Inherit the Earth (35 page)

The pattern had the strength to support tall structures—Lenny’s stack was forty stories high—but the resultant buildings had zigzag edges that looked decidedly untidy. The individual apartments came out like long square tubes with triangular-sectioned spaces behind each sidewall, into which all the supportive apparatus of modern life had to be built. Bathrooms and kitchens tended to be consigned to this inconvenient residuum, so that the square section only needed one dividing wall separating living room and bedroom.

All this might have seemed charming, in a minimalist sort of way, had it not been for the fact that the entire edifice in which Lenny Garon lived had been gantzed out of pale gray concrete
rubble and dark gray mud. Beside the more upmarket blocks that had been tastefully decorated in lustrous pigments borrowed from flowering plants or the wing cases of beetles, Lenny’s building looked like a glorified termite mound.

“Thanks for coming, Damon,” Lenny said, anxiously blinking his eyes as he checked the corridor while letting Damon into a capsule that was only slightly more squalid than the rest. “I really appreciate your giving me the benefit of your experience.”

It took Damon a moment or two to realize that the boy was putting on a show for the eyes and ears that even walls as shabby as these must be expected to contain, in case anyone should ever consult them with a view to identifying accessories to a crime. He didn’t bother to add his own line to the silly charade.

“Thanks, Lenny,” Madoc said to the anxious streetfighter, once Damon was safely inside. “Now take a walk, will you. I’ll pay you a couple of hundred in rent, but you’ll have to forget you ever saw us, okay?”

Lenny was evidently disappointed by the abrupt dismissal, but he was appropriately impressed by the notion that he could sublet his apartment by the hour for real money. “Be my guest,” he said—but he dawdled at the door before opening up again. “I hear you’re an enemy of mankind now, Damon. Good going—anything I can do, you only have to ask.”

“Thanks,” Damon said. “I will.”

As the door slid shut behind the boy Damon looked around the room, wondering why people still chose to live this way in a city full of empty spaces. While the greater part of Los Angeles slowly rotted down to dust—whole counties ripe for redevelopment by today’s more expert gantzers—it was preference rather than economic necessity which kept its poorer people huddled together in neighborhoods full of high-rise blocks, living in narrow rooms with fold-down beds, kitchens the size of cupboards, and even smaller bathrooms.

Perhaps, Damon thought, people had grown so completely accustomed to crowding during the years before the Crash that
their long-lived children had had the habit ingrained in their mental pathways during infancy, and there simply weren’t enough children in Lenny Garon’s generation to start a mass migration to fresher fields. That kind of explanation seemed, at any rate, to make more sense than oft-parroted clichés about buildings needing services and the proximity principles of supply and transport.

“I suppose you heard what happened?” Madoc said miserably.

“Yamanaka gave me the brute facts,” Damon admitted. “I talked to Diana, but she had other things on her mind and it wouldn’t have been a good idea to tell me anything the cops didn’t already know. You found a VE pak—have you had a chance to play it through?”

“Sure. I took it all the way to the top—the Old Lady herself—so that we could play it through without anyone else looking in. It shows Silas Arnett being questioned by Surinder Nahal, giving answers very different from those he gave on the tape that was dumped on the Web. Do you want to see it? The Old Lady says it’s just another fake, probably cooked up for Interpol’s benefit.”

“It doesn’t show Nahal being killed?”

Madoc was infinitely more willing than Hiru Yamanaka to display his surprise. “No,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “Why would it?”

“That’s what Yamanaka’s expecting. They found Silas dead and a tape that shows him being shot—as if it were an execution.”

“Eliminators?” Madoc asked.

“That’s what it looks like,” Damon said with a sigh, “but we live in a very deceptive world. Unfortunately, the fact that it’s only one more fake cooked up for his benefit won’t make Yamanaka any less anxious to get his hands on the VE pak. Avoiding loss of face is just about the only thing left to him—he must know by now that the people behind this are out of reach. The
police might think they’re maintaining the law of the land, just as the Washington Rump still thinks it’s in charge of making it, but the whole system is exhausted. When all appearances can be manufactured, the concept of
evidence
loses its meaning.”

Madoc released the VE pak from where he’d loaded it into Lenny Garon’s console and passed it over to Damon. “Do you know who’s behind this?” he asked.

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Damon admitted. “According to a dream I had when they snatched me away from Karol’s friends, it’s someone who claims to be speaking on behalf of the entire world order, but that might be megalomania or simple overstatement.”

Madoc was so enthusiastic to say what he had to say that he didn’t bother to query Damon’s reference to a dream. “The Old Lady says that it’s someone from PicoCon. Someone high up in the corp structure.” He met Damon’s eyes anxiously, looking for a reaction.

“That would make sense,” Damon conceded. “It has to be someone with access to cutting-edge technology, and PicoCon is the edge beyond the edge. I’m sorry I got you into this, Madoc—I thought at first that it was just a petty thing. Nobody expects to go after an Eliminator Operator and run into the full might of PicoCon.”

“The cops know that I didn’t kill the guy whose body we found, don’t they?” Madoc queried uneasily.

“Sure. Yamanaka knows that the corpse was torched several hours before you got there. His own surveillance team gave you a perfect alibi. If you say the cops spooked you—came in without a proper warning or whatever—you might excuse the blow with the crowbar as a reflexive response. The LAPD will want to pay off some of their grievances against you, but a decent lawyer ought to be able to persuade a judge to take a reasonable view of the matter.”

“Who did kill him, do you think?” Madoc asked cautiously. “PicoCon?”

“I’m not sure that anybody did. I suspect that the orchestrator of this little pantomime is trying to establish that in today’s world a body, an autopsy, and a DNA analysis don’t add up to proof that someone is actually dead. The people behind this are convinced that Conrad Helier’s alive, and they refuse to be told that he’s not.”

“Where did they get a body with Surinder Nahal’s DNA?” Madoc wanted to know.

“Tissue-culture tanks that turn out steaks the size of a building could turn a half a liter of blood into a skeleton with a few vital organs and a covering of skin, without even needing rejuve technology to stretch the Hayflick limit. If Karol’s body ever gets fished out of the Pacific, I suspect it’ll be just as thoroughly beaten up and just as fake. None of which would prove anything about my father, who died in bed of natural causes—
his
cadaver would have gone to the medical examiner with every last anatomical detail in its proper place. As for Silas . . . well, it looks as if he really
might
be dead, but I don’t know what to believe anymore. What else have you got for me?”

“Not much,” Madoc admitted with an apologetic sigh. “The way the latest round of false testimony is being set in place, it
looks
as if this guy Nahal had some kind of grudge against your father and his cronies that he’d been nursing for a hundred years. It
looks
as if Nahal had Arnett snatched, and that he put out the counterfeit Operator one-oh-one stuff himself—although the word is already out that the woman who built up the Operator one-oh-one name and reputation has turned herself in to prove that her name’s been taken in vain. If you want stand-up proof that the
real
movers and shakers are PicoCon people, I don’t have any—and I don’t think you or I could ever come up with any. Do you think
they
killed Arnett so he couldn’t retract his confessions?”

Damon shrugged. “I haven’t been idling around while you’ve been battling it out with the LAPD,” he said. “I got kidnapped twice—once by Karol’s hirelings and once by some people who
didn’t want Karol’s hirelings to put me away. The second crowd introduced me to the VE to end all VEs—a manufactured dream, of the kind the industry’s been trying to develop for a century and more. It might have been a trick, and I suppose it
might
have been a real dream—but if it wasn’t the spokesman for the movers and shakers gave me a message to pass on to my dead father. Then they stuck me in a derelict house with Lenny’s friend Cathy to wait for the bloodhounds.” After a slight pause he went on: “The Old Lady has to be right. No one but PicoCon could have access to VE tech that far ahead of the market—although the guy I talked to, whose image was all tricked out like some chrome-plated holovid robot, spun me some line about products not being made for the market anymore.”

“Lenny told me about Cathy,” Madoc said. “Was she in on Arnett’s kidnap?”

“I don’t think so—although they probably planted the centipedes that disabled Silas’s defenses in her luggage when they found out he’d invited her to stay. Her abduction was just a red herring. Whoever’s doing this—and I mean the individual in charge of the operation, not the corp—believes in having his fun while he works.”

“What was the message to your father?” Madoc asked curiously but tentatively. He obviously half expected to be told that it wasn’t his business.

Damon didn’t see any need to keep that particular secret. “Stop playing God,” he said bluntly. When Madoc raised his eyebrows, expecting further elaboration, he added: “Apparently, everybody who’s anybody wants to play God nowadays, and the
big
gods way up on Olympus are trying to figure out a set of protocols that will allow them all to play together. They want everybody to abide by the rules. If the story I was told can be taken seriously, this thing got started because my foster parents turned churlish when they were invited to join the club. So did the people at Ahasuerus. The alleged purpose of this little game is simply to force them to play ball, but the fact that it’s being
formulated as a game certainly doesn’t mean that it’s harmless. You know what they say:
‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport
.’”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Madoc demanded obligingly.

“It means that self-appointed gods inevitably begin to see
everything
as a game,” Damon told him. “When you can do anything at all, you can only decide what to do at any particular moment on aesthetic grounds. Once you get past the groundwork of Creation, what is there to do with what you’ve made but play with it?”

Madoc picked up the thread of the argument readily enough. “Is that what your foster parents are doing? Playing a game with the world they made?”

Damon shrugged his shoulders. “If they are,” he said, “they’re being very secretive about it. Karol dropped a few hints, but the guys he hired to remove me from the action were giving nothing away. I suppose it’s only natural that after I dropped out they’d want me to get down on my knees and beg before they let me in again.”

“But you don’t want to get back in. You’ve got a life of your own now.”

“It’s not that simple anymore,” Damon said.

“It is if you want it to be.”

“I suppose I can simply refuse to play messenger no matter how hard I’m pressed,” Damon conceded, working through that train of thought. “I could go home, get back into my hood and pick up where I left off, building Planet X for those game players, designing phone tapes, putting Di into the pornotape and taking her out again, using her and then erasing all the recognizable aspects of her individuality. I
could
just get on with my work and hope that I’ll be allowed to get on with it in peace—except that after my little trip to Olympus, I’m no longer sure that kind of thing is worth doing. The chrome-plated cheat who told me I could fly was lying—but I think he was trying to persuade me that if only I were willing to come aboard I might be able to
learn
to fly.”

Madoc couldn’t follow that, but Damon was too preoccupied with his own train of thought to pause for fuller explanations. “The trouble is,” he went on, “that when you’ve looked up at Olympus and down into the ultimate abyss, it puts everything else into a new perspective—even though you know full well that it’s only a VE, just one more small step on the way to realizing
all
our dreams. That’s who the
real
movers and shakers were supposed to be, in the original poem: not statesmen or corpsmen, but dreamers of dreams.”

“Realizing our dreams is a long hard road for people like you and me,” Madoc pointed out. “Our kind of work might look a little shabby compared with PicoCon’s, but how else are people like us going to work our way up? Unless, of course, you’ve decided that now you’ve broken into your father’s money you might as well use it all. You don’t have to—just because you’re not a virgin anymore it doesn’t mean you’re a whore.” He sounded genuinely concerned for the matter of principle that seemed to be at stake.

“I want to
know
, Madoc,” Damon said softly. “I want to know
exactly
what’s going on—and you can’t find out for me. PicoCon has all the answers; maybe I
should
try to get aboard.”

“A corpsman? Not you, Damon. Not
that
.”