Authors: Brian Stableford
“Nobility doesn’t come into it,” the monk told him. “I simply want Conrad Helier to come out of hiding. You were the bait. To be perfectly honest, I’m a little disappointed in him. Dumping that tape was a distinctly weak-kneed response to my challenge. The tape I left with the burned body was much cleverer—as we would all have had the chance to appreciate if Damon’s troublesome friend hadn’t got to the scene before the police and removed the evidence. I wish I knew whether your friends’ failure to rescue you is a matter of incompetence, laziness, or a sacrifice move. They might actually have abandoned you to whatever fate I care to decide. Perhaps they think that it might inconvenience me more if nobody actually came to rescue you at all.”
“Fuck this,” Silas said vituperatively. “All this may be just a game to you, but I’m
suffering
. If you’ve done what you set out to do and don’t intend to kill me, isn’t it about time you simply let me go?”
“It’s certainly time that someone came to get you,” the monk admitted. “I’m truly sorry that Conrad Helier hasn’t bothered to do it. Alas, I can’t simply
release
you. This VE’s fitted to a telephone, and I’m calling from elsewhere. The mechanical devices holding you in position require manual release.”
“Someone was here earlier—actually in the room. You took care to let me know that when I first woke up.”
“Everything had to be set up, and manually operated devices have to be put in place manually. As soon as you were secure, however, my helpers made themselves scarce. You’ve been alone
for some time, excepting virtual encounters. You mustn’t worry, though. I may have overestimated Conrad Helier’s resources or willingness to respond, but if he doesn’t come for you soon Interpol or Ahasuerus will. That wouldn’t suit my purposes nearly as well, but I suppose it might have to do.”
“The reason you overestimated Conrad’s resources and his
willingness to respond
,” Silas snarled, “is that you simply can’t bring yourself to accept that he’s dead and buried.”
“No,” said the monk, “I can’t. I know how he did it, you see—and I’ve proved it by repeating the trick. He’s not too proud to repeat it himself, it seems. Karol Kachellek’s gone missing, supposedly blown up by a bomb planted on the
Kite
by persons unknown. The implication, of course, is that whoever took you has also gone after Kachellek—but I didn’t do it. I dare say a dead body will turn up in a day or two, suitably mangled but incontrovertibly identifiable by means of its DNA. By my count, that makes three men who are supposed to be dead but aren’t. Where will it all end? It’s beginning to look as if Helier is determined to call my bluff and sit tight no matter what.”
It seemed to Silas that the only one who was
sitting tight
was him. He wriggled his torso, deliberately pushing against the back of the padded chair in the hope of countering the aches generated within his muscles. He dared not move his arms or legs in the same way because that would have made the restraining cords contract and cut into his raw flesh. It helped a little.
“I’d hoped, of course, that Helier might be hiding out on the artificial island,” the monk went on, “but that was overoptimistic. He’s off-world—probably a lot further from Earth than Hywood. Not that that’s a bad thing, from my point of view. If Kachellek joins them the whole core of the team will be up, up, and away. I’d be prepared to settle for that—always provided that if they ever want to play in
my
sandpit again they’ll accept
my
rules. Heaven forbid that we should ever succeed in crushing the spirit of heroic independence, when all we actually need to do is send it into space. If Conrad Helier does eventually come to get you, Silas, tell him that’s the deal: he can follow his own
schemes in heaven, but not on Earth. Anything he does down here has to be checked out with the powers that be, and if it isn’t authorized it doesn’t happen. He’ll know who the message is from.”
Silas remained stubbornly silent, although he knew that he was supposed to respond to this instruction. The twittering of virtual birds filled the temporary silence. Their voices seemed oddly insulting; the cycles of their various songs were out of phase, but the programmed nature of the chorus was becoming obvious. Damon Hart, Silas felt sure, would have used an open-ended program with an elementary mutational facility for each individual song, so that the environment would be capable of slow but spontaneous evolution.
As if he were somehow sensitive to Silas’s thoughts, his captor said: “It begins to look as if Damon Hart’s the only worthwhile card I’ve got. You really should have taken better care of that boy, Silas—you’ve let him run so far that you might never get him back. Do you suppose Conrad Helier might be prepared to sacrifice him as well as you?”
“You’re crazy,” Silas said sulkily. “Conrad’s dead.”
“I understand that you feel the need to keep saying that,” the monk reassured him. “After all, you’re still on the record, even if no one’s ever going to play it back but me. You’ll forgive me if I ignore you, though. Helier
will
have to come out eventually, if he wants to deal. I really don’t want to foul his operation up. I admire his enterprise. All I want is to ensure that we’re all playing on the same team, planning our ends and means together. We
are
all on the same side, after all—we’ll get to where we’re going all the sooner if we all pull in the same direction.”
“Where
are
we going?” Silas asked. “And who’s supposed to be doing the pulling? Exactly who
are
you?” Unable to resist changing the position of his legs he tried to do so without moving his ankles, but he was no contortionist. He gasped as the ankle straps clutched at him.
If the real man behind the image of the monk could hear evidence of Silas’s distress he ignored it. “Please don’t be deliberately
obtuse, Silas,” he said in the same bantering tone. “We’re going to the land of Cokaygne, where all is peace and harmony and everybody lives forever. But there can’t be peace unless we find a peaceful way of settling our differences, and there won’t be harmony unless we can establish a proper forum for agreeing on our objectives and our methods. That’s all I want, Silas—just a nice, brightly polished conference table to which we can
all
bring our little plans and projects, so that they can all receive the blessing of the whole board of directors. As to who’s doing the pulling, it’s everyone who’s making anything new—and those who make the most are pulling the hardest.”
When the flaring pain in his ankles died down of its own accord Silas felt a little better. “Conrad never liked that kind of corpspeak,” he growled, “or the philosophy behind it. If he were alive—which he isn’t—you’d never get him to knuckle under to that kind of system. He always hated the idea of having to take his proposals and projects to panels of businessmen. He did it, when he needed finance—but he stopped doing it the moment he could finance himself. He’d never have gone back to it. Never in a million years.”
“That’s because he was a child of the old world,” the monk said. “Things are different now, and although it’s a little ambitious to start talking in terms of a million years I really do believe that we have to start thinking in terms of thousands. If Conrad Helier hadn’t decided to drop out of sight, he’d be in a better position to see how much things have changed. If he participated in the wider human society even to the limited extent that Hywood and Kachellek do he’d still have his finger on the pulse of progress, but he seems to have lost its measure. I think he’s fallen victim to the rather childish notion that those who desire to plan the future of the human race must remove themselves from it and stand apart from the history they intend to shape. That’s not merely unnecessary, Silas, it’s downright
silly
—and we can’t tolerate it any longer.”
Silas was busy fighting his anguish and couldn’t comment. The other continued: “We don’t have any objection to vaulting
ambition—as I said before, we admire and approve of it—but Helier and his associates have to realize that there are much bigger fish in the pool now. We’re just as determined to shape the future of the world as he is, and we have the power to do it.
We don’t want to fight
, Silas—we want to work together. Helier is being unreasonable, and he must be made to see that. The simple fact is that if he can’t be a team player, we can’t allow him to play
here
. That goes for Eveline Hywood and Karol Kachellek too. People can’t make themselves invisible by pretending to die, any more than they can exclude themselves from their social obligations by refusing to answer their phones. We have to make them see that—and in this instance,
we
includes
you
.”
“I don’t want to play,” Silas told the man of many masks flatly. “I’m retired, and I intend to stay that way. All I want is out of here. If you want me to beg, I’m begging. Tell your machine to give me back my IT. At the very least, tell it not to grab me so hard every time I twitch. I couldn’t break free if I tried.”
“It won’t be long now,” the monk said. “If I’d realized in advance that Helier would play it this way I’d have made things easier for you. My people could have found you two days ago, and I didn’t want to make it
too
easy. I really am sorry. I’ll give Helier two more hours, and if nobody’s found you by then I’ll tip off Interpol. They should be able to get the local police to you within twenty minutes—it’s not as if you were way out in the desert.”
“Two fucking hours may seem like nothing to you,” Silas muttered hoarsely, “but you aren’t sitting where I am.”
“Oh, pull yourself together, man. You’re not going to die. You’ve got sore wrists and ankles, not a ruptured ulcer. I’m trying to make you understand something
important
. I could almost believe that you really
have
retired.”
“I have, damn it! I got heartily sick of the whole fucking thing! I’m done working night and day in search of the biotech Holy Grail. I’m a hundred and twenty-six years old, for God’s sake! I need time to rest, time to let the world go by, time without
pressure
. Eveline and Karol might have been entirely swallowed up
by Conrad’s obsessions, but I haven’t. I watched Mary die and I watched Damon grow up, both of them so tightly bound by those obsessions that they were smothered. Damon had a life in front of him, but the only way Mary could break free, in the end, was to die. Not me. I
retired
.”
“You really don’t see, do you?” said the fake monk patronizingly. “You’ve never been able to break free from the assumptions of the twenty-first century. In spite of all that IT has achieved, you still take death and decay for granted. You think that your stake in the world will end in ten or twenty or fifty years’ time, when the copying errors accumulated in your DNA will have filled out your body with so many incompetent cells that all the nanomachines in the world won’t be able to hold you together.”
“It’s true,” Silas growled, surprising himself with the harshness of his voice. “Even men fifty or a hundred years younger than I am are being willfully blind if they think that advances in IT will keep pushing back the human life span faster than they’re aging. Sure, it’s only a matter of time before rejuve technology will cut a lot deeper than erasing wrinkles. It really will be possible to clear out the greater number of the somatic cells which aren’t functioning properly and replace them with nice fresh ones newly calved from generative tissue—but only the greater number. Even if you really could replace them all, you’d still be up shit creek without a paddle because of the Miller effect. You
do
know about the Miller effect, I suppose, even though you’re not a biologist by trade or vocation?”
“I know what the Miller effect is,” the monk assured him. “I’m thoroughly familiar with
all
the brave attempts that have been made to produce a biotech fountain of youth—even those made way back at the dawn of modern history, when Adam Zimmerman was barely cold in his cryonic vault. I know that there’s a fundamental difference between slowing aging down and stopping it, and I know that there’s an element of paradox in every project which aims to reverse the aging process. I’m not claiming that
anyone
now alive can become truly emortal no matter
how fast the IT escalator moves. I might have to settle for two hundred years, Damon Hart for two-fifty or three hundred. Even embryos engineered in the next generation of Helier wombs for maximum resistance to aging might not be able to live much beyond a thousand years—only time will tell. But that’s not the point.
“The point, Silas, is that even if you and I won’t be able to play parent to that new breed, Damon’s generation will. Conrad Helier and I must be reckoned
mortal
gods—but the children for whom we hold the world in trust will be an order of magnitude less mortal than we. The world we shape must be shaped
for them
, not for old men like you. Those who have had the role of planner thrust upon them must plan for a thousand years, not for ten or a hundred.
“Conrad Helier understands that well enough, even if you don’t—but he still thinks that he can play a lone hand, sticking to his own game while others play theirs. We can’t allow that. We aren’t like the corpsmen of old, Silas—we don’t want to tell you and him what to do and we don’t want ownership of everything you and he produce, but we do want you both to join the club. We want you both to play with the team. What you did in the Crash was excusable, and we’re very grateful to you for delivering the stability of the New Reproductive System, but what Conrad Helier is doing now has to be planned and supervised by all of us. We have to fit it into
our
schemes.”