Inherit the Earth (29 page)

“His collaborators are still alive,” Yamanaka countered—and then, after a carefully weighed pause, added: “or
were
, until this plague of evil circumstance began.”

B
y the time the two cars reached the local Interpol headquarters Damon had decided to continue the strategy that he had reflexively undertaken while chatting informally to Hiru Yamanaka, and which he had employed in all his previous dealings with the police. He proceeded to deny everything. He told himself that his purpose was to conserve all the relevant information he had for his own future use, but he was uncomfortably conscious of his own inability to decide exactly what was relevant.

The strategy was not without its costs. For one thing, Yamanaka refused to let him speak to Diana Caisson—although Damon wasn’t certain that he needed to rush into a confrontation as awkward as that one would inevitably prove to be. For another, it intensified Yamanaka’s annoyance with him—which would be bound to result in an intensification of the scrutiny to which his life and actions were currently being subjected.

Yamanaka had obviously anticipated that Damon would not respond to his subtle overtures, although he put on a show of sorrow. He soon reverted to straightforward interrogation, although his pursuit of information seemed rather halfhearted. At first Damon took this to be a gracious acceptance of defeat, but by the time the interview was over he had begun to wonder whether Yamanaka might actually prefer it if he were out on the
street inviting disaster rather than sitting snugly and safely in protective custody while Interpol chased wild geese.

“The claims made by the so-called real Operator one-oh-one are, of course, receiving a full measure of publicity,” Yamanaka told him, with a dutiful concern that might well have been counterfeit. “They have not gone uncontradicted, but would-be assassins might not be inclined to believe the contradictions. Were you to return to your apartment right away, trouble might follow you. Were you to attempt to disappear into the so-called badlands in the east of the city, you might easily deliver yourself into danger.”

“I can make my own risk assessments and responses,” Damon told him. The fog was lifting now, and he was becoming more articulate by the minute. “You don’t have any evidence at all to connect me to Surinder Nahal’s death. As far as I can tell, you have nothing to connect Madoc and Diana to it either, except that they found the body before the local police. Maybe Madoc got a bit excited when the cops burst in on him, but that’s understandable. It’s not as if they did any real damage. Even if you press ahead with the assault charges, the fact that they might have gone to the place where they found the body on my behalf doesn’t make me an accessory to the assault. Given that you don’t have any charges to bring against me, I think you ought to let me go now.”

“I can hold you overnight if I have reason to believe that you’re withholding relevant information,” Yamanaka pointed out, strictly for form’s sake.

“How could I possibly know anything relevant to the assault?”

“Apparently,” Yamanaka observed serenely, “you don’t even know anything relevant to your own kidnapping. Given that you were unlucky enough to be kidnapped twice in a matter of hours, that seems a little careless.”

“Karol’s error of judgment wasn’t a kidnapping at all,” Damon said. “It was just a domestic misunderstanding. As for the second incident, I was asleep the whole time, from the moment I
was gassed until the moment I woke up where Rachel Trehaine found me.”

“Even so, Mr. Hart,” Yamanaka observed, as a parting shot, “you seem to have become extraordinarily accident-prone lately. It might be unwise to trust your luck too far.”

Damon didn’t want to extend the conversation any further. He accepted a ride back to his apartment building, but the uniformed officer who drove the car didn’t attempt to continue the interrogation.

When he’d taken time out to visit the bathroom and order some decent cooked food from the kitchen dispenser, Damon checked his mail. He wasn’t unduly surprised or alarmed to find that there was nothing from Madoc Tamlin, although there were three messages from Diana Caisson, all dispatched from the building he’d just come from. There was nothing from Molokai, but there was, at long last, a curt note from Lagrange-5, saying that Eveline Hywood would be available to take his call after nineteen hundred hours Greenwich Mean Time.

Damon subtracted eight hours and checked the clock, which informed him that he had half an hour still in hand. He double-checked the date to make sure that he had the right one—he’d lost an entire day between the time he’d been snatched from Karol Kachellek’s secret hideaway and the morning he’d been picked up in Venice Beach.

By the time he’d changed and eaten a makeshift meal the half hour was almost up. He decided that he couldn’t be bothered twiddling his thumbs until the hour struck, so he slipped inside his hood.

It would have been typical of Eveline to refuse the call until the appointed hour actually arrived, but she didn’t. It wasn’t an AI sim that answered the phone, but that didn’t mean that the conversation would be eye-to-eye. The image floating in the familiar VE environment was being directly animated by Eveline Hywood, but it still had to be synthesized to edit out the hood she was wearing. Damon knew that Eveline would be giving no
secrets away, in what she said or the way she looked, but he still wanted to hear what she had to say.

“Damon,” she said pleasantly. “It’s good to see you. I’ve been very worried about you. Is there any news of Karol or Silas?” Eveline knew perfectly well that if there had been any news it would have been relayed to her instantly, but she was putting on a show of concern. Damon noticed that the last time she had undergone somatic adjustment for her progressive myopia she had had her irises retinted. Her natural eye color was dark brown, but her irises were now lightened almost to orange. Given that the melanin content of her skin had been carefully maintained, the modified eyes gave her stare a curiously feline quality. It was easy enough to believe that she might be the prime mover in whatever plot had caused such intense annoyance to the recently self-appointed overlords of Earth.

“They’re still missing,” Damon confirmed. “I expect they’ll turn up eventually, dead or alive. That’s out of our hands, alas. Do you have any idea what’s going on, Eveline?” He knew that he’d have to wait a little while for her answer; their words and gestures had a quarter of a million miles to traverse. The time delay wasn’t sufficient to cause any real difficulties, and Eveline must be thoroughly accustomed to it, but Damon knew that he would find it disconcerting to begin with. While he waited, he looked at her appraisingly, trying to figure out exactly what kind of person she was. He had never managed to do that while they were living under the same roof.

He wondered why Eveline had designed the VE as a duplicate of her actual environment. Was she underlining the fact that she lived in deep space: the only foreign country left where things
had
to be done differently? In L-5, even a room decked out as simply as possible had to have all kinds of special devices to contain its trivial personal possessions and petty decorations. In space, nothing could be relied upon to stay where you put it, even in a colony which retained a ghost of gravity by virtue of its spin.

“Someone is evidently intent on blackening your father’s name,” Eveline told him, with an airy wave of her slender hand. “I can’t imagine why. These self-appointed Eliminators seem to be getting completely out of hand. There are none up here, mercifully; L-Five isn’t perfect, but it’s a haven of sanity compared to Earth. I think it’s because we’re building a new society from scratch, without nations or corporations; because we have no history we feel no compulsion to maintain such ancient traditions as rebellion, hatred, and murder.”

Damon didn’t bother to question her certainty as to whether L-5 was really Eliminator-free, or corporation-free. It had taken so long to get through to her that he didn’t want to waste any time. He knew perfectly well that he wasn’t going to get any straight answers, but he wanted to know where he stood, if she was prepared to tell him.

“Why is it happening
now
, Eveline?” he asked softly. “What brought your adversaries crawling out of the woodwork after all this time?”

“I have no idea,” she said. Damon had to presume that she was lying, but that was only to be expected, given that this was far from being a secure call. They both had to proceed on the assumption that anyone with any interest in this convoluted affair might be listening in. If she wanted to give him any clues, she would have to do it very subtly indeed. Unfortunately, he and Eveline had been virtual strangers even while they were living under the same roof; they had no resources of common understanding to draw on.

Damon had opened his mouth to ask the next question before he realized that Eveline had only paused momentarily. “You might be better able to guess than I am,” she added. “After all, this whole affair is really an attack on you, isn’t it?”

“It seems to have turned out that way,” he admitted. But it didn’t start like that, he thought. That’s a deflection, a diversionary tactic—for which you and my father’s other so-called friends are partly responsible. You called the bet and raised the stakes. I’m just caught in the crossfire.

“Please be careful, Damon,” Eveline said. “I know that we’ve had our differences, but I really do care about you a great deal.”

Damon was glad to hear it. It was an encouragement to continue. Eveline could have shut him out completely, but it seemed that she didn’t want to do that—or didn’t dare to. “Could it have something to do with this stuff that you and Karol are investigating—these para-DNA life-forms?” he asked, biting the bullet. He expected her spoken answer to be a denial, of course, but he also expected it to be a lie. So far as he could judge, Karol’s dabbling with the black deposit on the rocks of Molokai’s shoreline was the only thing which could possibly make this a “very bad time.”

“How could it have anything to do with that?” Eveline asked, frowning as if in puzzlement—but her synthesized stare was gimlet sharp. A flat denial would have instructed him to let the matter lie; the question was actively inviting further inquiry. Damon knew that he had to select his words very carefully, but he felt slightly reassured by the fact that his foster mother
might
be making a vital concession.

“I’m not sure,” he said, in a calculatedly pensive manner. “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 had a third alternative in mind when he said it, Damon left unsaid, and there is a third alternative, isn’t there? The third alternative was sideways, and he searched Eveline’s steady gaze for some confirmatory sign that she knew what he was driving at.

“That’s right,” Eveline said conversationally. “We’re expecting two of our probes to start relaying valuable information back from the outer solar system within a matter of days. Karol’s people will continue to work on the seabed samples, of course, but my own estimate of the probabilities is that they’re unlikely to find anything. I think the Oort Cloud is the likelier source—but I’ve always had panspermist leanings, as you know. It’s very difficult to be perfectly objective, even when you’ve been a scientist for more than a hundred years.”

“It would be more interesting, in a way, if it had come from one of the black smokers,” Damon said, hoping that she would not mind being challenged. “For one planet to be able to produce two different forms of life suggests an authentic creative verve. I always thought panspermia was a rather dull hypothesis, with its suggestion that wherever we might go in the universe we’ll only find more of the same.”

“Sometimes,” Eveline said, “the truth
is
dull. You can design virtual environments as gaudy and as weird as you like, but the real world will always be the way the real world is.” She looked around as she said it at the scrupulously dull and slavishly imitative VE with which she had surrounded herself.

“Speaking of dull truths,” Damon said, “I suppose you and my late father didn’t really cause the Crash?”

“No, we didn’t,” she answered predictably. “When they find Silas, he’ll put the record straight. He didn’t really say any of those things—it’s all faked. Just another virtual reality, as fantastic and ridiculous as any other. It’s all lies—you know it is.” Her eyes weren’t fixed on his now; if he was reading her correctly, she was dismissing this topic and asking him to move on.

“Do you think there might be a new plague?” he asked mildly. “Might this para-DNA invader throw up something just as nasty as the old meiotic disrupters and chiasmalytic transformers?”

“That’s extremely unlikely,” she answered, just as mildly. “So far as we can tell, para-DNA is entirely harmless. Organisms of this kind will inevitably compete for resources with life as we know it, but there’s no evidence at all of any other kind of dangerous interaction and it would be surprising if there were. Para-DNA is just something which happened to drift into the biosphere from elsewhere—almost certainly from the outer solar system, in my opinion. It’s fascinating, but it’s unlikely to pose any serious threat.”

“Are you absolutely sure of that?” Damon asked, watching the luminous eyes.

“You know perfectly well that there’s no absolute certainty in science, Damon,” Eveline answered equably. “Investigations of
this kind have to be carried out very carefully, and we have to wait until we have all the data in place before we draw our ultimate conclusions. All I can say is that there’s no reason at present to believe that para-DNA is or could be dangerous.”