn’t want to become sidetracked into discussions of his irresponsible adolescence, or his not-entirely-respectable present. “Why should anyone accuse Conrad Helier of being an enemy of mankind?” he asked bluntly.

“He’s dead, Damon,” Karol said softly. “Nobody can hurt him, whatever lies they make up.”

“They can hurt you and Eveline. Proofs will follow, they say. Whatever they’re planning to say about Conrad Helier will reflect on you too—and would even if he were just another colleague you happened to work with once upon a time, to whose fate you were now indifferent.”

“Conrad never did anything that I would be ashamed of,” Karol said, his voice becoming even softer.

Damon let a second or two go by for dramatic effect and then said: “What if he
were
alive, Karol?”

The blond man had sufficient sense of drama to match Damon’s pregnant pause before saying: “If he were, he’d be able to work on the problem which faces us just now. That would be good. He’s present in spirit, of course, in every logical move I make, every hypothesis I frame, and every experiment I design. He made me what I am, just as he made the whole world what it is. You and I are both his heirs, and we’ll never be anything else, however hard we try to avoid the consequences of that fact.” He tried to fix Damon with a stern gaze, but stern gazes weren’t his forte.

The blond man paused before a rocky outcrop which was blocking their path, and knelt down as if to duck any further questions. Miming intense concentration, he scanned the tideline which ran along the wave-smoothed rock seven or eight centimeters above the ground. It was a performance far more suited to his natural inclinations than stern fatherly concern.

The wrack which clung to the rock was slowly drying out in the sun, but the incoming tide would return before it was desiccated. In the meantime, the limp tresses provided shelter for tiny crabs and whelks. Where the curtains of weed were drawn slightly apart barnacles had glued themselves to the stony faces and sea anemones nestled in crevices like blobs of purple jelly. The barer rock above the tide line was speckled with colored patches of lichen and tarry streaks which might—so far as Damon could tell—have been anything at all.

Karol took a penknife from his pocket and scraped some of the tarry stuff from the rock into the palm of his hand, inspecting it carefully. Eventually, he tipped it into Damon’s hand and said: “
That’s
far more important than all this nonsense about Eliminators.”

“What is it?” Damon asked.

“We don’t have a name for the species yet—nor the genus, nor even the family. It’s a colonial organism reminiscent in some ways of a slime mold. It has a motile form which wanders around by means of protoplasmic streaming, but the colonies can also set rock-hard, setting their molecular systems in sugar like sporulating
bacteria or algae that have to withstand ultralow temperatures. In its dormant state it’s as indestructible as any life-form can be, able to survive all kinds of extremes. Its genetic transactions are inordinately complicated and so far very mysterious—but that’s not surprising, given that it’s not DNA-based. Its methods of protein synthesis are quite different from ours, based in a radically different biochemical code.”

Damon had given up genetics ten years before and had carefully set aside much of what his foster parents had tried so assiduously to teach him, but he understood the implications of what Kachellek was saying. “Is it new,” he asked, “or just something we managed to overlook during the last couple of centuries?”

“We can’t be absolutely certain,” Karol admitted scrupulously. “But we’re reasonably certain that it wasn’t
here
before. It’s a recent arrival in the littoral zone, and as of today it hasn’t been reported anywhere outside these islands.”

Damon wondered whether
as of today
meant that Karol had reason to expect a new report tomorrow or the day after, perhaps when the mud samples he’d loaded onto the lorry had been sieved and sorted. “So where did it come from?” he asked.

“We don’t know yet. The obvious contenders are up, down. . . .” The blond man seemed to be on the point of adding a third alternative, but he didn’t; instead he went on: “I’m looking downward; Eveline’s investigating the other direction.”

Damon knew that he was expected to rise to the challenge and follow the line of argument. The
Kite
had been dredging mud from the ocean bed, and Eveline Hywood was in the L-5 space colony. “You think it might have evolved way down in the deep trenches,” Damon said. “Maybe it’s been there all along, ever since DNA itself evolved—or maybe not. Perhaps it started off in one of those bizarre enclaves that surround the black smokers where the tectonic plates are pulling apart and has only just begun expanding its territory, the way DNA did a couple of billion years ago—or maybe it was our deep-sea probes that brought it out and gave it the vital shove.

“On the other hand, maybe it drifted into local space from elsewhere in the universe, the way the panspermists think that
all
life gets to planetary surfaces. We have probes out there too, don’t we—little spaceships patiently trawling for Arrhenius spores and
stirring things up
as they go. Maybe it’s been in the system for a long, long time, or maybe it arrived the day before yesterday . . . in which case, there might be more to come, and soon. I can see why you’re interested. How different from DNA is its replicatory system?”

“We’re still trying to confirm a formula,” Karol told him. “We’ve slipped into the habit of calling it para-DNA, but it’s a lousy name because it implies that it’s a near chemical relative, and it’s not. It coils like DNA—it’s definitely a double helix of some kind—but its subunits are quite different. It seems highly unlikely that the two coding chemistries have a common ancestor, even at the most fundamental level of carbon-chain evolution. It’s almost certainly a separate creation.

“That’s not so surprising; whenever and wherever life first evolved there would surely have been several competing systems, and there’s no reason to suppose that one of them would prove superior in every conceivable environment. The hot vents down in the ocean depths are a different world. Life down there is chemosynthetic and thermosynthetic rather than photosynthetic. Maybe there was always room down there for more than one chemistry of life. Perhaps there are other kinds still down there. That’s what I’m trying to find out. In the meantime, Eveline’s looking at dust samples brought in by probes from the outer solar system. The Oort Cloud is full of junk, and although it’s very cold there now it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that life evolved in the outer regions of the solar system when the sun was a lot younger and hotter than it is now, or that spores of some kind could have drifted in from other secondary solar systems. We don’t know—
yet
.”

“You don’t think this stuff poses any kind of
threat
, do you?” said Damon, intrigued in spite of himself. “It’s not likely to start displacing DNA organisms, is it?”

“Until we know more about it,” Karol said punctiliously, “it’s difficult to know how far it might spread. It’s not likely to pose any kind of threat to human beings or any of our associated species, given the kind of nanotech defenses we can now muster, but that’s not why it’s important. Its mere existence expands the horizons of the imagination by an order of magnitude. What are a few crazy slanderers, even if they’re capable of inspiring a few crazy gunmen, compared with
this?
”

“If it
is
natural,” said Damon, “it could be the basis of a whole new spectrum of organic nanomachines.”

“It’s not obvious that there’d be huge potential in that,” Karol countered. “So far, this stuff hasn’t done much in the way of duplicating the achievements of life as we know it, let alone doing things that life as we know it has never accomplished. It might be woefully conventional by comparison with DNA, capable of performing a limited repertoire of self-replicating tricks with no particular skill; if so, it would probably be technologically useless, however interesting it might be in terms of pure science. We’re not looking to make another fortune, Damon—when I say this is important, I don’t mean commercially.”

“I never doubted it for a moment,” Damon said drily—and turned abruptly to look at the man who was rapidly coming up behind them. For a moment, it crossed his mind that this might be an Eliminator foot soldier, mad and homicidal, and he tensed reflexively. In fact, the man was an islander—and Karol Kachellek obviously knew him well.

“You’d better come quick, Karol,” the man said. “There’s something you really need to see. You too, Mr. Hart. It’s bad.”

T
he package had been dumped into the Web in hypercondensed form, just like any other substantial item of mail, but once it had been downloaded and unraveled it played for a couple of hours of real time. It had been heavily edited, which meant that the claim with which it was prefaced—that nothing in it had been altered or falsified—couldn’t be taken at all seriously.

The material was addressed To all lovers of justice, and it was titled Absolute Proof That Conrad Helier Is an Enemy of Mankind. It originated—or purported to originate—from the mysterious Operator 101. Karol Kachellek and Damon watched side by side, in anxious silence, as it played back on a wallscreen in Karol’s living quarters.

The first few minutes of film showed a man bound to a huge, thronelike chair. His wrists and ankles were pinned by two pairs of plastic sheaths, each three centimeters broad, which clasped him more tightly if he struggled against them. He was in a sitting position, his head held upright by an elaborate VE hood which neatly enclosed the upper part of his skull. His eyes were covered, but his nose, mouth, and chin were visible. His pelvic region was concealed by a loincloth. There were two feeding tubes whose termini were close to the prisoner’s mouth, and there was a third tube connected to a needle lodged in his left forearm, sealed in place by a strip of artificial flesh.

“This man,” a voice-over announced, “is Silas Arnett, an intimate friend and close colleague of Conrad Helier. He has been imprisoned in this manner for seventy-two hours, during which time almost all of the protective nanomachinery has been eliminated from his body. He is no longer protected against injury, nor can he control pain.”