Inherit the Earth (17 page)

“If Madoc’s given you the same spiel he gave me he’ll have told you that the human body renews itself every eight years or so—that all the cells are continually being replaced, on a piecemeal basis, to the extent that there’s hardly an atom inside you now that was there when you were nine years old, and hardly an atom that will be still with you when you’re twenty-five. That’s true—but the inference he intends you to take, which is that it doesn’t matter what you do to your body now because you’ll have a brand-new one in ten years’ time is false and dangerous. That constant process of reproduction isn’t perfect. It’s like taking a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy—every time an error or flaw creeps in it’s reproduced, and gradually exaggerated.

“Your internal technology will increase the number of times you can photocopy yourself and still be viable, but the errors and flaws will still accumulate—and everything you do to create more flaws will cost you at the far end of your life. In a few days’ time you won’t be able to see the scars that Brady’s knife left, but you should never make the mistake of thinking that you’ve been fixed up as good as new. There’s no such thing. If you want my advice, Lenny, give it up now. It doesn’t matter how good you might become—it’s just not worth it.”

The expression on the boy’s face said that this wasn’t the kind of judgment he had expected. He had braced himself against the possibility of being told that he might not be good enough to make the grade, but he hadn’t braced himself against this. He
opened his mouth, but Damon didn’t want to know what he was going to say.

“Don’t blow your chance to ride the escalator all the way to true emortality, Lenny,” he said. “The ten-year advantage you have over me could be vital—but not nearly as vital as looking after your tender flesh. Maybe neither of us will get there, and maybe both of us will die in some freak accident long before we get to our full term, but it makes sense to do the best we can. Getting the IT a little bit sooner won’t do you any good at all if you give it less to work with when it’s installed. Nanotechnology is only expensive because PicoCon takes so much profit; in essence, it’s dirt cheap. It uses hardly any materials and hardly any energy. Everything goes to the rich first, but after that the price comes tumbling down. The best bet is to look after yourself and be patient—that’s what I’m doing now, and it’s what I’ll be doing the rest of my life, which I hope will be a
very
long time.”

Damon knew that the lecture was rushed, but he didn’t have time to fill in all the details and he didn’t have time to take questions. Lenny understood that; his face had become more and more miserable while Damon spoke, but he was still determined to play it tough. The boy waited for Damon to close the conversation.

“I really have to go, Lenny,” Damon said as softly as he could. “I’m sorry. Maybe we can talk again, about this and other things, but not now.” He broke the connection. Then he got out of the booth and went in search of Karol Kachellek.

K
arol Kachellek was still in the workroom where he and Damon had watched the tape of Silas Arnett’s mock trial. When Damon came back he was under the phone hood and the room was unlit, but he came out as soon as he realized that he wasn’t alone and brushed the light-switch on his console. Damon hadn’t managed to catch the last few words Karol had spoken before signing off but he blushed slightly anyway, as if walking into a darkened room were an infallible sign of stealthy intent.

Damon was all set for more verbal fencing, but the bioscientist was in a very different state of mind now.

“I’m sorry, Damon,” Kachellek said, with unaccustomed humility. “You were right. This business is far more complicated than I thought—and 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 only wish I did.” The unprecedented plaintiveness in his foster father’s voice made Damon want to believe that he was sincere. “You mustn’t worry, Damon. It will all be sorted out. I don’t know who’s doing this, or why, but . . . . ” As 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 synergistic combination of all three.

Karol reddened even more deeply under his foster son’s steady 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, if he said it at all. 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 all 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 instead, but that might well be effective enough for his purposes 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,” Karol said emphatically. His manner was defensive, but he really did sound sincere. “I really don’t understand what’s happening. Who would want to do this to us, Damon? Why—and why
now?
”

Damon wished that he had a few answers to offer; he had never seen any of his foster parents in such a state of disarray. He felt obliged to wonder whether the tape could have been quite as discomfiting if there had been no truth at all in its allegations, but he was certain that Karol’s blustering couldn’t all be bluff. He really didn’t understand what was happening or who was behind it, or why they’d chosen to unleash the whirlwind at this particular time. Maybe, given time, he could work it all out—but for the moment he was helpless, to the extent that he was even prepared to accept guidance from Damon the prodigal, Damon the betrayer.

“Tell me about Surinder Nahal,” Damon said abruptly. “Does
he
have motive enough to be behind all this?” He was avid to seize the chance to ask some of the questions he’d been storing up, hoping that for once he might get an honest reply, and that
seemed to be the best item with which to begin. Karol was far more likely to know something useful about a rival gene-tweaker than the disappearance of an eighteen-year-old girl.

However far Karol was from recovering his usual icy calm, though, he still had ingrained habit to come to his aid. “Why him?” he parried unhelpfully.

“Come on, Karol,
think
,” Damon said urgently. “Silas isn’t the only one who’s gone missing, is he? If nothing was wrong, Madoc would have found Nahal by now and let me know. If he isn’t part of the problem, he must be part of the solution. Maybe his turn in the hot seat is coming next—or maybe he’s the one feeding questions to the judge. How bad is the grudge he’s nursing?”

“Surinder Nahal was a bioengineer back in the old days,” Kachellek said, with a slight shrug of his shoulders. “His field of endeavor overlapped ours—he was working on artificial wombs too, and there was a difference of opinion regarding patents.”

“How strong a difference of opinion? Do you mean that he accused Conrad Helier of obtaining patents that ought to have been his?”

“You don’t know what it was like back then, Damon. The queue outside the patent office was always five miles long, and every time a significant patent was granted there were cries of
Foul!
all along the line—not that it mattered much, the way the corps were always rushing to produce copycat processes just beyond the reach of the patents and throwing lawsuits around like confetti. The Crash put an end to all that madness—it focused people’s minds on matters of
real
importance. There’s nothing like a manifest threat to the future of the species to bring people together. In 2099 the world was in chaos, on the brink of a war of all against all. By 2110 peace had broken out just about everywhere, and we were all on the same side again.

“Sure, back in ninety-nine Surinder Nahal was hopping mad with us because we were ten places ahead of him in the big queue—but it didn’t last. Ten years later we were practically side by side in the struggle to put the New Reproductive System
in place. There was a little residual bad feeling because he thought he hadn’t been given his fair share of credit for the ectogenetic technology that was finally put in place, but nothing serious. I haven’t heard of him in fifty years; if I’d ever thought about him at all I’d have presumed that he was retired, like Silas. I can’t believe that a man like him could be responsible for all this—he was a
scientist
, like us. It makes no sense. It must be someone from. . . . ” He stopped as soon as he had fully formulated the thought in his own mind.

“Someone from what?” Damon asked sharply—but it was too late. The moment of his foster father’s vulnerability had passed, killed by the lengthy development of his judgment of Surinder Nahal. Karol had no intention of finishing his broken sentence; he deliberately turned away so that he didn’t have to answer Damon’s demanding stare. Whatever conclusion he had suddenly and belatedly jumped to, he clearly intended to act on it himself, in secret. Damon tried to make the charitable assumption that Karol had only stopped dead because he was standing in a room whose walls might easily be host to a dozen curious eyes and ears, but he couldn’t help feeling that it was a personal slight nevertheless: a deliberate act of exclusion.

“Is it possible,” Damon said, trying not to sound
too
hostile, “that the viruses which caused the plague of sterility really were manufactured, by
someone?
Was it really a Third Plague War, as the judge said? Could the Crash have been deliberately caused?” He didn’t expect an honest answer, but he figured that if a man like Hiru Yamanaka could set such store by eye-to-eye interrogation, there must be something in the theory.

Karol met his eye again, pugnaciously. “Of course it could,” he snapped, as if it ought to have been perfectly obvious. “History simplifies. There weren’t two plague wars, or even three—there was only one, and it involved more battles than anyone ever acknowledged. All that stuff about one war launched by the rich against the poor and another by the poor against the rich is just news-tape PR, calculated to imply that the final score was even. It wasn’t.”

Damon wasn’t at all surprised by this judgment, although he hadn’t expected to hear it voiced by a man like Karol Kachellek. He was familiar with the thesis that
all
wars were waged by the rich, with the poor playing the part of cannon fodder.

“Are you saying that
all
the new and resurgent diseases were deliberately released?” Damon asked incredulously. “All the way back to AIDS and the superbacs?”

“No, of course I’m not,” Karol said, scrupulously reining in his cynicism. “There were real problems. Species crossovers, antibiotic-immune strains, new mutations. There really was a backlash against early medical triumphs, generated by natural selection. I don’t doubt that there were accidental releases of engineered organisms too. There’s no doubt that the first free transformers were spontaneous mutations that allowed genetherapy treatments to slip the leash of their control systems and start a whole new side branch in the evolutionary tree. Maybe ninety-nine out of every hundred of the bugs that followed in their wake were products of natural selection—and nine out of ten were perfectly harmless, even benign—but the people who made good transformers by the score were perfectly capable of making not-so-good ones too.”

“And they could get paid to do it, I suppose? They weren’t too proud to take defense funding.”

“
Everybody
took defense funding in the twenty-first century, Damon. Purely for the good of science, you understand—for the sake of the sacred cause of progress. There must have been thousands who wrung their hands and howled their lamentations all the way to the bank—but they took the money anyway. That’s not the point. The point is that nobody knows for sure where
any
of the bad bugs came from—not even the ones whose depredations were confidently labeled the First and Second Plague Wars. The principal reason why the Crash wasn’t called a plague war at the time was that nobody was excluded from it. No one seemed to have any defense ready; everybody seemed to be a victim. That doesn’t mean that no one had any reason to release
viruses of that type. As Conrad said in that clip the Eliminator dropped into his little comedy, it
forced
us to do what we’d needed to do for a hundred years but never contrived to do—to bring human fertility under careful control.”

“Not so much a war of the rich against the poor, then, as a war of the few against the many.”

“No. If it was any kind of plague war at all it was a war to end that kind of warfare. It was humankind against the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—the last stand against the negative Malthusian checks.”

“So if it
was
deliberate, the people responsible would have had your wholehearted support?”

“You don’t understand, Damon,” Karol said, in a tone of voice that Damon had heard many times before. “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—that if the sum of individual choices didn’t add up to voluntary restraint, then war, famine, and disease would remain necessary factors in human affairs. People were already living considerably longer, as a matter of routine, than their immediate ancestors. PicoCon and OmicronA were only embryos themselves in those days, but their mothercorps were already promising a more dramatic extension of the life span by courtesy of internal technology. It was easy enough to see that matters would get very fraught indeed as those nanotechnologies became cheaper and more efficient.