Authors: Brian Stableford
Silas wondered whether Cathy would be disappointed if she knew how he felt. Perhaps she
wanted
to find him utterly sober, weighed down by ennui—and thus, perhaps, even more worthy of her awe and respect than he truly was.
He placed his hand on her shoulder and caressed the contour of her collarbone. Her skin, freshly washed, felt inexpressibly
luxurious, and the sensation which stirred him was as sharp—perhaps even as innocent—as it would have been had he never felt its like before.
A practiced mind was, indeed, exceedingly adept at forgetting; it had wisdom enough not merely to forget the trivial and the insignificant, but also that which was infinitely precious in rediscovery.
“It must be strange,” she said, insinuating her slender and naked arm around his waist, “to look out on the sea and the sky with eyes that know them so well. There’s so much in the world that’s unfamiliar to me I can’t begin to imagine what it would be like to
recognize
everything, to be completely
at home
.” She was teasing him, requiring that he feed her awe and consolidate her achievement in allowing herself to be seduced.
“That’s not what it’s like,” he said dutifully. “If the world stayed the same, it might be more homely; but one of the follies of authentic youth is the inability to grasp how quickly, and how much, everything changes—even the sea and the sky. The line left behind by the tide changes with the flotsam; even the clouds sailing serenely across the sky change with the climate and the composition of the air. The world I knew when I was young is long gone, and depollution will never bring it back. I’ve lived through half a hundred worlds, each one as alarming and as alien as the last. I don’t doubt that a dozen more lie in ambush, waiting to astonish me if I stay the course for a few further decades.”
He felt a slight tremor pass through her and wondered whether it was occasioned by a sudden gust of cool wind or by the thrust of her eager imagination. She had known no other world than the one into which recently acquired maturity had delivered her, but she must have had images in her mind of the various phases of the Crisis. It was all caught in the Net, if only as an infinite jumble of glimpses. Today’s world was still haunted by the one which had gone madly to its destruction—the one which Silas Arnett had helped to save.
She smiled at him again, as innocently as a newly hatched sphinx.
It’s not my wisdom which makes me attractive to her, Silas thought. She sees me as something primitive, perhaps feral. I was born of woman, and there was a full measure of effort and pain in my delivery. I grew to the age she is now without the least ability to control my own pain, under the ever present threat of injury, disease, and death. There’s something of the animal about me still.
He knew that he was melodramatizing for the sake of a little extra excitement, but it was true nevertheless. When Silas had been in his teens there had been more than ten billion people in the world, all naturally born, all naked to the slings and arrows of outrage and misfortune. Avid forces of destruction had claimed all but a handful, and his own survival had to be reckoned a virtual miracle. When Catherine Praill came to celebrate her hundred-and-twentieth birthday, by contrast, nine out of ten of her contemporaries would still be alive. Her survival to that age was virtually assured, provided that she did not elect to waste herself in submission to extravagant and extraordinary risks.
Silas looked up briefly, but the bird man was out of sight now, eclipsed by the green rim of the cliff. He imagined Catherine costumed with brightly colored wings, soaring gloriously across the face of the sinking sun—but he preferred her as she was now, soft and fresh and unclothed.
“Let’s go inside,” he said, meaning Let’s make love while the sunlight lasts, while we can revel in the fleeting changes of the colored radiance.
“Might as well,” she said, meaning Yes, let’s do exactly that.
Sexual intercourse never left Arnett deflated or disappointed. It never had, so far as he could remember. It might have done, sometimes, when he was authentically young, but in the fullness of his maturity lovemaking always left him with a glow of profound satisfaction and easeful accomplishment. He knew that this seeming triumph probably had as much to do with the gradual adjustment of his expectations as with the honing of his skills
but he did not feel in the least diminished by that hint of cynicism. He believed with all sincerity that he knew the true value of everything he had—and his expert memory had scrupulously erased most of the prices he had been forced to pay by way of its acquisition.
Cathy had drifted into a light sleep almost as soon as they had finished, and when her sleep had deepened Arnett was able to disentangle his limbs from hers without disturbing her. He helped the half-reflexive movements which eased her into a more comfortable position, and then he slowly withdrew himself from the bed. Naked, he went back to the open window and on to the balcony.
The sun had set and the wing glider was long gone. Arnett relaxed into the luxury of being unobserved. He put a high value on that privilege, as anyone would who had grown to maturity in a world teeming with people, where the friction of social intercourse had only just begun to be eased by access to the infinite landscapes of virtual reality.
He had chosen the house in which he lived precisely because it was hidden from all its neighbors by the contours of the cliff. The house was not large, and far from fashionable—it was all above ground, its walls as white as the chalkiest aspects of the cliff face, its angles stubbornly square, its windows unrepentant panes of plain glass—but that was exactly why he liked it. It did not blend in with its surroundings; its roots and all its other quasi living systems were hidden away in closets and conduits. It was, after its own fashion, every bit as old-fashioned as he was, although it was no more than twenty years old—almost as young as Catherine Praill.
Silas wondered whether Cathy would quickly drift away now that she had “collected” him, or whether she would attempt to maintain their friendship, seeking further amusement and further enlightenment in the patient acquaintance of one of the oldest men in the world. He didn’t want her to drift away. He wanted her to stay, or at least to return again and again and again—not because her slowly evaporating youth was such a
rare commodity, but because he had long ago learned to appreciate constancy and to expand his pleasures to fit the time and space that were available for their support.
A movement caught his eye: something which emerged very briefly from the gathering shadows at the foot of the cliff face and then faded back into obscurity.
He was not immediately anxious, even though he guessed that it must be a human being who had descended unannounced into his haven of privacy—but he stepped back from the balcony and went to dress himself.
The bedroom was dark by now, but he had no difficulty finding what he needed. He pulled on the various elements of his suitskin. Their seams reacted to his body heat, joining up with smooth efficiency as if they were eager to begin their cleansing work. He stepped into a pair of slippers, no stronger or more massive than was necessary to protect the suitskin’s soles in an indoor environment.
Silas didn’t switch on the landing light until the door was safely closed behind him. He didn’t want to wake the girl from what he hoped were pleasant dreams. He went swiftly down to the hallway and stepped into the tiny room beneath the staircase. He activated the house’s night eyes, bringing a dozen different images to the bank of screens mounted on the wall. He picked up the VE hood, which would give him a far clearer view once he had selected the right pair of artificial eyes—but there was no way to make the choice.
The foot of the cliff, limned in red, was stubbornly bare. The shadows in which he had glimpsed movement were empty now.
One of the screens blanked out, and then another.
That did alarm him; in the circumstances, he couldn’t believe that it was a mere malfunction. He lifted the VE hood, but he still had no idea which connection he should make—and if the screens were going down, the hood would be just as useless as they were. Someone was blinding the house’s eyes, and must have come equipped to do it—but why? He had no enemies, so far as he knew, and the rewards of burglary had long ago sunk
to the level which made the risk unacceptable to anyone but a fool. The quaint outward appearance of the house might, he supposed, have indicated to juvenile vandals that it was poorly protected, but he couldn’t imagine anyone scaling the cliff face in the dark merely to do a little gratuitous damage.
He watched, helplessly, as the screens went out. When six more of the night eyes had been blinded without his catching the briefest glimpse of a hand or a face, he knew that it was not the work of children or foolish thieves. He became afraid—and realized as he did so how strange and unfamiliar fear had become.
A rapid dance of his fingertips sealed all the locks that were not routinely engaged, activated all the house’s security systems and notified the police that a crime might be in progress. That, at least, was what his instructions
should
have accomplished—but the confirmatory call which should have come from the police didn’t arrive; the telephone screen remained ominously inactive. He knew that there was no point in putting the VE hood over his head and he lowered it onto its cradle.
Several seconds dragged by while he wondered whether it was worth running to his study, where the house’s main workstation was, but when he emerged from the cupboard he didn’t head in that direction. Instead, he stood where he was, watching the door at the end of the hallway. It was obvious that his links with the outside world had been severed, and that the door in question was the only security left to him. He wondered whether the threat might be to her rather than to himself, feeling a pang of bitter resentment because a near perfect day was about to be ruined at the eleventh hour—but that was just a desperate attempt to pretend that the danger wasn’t
his
danger.
The simple truth was that his communication systems were very nearly the best that money could buy, and that someone had nevertheless overridden them with ridiculous ease. Whatever reason they had, it couldn’t be trivial.
When the door burst in, Silas couldn’t quite believe his eyes. In spite of the failure of his artificial eyes and voice he had not believed that his locks could be so easily broken—but when he
saw the human figures come through, wearing black clothes and black masks, the outer layers of his patiently accreted, ultracivilized psyche seemed to peel away. He knew that he had to fight, and he thanked providence that he still knew how. In his innermost self, he
was
still primitive, even feral. He had no weapon, and he could see the foremost of the invaders had some kind of snub-nosed pistol in his hand, but he knew that he had to go forward and not back.
His rush seemed to take the intruder by surprise; the man’s eyes were still slightly dazzled by the bright light. Silas lashed out with his foot at the hand which held the gun, and felt his slippered toes make painful connection—but the pain was immediately controlled by his internal technology.
The gun flew away. It was the unexpectedness of the assault rather than its force that had jolted it free, but the effect was the same. Silas was already bringing his flattened hand around in a fast arc, aiming for the man’s black-clad throat—but the intruder had evidently been trained in that kind of fighting, and was more recently practiced in its skills. The blow was brutally blocked and Silas felt unexpectedly fiery pain shoot along his forearm; it was controlled, but not before he had flinched reflexively and left himself open to attack.
His hesitation probably made no difference; there would have been no time for a riposte and no effective blow he could have dealt. There were three intruders coming at him now, and they hurled themselves upon him with inelegant but deadly effect. He flailed his arms desperately, but there was no way he could keep them all at bay.
With his arms still threshing uselessly, Silas was thrown back and knocked down. His head crashed against the wall and the pain was renewed yet again. The pain was almost instantly contained and constrained, but it could only be dulled. Merely deadening its fury could not free his mind to react in artful or effective fashion. There was, in any case, no action he could take that might have saved him. He was outnumbered, and not by fools or frightened children.
One of the intruders bent to pick up the fallen gun, and he began firing even as he plucked it from the floor. Silas felt a trio of needles spear into the muscles of his breast, not far beneath the shoulder. There was no pain at all now, but he knew that whatever poison the darts bore must have been designed to resist the best efforts of his internal technology. These people had come equipped to fight, and their equipment was
the best
. He knew that their motives must be similarly sophisticated and correspondingly sinister.
It was not until the missiles had struck him and burrowed into his efficiently armored but still-frail flesh, that Silas Arnett called to mind the deadliest and most fearful word in his vocabulary:
Eliminators!
Even as the word sprang to mind, though—while he still lashed out impotently against the three men who no longer had to struggle to subdue him—he could not accept its implications.
I have not been named!
he cried silently.
They have no reason!
But whoever had come to his house, so cleverly evading its defenses, clearly had motive enough, whether they had reason enough or not.