Authors: Brian Stableford
“Are you sure they
killed
him?” Damon asked sharply.
The tall man hesitated before he shrugged again, which suggested to Damon that it was a recognized possibility that Silas hadn’t been killed and that the body dumped in the road might have been the same kind of substitute as the body left for Madoc to find. “His nanotech had all been flushed,” the man with the bruise said eventually. “They must have known that if they watched the tape we put out on the Web. Maybe they were just knocking him out—but they had no reason to do that if they were
your
people. Who’d ever have thought Eliminators could be that smart, that well organized?”
“Who are
my
people supposed to be?” Damon asked him. “You mean Conrad Helier’s people—except that Conrad Helier’s dead. So is Karol Kachellek, except that you probably don’t believe that either. So who’s supposed to be running things, given that Eveline Hywood’s a quarter of a million miles away in lunar orbit? Me?”
The tall man shook his head sadly. “All I wanted was a quiet
talk
,” he repeated, as if he simply could not believe that such an innocent intention had led to brawling, shooting, and kidnapping—all of it dutifully registered on spy eyes that the police would have debriefed by now.
“Where are we going?” Damon asked.
“Out of town,” the tall man informed him gruffly. “Your fault, not mine. We could have sorted it out back home if you hadn’t blown it. Now, we have to take it somewhere
really
private.”
The Sespe and Sequoia Wilderness reserves had supposedly been rendered trackless in the wake of the Second Plague War—by which time its chances of ever getting back to an authentic wilderness state were only a little better than zero—but Damon knew that closure against wheeled vehicles didn’t signify much when helicopters like this one could land in a clearing thirty meters across.
“You can’t get more private than Olympus,” Damon said—but as he looked out again at the nonvirtual mountains which were now surrounding the helicopter he realized that he had actually contrived to force his adversaries to take a step they had not intended. This time, there was a record of his abduction in Interpol’s hands. This time, Interpol could put faces and names to his captors, or at least to their foot soldiers. He knew that he could claim no credit for the coup—it was all the result of a chapter of accidents and misconceptions—but the fact remained that the game players had finally been taken beyond the limits of their game plan. They had been forced to improvise. For the first time, PicoCon—assuming that it
was
PicoCon—was losing its grip.
“Your boss is scared,” Damon said, working through the train of thought. “He thinks it really might have been the Eliminators who got to Silas, after the people he expected to collect him never showed up. One minute he was convinced the message Silas was supposed to deliver was home and dry, the next he was unconvinced again. You’re right—if Silas
is
dead you could be in real trouble, especially now that Interpol has two faces in the frame. Mr. Yamanaka doesn’t like the way you’ve been running rings around him. He’ll come after you with such ferocity that you’ll be very lucky indeed to get away with only losing your job. How much damage could you do to PicoCon, do you think, if you and your partner decided to talk?”
The tall man didn’t react to the mention of PicoCon. “All you had to do was
listen
,” he complained. “You could have saved us all a hell of a lot of trouble.”
“If you were the ones who took Silas in the first place,” Damon pointed out, “and posted that stupid provocative note under my door, you went to a hell of a lot of trouble yourselves, all because you
wouldn’t listen
when we told you that Conrad Helier is dead.”
“Sure,” said the tall man scornfully. “Helier’s dead, and para-DNA is a kind of extraterrestrial tar, just like Hywood says.
All
you ever had to do was listen
—but now it’s getting ugly and it’s all
your
fault.”
“
What
does Eveline say about para-DNA?” Damon wanted to know.
“If you spent more time listening to the news and less playing cloak-and-dagger, you’d know. She made an announcement to the entire world, press conference and all. Para-DNA is extraterrestrial—the first representative of an entirely new life system, utterly harmless but absolutely fascinating. We are not alone, the universe of life awaits us, etcetera, etcetera. Now we know where you got your impulsive nature from, don’t we?”
“Are you saying that para-DNA
isn’t
extraterrestrial—or that it isn’t harmless?”
“I don’t
know
,” the tall man informed him, as if it were somehow Damon’s fault that he didn’t know. “All I know is that if it’s on the news, it’s more than likely to be lies, and that if the name Hywood’s attached to it then it must have something to do with our little adventure. I may be only the hired help but I’m not
stupid
. Whatever all this is about, your people aren’t responding sensibly. It doesn’t take a genius to figure that Hywood was supposed to talk to my employers before she started shooting her mouth off to the whole wide world, but she decided to kick off early instead. The whole damn lot of you are so damn
touchy
. Must be hereditary.”
Damon didn’t bother to point out that Eveline Hywood wasn’t his mother. Conrad Helier
was
his real father, and Conrad Helier’s closest associates had provided the nurture to complement his nature. It had never occurred to him before that his contentiousness might be a legacy of his genes or his upbringing, but he could see now that someone considering his reactions to this strange affair alongside those of his foster parents might well feel entitled to lump them all together.
The helicopter now began its descent toward a densely wooded slope which, while nowhere near as precipitate as the slope of the virtual mountain where he had talked to the robot
man, nevertheless seemed wild enough and remote enough to suit anyone’s idea of perfect privacy.
It was just as well that the helicopter could land in a thirty-meter circle, because the space where it touched down wasn’t significantly bigger. The tall man undid Damon’s safety harness before he could do it himself and said: “Can you get down?”
“I’m fine,” Damon assured him. “No thanks to you. You’re not coming?”
“I’m far from fine—and that’s entirely down to you,” the man with the bruise countered. “
We
have to disappear. It wasn’t exactly a pleasure meeting you, but at least I’ll never see you again.”
“You know,” said Damon as the pilot reached back to open the door beside him, “you really have a problem. Apart from being an incompetent asshole, you have this moronic compulsion to blame other people for your own mistakes.” He got the distinct impression that the tall man would have hit him, if only he’d dared.
“Thanks,” said Damon to the pilot as he lowered himself to the ground. He ducked down low the way everybody always did on TV, although he knew that he was in no real danger from the whirling rotor blades.
There was a cabin on the edge of the clearing that looked at first glance as if it must have been two hundred years old if it were a day—but Damon saw as soon as he approached it that its “logs” had been gantzed out of wood pulp. He judged that its architect had been a relatively simple-minded AI. The edifice probably hadn’t been there more than a year and shouldn’t have been there at all. Given that the nearest road was halfway to Fillmore, though, it was certainly private; it probably had no electricity supply and no link to the Web. It was a playpen for the kind of people who thought that they could still get back in touch with “nature.”
The man who was waiting for Damon stayed inside until the helicopter had risen from the ground, only showing himself in the doorway of the cabin when no one but Damon could see his face. Damon saw immediately that he was an
old
man, well preserved
by nanotech without being prettified by rejuve cosmetology. His hair was white and he was wearing silver-rimmed eyeglasses. Nobody had to wear spectacles for corrective purpose anymore, so Damon assumed that he must have become used to wearing them in his youth, way back in the twenty-first century, and had kept them as a badge of antique eccentricity.
“Are you the Mirror Man?” Damon asked as he approached.
The ancient shook his head. “The Mirror Man’s off the project,” he said, evidently untroubled by the admission he was making in recognizing the description. “I’ve been appointed in his stead, to tidy things up—and to calm things down. Come in and make yourself at home.” He pronounced the final phrase with conscientiously lighthearted sarcasm.
“I’m a prisoner,” Damon pointed out as the other stood aside to let him pass, “not a guest.”
“If you’d only paused to listen to what the man had to say,” the old man replied mildly, “we’d have offered you a formal invitation. I think you’d have found it too tempting to refuse. You can call me Saul, by the way.” It wasn’t an invitation to intimacy; Damon guessed that if the man was called Saul at all it would be his surname, not his given name.
“Stay away from the road to Damascus,” Damon muttered as he surveyed the room into which he was being ushered. “Revelations can really screw up your life.”
The cabin’s interior was more luxurious than the exterior had implied, but it had a gloss of calculated primitivism. Authentic logs were burning within the proscenium arch of an inauthentic stone fireplace set upon a polished stone hearth. There were three armchairs arranged in an arc around the hearth, although there was no one waiting in the cabin except the old man.
There was a stick of bread on the table, together with half a dozen plastic storage jars and three bottles: two of wine, one of whiskey. Damon almost expected to see hunting trophies on the wall, but that would have been too silly. Instead there were old photographs mounted in severe black frames: photographs taken in the days when the wilderness had only been half spoiled.
“Are we expecting somebody else?” Damon asked.
“I hope so,” said Saul. “To tell you the truth, I’m rather hoping that your father might drop by. If he’s still on Earth, he’s had time to reach the neighborhood by now. If he’s stranded out in space, though . . . well, we’ll just have to wait and see.”
Damon didn’t bother with any tokenistic assertion of his father’s membership of the ultimate silent majority. Instead, he said: “Nobody came in response to your other invitations. Why should anyone come now?”
“Because the cat’s out of the bag,” the old man told him. “Eveline Hywood hurried the announcement through, in spite of everything. When the grim satisfaction has worn off, though, she’ll remember that this is only the beginning. Your father’s shown us that he won’t be bullied, and that he’s more than willing to fight fire with fire, tape for tape and appearance for appearance—but he can’t move to the next stage of his plan without clearing it with us because he now knows that we know what that next phase will be—and that if we think it’s necessary, we’ll close the whole thing down.”
“Who’s
we?
” Damon wanted to know—and was optimistic, for once, that he might be told.
“All of us. Not just PicoCon, by any means. Your father may think that he made the world, and we’re prepared to give him due credit for saving it, but we’re the ones who
own
it, and we’ve already made
our
peace. If he’s absolutely determined to return to the days when we were all on the same side, that’s fine by us—just so long as it’s
our
side that everybody’s on.”
Damon pulled one of the armchairs back from the fire before sitting down in it. He’d thought that he had recovered well enough from the shot in the back, but once he’d taken the weight off his feet he realized that nobody could get shot, even in today’s world, without a considerable legacy of awkwardness and fatigue. He stirred restlessly, unable to find a comfortable posture.
Saul drew back the neighboring chair in the same careful manner, but he went to the table instead of sitting down. “You want food?” he said. “You haven’t eaten in quite a while.”
Damon knew that he was being offered waiter service, but he didn’t want to take it. “I’ll help myself, if you don’t mind,” he said.
“Somehow,” said the old man, peering over the rim of his spectacles, “I just
knew
you were going to say that.”
I
never delivered your message,” Damon said when he’d finished licking his fingers. He was sitting more comfortably now—comfortably enough not to want to get up for anything less than a five-star emergency. Saul was still standing up, hovering beside the table while he finished his own meal.
“Yes, you did,” the old man countered. “Hywood’s more sensitive than you give her credit for. You got through to her, far better than you got through to Kachellek.”
“Is Karol really dead?”
“I honestly don’t know. I doubt it very much. The business with Silas Arnett took us aback a bit, but I sincerely hope that it was merely a matter of playing to the grandstand: tape for tape, as I said, appearance for appearance.
Our
fake body’s better than
your
fake body
and
we got our tape to Interpol while you let yours go astray, so up yours. That
has
to be your father, don’t you think? Eveline’s as clever as she’s stubborn, but she isn’t angry or vengeful. But
you’d
have done it all, wouldn’t you? You’d have lashed out as soon as you came under attack—and even when you thought you’d won, you’d still have put out one last kick in the head for good measure. You’re Conrad Helier’s son all right.”