Inherit the Earth (39 page)

“I never pretended to die,” the bespectacled man observed drily. “I just faded out of view. Would you like something to eat, Silas?”

“I’ve eaten,” Silas replied brusquely.

“To drink?”

Silas looked at Damon’s glass. “Just water,” he said. He let Saul go to the bathroom to get it while he studied Damon. Saul didn’t hurry.

“You all right?” Silas said. “I heard they shot you too.”

“Twice,” said Damon. “My own fault—the first time I wouldn’t lie down for the gas and the second time I wouldn’t wait for a polite invitation. I’m fine—and still alive by everyone’s reckoning, including the Eliminators who have me down as an enemy of mankind. What
does
the G stand for?”

“Gantz,” Silas told him, watching the bathroom door at which
Saul had not yet reappeared. “He’s Leon Gantz’s grandson, nephew of Paul and Ramon—and his other granddaddy was one of the insiders in the Zimmerman coup. He’s one of the last best products of the Old Reproductive System.”

Damon said nothing while he mulled over the possible significance of this revelation.

“How’s Diana?” Silas asked, groping for a topic of conversation more suited to an emotional reunion between a foster father and his estranged child.

“We split up,” Damon told him. By way of retaliation he asked: “How’s Cathy?”

“She thinks I’m dead. I haven’t decided yet whether to let her in on the secret.”

“But you’re going to keep it from the rest of the world?” Damon asked, with one eye on the third party who had just reemerged from the bathroom.

Silas shrugged as he accepted a tumbler of water from Frederick Gantz Saul’s steady hand; his own was trembling slightly. “Between them, PicoCon and Karol haven’t left me a lot of choice, have they? I’m flattered that Eveline wants me back, but it would have been nice to have a less pressured decision to make.”

“
Is
it just Karol and Eveline?” Damon asked. “Or is there someone else jerking
their
strings?”

It seemed that Silas couldn’t quite meet Damon’s eye, so he looked sideways at Saul, as if to say that there were secrets that still needed to be kept.

“He’s been told a thousand times,” Saul said, “but he still won’t believe it. He even tried to imply that it was
you
he was rebelling against, because you were the only real father figure he had. You’re the one who owes it to him to explain that flesh and blood do not a father make.”

“Clever bastard, isn’t he?” Silas said to Damon. Then he sighed theatrically. “We lied to you, Damon. We lied to the world. Conrad’s alive. Not on Earth, mind—but he
is
alive. I didn’t want to lie to you, but by the time I was ready to break
ranks I wasn’t sure I could tell you without also telling the world.”

It was no longer a surprise, but it
was
a shock of sorts. Damon had to sit down again, and this time he looked into the fire, at the glowing ash flaking from the half-consumed logs.

Silas took the seat next to him: the seat that had been reserved for him all along. “What else do you want to know?” he said quietly. “Saul knows it all by now, I suppose—but he might not have given you a straight account of it. I’m not here to negotiate with him, or to set the seal on any agreements. I’m just here to acknowledge that we’ve taken note of his concerns.”

“So he really is playing God,” Damon said, meaning Conrad Helier. “Even to the extent of moving in mysterious ways.”

“We’re not interested in playing God,” Silas countered. “That’s
Saul’s
way of looking at the world. The man who taunted me while he made up that fatuous tape mistook the meaning of that quote he flung in my face. We never aimed to
occupy
the vacant throne of God—we just decided that we had to do our bit to help compensate for its vacancy. We’re not interested in moving into Olympus—we never have been.”

“You’d be happier in the palace of Pandemonium, no doubt?” Damon suggested sarcastically.

“Damon, I don’t want to be a god and I
certainly
don’t want to be a devil. I’m a man, like other men. So is Conrad.”

“Except that you’re both supposed to be dead. I couldn’t believe that my father had faked his death, even though the Mirror Man seemed so very sure. Even after the Mirror Man had shown me that if anyone in the world had the technical resources to
make
sure, it was him, I wouldn’t concede. I couldn’t believe that Conrad Helier could be so hypocritical—to preach the gospel of posthumous reproduction as forcefully as he did, and then go into hiding while his friends brought up his own child. If you and he are men like other men, how come there’s one law for the rest and another for you?”

“Conrad did back himself into a corner,” Silas admitted. “Sometimes, when you change your mind, you have to figure
out how best to limit the damage. Being men like other men, Conrad and I don’t always get things right. If you live as long as you might, Damon, you’ll make plenty of errors of judgment along the way.”

“Like designing the viruses which caused the Crash? You did that too, I suppose?”

“We designed one of them. To this day, I don’t know for sure who designed the others, although we always suspected that Surinder Nahal must have made at least one—and it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if Frederick G. Saul had a hand in it somewhere, even if the hand in question was only clutching a thick wad of cash. It’s possible that some of the transformers really did arise naturally—in which case we needn’t have bothered—but I always thought the Gaian Mystics were fools to insist beforehand that Ma Nature would find a way, and even bigger fools to insist afterwards that she had. The arguments in the second of my fake confessions were good ones: we didn’t kill anybody; we just took away a power which should never have been claimed as a right. When the multiplication of the species reached the point at which the ecosphere stood in imminent danger of irreversible injury, the increase had to be halted, and the reproduction of individuals had to be limited in the interests of the whole community. The Crash had to happen. Conrad tried to make it as painless as possible. If you’d been in his place you’d have done it too.”

“So why not take credit for it? Why not admit it, instead of letting the despised Gaian Mystics credit it to the Earth Mother? Why let it hang over your reputation like the sword of Damocles, waiting for a rival megacorp or a maverick Eliminator to cut it loose?”

“The fallout would have interfered with our work. If Conrad had tangled himself up with the necessity to plead his case in the media, he wouldn’t have been able to get the New Reproductive System up and running so quickly. Sometimes, hypocrisy is unavoidable.”

Damon curled his lip righteously. “And it still is, isn’t it?” he
said. “Otherwise, Conrad would be able to stand up and take due credit for his latest parlor trick.
He
designed para-DNA, didn’t he? Eveline’s so-called discovery is just one more Big Lie—a lie that Mr. Saul’s friends were trying to nip in the bud. That’s what the whole pantomime was intended to do: squash
your
plan before it had a chance to interfere with
theirs
.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Silas said sourly. “As soon as I retired, I was out of it. After that, neither Eveline nor Karol would give me the time of day. You’ll have to ask Saul for
recent
intelligence of Conrad’s plans.”

Saul had taken his own seat by now. “You’re too modest, Silas,” he said. “You knew the way things were heading. Isn’t that why you left?”

“G for Gantz,” Silas repeated. “Is that
really
what this has all been about? Keep your sticky hands off
my
toys?”

“No, it isn’t,” Saul replied sharply. “It isn’t a
petty
matter at all. I only wish your friends had realized that.”

“You’re losing me,” Damon observed.

Saul said nothing, stubbornly waiting for Silas to take the responsibility. “You’re right, Damon,” Silas said eventually. “Para-DNA is a laboratory product. We worked on it for years: a non-DNA life system capable of forming its own ecospheres in environments more extreme than the ones DNA can readily cope with. At first we were talking in terms of bridging the gap between the organic and the inorganic—a whole new nanotech combining the best features of both. The early talk about applications was all about seeding Mars and the asteroids, perhaps as a step in terraformation but not necessarily. Conrad was disappointed about the failure of our probes to find extraterrestrial life, and doubly disappointed by the fact that all the pre-Crash arks that set out in search of new Ararats seemed to have failed in their quest. It was another little flaw in the universal design which Conrad set out to correct. He didn’t think of it as playing God—merely compensating once again, in a wholly
human
way, for the vacancy of the divine throne.”

“But that was only the
first
plan, wasn’t it?” Saul put in.

“Yes,” Silas admitted. “Eventually, Conrad began considering other possible applications. There were a lot of people who were glad that the probes and the arks hadn’t turned up anything at all: people who’d always thought of alien life in terms of competition and invasion, as a potential
threat
. Conrad despised that kind of cowardice—but there’s something about the view of Earth you get from Lagrange-Five and all points farther out that gives people a jaundiced view of the people at the bottom of the gravity well. You’ve probably seen it in Eveline, if you’ve talked to her lately—and Mr. Saul is unfortunately correct in judging that Eveline’s not much more than Conrad’s echo.

“Anyway, for whatever reason, Conrad became increasingly disappointed by the development of the utopia which the New Reproductive System was supposed to have produced. He felt that the old world still cast too deep and dark a shadow over the new. He thought he’d put an end to the old patterns of inheritance, but he was overoptimistic—as you can readily judge from the fact that men like Frederick Gantz Saul are now safely ensconced in the uppermost echelons of PicoCon. For a brief while, when the viruses seemed to have the upper hand, everyone was on the same side—or so it appeared to Conrad—but when the menace had been overcome and the NRS was up and running, the old divisions soon reappeared.”

“Remember, though,” Saul put in, “that Conrad Helier was a backslider too. You’re the living proof of it, Damon. Even he couldn’t live up to the highest principles of the utopia he’d sketched out on his drawing board.”

Silas ignored that. “Conrad became convinced that Earth had lost its progressive impetus,” he said dully. “He became very fond of going on and on about new technology being used to preserve and reproduce the past instead of providing a womb for new ambition. It was mostly hot air, I thought—that was one of the reasons why we fell out. He came to believe that the only way to get things moving here on Earth in a way that would give proper support and encouragement to the people out on the frontier—the Lagrangists and their kin—was to get everyone
back on the same side, united against a perceived threat. He came to think that Earth was in need of an alien invader: an all-purpose alien invader which could turn its hand to all kinds of tasks.”

Damon shook his head. “Para-DNA,” he said. “Utterly harmless but absolutely fascinating, etcetera, etcetera—until more and more of it turns up and it begins to reveal its true versatility. And what then, Silas? Conrad can’t possibly be backslider enough to start killing people.”

“No,” Silas said unhappily. “But he doesn’t have any compunctions at all about destroying
property
. That, I assume, is what attracted the attention and fervent interest of Frederick
Gantz
Saul and the present controllers of the Gantz patents. Hence the warning shots fired across our bows. Hence this meeting, in the course of which Mr. Saul will no doubt commission both of us to explain to Conrad and Eveline that the fun’s over: that Eveline’s preemptive move to established the extraterrestrial credentials of para-DNA has to be our last. I assume he’s about to tell us that if the plan goes forward one more inch he and his friends will come after us
hard
, with authentically lethal force.”

Damon looked at Saul, who was still looking at Silas. “You shouldn’t have retired, Silas,” Saul remarked. “You should have stayed on the inside, to maintain a bridge to sanity.”

“Conrad’s not mad,” Silas was quick to retort. “His anxieties were real enough. He’s afraid that the earthbound majority of the human race is on the brink of exporting its spirit of adventure to virtual environments, by courtesy of PicoCon’s VE division and all the bright young men of Damon’s generation. The fashionability of VE games, VE dramas, and telephone VEs is already helping to move a substantial part of everyday human existence and everyday communication into a parallel dimension where artifice rules—and the cleverer the VE designers and the AI answering machines become, the more secure that reign will be.

“Conrad thinks that people shouldn’t be living in the ruins of the old world, contentedly huddling together in the better parts of the old cities, binding themselves ever more tightly to their
stations in the Web like flies mummified in spider silk. Nor does he think it’s rebellion enough against that kind of a world for the disaffected young to use derelict neighborhoods as adventure playgrounds where they can carve one another up in meaningless ritual duels. He thinks that if we can’t maintain some kind of historical momentum, we’ll stagnate. He thinks that we have to build and keep on building, to grow and keep on growing, to expand the human empire and keep on expanding it, to
make progress
. If people need a spur to urge them on, he’s more than willing to provide it. I don’t say that’s right, but it’s not
mad
.