Inherit the Earth

Illustration by Mike Aspengren

Damon Hart never found it easy to get three boxes of groceries from the trunk of his car to his thirteenth floor apartment; it was a logistical problem with no easy solution, given that both his parking-slot and his apartment door were so far from the elevator. Some day, he supposed, he would have to invest in a collapsible electric cart, but such a purchase still seemed like another step in the long march to conformism—perhaps the one which would finally seal his fate.

By the time he opened the apartment door he felt distinctly ragged. He could have done without the carving-knife that slammed into the doorjamb ten centimeters away from his ducking head and stuck there, quivering.

“You bastard!” Diana said, rushing forward to meet him.

It didn’t take much imagination to figure out what had offended her so deeply. He should have tidied the work away, concealing it behind some gnomic password.

“It’s not a final cut,” he told her, setting the first box down and raising his arms with the palms flat in a placatory gesture. “It’s just a first draft. It won’t be you in the finished product—it won’t be anything like you.”

“That’s bullshit,” she said, her voice still taut with pent-up anger. “First draft, final cut—I don’t give a damn about that. It’s sick, Damon.”

He knew that it might add further fuel to her wrath but he deliberately turned his back on her and went back into the corridor to fetch the second box of groceries. This is it, he thought, as he picked it up. This is really it. In a ideal world there ought to be a more civilized way of breaking up, but theirs had always been a combative affair, whose every stress and strain became manifest in explosive anger. In the beginning, that had added excitement, but things had now reached the stage when all the storm and stress was a burden he could do without.

My fighting days are over, Damon thought. I can’t do it any more.

Once the last box was inside and the door was safely closed behind him, he felt that he was ready to face her. Her tremulous rage was already dissolving into tears and she was digging her fingernails into her palms so deeply that they were drawing blood. With Diana, violence always shifted abruptly into a masochistic phase; real pain was sometimes the only thing that could block out the kinds of distress with which her internal technology was not equipped to deal.

“You don’t want me at all,” she complained. “You don’t want any living partner. You only want my virtual shadow. You want a programmed slave, so you can be absolute master of your paltry sensations. That’s all you’ve ever wanted.”

“It’s a commission,” he retorted, bluntly. “It’s not a composition for art’s sake, or for my own gratification. It’s not even technically challenging. It’s just a piece of work. I’m using your body-template because it’s the only one I have that’s pre-programmed to a suitable level of complexity. Once I’ve got the basic script in place I’ll modify it out of all recognition—every feature, every contour, every dimension. I’m doing it this way because it’s the easiest way to do it. All I’m doing is constructing a pattern of appearances; it’s not real.”

“You don’t have any sensitivity at all, do you?” she came back. “To you, the templates you made of me are just something to be used in petty pornography. They’re just something convenient. It wouldn’t make any difference what kind of tape you were making, would it? You’ve got my image worked out to a higher degree of digital definition than any other, so you put it to whatever use you can: sex tapes, horror shows ... anything. It really doesn’t matter to you whether you’re making training tapes for surgeons or masturbation-aids for freaks, does it?”

As she spoke she struck out with her fists at various parts of his imaging system: the console, the screens and—most frequently—the dark helmet within whose inner surface a clever programmer could inscribe an infinite range of imaginary worlds.

“I can’t turn down commissions,” said Damon, as patiently as he could. “I need connections in the marketplace and I need to be given problems to solve. Yes, I want to do it all: sex tapes and training tapes, abstracts and dramas, games and repros and stupid ads. I want to be master of it all, because if I don’t have all the skills, anything I devise for myself will be tied down by the limits of my own idiosyncrasy.”

“And templating me was just another exercise. Building me into your machinery was just a way to practise.”

“It’s not you, Di,” he said, wishing that he could make her understand. “It’s not your shadow, certainly not your soul. It’s just an appearance. When I use it in my work I’m not using you.

“Oh no?” she said. “When you stick your head into that black hole and put that plastic suit on, you leave this world behind and you enter another. When you’re there—and you sure as hell aren’t here very often—the only contact you have with me is with my appearance, and what you do to that appearance is what you do to me. When you put my image through the kind of motions you’re building into that sleazy fantasy it’s me you’re doing it to, and no one else.”

“When it’s finished,” he said, doggedly, “it won’t look or feel anything like you. Would you rather I paid a copyright fee to reproduce some stock character? Would you rather I sealed myself away for hours on end with a hired model?”

“I’d rather you spent some time with me,” she told him. “I’d rather you lived in the actual world instead of devoting yourself entirely to substitutes. I never realised that giving up fighting meant giving up life.”

“You had no right to put the hood on,” Damon told her, coldly. “I can’t work properly if I feel that you’re looking over my shoulder all the time. That’s worse than knowing that I might have to duck when I come through the door because you could be waiting for me with a deadly weapon.”

“It’s only a kitchen-knife. At the worst it would have put your eye out.”

“I can’t afford to take a week off work while I grow a new eye—and I don’t find experiences like that amusing or instructive.”

“You were always too much of a coward to be a first-rate fighter, ” she told him, trying hard to be scornful. “You switched to the technical side of the business because you couldn’t take the cuts.” Damon had never been a reckless fighter, all flamboyance and devil-my-care; he had always fought to win with the minimum of effort and the minimum of personal injury. Because most of his opponents hadn’t cared much about skill, or art, or even sensible self-preservation, he had won four out of five of his fights. He didn’t consider that to be evidence of stupidity or stubbornness—and he’d switched to tape-doctoring because it was more challenging and more interesting than carving people up.

“If you want the sound and fury of the streets,” he said, tiredly, “you know where they are.”

“You don’t need me any more, do you?” she complained. “All you ever wanted of me is in that template. As long as you have my appearance programmed into your private world you can do anything you like with me, without ever having to worry whether I’ll step out of line. You’d rather have virtual image than a real person, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t even take that helmet off to eat and drink if you didn’t have to. If you had any idea how much you’ve changed since...”

It was probably truer than she thought, but he didn’t see any need to be ashamed of it. The whole point about the world inside a VR hood, backed up by the full panoply of suit-induced tactile sensation, was that it was better than the real world: brighter, cleaner and more controllable. Earth wasn’t hell any more, thanks to the New Reproductive System and the wonders of internal technology, but it wasn’t heaven either. Heaven was something a man could only hope to find on the other side of experience, in the virtuous world of virtual imagery.

The brutal truth of the matter, Damon thought, was that everything of Diana Caisson that he actually needed really was programmed into her template. The absence from his life of her changeable, complaining, untrustworthy, knife-throwing self wouldn’t leave a yawning gap.

“You’re right,” he told her. “I’ve changed. So have you. That’s OK. We’re authentically young; we’re supposed to change. We’re supposed to become different people, to try out all the personalities of which we’re capable. The time for constancy is a long way ahead of us yet.” He wondered, as he said it, whether it was true. Was this really just a phase in an evolutionary process, or was it a permanent capitulation? Was he taking a rest from the kind of hyped-up sensation-seeking existence he’d led while running with Madoc Tamlin’s gang, or was he turning into one of the meek whose alleged destiny was to inherit the Earth?

“I want the template back,” Diana said, sharply. “When I go, I’m taking my virtual shadow with me.”

“You can’t do that,” Damon retorted, knowing that he had to put on the appearance of a fight before he eventually gave in, lest it be too obvious that all he had to do was remold her simulacrum from the modified echoes which he had built into half a dozen different commercial tapes of various kinds. While he only required her image, he could always get her back, no matter how comprehensively and how ostentatiously he purged his systems of her likeness.

“I’m doing it,” she told him, firmly. “You’re going to have to start that slimy sideshow from scratch, whether you pay for a ready-made template or pay for some whore who’ll let you build a new one on your own.”

“If I’d known,” he said, with calculated provocativeness, “I wouldn’t have had to struggle upstairs with three boxes of groceries.”

From there it was only a few more steps to a renewal of the armed struggle, but he kept the knife out of it, and his aim—as always—was to win with the minimum of fuss. He made her work hard to dispel her bad feeling in pain and physical stress, but she got there in the end, without having to scream too much abuse.

Afterwards, he helped her pack.

There wasn’t that much to collect. It only filled four boxes—and because there were two of them to do the work, they didn’t pose that much of a logistical problem.

When he got back to the apartment, the cops were waiting for him. Damon knew that it couldn’t be a trivial matter if they had taken the trouble to call in person. Even the cops conducted their interviews by video, unless they had some special reason for appearing in the flesh.

“Whatever it is,” Damon was quick to say, as a smartcard identifying the senior man as Inspector Hiru Yamanaka of Interpol was held out for his inspection, “I’m not involved. I don’t run with the gang any more and I don’t have any idea what they’re up to. These days, I only go out to fetch the groceries.”

The men from Interpol preceded Damon into the apartment, ignoring the stream of protestations. Yamanaka showed not a flicker of interest as his heavy-lidded gaze took in the knife stuck into the door-jamb, but his unnamed sidekick took silent but ostentatious offence at the untidy state of the room. As soon as the door shut Yamanaka said: “What do you know about the Eliminators, Mr. Hart?”

“I was never that kind of crazy,” Damon told him, affrontedly. “I was a serious street fighter, not a hobbyist assassin.”

“No one’s accusing you of anything,” the second cop said, in the unreliably casual way cops had.

Damon knew no more about the Eliminators than anyone else—perhaps less, given that he was no passionate follower of the kind of newstape which followed their activities with avid fascination. He was not entirely unsympathetic to those who thought it direly unjust that longevity, the pain-control, immunity to disease and resistance to injury were simply commodities to be bought off the nanotech shelf, possessed in the fullest measure only by the rich, but he certainly wasn’t sufficiently hung up about it to become a terrorist crusader. The Eliminators were on the lunatic fringe of the many disparate and disorganised communities of interest fostered by the Web; they were devoted to the business of giving earnest consideration to the question of who might actually deserve to live forever. Some of their so-called Operators were into the habit of naming those whom they considered “unworthy of eternity,” via messages dispatched to netboards from illicit temporary linkpoints, usually accompanied by downloadable packages of “evidence” which put the case for elimination. The first few freelance executions had unleashed a tide of media alarm—which had, of course, served to glamourize the whole enterprise and conjure into being a veritable legion of amateur assassins. Being named by a well-known operator was not yet a guarantee that one would be attacked and perhaps killed, but it was something that had to be taken seriously.

It didn’t take much imagination to understand that Interpol must be keen to nail a few guilty parties and impose some severe punitive sanctions, pour encourager les autres, but Damon couldn’t begin to figure out why their suspicions might have turned in his direction.

“May I?” Yamanaka asked. His neatly-manicured finger was pointing to the windowscreen.

“Be my guest,” Damon said, sourly.

Yamanaka’s fingers did a brief dance on the windowscreen’s keyboard. The resting display gave way to a pattern of words etched blue on black:

Damon felt a sinking sensation in his belly. He knew that he ought to have been able to regard the message with complete indifference, but the simple fact was that he couldn’t.

“What has that to do with me?” he asked, combatively.

“According to our records,” Yamanaka said, smoothly, “you didn’t adopt your present name until ten years ago, when you were in your teens. Before that, you were known as Damon Helier. You’re Conrad Helier’s natural son.”

“So what? He died twenty years before I was bom, no matter what that crazy says. We’re about to begin the twenty-third century—it doesn’t matter any more who anybody’s natural father was.”

“To most people,” Yamanaka agreed, “it’s a complete irrelevance—but not to you, Mr. Hart. You were given your father’s surname. Your four foster-parents were all close colleagues of your father. Your father even left money in trust for you, which you inherited a couple of years after changing your name. I know that you’ve never touched the money, and that you don’t see your foster-parents any longer, and that you’ve done your utmost to distance yourself from the destiny which your father apparently planned out for you—but that doesn’t signify irrelevance, Mr. Hart. It suggests that you took a strong dislike to your father and everything he stood for.”

“So you think I might do something like this? I’m not that stupid, and I’m certainly not that crazy. Who put you on to me? Who pointed the finger at me? Was it Karol Kachellek?”

“No one identified you as a possible suspect,” the Interpol man said. “We’re checking everyone who might have some kind of grudge against Conrad Helier—or Conrad Helier’s memory. We know that Operator 101 always transmits his denunciations from the L.A. area, and you’ve been living hereabouts throughout the time he’s been active.”

“I told you—I’m not that kind of lunatic, and I try never to think about Conrad Helier and the plans he had for me. I’m my own man, and I have my own life to lead. Why are you so interested in a message that’s so patently false? You can’t possibly believe that Conrad Helier is still alive—or that he was an enemy of mankind, whatever that’s supposed to mean.”

“We’re interested because it’s a new departure,” Yamanaka said, evenly. “No operator, including 101 has ever used the phrase enemy of mankind before. Nor has any ever appealed to kindred spirits to do anything other than kill someone. It might be a hoax, or course—one of the nastiest aspects of the Eliminator’s game is that anyone can play. This code number’s been used eight times but that doesn’t necessarily mean that all the messages came from one source. We became even more interested when we began checking it out. You’re not the only person connected with Conrad Helier living hereabouts.”

“One of my foster-parents, Silas Arnett, lives south of San Francisco,” Damon admitted. “I haven’t seen him in years. We don’t communicate at all.”

“He seems to have disappeared from his home,” Yamanaka said. “We don’t know how long he’s been missing, but we fear foul play. Another of your father’s contemporaries, Surinder Nahal—the only person who might conceivably qualify as an enemy of his, according to our files—has an address in San Diego, but he’s proving equally difficult to trace.”

“I don’t know Nahal at all,” Damon said, truthfully.

“Karol Kachellek also claimed that he hadn’t seen Arnett for many years,” Yamanaka added. “Eveline Hywood said the same. It seems that your surviving foster-parents fell out with one another as well as with you.”

“Maybe. Silas’s decision to retire must have seemed to Karol and Eveline to be a failure of vocation almost as worthy of censure as my own: yet another betrayal of Conrad Helier’s sacred cause.”

Yamanaka nodded, as if he understood—but Damon knew that he almost certainly didn’t. It was difficult to guess Yamanaka’s true age, because a man of his standing would have the kind of internal technology which was supposedly capable of sustaining eternal youth, but Damon judged that he was no centenarian. To the policeman, as to Damon, Conrad Helier’s career would be stuff of history. At school he must have been told that the artificial wombs which Conrad Helier perfected, and the techniques which allowed such wombs to produce legions of healthy infants while the plague of sterility spread like wildfire across the globe, were the salvation of the species—but that didn’t mean that he understood the reverence in which Conrad Helier had been held by his co-workers.

“Do you have any idea why anyone would want to blacken your father’s name fifty years after his death, Mr. Hart?” Yamanaka asked, with a blandness that was patently false.

“I was encouraged in every possible way to see my father as the greatest hero and saint the world ever had,” Damon said. “I couldn’t follow in his footsteps, and I didn’t want to, but that doesn’t mean that I disapprove of where they led. Whoever posted this notice is sick.”

“There were several witnesses to the death of Conrad Helier,” the Interpol man said, matter-of-factly. “The doctor who was in attendance and the embalmer who prepared the body for the funeral both confirm that they carried out DNA-checks on the corpse, and that the gene-map matched Conrad Helier’s records. If the man whose body was cremated on 27 January 2147 wasn’t Conrad Helier then the gene-map on file in the Central Directory must have been substituted.” He paused briefly, then said: “You don’t look at all like your father. Is that deliberate, or is it simply that you resemble your mother?”

“I’ve never gone in for cosmetic reconstruction,” Damon told him, warily. “I have no idea what my mother looked like; I don’t even know her name. I understand that her ova were stripped and frozen at the peak of the Crisis, when they were afraid that the world’s entire stock might be wiped out by the plague. There’s no surviving record of her name. At that time, according to my co-parents, nobody was overly particular about where healthy ova came from; they just wanted to get as many as they could in the bank. They were stripping them from anyone more than five years old, so it’s possible that my mother was a mere infant.”

“It’s possible, then, that your natural mother is still alive,” Yamanaka observed.

“If she is,” Damon pointed out, “she can’t possibly know that her ovum was inseminated by Conrad Helier’s sperm and that I was the result.”

“I suppose Eveline Hywood and Mary Hallam must both have been infected before their wombs could be stripped,” Yamanaka said, disregarding the taboos which would presumably continue to inhibit free conversation regarding the legacy of the plague until the last survivors of that era had retired from public life. “Or was it that Conrad Helier was reluctant to select one of your co-parents as a natural mother in case it affected the partnership?”

“I don’t think any of this is relevant to the matters you’re investigating,” Damon said, “and I think the investigation itself is a waste of time.”

“I don’t know what might be relevant and what might not,” Yamanaka said unapologetically. “The message supposedly deposited by Operator 101 might be pure froth, and there might be nothing sinister in the disappearance of Arnett and Nahal—but this could represent the beginning of a new and nastier phase of Eliminator activity. They already attract far too much media attention, and this story is only one step short of becoming a headline scandal. I have to investigate it at least as assiduously as the dozens of newsmen who must have been commissioned to start digging, and I need to stay at least one step ahead of them. I’m sorry to have troubled you, but I judged it to be necessary, if only to inform you of what had happened.”

He’s delicately implying that I might be in danger, Damon thought. If he’s right, and Silas’s disappearance has something to do with the message, this really might be the beginning of something nasty. Even if it’s only a newstape hatchet job...

“I’ll ask around,” he said, carefully. “If I discover anything that might help you, I’ll be sure to let you know.”

“Thank you, Mr Hart,” the man from Interpol said, offering no clue as to exactly what he understood by Damon’s promise to ask around. “I’m grateful for your cooperation.”

“It’s too tight,” the boy complained. “I can’t move properly.”

“No it’s not,” said Madoc Tamlin, with careful patience, as he knelt to complete the synaptic links in the reta mirabile which covered the fighter’s body like a bright spiderweb. “It’s no tighter than pants and a shirt. You can move quite freely.”

The boy’s fearful eyes looked over Tamlin’s shoulder, lighting on Damon’s face. Damon saw the sudden blaze of belated recognition. “Hey,” the boy said, “you’re Damon Hart! I got a dozen of your fight tapes. You going to be doing the tape for this? That’s great! My name’s Lenny Garon.”

Damon didn’t bother to interrupt the flow to tell the kid that he hadn’t come to watch the fight or that he hadn’t—as yet—been contracted to doctor the tapes. He understood how scared the youngster must be. The fight was only for show, but that didn’t mean the kid wasn’t going to get hurt; in fact, if Damon judged the situation rightly, it was a guarantee that he was going to get cut up pretty badly. It would be the first time the little sucker had gone up against a skilled knifeman, and he must know that he was out of his depth. There was a certain irony in the fact that the only way someone like Lenny Garon could make enough money to equip himself with tissue-repair technology was to sustain the injuries that the relevant nanotech was geared to undo, but Damon no longer found anything to savour in that kind of irony.

Tamlin stood up, already issuing stem instructions as to where the combatants shouldn’t stab one another. He didn’t want the recording apparatus damaged. “The only way you can make real money for this kind of work,” he told the kid, “is to get used to the kit and to make damn sure it doesn’t get damaged. Given that your chances of long-term survival are directly proportional to your upgrade prospects, you’d better get this right, because it’s the only break you’re likely to get. Savvy?”

Garon nodded dumbly. Tamlin was a major player in the Underworld games these days, and the boy respected his opinion. “I can do it,” he said, uneasily. “I got all the feints and jumps. It’ll be OK.”

“We don’t want feints and jumps,” Tamlin countered, with a contemptuous sneer intended to wind the boy up. “We want purpose and skill and desperation. Just because we re making a VR tape... explain it to him, Damon.”

“We aren’t making a simple recording that will give a floater the illusion that he’s going through your moves, Lenny,” Damon said, off-handedly. “We’re making a template. It’s raw material, which has to be carefully refined, but it has to have a sense of urgency about it—an edge. Playacting doesn’t do it. It reeks of fake. I know it’s difficult, but if you want to be good at this, you have to go all the way... and as Madoc says, you have to look after the wiring. No record at all is even worse than a bad one.”

The kid nodded respectfully. Damon still had a reputation on the streets; his tapes made sure of that.

“Just remember,” Tamlin said, as he pushed the boy forward, “it’s a small price to pay for taking one more step towards immortality.” Street talk always spoke of immortality rather than emortality—which, strictly speaking, was all that even the very best internal technology could hope to provide.

Damon watched the two fighters square up. Their kit was more than a little cumbersome, but very few artificial organics were as delicate as the real thing and you couldn’t get template-precision with thinner webs. Then he looked away, at the ruined buildings to either side of the street. This whole district was ex-urban wilderness, emptied by the Crash and never recolonized or reclaimed. Nobody lived here; it was just a vast playground for the gangs. Damon wondered what it must have been like in the bad old days of the Crisis, crowded out with the unemployable and the insupportable: one of countless concentration-city powder kegs waiting for an inflammatory spark that had never come. He couldn’t imagine it. Even the very old, who had lived through the Crisis and the Crash, had mostly lost their memories of it.

The fight itself was boring, although the other watchers—whose sole raison d’etre was to whip the combatants into a frenzy—weighed in with the customary verve and fury. Amazingly, the kid managed to stick Brady in the gut while the experienced fighter was playing cat and mouse with him, which made Brady understandably furious. It was immediately clear that he wasn’t going to settle for some token belly-wound as a reprisal; he wanted copious bloodshed. That would be more than OK by Tamlin, so long as the cuts didn’t do too much damage to the recorders. Young Lenny would be all the more enthusiastic to volunteer for something really heavy in order to pay for the nanotech that would make him as good as new and keep him that way.

Tamlin noticed Damon’s reluctance to join in the loud exhortations of the crowd. “Don’t get all stiff on me, Damon,” he said. “You may be in the Big World now, but you’re too young to get rigor mortis. You pissed about splitting with Diana?” Tamlin hadn’t said so, but Damon presumed that Diana had gone straight to him after the split. Tamlin surely wouldn’t take her back on a full-time basis, but he’d be ready to lend her a shoulder to cry on, for a week or two.

“Interpol came to call,” Damon told him, abstractedly. “They were asking about Eliminators.”

“Eliminators! You don’t have any truck with them, do you?”

“Of course not. It’s just a connection from the distant past—something I thought I’d won free of.”

Madoc Tamlin was the only person Damon knew who would be able to take the correct inference from those words; even Diana Caisson didn’t know that Damon Hart had once been Damon Helier. Damon saw the flicker of interest ignite in his friend’s eye, but Tamlin knew better than to say too much out loud. All he said was: “Oh?”

“You know some light-footed Web-walkers, don’t you?” Damon said. “Do you know anyone who could do Interpol-type work better than Interpol can?”

“They all say they can,” Tamlin replied, cautiously. “It’s a key item of the creed that all the best cracksmen are outlaws. The really good ones get all their commissions from the corps, though—they’re just undercover suits with expensive tastes. I don’t know anyone who could outsmart Interpol on the cheap. Nobody does.”

“If this thing turns out to be serious,” Damon said, stressing the if, “I’d be willing to lay out serious credit to pursue it.”

“Do you have that kind of money?” Tamlin asked, warily. “You haven’t been making it on what I pay you.”

“I’ve got some put away,” Damon said, feeling no compulsion to specify where it had come from. He fetched a smartcard out of his pocket and held it out. “It’s already authorised for cash withdrawals,” he said. “It’s all above board. You can draw ten thou with no questions asked. If you need more, call me—but it had better be worth paying for.”

“What am I looking for?” Tamlin asked, mildly.

“Some local pervert calling himself Operator 101 has posted a notice about Conrad Helier, claiming that he’s still alive and that he’s guilty of some as-yet-unspecified crime. One of my foster-parents, Silas Arnett, has gone missing from home near San Francisco.”

“I thought you didn’t like your foster-parents,” Tamlin said, keeping one eye on the fight. Lenny Garon was in real trouble now. The crowd were baying for blood, and getting it. Damon kept his own eyes firmly on Tamlin’s face.

“We had a disagreement,” Damon said, dismissively. “They only did what they thought was right, and Silas tried a lot harder than Karol or Eveline to figure out what that might involve. After I left, he dropped out too. I owe him.”

“It’s Helier you’re really interested in, isn’t it?” Tamlin asked, running his fingers speculatively back and forth along the edge of the smartcard. “This Arnett guy is a side-issue. You want to know if your natural father really is alive.”

“If he were,” Damon admitted, “I’d like to know. But what I really want to know is whether he really was an enemy of mankind.” He said it lightly, to imply that he was joking, but he knew that Tamlin would wonder whether this was one of the many true words that were rumoured to be spoken in jest. He wasn’t entirely sure himself.

“How are things otherwise?” Tamlin asked, finally putting the smartcard away. “Honest toil living up to your expectations?”

“I’m taking a break,” Damon told him. “A brief excursion to Hawaii.”

“Vacation?”

“Independent line of enquiry. Karol Kachelleck is there, working out of Molokai. He probably won’t tell me anything, even if he has some idea what’s going on, but if I go in person I might at least unsettle him a bit.”

Tamlin shrugged.

“You might also ask around about someone named Surinder Nahal,” Damon added. “He was a bioengineer contemporary with my co-parents. He seems to have been a rival of sorts—maybe the closest thing to an enemy they had. He’s disappeared too.”

Tamlin nodded, and then turned back abruptly to the fight as a roar went up from the watchers. Brady had rammed his advantage home, and poor Garon was on the ground, screaming.

Damon knew that it would all be feeding into the template: the reflexes and convulsions of pain, shock and horror, all ready-digitised, ripe for manipulation and refinement, for teasing into proper shape. By the time he—or someone like him—had finished with the tapes there’d be nothing of the kid left at all; there’d only be the actions and the reactions, dissected out and purified as a marketable commodity. It was all in rank bad taste, of course, but it was a living for all concerned. It was his own living, based in talents that were entirely and exclusively his own, using nothing that Conrad Helier had left to him in his will or his genes. Damon wanted very badly to be his own man. Taking money from the legacy to bankroll Tamlin’s investigations in the Underworld wasn’t a betrayal of that end; it was an utterly impersonal matter. It seemed wholly appropriate that Conrad Helier’s money should be used to find out what was going on—always assuming, of course, that something worthy of investigation was going on.

Tamlin had moved forward to help the stricken streetfighter—not because he was overly concerned for the boy’s health but because he wanted to make certain that the equipment was in good order.

“Give my regards to Diana,” Damon said, as he turned away. “Tell her I’m sorry, but that it’ll all work out for the best.”

He couldn’t tell whether Tamlin had heard him or not.

Damon stood on the quay in Kaunakakai’s main harbour and watched the oceanographic research vessel Kite sail smoothly towards 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 subtropical Sun. 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. He didn’t wave a greeting and he kept Damon waiting 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.

Eventually, Kachellek came over to Damon and offered his hand to be shaken. 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 dead Mary had been the real foster-mother.

“This isn’t a good time for visiting, Damon,” Kachellek 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,” he went on. “It’ll be a while 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 the time to worry about Eliminators and other assorted madmen. I can’t see why Interpol are 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.”

They soon passed beyond the limits of the harbour, and headed westwards towards the outskirts of the port. Mauna Loa was visible in the distance, looming over the precipitous landscape, but the town itself was uncomfortably reminiscent of the parts of L.A. where Damon had spent the greater part of his adolescence. Molokai had been one of the many bolt-holes whose inhabitants had tried to impose quarantine in the early 2100s, but the plague 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 that wasn’t large, and 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 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.

There was little to see on the landward side but the lingering legacy of human profligacy, so Damon looked out to sea while they walked. The ocean gave the impression of having always been the way it was: huge, blue 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. Lanai was visible on the horizon, on the far side of the Kaiohi Channel.

“You and Silas were friends for a long time,” Damon remarked. “Aren’t you concerned about his disappearance?”

The blond man shrugged. “We were colleagues, not friends,” he said. “When we ceased to be colleagues we ceased to mean anything to one another. People live for a long time nowadays, Damon, and it’s no longer the case that people you know for fifty or a hundred years have to play a major role in the unfolding narrative of your life. Whatever has happened to Silas, it doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

It was too stark and too brutal to be entirely convincing. Kachellek had never been entirely at ease with Damon, so it was difficult to judge whether he was any more unsettled than usual, but there was something about his dismissiveness which seemed dishonest.

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. “Do you feel the same way about Eveline?” he said, aloud. “Was she just someone you worked with for a while, before you went your separate ways?”

“I’m still working with her,” Kachellek replied.

“But she’s off-planet, in L-5.”

“Modem 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.” It was a horribly pompous speech; Kachellek was by no means a subtle man.

“A common cause which I deserted,” Damon said, bitterly. “In spite of all the grand plans which Conrad Helier had for me. You’re not him, Karol. You could have seen my point of view, if you’d wanted to. You and I could have built a relationship of our own.”

“Fostering you was a job your father asked me to do,” Kachellek retorted, bluntly. “I’d have continued doing it, if there had been anything more I could do. But what you wanted was to get away, to abandon everything your father tried to pass on to you, to run wild. You moved away from us, Damon, and changed your name; you declared yourself irrelevant to our concerns. I don’t owe you anything.”

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

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

“They can hurt you and Eveline. They might have hurt Silas already. Surely that’s reason enough to be interested, if not afraid? Whatever they’re planning to say about my father will reflect on you too—unless you think he’s just another colleague you happened to work with once upon a time, whose acquaintance has now become irrelevant.”

“Conrad can never be irrelevant to me,” Kachellek said, rising obediently to the bait but not showing the slightest sign of bad temper. “He isn’t able to work on the problem which faces us just now, but he’s present in spirit in every logical move I make, every hypothesis I frame, 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 obviously had no intention of giving Damon an easy ride.

Kachellek paused before a rocky outcrop which was blocking their path, and knelt down as if to duck any further questions. He scanned the tideline which ran along the wave-smoothed rock a few inches above the ground. The weed which clung there 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 weed was interrupted, sea anemones nestled in crevices like blobs of jelly. The bare rock above the tide-line was speckled with coloured patches of lichen and tarry streaks which might have been anything. Kachellek 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 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-mould. It has a motile form which wanders around by means of protoplasmic streaming, but the colonies can also set rock-hard. 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 on a radically different genetic system and genetic code.”

Damon had given up genetics, and had carefully set aside much of what his co-parents had tried 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,” said Kachellek, scrupulously. “But we’re reasonably certain that it wasn’t here before. It’s a recent arrival in the littoral zone, and so far it hasn’t been reported anywhere outside these islands.”

“So where did it come from?”

“We don’t know yet. The obvious contenders are up, down...” He seemed to be on the point of adding a third alternative, but didn’t; instead he went on: “I’m looking downwards; 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 on the sea-bed,” Damon said. “Maybe it’s been there all along, 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. On the other hand, maybe it drifted into local space from elsewhere in the Universe, in the form of Arrhenius spores... again, maybe a long, long time ago or maybe the day before yesterday. How different from DNA is its replicatory system?”

“We’re still trying to confirm a formula,” Kachellek told him. “We’ve slipped into the habit of calling it para-DNA but it’s 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 have a common ancestor, even at the most fundamental level of chemical evolution. It’s 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 be superior in all conceivable environments. 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 system is full of junk, and it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that life has evolved in the outer regions, or that spores of some kind could have drifted in from other 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?”

“Until we know more about it,” Kachellek said, sternly, “it’s difficult to know how far it might spread. It’s not likely to pose any kind of threat to human beings, given the kind of nanotech defences 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 slanders, 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 nanomachines.”

“It’s not obvious that there’d be huge potential in that,” Kachellek 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 inefficient, capable of performing a limited repertoire of self-replicating tricks with no particular skill; if so, it would 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—but he was an islander, and Kachellek obviously knew him well.

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

The package had been dumped into the Web in hypercondensed form like any other item of mail, but once it had been downloaded and unravelled it played for a couple of hours of real time. It had been heavily edited, so the claim with which it was prefaced—that nothing had been altered or falsified—couldn’t be taken 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 came—or purported to come—from the mysterious Operator 101. Kachellek and Damon watched in anxious silence as it played back.

The first few minutes of film showed a man bound to a huge, throne-like chair. His wrists and ankles were pinned by two pairs of plastic sheaths, each three centimetres broad, which clasped him more tightly if he struggled against them. He was in a sitting position, his head held upright by a device which neatly enfolded his skull. His eyes were covered but his nose, mouth, and chin were visible. His pelvic region was also enclosed.

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

Damon glanced sideways at Kachellek, whose face had set like stone. He didn’t doubt that this was, indeed, Silas Arnett; nor did he doubt that Arnett had been stripped of the apparatus that normally protected him against injury, aging, and the effects of torture. But if they intend to force some kind of confession out of him, Damon thought, everyone will know that it’s quite useless. Take away a man’s ability to control pain and he can be made to say anything at all. What kind of “absolute proof” is that?

The image abruptly shifted to display a virtual courtroom. It was a highly impressionistic image—a cartoon rather than a serious attempt at videosynthesis. The accused man who stood in the dock was a caricature, but Damon had no difficulty in recognising him as Silas Arnett. The twelve jurors who were positioned to his left were mere sketches, and the person whose position was to the right—who was presumably the prosecutor—had little more in the way of features than they did. The black-robed judge who faced Arnett didn’t look any more real, but in his case it wasn’t for lack of detail; his face had been carefully drawn, and Damon’s expert eye judged that it had been carefully designed for convincing animation.

“Please state your name for the record,” said the judge. His voice was deep and obviously synthetic.

“I’ll do no such thing,” said the figure in the dock. Damon recognised Silas Arnett’s voice, but in the circumstances he couldn’t be sure that the words hadn’t been sythesized by a program that had analysed the voice.

“Let the name Silas Arnett be entered in the record,” said the judge. “I am obliged to point out, Dr. Arnett, that there really is a record. Every moment of this trial will be preserved for posterity. Any and all of your testimony may be broadcast, so you should conduct yourself as though the whole world were watching. Given the nature of the charges which will be brought against you, that may well be the case.”

“I didn’t think you people bothered with interrogations,” Arnett said. It seemed to Damon that he was injecting as much contempt into his voice as he could. “I thought you operated strictly on a sentence first, verdict afterwards basis.”

“It sometimes happens,” said the judge, “that we are certain of one man’s guilt, but do not know the extent to which his collaborators and accomplices were involved in his crime. In such cases we are obliged to undertake further enquiries.”

“Like the witch-hunters of old,” said Arnett, grimly. “I suppose it would make it easier to select future victims if the people you select out for murder were forced to denounce others before they die. Any testimony you get by such means is worse than worthless; this is a farce, and you know it.”

“We know the truth,” said the judge, flatly. “Your role is merely to confirm what we know.”

“Fuck you,” Arnett said, with feeling. It was a direly old-fashioned curse: something out of Conrad Helier’s Ark, which should not have any force in the modem world. The significance of the word, and the act it described, had changed considerably since the old world died; the word had lost the warrant of obscenity it had once possessed.

“The charges laid against you, Silas Arnett, are these,” said the machine-made voice, while the judge’s virtual lips moved in perfect sync. “First, that in the years 2070-2080 you did conspire with others, including Conrad Helier, Mary Hallam, Eveline Hywood and Karol Kachellek, to cause actual bodily harm to between thirteen billion and fifteen billion individuals by disabling their reproductive organs. Second, that you did collaborate with others, including those named, in the design, manufacture, and distribution of the various virus species known as meiotic disrupters and chiasmalytics. How do you plead to these charges?”

Damon was astonished by his own reaction, which was more extreme than he could have anticipated. He was seized by an actual physical shock which left him trembling. He turned to look at Karol Kachellek, but the blond man wouldn’t meet his eye. Kachellek seemed remarkably unperturbed, considering that he had just been accused of manufacturing and spreading the great plague of sterility whose dire effects he and his collaborators had so gloriously subverted.

“If you had any real evidence,” Arnett said, while the face of his simulacrum took on a strangely haunted look, “you’d have brought these charges in a real court of law. The simple fact that I’m here demonstrates the absurdity and falseness of any charges you might bring.”

“You’ve had a 120 years to surrender yourself to judgment by another court,” said the judge, his voice acidly mechanical. “This court is the one which has found the means to bring you to trial; it is the one which will judge you now. You will be given every opportunity to enter a defense, should you so wish and to justify your criminal actions as best you can, before sentence is passed upon you.”

“I refuse to pander to your delusions. I’ve nothing to say.”

“Our investigations will be scrupulous nevertheless,” the judge said. “They must be, given that the charges, if true, require sentence of death to be passed upon you.”

“You have no right to do that!”

“On the contrary. We hold that what society bestows upon the individual, through the medium of technology, society has every right to withdraw from those who betray their obligations to others. This court intends to investigate the charges laid against you as fully as it can, and when they are proven it will invite any and all interested parties to pursue those who ought to be standing beside you in the dock. None will escape, no matter what lengths they may have gone to in the hope of evading judgment. There is no station of civilization sufficiently distant, no deception sufficiently secure, to place a suspect beyond our reach.”

What’s that supposed to mean? Damon wondered. Do they really believe that Conrad Helier is alive, and that he faked his death in order to avoid punishment for what he’d done? “Karol—” He said aloud, but Kachellek raised a hand to instruct him to be quiet.

“The people you’ve named are entirely innocent of any crime,” Arnett said, anxiously. “You’re insane if you think otherwise.”

Damon tried to judge from the timbre of the voice the extent to which Arnett’s pain-control system had been dismantled, so as to force him to suffer physical symptoms of distress to which he had long been unaccustomed. If there were indeed a reality behind this cartoonish charade Arnett’s body must by now be an empire at war, and he must be feeling all the violence of the conflict. The tireless molecular agents which benignly regulated the cellular commerce of his emortality were dying beneath the onslaught of custom-designed assassins: Eliminators in miniature, which would exterminate them all, given time, and leave their detritus to be flushed out by his kidneys. Even if Arnett had not yet been subjected to actual torture he must feel the returning grip of his own mortality, and the deadly cargo of terror which came with it.

The picture dissolved, and was replaced by an image of Conrad Helier, which Damon immediately recognised as a famous section of archive footage.

“We must regard this new plague not as a catastrophe but as a challenge,” Helier stated, in ringing tones. “It is not, as the Gaian Mystics would have us believe, the vengeance of Mother Earth upon her rapists and polluters, and no matter how fast and how far it spreads it cannot and will not destroy the species. Its advent requires a monumental effort from us, but we are capable of making that effort. We have, at least in embryo, technologies which are capable of rendering us immune to aging, and we are rapidly developing technologies which will allow us to achieve in the laboratory what fewer and fewer women are capable of doing outside it: conceive and bear children. Within twenty or thirty years we will have what our ancestors never achieved: democratic control over human fertility, based in a New Reproductive System. We have been forced to this pass by evil circumstances, but let us not undervalue it; it is a crucial step forward in the evolution of the species, without which the gifts of longevity and perpetual youth might have proved a double-edged sword. ...”

The speech faded out. It was easy enough for Damon to figure out why the clip had been inserted. Recontextualized by the accusations which the anonymous judge had brought against Arnett, it implied that Conrad Helier had thought the great plague a good thing: an opportunity rather than a curse; a significant step on the road to salvation.

Damon had no alternative but to ask himself the questions demanded by the mysterous Operator. Had Conrad Helier been capable of designing the agents of the plague as well as the instruments which had blunted its effects? If capable, might he have been of a mind to do it? The answer to the first question, he was certain in his own mind, washes. He was not nearly as certain that the answer to the second question was no—but he had never known his biological father; all he had ever known was the oppressive force of his father’s plans for him, his father’s hopes for him. He had rebelled against those, but his rebellion couldn’t possibly commit him to believing this—and he did know the other people named by the judge. Karol was distant and diffident, Eveline haughty and high-handed, but Silas and Mary had been... everything he required of them. Surely it was unimaginable that they could have done what they now stood accused of doing?

The image cut back to the courtroom, but the moment Damon heard Silas Arnett speak he knew that time had elapsed. A section had been cut from the tape.

“What do you want from me?” Arnett hissed, in a voice full of pain and exhaustion. “What the fuck do you want?”

It was not the virtual judge who replied this time, although there was no reason to think that the second synthesized voice issued from a different source. “I want to know whose idea it was to launch the great plague,” said the figure to Arnett’s right. “I want to know where I can find incontrovertible evidence of the extent of the conspiracy. I want to know the names of everyone who was involved. I want to know where Conrad Helier is now, and what name he’s using.”

“Conrad’s dead. I saw him die!” Arnett’s voice was almost hysterical, but he seemed to making Herculean efforts to control himself.

“No you didn’t,” said the accusing voice, without the slightest hint of doubt. “Someone switched the DNA-samples so as to fake the identification. Was that you, Dr. Arnett?”

There was no immediate reply. The tape was interrupted again; there was no attempt to conceal the cut. Damon could imagine the sound of Arnett’s screams easily enough; only the day before he had listened to poor Lenny Garon recording a tape which it would probably be his privilege to edit and doctor and convert into a peculiar kind of art...

“It was my idea,” Silas Arnett said, in a hollow, grating voice. “Mine. I did it. The others never knew. I used them, but they never knew.”

“They all knew,” said the inquisitor firmly.

“No they didn’t,” Arnett insisted. “They trusted me, absolutely. They never knew. They still don’t—the ones who are still alive, that is. I did it on my own. I designed the plague and set it free, so that Conrad could do what he had to do. He never knew that it wasn’t natural. He died not knowing. He really did die not knowing.”

“That’s very noble of you,” said the other, in a voice dripping with irony. “But it’s not true, is it?”

“Yes,” said Arnett.

This time, the editor didn’t bother to cut out the sound of screaming. Damon shivered, even though he knew that he and everyone else who had managed to download the tape before Interpol deleted it was being manipulated for effect. This was melodrama, not news—but how many people, in today’s world, could tell the difference? How many people would be able to say: It’s just some VR pomotape. It doesn’t mean a thing.

Suddenly, Diana Caisson’s reaction to the discovery that Damon was using her template as a base for the sex tape he had been commissioned to make didn’t seem quite so unreasonable.

The interrogator spoke again. “The truth, Dr. Arnett, is that at least five persons held a secret conference in May 2072, when Conrad Helier laid out his plan for the so-called salvation of the world. The first experiments with the perfected viruses were carried out in the winter of 2075-76, using rats, mice and human tissue-cultures. When one of his collaborators—was it you, Dr. Arnett?—asked Conrad Helier whether he had the right to play god his reply was ‘The position’s vacant. If we don’t, who will?’ That’s the truth, Dr. Arnett, isn’t it? Isn’t that exactly what he said?”

Arnett’s reply to that was unexpected. “Who are you?” he asked, his pain seemingly mingled with suspicion. “I know you, don’t I? If I saw your real face, I’d recognize it, wouldn’t I?”

The answer was equally surprising. “Of course you would,” the other said, with transparently false gentleness. “And I know you, Silas Arnett. I know more about you than you can possibly imagine. That’s why you can’t hide what you know.”

At this point, without any warning, the picture cut out. It was replaced by a text display which said:

Damon stared numbly at the words, which glowed as if they had been written in fire.

When Damon called Madoc Tamlin Diana answered; mercifully, it was only a voice link, so neither of them had to look the other in the eye.

“It’s Damon,” he said, brusquely. “I need to get a message to Madoc. Tell him I really need that package we discussed. He has to get on to it right away. I’ve authorised him to draw twice as much cash. I’ll fly back tonight or tomorrow, and I really need to know whatever he can dig up as soon as humanly possible. Have you got all that?”

“Of course I’ve got it,” she snapped back. “Do you think I’m stupid or something?”

Damon had to suppress an impulse to react in kind. Instead, he said: “Sorry, Di—I’m a bit wound up. Just ask Madoc to do what he can, and tell him he has extra resources if he needs them, OK?”

By the time he signed off Karol Kachellek had put the other phone receiver down. Damon didn’t know who he had been talking to. “I’m sorry Damon,” Kachellek said, bluntly. “You were right—this is far worse than I thought. It couldn’t have come at a worse time.”

“What’s it all about, Karol?” Damon asked, quietly. “You do know, don’t you?”

“I wish I did. You musn’t worry, Damon. It will all be sorted out. I don’t know who’s doing this, or why, but...” As the the blond man trailed off, Damon stared at him intently, wondering whether the red flush about his brow and neck was significant of anger, anxiety, embarrassment or some combination of all three.

Kachellek reddened more deeply under his gaze. “It’s all lies, Damon,” he said, awkwardly. “You can’t possibly believe any of that stuff. They forced Silas to say what he did. We can’t even be sure that it really was his voice. It could all have been synthesized.”

“It doesn’t much matter whether it’s lies or not,” Damon told him, grimly. “It’s going to be talked about the world over. Whoever made that tape is cashing in on the newsworthiness of the Eliminators, using their crazy crusade to ensure maximum publicity for those accusations. The tape-doctor didn’t even try to make them sound convincing. He settled for crude melodrama—but that might be effective enough for his purpose, if all he wants is to kick up a scandal. Why put in those last few lines, though? Why take the trouble to include a section of tape whose sole purpose is to establish the possibility that Silas might have known his captor? What are we supposed to infer from that?”

“I don’t know,” Kachellek said, emphatically and defensively. “I don’t understand what’s happening.”

“Tell me about Surinder Nahal,” Damon said, abruptly.

Kachellek still hadn’t recovered his usual icy calm. “What about him?” he asked, unhelpfully.

“Come on, Karol, think. Silas isn’t the only one who’s gone missing. Could whoever made that tape be deliberately pointing the linger of suspicion at Nahal?”

“Nahal was a bioengineer back in the old days,” Kachellek said. “His field of endeavour overlapped ours to some extent. There was a little bad feeling because he thought he hadn’t been given his fair share of credit for establishing the New Reproductive System, but nothing serious. I haven’t heard of him in fifty years; I presume that he retired, like Silas. I can’t believe that he’s responsible for all this. It makes no sense. It must be someone from...”

“Someone from what?” Damon asked, sharply, when Kachellek stopped in mid-sentence again. Kachellek had no intention of finishing, though; he deliberately turned away. Whatever he knew, he wasn’t going to state it aloud. Perhaps that was because he was in a room whose walls might easily be host to a dozen eyes and ears, but Damon felt that it was a personal slight aimed at him, a deliberate exclusion.

“Is there any possibility,” Damon said, with careful hostility, “that the viruses which caused the plague of sterility really were manufactured, by someone? Could the Crash have been deliberately caused?”

Kachellek immediately met his eye again, pugnaciously. “Of course it could, he snapped, as though it ought to have been perfectly obvious. “People don’t talk about it nowadays, of course, because it’s not considered a fit topic for polite conversation, but the world before the Crash was very different from the one in which you grew up. There were a lot of people prepared to say that the population explosion had to be damped down one way or another—if not by voluntary restraint then by war, famine or plague. Primitive anti-aging technologies had already become available, and it was easy enough to see that things could get very fraught indeed when they became cheaper and more efficient. A lot of mutant viruses were arising naturally—ten billion people crammed into polluted supercities constitute a wonderland of opportunity for virus evolution—and a lot more were being tailored in labs for use as transgenic vectors, pest controllers, so-called beneficial fevers and so on. All kinds of things came out of that cauldron, as many by accident as by design. When the Crash began, speculation that it had been deliberately caused was rife; it wasn’t until the Crash had almost run its course that people put that kind of talk aside to concentrate all their attention and energies on the problem of what to do about it. This is just a resurrection of ancient and tired rumours, Damon. I don’t know whether to be glad or alarmed that there are so few people around who remember the last time they did the rounds. The fact remains that we didn’t do it. We’re not guilty of any wrongdoing.”

Damon knew that Karol Kachellek had been bom in 2046; he had been fifteen years younger than Conrad Helier and seven years younger than Silas Arnett. Surinder Nahal must have been much the same age—about thirty years off the current world record for longevity—but the fact that the slanders were old didn’t mean that the slanderer had to be equally old. The history of the twenty-first century was all on the Web, easily accessible to anyone who cared to dig.

“Were you actually present when my father died, Karol?” Damon asked, quietly.

“Yes I was. I was by the side of his hospital bed, watching the monitors. His nanomachines were at full stretch, trying to repair the internal damage, but they just weren’t up to it. He’d suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage and there were more complications than I can count. We call ourselves emortals, but we’re not really immune to disease and injury, even if we exclude the effects of extreme violence. There are dozens of potential physiological accidents with which the very best internal technology is impotent to deal even today. Kids of your generation, who feel free to take delight in savage violence because its effects are mostly reparable, are stupidly playing with fire. In essence, your father died of a massive stroke—but if the lunatic who made that tape intends to build a case on the seeming implausibility of that cause of death he’s barking up the wrong tree. If Conrad had wanted to fake his death, he’d have chosen something far more spectacular.”

“How did you know he was dead?” Damon asked.

“I told you,” Kachellek replied, with ostentatious patience. “I was watching the monitors. I also watched the doctors trying to resuscitate him. I wasn’t actually present at the post mortem, but I can assure you that there was no mistake.”

Damon didn’t press the point. If Conrad Helier had faked his death, Karol Kachellek would surely have been in on the conspiracy, and he was hardly likely to back down now. “I’m going back to L.A. as soon as I can,” he said. “Maybe you ought to come with me. The people who took Silas might have designs on you too. The police can offer you far better protection in L.A. than they can in a desolate spot like this.”

“I can’t go anywhere,” Kachellek said, stubbornly. “I’ve got work to do—here.”

I have work to do too, Damon thought. I know what skills it took to put that tape together, technically and in terms of its narrative implications and through Madoc I have access to some first-rate outlaw Webwalkers. I can get to the bottom of this, if I try hard enough, no matter how insistent you are on keeping me out of it.

The last scheduled flight from Honolulu was due out at nine. Karol Kachellek—who was an important man on Molokai—had no difficulty at all in requisitioning a light aircraft and a pilot to fly it out of Kaunakakai. Damon wasn’t in the least flattered that his foster-father took the trouble; he could see how keen Kachellek was to see the back of him.

Damon would rather have sat up front in the cockpit of the plane but he wasn’t given the choice. He was ushered into one of the four passenger seats by the pilot, who was a stocky man with greying temples and an Australian accent. Presumably he thought the grey made him look more dignified; he looked to have money enough to have corrected it if he’d wanted to.

“We’ll be up and down in no time at all,” the pilot told him, before taking his own seat. “Might be a little rough in the wind, though—better keep your belt on.”

Damon thought nothing of this instruction to begin with, and he was so deep in thought that ten or twelve minutes had elapsed before he finally took note of the fact that the Sun—which should have been dead ahead of the plane’s course—was way over to starboard.

“Hey!” he called to the pilot. “What’s our course?”

The pilot made no reply. That was when Damon tested his safety-harness and found that it was locked tight. He called out again, demanding to know what was going on, but the pilot wouldn’t even turn around to look at him. He realised, cursing himself for not having done so before, that he was being kidnapped.

Damon’s knowledge of the local geography was vague, but he figured that if they were heading south they’d be over Lanai at much the same time that they ought to have been coming down at Honolulu. How many other islands there might be to which they might be headed he had no idea, but there were probably several, and the plane was small enough to land on any kind of strip.

“Was this Karol’s idea?” he shouted to the pilot? “Or are you working for someone else entirely?”

He wasn’t surprised when there was no reply. He had nothing but his powers of reason to aid him, and he had not enough data to work with. Furious thought merely served to multiply the questions facing him. If Karol Kachellek had instructed the pilot to kidnap him, what motive could he possibly have? Was he trying to hide Damon away, either to keep him from harm or to keep him from asking awkward questions? If the pilot was working under orders from elsewhere, who might be interested in kidnapping him? The people who already held Silas Arnett? If so, why? Did they think he had information which could be used to supplement what they had supposedly winkled out of Silas? Did they intend to force some kind of confession out of him by similar means?

It was difficult to be patient, but in the end there was no alternative. The journey wasn’t significantly longer than it should have been but they overflew Lanai and headed for a much smaller island beyond it, dominated by a single volcanic peak. The plane came down just as the Sun had begun to slide beyond the horizon.

When the pilot came back to release Damon from the trick harness he was carrying a gun: a wide-barreled pepper-box calculated to inflict widespread but superficial injuries. Were it to go off, Damon would lose a lot of blood very quickly, but his nanomachines would be able to seal off the wounds without mortal damage being done.

“No need to worry, Mr. Hart,” the stout man said. “Nobody means to do you harm. You’ll be safe here until carnival’s over.”

“Safe from whom?” Damon asked. “What exactly is the carnival? Who’s doing all this?”

He wasn’t surprised when he received no answers to any of these questions.

The air outside the plane seemed oppressively humid. Damon allowed himself to be guided across the landing-strip to a jeep parked in the shadow of a thick clump of trees. The man waiting in the driving seat was as short as the pilot but much slimmer and—if appearances could be trusted—much older. His skin was the kind of dark coffee colour that most people who lived in tropical regions preferred. He wasn’t carrying a gun.

“I’m sorry about this, Mr. Hart,” he said, “but we weren’t sure that we could persuade you to come here of your own accord. Until we can get to the people who have Arnett, everyone connected with your family is in danger.” To the pilot he said: “You can go now. Take the plane down to Hilo, just in case.”

“Who are you?” Damon demanded.

“Get in, Mr. Hart,” the old man said. “My name, for what it’s worth, is Rajuder Singh. I knew your father and your foster-parents, long ago, but I doubt that any of them ever mentioned my name. Karol Kachellek still keeps in touch.”

“Did Karol arrange this?”

“It’s for your own protection. Please get in, Mr. Hart.”

Damon climbed into the vehicle. The jeep glided into the trees and was soon deep in a ragged forest of thin-boled conifers. The forest was very quiet, after the fashion of artificially-regenerated forests everywhere; the trees, genetically engineered for rapid growth in the unhelpful soil, were not fitted as yet to play host to the rich fauna which ancient natural forests had once entertained. A few tiny insects splashed on the windshield of the jeep as it moved through the gathering night but there was no sound of birdsong. The road was rough and far from straight, but the driver evidently knew it well.

“Did Karol Kachellek instruct the Australian to bring me here?” Damon asked, again.

“Yes he did,” Singh said, blandly. “He had to make a decision in a hurry—he didn’t expect you to come to Molokai. Our people will bring the situation under control in time, but things have moved a little too fast. I’m afraid that you’re in more danger than you know, Mr. Hart—I’ll show you why in a few minutes’ time.”

“Who, exactly, are our people?”

Rajuder Singh smiled. “Friends and allies,” he said, unhelpfully. “Not many of us left, nowadays—but we keep the faith.”

“Conrad Helier’s faith?”

“That’s right, Mr. Hart. You’d be one of us yourself, I dare say, if you hadn’t chosen a different path.”

“Are you saying that there’s some kind of conspiracy involving my foster-parents? Some kind of grand plan in which you and Karol and Eveline are involved?”

“Just a group of friends and co-workers,” the other replied, lightly. “No more than that—but someone seems to be attacking us, and we have to look after our own.”

“You think that Surinder Nahal is attacking you?”

“We really don’t know—yet. For now, it’s necessary to be careful. This is a bad time, but that’s presumably why our unknown adversary chose it.”

Damon remembered that Karol Kachellek had been equally insistent that this was a bad time. Why, he wondered, was the present moment any worse than any other time?

The twilight was so brief that the stars were shining long before the vehicle reached its destination, which was a sizeable bungalow set in a clearing. Damon was oddly relieved to observe that it was topped by an unusually large satellite-dish; however remote this place might be it was part of the Web; all human civilization was its neighbourhood.

Rajuder Singh showed him into a spacious living-room. When Damon opened his mouth to speak he held up his hand, and swiftly crossed the room to a wall-mounted display-screen. “This is the same netboard which carried Operator 101’s earlier messages,” he said, while his fingers brought the screen to life.

Damon stared dumbly at the words which appeared there.

“It was dumped shortly before you boarded the plane at Kaunakakai,” Singh told Damon, when the import of the words had had time to sink in. “Karol thought you might be inclined to argue if he showed it to you there and then. He seems to think that you always do the opposite of anything he suggests.”

Damon could understand why Kachellek might have formed that impression. “It’s crazy,” he said, referring to the message. “It’s completely crazy.”

“Yes it is,” said the other. “I can’t understand why anyone would want to attack you in this way. Can you?” It occurred to Damon that the people he had ordered Madoc Tamlin to investigate might resent the fact—and might possibly be scared that the buying-power of Conrad Helier’s inheritance might pose a greater threat to their plan than Interpol or the friends and allies of Conrad Helier himself.

“Unfortunately,” Singh observed, “such slanders can sometimes take effect before convincing rebuttals can be assembled. You see why we thought it best to remove you from harm’s way. I’m sorry that you’ve been caught up in all this—it really has nothing to do with you.”

“What has it to do with?” Damon asked, his voice taut with frustration. “What are you people up to? Why is this such a bad time for all this to blow up?”

“I can’t tell you that,” Singh said, with a note of apology in his voice that almost sounded sincere.

“I’ll find out anyway,” Damon told him—but he was wary enough not to let bravado lead him to give too much away. It might be inadvisable to boast about Madoc Tamlin’s capabilities to people who might be just as reluctant to be found out as Operator 101.

The words displayed on Singh’s screen suddenly disappeared, to be replaced by an urgently-flashing message which simply said: READ NOW. The system had undoubtedly been programmed with nets set to trawl the cyberspatial sea for items of a particular kind, and one of them had just made contact. “Excuse me,” Singh murmured, as he moved to claim his prize.

When Singh touched the console beneath the screen the flashing words were replaced by an image of a man sitting on a perfectly ordinary chair. Damon recognised Silas Arnett. He was not under any obvious restraint, but there was a curious expression in his eyes, and both of his hands were heavily bandaged. He began speaking in a flat monotone.

Damon knew immediately that the image and the voice were both fakes, derived from the kind of template he used routinely in his work.

“The situation was out of hand,” the false Arnett said, dully. “All attempts to limit environmental spoliation by legislation had failed, and all hope that the population would stabilize or begin to decline as a result of individual choice was gone. We were still winning the battle to provide enough food for everyone, even though the distribution system left seven or eight billions lacking, but we couldn’t cope with the sheer physical presence of so many people in the world. Internal technology was developing so rapidly that it was obvious to anyone with half a brain that off-the-shelf emortality was less than a lifetime away, and that it would revolutionize the economics of medicine. Wars over lebensraum were being fought on every continent, with all kinds of weapons, including real plagues: killing plagues.

“When Conrad first put it to us that what the world needed more desperately than anything else was a full stop to reproduction—an end to the whole question of individual choice in matters of fecundity—nobody said ‘No! That’s horrible!’ We all said ‘Yes, of course—but can it be done?’ When Conrad said ‘There’s always a way,’ no one challenged him on the grounds of propriety. I couldn’t see how we might go about designing a plague of sterility, because there were no appropriate models in nature—how could there be, when the logic of natural selection demands fertility and fecundity?—and I couldn’t envisage a plausible physiology, let alone a plausible biochemistry, but Conrad’s way of thinking was quite different from mine. Even in those days, all but a few of the genes we claimed to have ‘manufactured’ were actually the chance products of mutation of extant genes—we had little or no idea how to go about creating genes from scratch to have entirely novel effects—but Conrad had a weird kind of genius for that kind of thing. He knew that he could figure out a way.

“I wonder, sometimes, how may other groups must have had conversations very like ours. ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could design a virus that would sterilize almost everyone on Earth?’... ‘Yes, wouldn’t it—what a shame there’s no place to start.’ Was there anywhere in the world in the 2070s where bioengineers gathered where such conversations didn’t take place? Maybe some of the others took it further; maybe they even followed the same thread of possibility that Conrad pointed out to us. Maybe Conrad wasn’t the only one who could have done it, merely the one who hit the target first. I don’t know—but I do know that if you’d put that kind of loaded pistol into the hand of any bioengineer of the period the overwhelming probability is that the trigger would have been squeezed.

“We didn’t discriminate: we set out to sterilise everybody. Everybody in the world. And we succeeded. That’s what saved the world; if the population had continued to increase and nanotech emortality had spread like wildfire through a world which was still vomiting babies from billions of wombs, nothing could have restrained the negative Malthusian checks. Famine, war and killing plagues would have run riot. As things were, famine was held at bay, the wars cooled off and the killing plagues were countered one by one. What happened in the last three decades of the twenty-first century wasn’t a tragedy at all—but the fact that it was seen as a tragedy, and a terrible threat to the future of the species, increased its beneficial effects. The Great Plague was a common enemy, and it created such a sense of common cause, focused on the development of artificial wombs and the securing of adequate supplies of sperms and ova, that for the first time in history the members of the human race were all on the same side.

“We’re still living on the legacy of that break in history, in spite of attempts made by madmen like the Eliminators to set us all at one another’s throats again. We’re still all on the same side, all engaged in the same ongoing quest—and Conrad Helier did that. You have no conception of the debt which the world owes to that man.”

“You don’t regret what you did, then?” asked a whispery voice from offstage.

“No,” said Arnett’s simulacrum, dispiritedly. “If you’re looking for some sign of repentance, forget it. What we did was necessary, and right.”

“And yet you’ve kept it secret all these years. When you were first accused of having done this, you denied it. When you realised that further denial was useless, you attempted to take sole responsibility—not out of pride, but out of a desire to protect your collaborators. The truth had, in the end, to be extracted from you. Why is that, if you aren’t ashamed of what you did?”

“Because there are people in the world like you. Because the world is overly full of people whose moral horizons are narrow and bleak. For every man who would have understood our reasons, there would have been half a hundred who would have said How dare you do this to me? How dare you take away my freedom of self-determination, even for the good of the world?’ Too many people would have seen sterilization as a theft, as a loss of power. Many young people, bom into a world of artificial wombs, find it faintly repulsive that women ever had to give birth, but too many members of the older generations still feel that they were robbed, changed without their consent. Karol Kachellek and Eveline Hywood are still doing important work; they never wanted to be sidetracked by the kind of publicity the revelations which you’ve forced out of me would generate—will generate, I suppose.”

“What right did you have to make decisions for all mankind?” the second synthetic voice asked, still maintaining its stage-whisper tone. “What right did you have to play God?”

“What gave us the right,” Arnett’s image replied, the voice as relentlessly dull as it had been throughout, “was our understanding. Conrad had the vision, and the artistry required to develop the means. The responsibility fell to him—you might as well ask what right he had to surrender it to others, given that those others were mostly ill-educated egomaniacs whose principal short-term aim was to slaughter their neighbours. Someone had to be prepared to take control, or the world was doomed. When you know that people won’t accept the gift of their own salvation, you have only two choices: to force it on them, or leave them to destruction. It was better for the world to be saved—and it was better for the world to believe that it had been saved by a fortunate combination of miracles rather than by means of a conspiracy. Conrad always wanted to do what was best for the world, and keeping our actions secret was simply a continuation of that policy.”

“What of the unhappiness caused by the frustration of maternal instinct?” asked the interrogative voice, in a voice devoid of any real indignation. “What of the misery generated by the brutal wrench which you administered to human nature? There are many—and not merely those who survived the Crash—who would argue that ours is now a perverted society, and that the reckless fascination with violence which is increasingly manifest in younger generations is a result of the perversion of human nature occasioned by universal sterilization.”

“The empire of nature ended with the development of language,” the fake Arnett replied. “Ever since then, human beings have been the product of their technology. All talk of human nature is misguided romantic claptrap. The history of human progress has been the history of our transcendence and suppression of the last vestiges of instinctive behaviour. If there was any maternal instinct left in 2070, its annihilation was a good thing. To blame any present unhappiness or violence on the loss or frustration of any kind of genetic heritage is stupid and ridiculous.”

There was an obvious cut at this point. The next thing Arnett’s image said was: “Who told you about all this? It can’t have been Karol or Eveline. Somebody must have put the pieces together—somebody with expert knowledge and a cunning turn of mind. Who?”

“That’s of no importance,” the other voice said. “There’s only one more matter which needs to be determined, and that’s the identity which Conrad Helier adopted after faking his death. We have reason to believe that he reappeared in the world after an interval of some twenty-five years, having undergone extensive reconstructive somatic engineering. We have reason to believe that he now uses the name Damon Hart. Is that true, Dr. Arnett?”

“Yes,” said a voice which sounded like Arnett’s, ringing false because his head was bowed and his lips hardly moved. “The person who calls himself Damon Hart is really Conrad Helier. It’s true.”

Damon heard the sound of the helicopter before Silas Arnett’s image faded from the screen, and immediately rounded on his companion. Singh had heard it too, and he was seized by sudden alarm. He backed away, and reached for his jacket pocket. He began to say something. The expression on his face suggested that it would be something reassuring, but Damon wasn’t about to be reassured. He didn’t know for sure whose side Rajuder Singh was on, but he wasn’t prepared to take it for granted that it was his own.

Before Singh had any chance to say what he intended to say or to grip whatever it was he had reached for, Damon was onto him. The blow he aimed with the edge of his right hand was delivered with practised efficiency The old man went down with a sharp gasp of surprise. Damon pinned him to the floor and put his own hand into the pocket.

He pulled out a tiny dart-gun. It was incapable of inflicting any lethal injury but it could have paralysed him for several minutes before his internal technology mobilised itself to cancel out the effects of whatever toxin the darts bore—long enough for Singh to have made his escape from the house, if that was what he had intended to do.

Singh pried his right hand loose and tried to grab the gun, wailing: “You don’t understand!”

Damon lifted the weapon out of his captive’s reach but didn’t hit him again; he couldn’t be sure that the man bore him any ill will. “Damn right I don’t,” he muttered, through clenched teeth.

The noise of the helicopter was deafening now. It couldn’t land because the clearing wasn’t big enough but it was hovering close to the house. Damon presumed that it was unshipping men, who would burst in at any moment—but whose men would they be?

“Who are you really working for?” Damon demanded of Rajuder Singh, making his voice as harsh as he could. “Tell me now, or I’ll cut you up so badly it’ll take all the nanotech you’ve got six weeks and more to put you back together, old man.”

Singh must have known something of Damon’s past, and something of his reputation. His eyes flickered wildly from side to side, as if in search of inspiration. Damon produced the knife he always carried in his boot, for old time’s sake. It had a doubly-serrated edge, designed to tear flesh in the ugliest possible way. He stroked Singh’s cheek with it, and watched the blood fountain out.

“I can take your eyes out before they get here,” Damon said. “And if by chance they aren’t the cops, I can do a lot worse.”

“It’s not what you think!” the slender man gasped, seemingly desperate to spit the words out. “I really am with Karol and your father! Truly I am. If that’s the enemy, you have to—”

Damon didn’t find out what Singh would have wanted him to do if it had been the enemy—whoever “the enemy” might be—because the windows imploded with a deafening roar and two gas-grenades came bouncing across the carpet, pumping smoke.

“Oh shit,” Damon said, lifting his arm reflexively as if to shield his nose and mouth from the fumes. He knew that it would do no good; this wasn’t the first time he had been gassed by the cops. He shut his eyes tightly but he knew that it was going to sting horribly anyway, and he wasn’t in the least comforted by the thought that the men outside were probably doing it in the hope of saving him from coming to any harm at the hands of his captors.

Bitter experience told him to hold off as long as possible and then to take a good deep breath, but it wasn’t easy to persuade his reflexes to fall into line. He suffered several seconds of severe discomfort before he was finally able to let go and fall unconscious.

When Damon woke up he knew by the muted roar of the engines that he was aboard an aeroplane—not some glorified boxkite like the one the Australian had piloted, but a real intercontinental jet. He found that he was stretched out across three seats in the first-class compartment. Hiru Yamanaka was sitting on the opposite side of the aisle, watching him solicitously.

The Interpol man waited politely and patiently for Damon to gather himself together. “I’m sorry about the gas, Mr. Hart,” he said, eventually. “We didn’t realise that you had the situation under control, and we didn’t know who was holding you. When we saw the message that was dumped immediately after your plane took off we feared the worst. Did you see it, by any chance?”

“I saw it,” Damon said, sourly. “Have you interrogated Rajuder Singh yet?”

“Not yet. We confirmed his identity easily enough, but he’ll be out for a long while. He seems to have had a heart attack. Perhaps you frightened him. His internal technics will pull him through, but they won’t let him wake up for a couple of days. Nothing we can do about that without imperilling his life.”

Damon accepted a bottle of mineral water from Yamanaka’s perennial sidekick, but waved away the offer of plastic-packaged food. He sipped slowly from the neck of the bottle, but didn’t immediately raise himself to a sitting position. His head was still aching—but his mind was working well enough to alert him belatedly to the significance of what Yamanaka had said about the message advertising his peril.

“Did you say that the notice naming me was posted after the plane took off?” he said, to make sure.

“Almost immediately afterwards. That’s why we feared that the two events were linked.”

“Singh claimed that it was dumped beforehand—that Karol told the pilot to take me to... where was I?”

“Kahoolawe.”

“Whatever—that Karol told him to take me there because he’d seen the message. If he knew about the message before it was dumped...” He stopped abruptly, wondering how best to proceed. One of the legacies of his chequered past was a deep-seated reluctance to tell the cops anything he didn’t actually have to, and he still harboured the ambition of getting to the bottom of this before Interpol did.

“That’s very interesting,” the Interpol man said. “There’s no evidence of Singh’s involvement with the Eliminators, incidentally, or anyone else of a criminal disposition. In fact, his record is unblemished to a degree that’s rather remarkable in such an old man. He’s an ecological engineer and has been for well over a century. He knew your father, although that was a long time ago.”

“How did you get on to him so quickly?” Damon asked.

“We were keeping a close watch over you, Mr. Hart, even before Operator 101’s third message went out. We were already tracking the plane. Did they but know it, Mr. Kachellek and Mr. Singh had no chance of stealing you away unobserved.”

Did they but know it, Damon echoed, silently. The trouble is that it’s impossible to figure out how much they do know, and what their real purpose might be. He knew that it was possible for internal technology to fake medical emergencies as well as taking action to solve them, but he didn’t know whether it was unduly paranoid to suspect that Rajuder Singh had done some such thing in order to avoid—or delay—having to answer awkward questions.

“Did you catch the pilot?” Damon asked Yamanaka.

“Alas, no. The plane landed at Hilo on full automatic. He must have bailed out. We’re pursuing our investigations on Hawaii and Oahu, but the situation there is very confused because of another incident.”

“What incident?” Damon asked, warily.

“An explosion aboard the Kite. Rescuers have picked up a dozen survivors so far, but there’s no sigh of Karol Kachellek. That’s a pity—we’d hoped to ask him a few more questions about this business.”

Either the unknown enemy is stepping up the violence of his campaign. Damon thought, or... It wasn’t easy to find words to couch the alternative. “You seem to have a talent for losing geneticists,” he observed, drily. “Is Eveline still where she’s supposed to be, out in L-5?”

“I believe so. For the moment, I’m more concerned with the whereabouts of Silas Arnett and the identity of the persons who have been broadcasting the messages. It may not mean anything, but we’ve received communications from someone who claims to be the real Operator 101, disowning all the recent notices posted under that alias. It’s rather difficult to check his story, of course, as he insists on maintaining his anonymity.”

“I saw a tape of Silas’s supposed confession,” Damon said. “It wasn’t him, you know—the whole thing was a fake worked up from a template. It wasn’t even a particularly slick job. I could have done it better. In fact—”

He stopped, not wanting to put ideas into Yamanaka’s head—but they were already there.

“In fact,” the Interpol man said, smoothly, “it was a painfully obvious fake, especially at the end. Which raises interesting questions about the whole series of broadcasts. If they’re supposed to look like fakes, what are we being tempted to believe, and why? Given that it’s been made so very obvious that this whole case is trumped up, might we not consider it more seriously than we would had it been more expertly compiled?”

Yamanaka didn’t mention the possibility—which had occurred to Damon while he watched the last tape—that the various messages had been put out from more than one source: that the third and fourth had been put out with the intention of discrediting the first and second by piling up lies and confusions. The fact that the man from Interpol didn’t mention it didn’t mean, however, that he wasn’t aware of it; he had used the plural when talking about persons who had put out the messages.

“What did your DNA analyses tell you?” Damon asked, gruffly, as he sat up gingerly, touching his fingertips to his forehead. “You must have the results by now—and I’ll bet you weren’t content with superficial tissues, either. You probably drained some spinal fluid, maybe even bone marrow. What’s the verdict? Am I my father, or my father’s son?”

“We’re completely satisfied that you’re not Conrad Helier,” Yamanaka told him, serenely. “If the records can be trusted, you and he have exactly the degree of genetic similarity that would be expected were you father and son. There’s some uncertainty, of course, as to whether the data relating to your father’s genome has been rigged to give that impression—but that kind of data is routinely filed in so many places that it would have been exceedingly difficult to alter them all. We also have a detailed record of your childhood and adolescence—it would have taken a great deal of effort to fake all that.”

“It’s not faked,” Damon assured the policemen. “I remember it quite clearly. I didn’t spring into the world full-grown. In this instance, the transparent lie really is just a transparent lie, not a cunningly-wrought truth.”

“I assume, then, that we must construe it as a provocative move of some kind,” Yamanaka said, evenly. “It may have been intended to startle a reaction from someone. Perhaps your kidnapping was that reaction—but it’s also possible, I suppose, that it was part of the provocative move. What do you think, Mr. Hart?”

“What I think,” Damon said, “is that your coming to my apartment in person was a provocative move on your part. You wanted to set me off, didn’t you? I suppose you’re delighted with the success of your strategy—I wasn’t involved before, but I’m certainly involved now.”

“You credit me with too much cleverness,” Yamanaka said, with a modesty that was surely feigned. “I had no idea then whether you were involved or not, and I’m still not sure. I don’t now where Karol Kachellek fits in, or Surinder Nahal—or Madoc Tamlin.”

“Madoc Tamlin?” Damone echoed, trying to conceal his dismay. Clearly the Interpol man was no fool—but what was he trying to imply now?

“He’s been asking a lot of questions,” Yamanaka observed. “He’s using your money to buy the answers. When you saw the second message you called him and you extended his authorization. You presumably believe that you’re pulling his strings—but I have to consider other possibilities too. I have to consider the possibility that your strings are being pulled. This is a very convoluted puzzle, Mr. Helier, and Madoc Tamlin has some very convoluted friends.”

“So have you, Mr. Yamanaka,” Damon countered.

The man from Interpol didn’t deny it. Instead, he said: “Dr. Arnett’s supposed confession was an interesting statement, wasn’t it? Food for thought for everyone—and food which will be all the more eagerly swallowed for being dressed up that way I dare say that he was right about the effect the Crash had, of bringing people together so that for the first and only time in human history they were all on the same side. The world isn’t like that any more, is it? In a way, that’s rather a pity, don’t you think?”

“Not really,” Damon replied. “A world devoid of conflicts would be a very tedious place to live. It’s good to know that we might live for a very long time—but it’s also good to know that we might not. Without an element of danger, life might easily become insipid.” He felt a lot better now, and he was able to sit up.

“I take your point,” Yamanaka conceded, graciously, “but you must remember that you and I are young men, who can barely imagine what the world was like before and during the Crash. I wonder, sometimes, how different things might seem to the very old—to men like Rajuder Singh, Surinder Nahal and Karol Kachellek, and women like Eveline Hywood. They might be rather disappointed in the world they made, and the children they produced from their artificial wombs, don’t you think? They were hoping to produce a Utopia, but... well, no one could convincingly argue that the meek have inherited the world—at least, not yet.”

Damon didn’t know what Yamanaka might read into any answer he gave, so he prudently gave none at all. He just wants to use me as a pawn, he thought. Maybe I could have stayed out of it, if I hadn’t gone to Madoc the minute he alerted me to what was going on, but I’m in now for better or for worse, and I have to play it through—not for Interpol, and not for my father’s true blue friends, but myself.

“Sometimes,” Yamanaka added, in the same off handedly philosophical tone, “I wonder whether anyone can inherit the world, now that people who owned it all in the days before the Crash believe that they can live forever. I’m not sure that they’ll ever let go of it deliberately... and such fighting as they have to do to keep it is mostly amongst themselves.”

“My father never owned more than the tiniest slice of the world,” he said, awkwardly conscious of the fact that he had said my father instead of Conrad Helier. “He was never a corporation man.”

“Your father remade and reshaped the world by designing the New Reproductive System,” Yamanaka replied, softly. “The corporation men who owned it might well have hated him for that, even though he never actually succeeded in toppling their commercial empire. Men of business always fear and despise Utopians. They probably hate him still, almost as much as the Eliminator diehards hate them.”

“But he’s been dead for fifty years,” Damon pointed out. “Corporation men wouldn’t waste time demonizing the dead.”

“His collaborators are still alive,” Yamanaka countered. “Or were, until this plague of evil circumstance began.”

When the plane landed in Los Angeles Damon was invited to accompany Hiru Yamanaka and his associate to the local Interpol headquarters, but he declined. Despite stem warnings regarding Interpol’s inability to guarantee his safety he insisted on going back to his apartment—and in the end, Yamanaka agreed to take him there.

“The claims made by the so-called real Operator 101 are, of course, receiving a full measure of publicity,” the policeman told him. “They have not gone uncontradicted, but would-be assassins might be not inclined to believe the contradictions. You really would be safer in another location.”

“You can’t take me into custody,” Damon said, obstinately. “I haven’t done anything wrong. If I thought I needed bodyguards, I could hire some very experienced street-fighters.”

“That would be unwise,” Yamanaka said, blandly. “My advice is to leave Madoc Tamlin and your former friends out of this. They’re essentially unreliable.”

Damon had his own views on that particular matter, but he didn’t object when Yamanaka’s taciturn companion didn’t get back into the car when they dropped him outside the cap-stack.

“Just a precaution,” the policeman said, as they rode the elevator to the thirteenth floor. “I won’t camp outside your door, but I’ll be around.”

Damon knew how easy it was to mount eyes and ears in the walls of the corridor, and he didn’t doubt that anyone approaching his apartment would be under constant surveillance. Yamanaka hadn’t made any false promises about respecting his privacy.

When he’d taken time out to visit the bathroom and order some food from the kitchen Damon stationed himself before the windowscreen. He wasn’t unduly surprised or alarmed when Madoc Tamlin’s phone insisted that he was unavailable. He half-expected to get the same response from Eveline Hywood, but in fact she answered immediately. She even came on camera, so that the time delay occasioned by the fact their words and gestures had to traverse a quarter of a million miles wouldn’t be quite as disconcerting.

“Damon,” she said, pleasantly. “It’s good to see you. I’ve been worried about you. Is there any news of Karol or Silas?” She was obviously well informed about what had been going on.

“They haven’t been found yet—dead or alive,” he told her. “Interpol insists that it’s only a matter of time. Do you have any idea what’s going on, Evelyn?”

“Someone is evidently intent on blackening your father’s name. I can’t imagine why. These self-appointed Eliminators seem to be getting completely out of hand. There are none up here, mercifully; L-5 isn’t perfect, but it’s a haven of perfect sanity compared to Earth.”

Damon didn’t bother to question her certainty as to whether L-5 was really Eliminator-free. For the moment, he was inclined to the opinion that the aggrieved Operator 101 really was the victim of a pseudonym-hijack and that this whole affair was a struggle between two very different groups.

“Why not, Eveline?” he asked, softly. “What brought your adversaries crawling out of the woodwork now?”

“I have no idea,” she said. He couldn’t tell whether she was lying. “You might be better able to guess than I am. After all, this whole affair is really an attack on you, isn’t it?”

It is now, he thought. But it didn’t start that way. That’s a deflection, a diversionary tactic, for which my father’s so-called friends are at least partly and perhaps wholly responsible.

“Could it have something to do with this stuff that you and Karol are investigating—these para-DNA life-forms?” he asked, abruptly. That was the only thing that was happening now, so far as he could judge—the only thing which made it a “bad time.”

“How could it?” she asked, frowning. Was she puzzled, he wondered, or annoyed by the accuracy of this guess?

“Karol said there were two possibilities regarding its origins: up and down. He was looking at the bottom of the sea while you’re looking for evidence of its arrival from elsewhere in the Solar System. But he seemed to have a third alternative in mind when he said it—and there is a third alternative, isn’t there?” He knew that he didn’t have to spell it out that the third alternative was sideways; Eveline understood well enough what he meant.

“I’m still very worried about you, Damon,” Eveline said, scrupulously ignoring his question. “I wish you were safe. I’m sure it will all work out, though, if you only give it time. When they find Silas, he’ll put the record straight.”

“What about Surinder Nahal?” he asked. “Could he really be the one behind this stupid carnival? Does he really think my father orchestrated the Crash as well as the recovery? Why hasn’t he said so before?”

“I don’t know, Damon,” she said, with exaggerated patience. “It’s all lies. You know that.”

“Is there going to be a new plague?” he asked, abruptly switching tack again. “Is para-DNA going to throw up something just as nasty as the old meiotic disrupters and chias-malytics?”

“That’s ludicrously melodramatic,” she answered, calmly. “So far as we can tell, para-DNA is quite harmless. Organisms of this kind compete for resources with life as we know it, but there’s no evidence of any other kind of interaction and it would be surprising if there were. Para-DNA is just something which happened to drift into the biosphere from elsewhere—probably from the outer Solar System. It’s fascinating, but it’s not dangerous.”

“Are you sure it came from the farther reaches of the Solar System?” Damon asked, determined not to let the matter lie.

“Not yet,” she answered, equably. “Investigations of this kind take time, and we have to be very careful to have all the data in place before we draw conclusions.”

“Yes,” Damon said, in a neutral tone which was meant to imply far more than the words could say. “I understand that.” He really thought he did. That part, at least, he thought he had figured out.

“Please be careful, Damon,” Eveline said. “In spite of our past disagreements, we all love you. We’d really like to have you back one day, when you’ve got all the nonsense out of your system.”

I believe you would, he thought. In fact, I believe you think you will. All he said out loud was: “I’ll be careful. Don’t worry about me. You’ve got better things to do.”

He tried to reach Madoc Tamlin, but he failed. He still didn’t read anything sinister into that, until he received an incoming call from Hiru Yamanaka informing him that Diana Caisson had been arrested for questioning about her possible implication in the suspicious death of Surinder Nahal.

At first, Yamanaka refused to let Damon talk to Diana, although he admitted that she had asked repeatedly to see him. The Interpol man also refused to discuss the details of the case which he was supposedly building against her, although he confirmed that she had been captured while fleeing with a companion from a house where Nahal’s body had been found, and that the police were still searching for Madoc Tamlin, who had been conclusively identified as the companion in question. It was not until Interpol received confirmation from the Oakland police that the body discovered in the house had been dead for some considerable time before Diana and Madoc Tamlin had arrived there that he relented.

“Will you let her go now?” Damon asked, as he was taken down to the holding cells beneath Interpol’s L.A. headquarters.

“I can hold her for a while longer,” Yamanaka told him. “I’ll charge her with illegal entry if I have to. I’d like to talk to your friend Tamlin before I let her go, if only to cross-check her claim that she doesn’t know why they went there. I do wish you hadn’t involved Tamlin in this business; it’s an unhelpful complication. When you offer money for information you attract all manner of spiders—not just the clever crackers who spend all their real-time poking around the Web but the poisonous ones who prey on anyone and everyone.”

“He seems to have located Surinder Nahal before you did,” Damon pointed out. “Did he lead you to him, by any chance?”

“No, he didn’t,” Yamanaka replied, in a faintly offended tone.

“You were acting on information received, weren’t you?” Damon guessed. “The people who tipped you off were the ones who got to Nahal before Madoc did. They’re one step ahead of all of us, aren’t they? Do you have any real idea yet who they are?”

“Some of them are one-time friends of your father’s, Mr. Hart,” Yamanaka said, perhaps feeling the need to demonstrate once again that he wasn’t a fool. “I think they knew that Silas Arnett had been kidnapped before we began looking for him, but that they preferred to try to handle things on their own—just as you did. Independence of thought and action seems to run in the family—and the Eliminators are far from being the only secret society supported and sustained by the Web.”

There was no time for further talk; Yamanaka let him into the cell where Interpol was keeping Diana. She seemed to be glad to see him, even though she hadn’t forgiven him anything. There was a noticeable tension in their embrace.

“This is crazy,” she said. “They must know we didn’t kill the guy. We didn’t even know the body was there.”

“They know you didn’t kill him,” Damon reassured her. “What on earth possessed you to go there? Why was Madoc fool enough to let you?”

“He asked me to help him,” Diana said defensively. “He didn’t tell me what he was doing. He just wanted me to talk my way into the place—spin a line to persuade the guy to open his door. It wasn’t necessary; the door was open when we got there. We didn’t even have time to start stripping data from the guy’s systems. The cops must have done that after they picked us up; whatever there was, they’ve got. Can you get me out, Damon? You owe me that much.”

While she talked, Diana moved her hands nervously back and forth. Damon didn’t doubt that the walls had eyes which could see every last gesture, but he was fairly sure the patient watchers wouldn’t be able to decode the signals she was sending. In a world where any environment might be bugged, people like Madoc Tamlin were careful to develop private codes of communication, known only to their closest friends. Diana clearly wasn’t an expert in the use of this one, but she knew enough to spell out a name, repeating it to make sure he got it.

The name she was signing was “Lenny.” There was only one Lenny she could mean.

“I’ll get you a lawyer,” Damon promised. “I don’t think they’re really interested in pressing charges—they just need an excuse to talk to Madoc for a while. They want to know what he found out, just for curiosity’s sake. It’ll be OK. You’ll be out in no time.”

As expected, Yamanaka was waiting for him outside.

“What did you find out?” the policeman inquired, politely.

“Nothing you didn’t overhear,” Damon assured him, not expecting to be believed. “How are things going at your end?”

“As your girlfriend said, we stripped the data from the systems in the house in Oakland and we’re going through it with a fine-toothed comb. It’s possible that Arnett was held there, but he’s certainly not there now and we can’t be sure. The fact that Nahal died in problematic circumstances gives us carte blanche to root through everything he left behind—if he is behind this puppet-show, we’ll uncover every last detail of it eventually. It’s just a matter of time.”

Damon was alert enough to note the peculiar circumlocution. “What do you mean, problematic circumstances?he asked. “I thought he’d been murdered.”

“According to the medical examiner,” Yamanaka said, “he wasn’t—not directly, at any rate. He seems to have died of natural causes. The only mystery is why his internal technology didn’t prevent it, but it’s probable that he was simply too old. We’re so used to nanotech magic that we’ve come to expect miracles which even the cleverest machinery can’t deliver.”

My father died of natural causes too, Damon thought, and I dare say that poor Karol will turn up drowned. Rajuder Singh hasn’t recovered consciousness yet, and perhaps he never will. If Silas is dead, too, that only leaves Eveline unaccounted for. Except, of course, for me.

“We live in a very complicated world,” Damon said, matching the Interpol’s man’s oddly irritating philosophical manner. “We’re so good at creating virtual realities that we’ve almost lost the trick of distinguishing appearance from reality. Maybe we expect more of social machinery like Interpol than Interpol can possibly be expected to deliver.”

“Are you talking about truth, or justice?” Yamanaka countered.

“Both,” said Damon, drily.

When he left Interpol headquarters Damon immediately headed for the most crowded streets in the city. He was reasonably sure that Yamanaka’s taciturn companion was still looking out for him, and that he wouldn’t be easy to shake off. He bought a new suit of clothes and left the old one behind, just in case Yamanaka had planted any discreet bugs on his person, and he stopped off at a public gym for a shower, just in case there was anything in his hair that shouldn’t have been there. His internal technology was good enough to take care of anything that had got under his skin. He looked up Lenny Garon’s address on the gym’s directory-terminal.

When he left the gym he struck lucky. A software glitch put half the local traffic signals out of action for a full five minutes—time enough to snarl up twenty thousand vehicles and create a jam which would require at least an hour to clear. The pavements jammed up almost as badly as the gridlocked vehicles, and tempers soared all along the line. Damon kept on ducking and dodging until he was certain that he was free and clear of all humanly possible pursuit, and then began the painstaking business of making his way across town without leaving a Webtrack.

“Is it about my tape?” Lenny Garon said, anxiously blinking his one good eye, as he let Damon into his squalid capsule. “Did something go wrong with the mesh?” Tamlin plainly hadn’t let him in on any secrets.

“Your tape’s fine,” Tamlin reassured him, once Damon was safely inside. “Just take a walk, will you? The two of us have something private to discuss. I’ll pay you a couple of hundred in rent, but you have to forget you ever saw us, OK?”

The kid was appropriately impressed. “Be my guest,” he said. As he disappeared into the corridor, he called back: “I hear you’re an enemy of mankind now. Good going.”

As the door slid shut behind the boy Damon looked around the room, wondering that people still had to live like this in a world whose population explosion had fizzled out long ago. While the greater part of L.A. slowly rotted down into dust its poorer people still huddled together in neighborhoods of high-rise blocks full of narrow rooms with fold-down beds, kitchens the size of cupboards and even smaller bathrooms. Perhaps people had grown over-accustomed to crowding during the years before the Crash, and now couldn’t live without it; that made more sense, in a way, than conventional explanations about buildings needing services and the proximity principles of supply and transport.

“What the hell is happening, Damon?” Tamlin asked, when the door was firmly closed and Lenny Garon’s footfalls had died into silence.

“You tell me.”

Tamlin shook his head again. “Damned if I know. How bad is the trouble I’m in?”

“Nothing much. They know Nahal was dead before you got there. All you did was find a body. They’d be grateful if it weren’t for the fact that somebody else had already tipped them off about it. They still want to talk to you, but they’ll be polite.”

Tamlin’s relief on hearing this news was very evident. “Who killed him?” he asked.

“Nobody. At the very worst, somebody flushed out his internal technology, the way Silas Arnett’s kidnappers did. Perhaps it’s suppose to look like justice. What did you find out, Madoc?”

“Not much,” Tamlin admitted. “The way the spiders are spinning, it looks as if this guy Nahal had some kind of grudge against your father and his cronies. Maybe he’d been nursing it for a hundred years, or maybe it’s just something that came back to haunt him in his old age. It looks as if Nahal had Arnett snatched, and that he put out the Operator 101 stuff himself—although the word is out that he isn’t the same guy who built up the Operator 101 name and reputation. He was difficult to trace, but not too difficult. I’m sorry about Diana—she wouldn’t stay home. You know how she is. I didn’t tell her anything.”

Damon had taken note of the emphases. “You said looks?” he queried.

“That’s right,” Tamlin confirmed. “I’ve no proof, but I have this itchy feeling that looks are all there is. Even before I found the door open and the guy lying dead... I think it was left all neat and tidy for someone to find—the cops, I guess. I get the impression that somebody’s busy clearing up their case for them. Whoever it is, they’re cleverer than any people I know, and have more money. That’s what I think, anyhow.”

“It’s what I think too,” Damon said. “You warned me when I asked you to help that all the best outlaw Webwalkers were in the pockets of the corps. I didn’t think it was relevant, but it is. All we could ever buy was a slice of the same pie they were feeding the authorities.”

Tamlin shook his head, wonderingly. “What’s it got to do with the corps?” he asked.

“Nothing, except insofar as the real owners and movers of the corps are hidden. The trouble with a world in which it’s difficult to keep secrets is that everyone tries so much harder. The Web is an open book to those who know how to turn its keys, and nanomachinery makes all kinds of unobtrusive eavesdropping as simple as falling off a log—and very, very cheap. There’s only one option for anyone who wants to move behind the scenes, and that’s to throw up multiple smokescreens. The only way to hide the truth is to dissolve it in an ocean of bluff and double-bluff. You and I wouldn’t even be clever enough to figure out who the players in this game might be, if it weren’t for the accident of biology that connected me to one of them—and even that would be irrelevant if it hadn’t been for the vanity which made my father instruct his trusty hirelings to do everything possible to turn me into a replica modeled on the same template.”

“Why did they say you were Conrad Helier? They couldn’t possibly expect people to believe that.”

“They didn’t. The third and fourth messages were calculatedly transparent lies, intended to discredit any truth that might have been lurking in the first two. My father’s team also wanted to give themselves an excuse for taking me out of the game—or dragging me further into it, on their side rather than the opposition’s. They didn’t approve of my sending you out digging for information—but they cocked up the abduction because they were in too much of a hurry.”

“Are you saying that your father really is alive, and that he really did cause the Crash?”

For a moment, Damon was tempted to tell his friend exactly what he did believe—but only for a moment. When the moment was past he knew that he’d made a crucial decision.

“No,” he said, after only the slightest pause. “He’s dead all right, and if the viruses which caused the Crash were manufactured, he didn’t do it. We just got caught in the crossfire of an old war which should have been laid to rest fifty years ago. It really doesn’t matter a damn who wins and who loses. Anyhow, Surinder Nahal has been cast in the role of guilty party, and now he’s dead the case will be closed.”

“You don’t think Nahal did it, do you?” Tamlin said, just to be sure.

“No,” Damon said, “I don’t think he did. I think my father’s friends want to keep the real guilty party out of sight, so that the only files that’ll be examined and picked apart will be Nahal’s—and those will be very carefully doctored. That way, they can shape the disclosures to suit themselves.” That much, he figured, was almost certainly true—but it was only a part of the truth. What the hidden movers wanted to keep hidden was something more significant than the possibility that Conrad Helier had designed and released the viruses which caused the Crash.

“Things could be worse,” Tamlin opined—still, apparently, buoyed up by the relief of knowing that Interpol had no particular grudge against him. “At least the bastards are still dying, one by one. Imagine how much worse it’d be if they really could live forever. No matter how far or how fast our generation went, we’d always be one step behind them. It’ll all be ours one day, though—we just have to be patient.”

Tamlin had always had an uncanny knack of putting his finger on the heart of a problem, although he was perversely prone to misinterpret the significance of what he saw. Damon was about to congratulate him on his cock-eyed perspicacity, with all due irony, but as he opened his mouth he saw Tamlin’s expression change to one of horror and alarm. He turned abruptly to see the apartment door sliding noiselessly into its bed.

A long arm, which was certainly not Lenny Garon’s, reached around the jamb and lobbed something into the tiny room. It fell at Damon’s feet. He had only seen such objects in broadcast VR dramas, but he recognised it immediately as an explosive grenade.

There was nowhere in the room to hide and the door was already sliding shut again. Had Madoc Tamlin been a hero of the self-sacrificing kind he might have tried to bundle Damon along in front of him as he headed for the exit, keeping his own body between his friend and the threat of mortal injury, but he wasn’t that kind of hero—and Damon couldn’t blame him for it.

What Tamlin actually did was to dive past Damon and hurl himself at the slowly-closing slit which led to relative safety. He didn’t make it. He couldn’t even get his fingers into the crack before the escape-route was sealed off. The doorway was just as narrow as everything else in the apartment, and the door was very efficient.

Damon watched, dumbly, as Tamlin put his arms over his head and huddled up into a quasi-foetal position, evidently hoping that his internal technology might be good enough to pull him through the effects of the explosion, if only he could make himself a small enough target.

Damon was startled by his own composure as he bent down and picked up the grenade.

“It’s not real,” he said, after holding it for ten or twelve seconds. “It’s a fake.”

Tamlin wasn’t immediately convinced, but it didn’t take him long to realise that he must look incredibly foolish. He slowly unwound, and looked Damon in the face. There was no relief in his expression now, although it would not have been inappropriate.

“What kind of crazy man would throw a fake grenade into a place like this?” he asked, harshly.

“The kind who wanted to deliver a message,” Damon replied, dully.

Tamlin looked at the grenade, as if he expected Damon to unscrew the cap and produce a piece of paper from its hollow interior. “What message?” he asked, as he came slowly to his feet.

“It says: If we really wanted you dead, you’d be dead,” he explained, softly. “You don’t have to worry about it, Madoc—it’s for me.”

When Damon got back to his apartment Hiru Yamanaka was waiting for him. He was alone. He was sitting in a chair, looking comfortable, but Damon knew well enough that he must have spent the bulk of the time he’d been there prying, with more ruthless efficiency than Diana had ever contrived. He’d probably found evidence of half a hundred minor misdemeanors, but he would doubtless file them away, at least for the time being.

“That wasn’t very wise, Mr. Hart,” Yamanaka said. “You could have put yourself in danger.”

“If anyone really wanted me dead, I’d be dead,” Damon told him.

“Really dead, or only apparently dead?” Yamanaka asked, innocently.

“How’s the investigation?” Damon countered.

“All wrapped up,” the man from Interpol said. “The evidence was delivered to us on a plate when we stripped the systems in that house up in Oakland. It seems that Surinder Nahal had suffered the fate which so many of our old men fear. His internal technology hadn’t been able to maintain his brain to the same standard as his body, and he’d fallen prey to mental illness. Having belatedly conceived a paranoid hatred for his more famous contemporary Conrad Helier, he kidnapped Silas Arnett and employed a mixture of straightforward torture and deceptive videosynthesis to build an entirely false case against the man of whom he was so envious. All the evidence to prove it is now in place. We found Arnett’s body, by the way—and what was left of Karol Kachellek’s. Arnett seems to have died of injuries inflicted after his internal technology had been flushed out; Kachellek may or may not have drowned before the sharks tore him apart. My investigation wasn’t a complete failure, however—we were able to track down the original Operator 101 when she started complaining about the usurpation of her psuedonym. I gather that she’s rather looking forward to her day in court, in anticipation of being able to plead the Eliminator cause with all due eloquence before a large video-audience. I do hope the newstapes won’t make a martyr of her.”

“It’s a perverse world we’re living in, Mr. Yamanaka,” Damon said. “Appearances matter far more than reality. In fact, we’ve sophisticated our virtual realities to the point where the distinction between appearance and reality has broken down. Each layer of illusion that we penetrate merely reveals another layer of illusion.”

“You know that’s not true, Mr. Hart,” the policeman said. “No matter what practical difficulties people like you and I might encounter in getting to the bottom of things, there really is a bottom. The truth is there, no matter how well-camouflaged it might be. If I didn’t believe that, I’d be no use at all as an investigator.”

“Are you satisfied that you’ve reached the bottom of this business?” Damon asked him, knowing the answer already. “Have you sorted out the truth from the morass of disinformation in which it’s submerged?”

“Not yet,” Yamanaka replied. “But I won’t stop trying. Will you?”

“Did Rajuder Singh ever wake up?” Damon asked.

Yamanaka nodded. “He told us that Karol Kachellek asked him to take care of you because he thought you were in danger, and that he knows no more than that. He says he didn’t know that the Operator 101 message naming you didn’t go out until after Kachellek had called him. It’s probably true, and if it’s false we’ll never be able to prove it. Do you want him charged with false imprisonment?”

“No. Let the matter rest.”

“Is that what you intend to do?” Yamanaka asked, again.

“I should never have hared off on a wild goose chase in the first place,” Damon told him. “I guess I must still be unduly sensitive about the matter of my supposed birthright, and I was all strung out because of the business with Diana. But it’s all over now. My father’s dead, and so are most of my foster-parents. There’s only Eveline left, and she’s a quarter of a million miles away. Diana won’t be coming back. I can get on with my own life now, and that’s what I intend to do.”

“You’re a liar, Mr. Hart,” Yamanaka said, with an off-hand calmness which didn’t take the sting out of the words. “You know as well as I do that the messages I first brought to your attention weren’t just raking over burnt-out embers. They were building up to some other revelation, but then your father’s friends stepped in and took over the script, putting their own scapegoat—with a full complement of supplementary evidence—in place of the one the opposition intended to use.”

“I suppose they killed him just to make it look good,” Damon said, to test the water.

“You know how easy it is to synthesize appearances,” the policeman said. “That doesn’t just apply to images transmitted over the Web and VR tapes. A first-rate biological engineer can probably fake genetic appearances as easily as a good tape-doctor can fake visual ones. There are far too many bodies in this affair, Mr. Hart—too many dead men whose internal technology ought to have kept them alive but somehow didn’t. A corpus delicti isn’t sufficient evidence of death in a world like ours—a world, where flesh can be manufactured and shaped, where the physical appearances of the living can be modified by somatic engineering and where new identities can be so easily created by throwing bits of data into the chaotic flow of the Webstream.”

Damon recalled what Madoc Tamlin had said about things being better than they might be. While the old continued to die, the young still had a chance to inherit the empires of the world—so it was in the interests of the old to maintain that image of the world. It was the interests of the people with the very best internal technology to play down its power—to maintain the idea that what people called immortality wasn’t really immortality at all, or even emortality. It was in the interests of the people who owned the corps which owned the world to persuade their would-be heirs that patience was still the cardinal virtue, that their elders were liable to lose their memories and their minds and were still certain to die, in the end. But if all of that were mere appearance and mere illusion, what hope would there be for the impoverished young ambitious to claim a generous slice of the big cake? The Eliminators offered hope of a nasty kind, but Damon knew only too well that it was a false hope, a mere colourful folly. Damon knew—and he was sure he knew it because he was his own man, and not because he was his father’s son—that the one and only real hope in a world like that was of a very different kind.

“With your help,” Yamanaka said, “I might be able to dig a little deeper. You’re in a better position to put pressure on Eveline Hywood, and pry into her affairs, than I could ever be. Together, we might be able to penetrate this sham and figure out what the real dispute is all about. My guess is that it’s about para-DNA. The people who launched this attack on your father’s inner circle intended to expose the fact that it’s fake—something cooked up in a lab, just like the viruses that caused the Crash.”

“You’re dreaming, Mr. Yamanaka,” Damon told him equably. “You’re living in a virtual reality of your own design. Para-DNA is a product of nature; my guess is that it drifted in from outer space. Anyone who said otherwise would be a liar—an obvious liar.”

Yamanaka didn’t scowl or shrug his shoulders; he just got up from the chair and quietly adjusted his clothing before heading for the door. Damon was expecting a Parthian shot, though, and he wasn’t disappointed.

“I’m disappointed in you, Mr. Hart,” Yamanaka said, as he let himself out. “I thought that you were really determined to be your own man, and to escape the tentacles of your father’s schemes and ideals. I thought that you might at least have a healthy resentment of that trick they pulled in naming you. No matter how many denials are broadcast, you’ll never be entirely safe from the Eliminators. Don’t you resent the fact that they’re still manipulating you, even after all these years?”

“You know what people say,” Damon countered, unwilling to let the policeman have the last word. He hesitated just long enough to conjure up a quantum of suspense and dramatic tension before adding: “If you can’t beat them, join them.”

The contact was so long in coming that he had almost stopped expecting it. Months passed: months which he spent in splendid isolation, creating imaginary worlds for anyone and everyone who would pay him to do it, making no discrimination between Madoc Tamlin’s black market tapes and those commissioned by legitimate corporations. He didn’t bother to keep a close watch on the news; by the time he heard that Eveline Hywood had confirmed that para-DNA was an alien invader carried into the inner Solar System by comets from the Oort Cloud, such excitement as the announcement had generated was already dying down. Nobody tried to call her a liar—no one, at any rate, who could get a hearing from the people who put the newstapes together.

Appropriately enough, the contact, when it finally came, was made in the one place where he thought his privacy really was guaranteed: in an imaginary world he was in the process of building. He was designing a sharespace for use in an adventure game, but it wasn’t nearly ready to be opened up for sharing. It was a big commission, requiring him to design the natural phenomena, flora and fauna of a hypothetical alien world orbiting a distant sun, whose visitors might undergo all kinds of vivid adventures, individually or in groups. He had his VR-apparatus hooked up to the Web so that he could decant commercially-available templates for adaptation and integration, but nothing was supposed to be able to come down the cable unless he summoned it. When he realised that there was someone else wandering around in his creation he felt a strange sense of violation which was even more shocking, in its way, than the appearance of the stranger. The appearance was, after all, a mere fiction; although it looked exactly like the pictures he had seen of his late father, it could have been anyone at all.

“Hello, son,” the image of Conrad Helier said, softly. “We meet at last.” As he spoke he looked around at the multicolored alien jungle and all the vivid insects with which Damon was busy populating it; his gaze seemed slightly disapproving, as if he found it all rather tawdry and inartistic.

Damon couldn’t entirely disagree with such a judgment, if it were indeed implied; he had been instructed—in so many words—to paint in gaudy and lushly unnatural colours, to think of Douanier Rousseau rather than Corot or Constable.

“You people really are full of surprises,” Damon said, determined to hold his own in what was bound to be a problamatic discussion. “I suppose sophisticated biotechnics and clever nanomachinery are so similar to magic that you’ve all started behaving like the magicians of legend: jealous, secretive, loving deceit for its own sake.”

“Not for its own sake,” the other said, with a sorrowful shake of the head. “The opposition are secretive, and fiercely jealous of their secrets, because their power is based in products and profits, patents and petty monopolies. To them, knowledge is capital to be hoarded and guarded, invested at the highest available rates of interest.”

“And you’re different, I suppose?”

“Yes we are,” Conrad Helier retorted, firmly. “Their end is our means. They don’t have any long-term objectives except preserving their advantages and maintaining their comforts. They only want to control things because they couldn’t bear to be controlled. Even though they’re effectively immortal, they’re still thinking in terms of today and tomorrow. They’ll grow out of it, in time—but until they do they’re a heavy anchor holding progress back. We’re planners and builders. We think in terms of centuries and millennia. We’re practising to be masters of evolution, but in the meantime we’re trying to be midwives of history. We’re not interested in money for its own sake, or power for its own sake. We’re interested in what money and power will enable us to do.”

“And pretending to die was just a career move, I suppose?”

“If you want to put it that way. It wasn’t difficult. I simply manufactured a second body—a clone, if you will—complete with all faults, for the benefit of the autopsy. You’d be surprised how easy it is to contrive a simple gypsy switch, even in a hospital, when no one’s expecting it.”

“And you did the same for Karol Kachellek and Surinder Nahal. What about Silas? Did you manage to get him back in time, or did the opposition really kill him?”

“We got him back. They released him once their pitch had been ruined. That’s one good thing about the way the game is being played—nobody fights to the death any more. Emortals tend to be scrupulously careful about that sort of thing.”

Damon remembered the fake grenade, and he nodded. “I guess that’s progress,” he admitted. “It might introduce an element of farce, but it’s better to play war-games than fight authentically bloody wars.”

“It was no part of our plan to involve you,” Conrad Helier’s simulacrum said, “but once you’d involved yourself we had to treat you as a player. You do understand that, don’t you?”

“I understand,” Damon said. “I caught on pretty quickly, didn’t I?”

“Yes, you did—quickly enough to make a father proud. Not that you could avoid your destiny forever, of course. No one can. You ought to be able to adapt more readily than most. You are my son, after all.”

Damon didn’t entirely like the tone of these remarks. Even now, he didn’t want to be taken for granted. “Was Silas’s supposedly fake confession true?” he asked, abruptly. “Did you design the viruses which caused the Crash?”

“I designed one of them. To this day, I don’t know who designed them all, and it’s certainly possible that some of them really did arise naturally. We didn’t kill anybody, Damon—we just took away the supposed right which people claimed to multiply themselves to the point at which the side-effects of their living destroyed the ecosphere. That statement Silas quoted is perfectly accurate: we had to play God, because the position was vacant.”

“And you’re still doing it—but you have to move in mysterious ways, because you’re not unopposed.”

“Again, if you want to put it that way—yes. Somebody has to make plans, Damon. Somebody has to ask the big questions. If everybody were prepared to join in, we’d be only too happy to let them—but there are too many people in the world who only value the moment and aren’t prepared to think about the more distant consequences of their actions. You understand that very well, I think.”

Damon felt a surge of resentment, but he didn’t try to contradict the phantom. “You designed para-DNA too, didn’t you?” he asked, instead.

“I didn’t do it on my own—but it is a laboratory product. We think that the Earth needs an alien invader, Damon: an all-purpose alien invader which can turn its hand to all kinds of purposes.”

“Why? What’s the point?”

“Because we can’t afford to export our spirit of adventure to virtual reality, and there’s a very real danger that we might do just that—as evidenced by the fact that you and I have to meet like this in order to avoid the millions of microscopic eyes with which the real world is dusted. People shouldn’t be living in the ruins of the old world contentedly huddling together in the better parts of the old cities and binding themselves ever more tightly to our particular stations in the Web like flies mummified in spidersilk. Nor is it rebellion enough against that kind of a world for the disaffected young to use derelict neighbourhoods as adventure playgrounds where they can carve one another up in meaningless ritual duels. We have to maintain some kind of movement, because without movement there’ll be no momentum. People have to build and keep on building, to grow and keep on growing. We have to make progress, Damon—and if people need a spur to urge them on, I’m more than willing to provide it.”

“And para-DNA is your spur. Another plague, like the ones the God of the Old Testament rained down on stubborn Egypt in order to secure the release of His people from captivity.” Damon’s voice dripped sarcasm.

“It’s not nearly as devastating as the slaughter of the first-born,” his father’s simulacrum pointed out. “Like the viruses which caused the plague, para-DNA is no killer—but it’ll be a terrible nuisance. It’ll attack the structure of the cities and the structure of the Web; it’ll make it impossible for the human race to dig itself a hole and live in manufactured dreams. It won’t attack people, and it certainly won’t murder people wholesale, but it’ll always be there: a sinister, creeping presence that will keep on cropping up where it’s least expected and where it’s least welcome, to remind people that there’s nothing—nothing, Damon—that can be taken for granted. Long life, the New Reproductive System, the Earth, the Solar System ... all these things have to be managed, guarded and guided. We ought to be looking towards the real alien worlds instead of—or at least as well as—synthesizing comfortable simulacra; my people are just trying to make sure that happens. As I said, it’s a long-term plan; nothing melodramatic will happen for a few years, but we couldn’t afford to have the plan aborted before we even got it off the ground. We have to keep up appearances for a long time yet. I’m sure you understand that. Why else would you turn down Mr. Yamanaka’s tempting offer to turn traitor?”

“Why did the corps try to sabotage the plan?” Damon wanted to know. “It sounds to me as if you’ll be stimulating a lot of economic activity.”

“The corporations don’t like us. They really would prefer it if the meek inherited the Earth. The corporations are only interested in what people want, and the more stable and predictable those wants are the better the corporation men like it. We’re interested in what people need, and that makes us difficult to figure. They don’t think of us as competition because we’re not aiming for profit and our risk calculations aren’t made by accountants, but we’re an irritating thorn in their side. They’re not about to launch an all-out crusade against us because it wouldn’t make economic sense, but they’re always prepared to make a small investment in a good spoiling tactic. They probably figure that they’ve won a tiny victory by forcing a few more of our personnel into effective invisibility, but that goes to show what small-minded cowards they are. In the end, they can’t win—because they’re not really playing to win—they’re only playing for money.”

“Playing God must be addictive,” Damon observed, neutrally, “but it’s only one more game, isn’t it? All this talk of yours is just rhetoric—mere appearance.”

“When human beings have properly adapted to what we now are,” Conrad Helier’s image replied, twisting its synthetic lips into a conscientiously ironic smile, “we’ll all be playing God, because it’ll be the only game in town. It’s not a position that can be left unfilled—not any more. We have the power and we have the time, so we have to take the responsibility.”

“And where do I fit into your grand plan? Or did you only use my name in your patched-up package of disinformation to get back at me for deserting the fold?”

“You decided to be a player, Damon. We had to put you in a position where you couldn’t do us any harm, for safety’s sake. Anything you say about us from now on is bound to seem suspect—and I can assure you that there’ll be no record of this conversation to prove that it ever took place. But if you want a place in the scheme, you only have to step aboard. Go out to L-5, Damon—join Eveline and work with her. It’s the place to be, nowadays and for the next forty or fifty years. After that ... anything’s possible, Damon. Anything’s possible, for you and for anyone, if you can only cultivate the skill and find the drive.”

“And that’s what you expect of me, isn’t it? That’s what you’ve always expected.”

“It’s a natural next step. You’ve got the senseless violence out of your system, and you’ve already shed your links to that particular phase of your past, one by one. There are only two possible futures before you now: either you become a corporation man, building gaudy fantasies like this to amuse the meek; or you become a real outlaw, and a real inheritor of Earth.”

Damon looked his enigmatic visitor squarely in his deceptive eyes, and said: “You’re not my father at all, are you? This is just one more phase of the game, one more layer of illusion.” He was aware of the desperate edge in his voice, and of the fact that he was being perverse for the sake of it. As Mr. Yamanaka had said, there was a truth lurking at the bottom of the swamp of deceits, and in his own mind Damon was morally certain that he had reached that truth. However false this appearance might be, and however absurd its context, he was completely convinced that the voice with which this man was speaking was his father’s voice, and that it was speaking as plainly and as honestly as it could.

“Does it really matter who or what I am?” the invader asked, quietly. “The specifics of the case are trivial; what really matters is the one thing that’s obvious no matter who’s alive and who’s dead, not who made what and why. Anything is possible, Damon, if you can only figure out what you want to do. If you want to, you can hide out in virtual space all your life; a lot of people will, now that the option’s there. If you’d rather be a man than a rabbit, though, don’t be ashamed of trying to play God in earnest, because there really isn’t any other game worth playing.”

“I don’t owe you anything,” Damon said, equally quietly. “Whoever you are, or pretend to be, I don’t owe you anything. I’m my own man.”

“You owe it to yourself to be and do everything you can,” said the person wearing Conrad Helier’s face. “Some day you will. All I’m asking you to do is to start now instead of leaving it until the day after tomorrow.”

With that, Conrad Helier’s simulacrum turned and walked away into the imaginary wilderness—into an unreasonably vivid forest like none that had ever been seen on the face of the Earth. Brightly-coloured insects fluttered into the virtual space he had vacated, impossibly pretty and precious. A semi-human dryad stepped out of the bole of one of the trees, blinking in the sudden sunlight. She wore Diana Caisson’s face, but there was nothing of the real Diana in her make-up; she was only a phantom, like the insects and the trees.

Like the invader before her, the dryad soon disappeared into a riot of colour and confusion—but Damon knew before then that whatever he chose to do today and tomorrow, he would never be rid of the challenge that had been set before him. As his father had said, the only thing to be decided was when he would begin.