Inherit the Earth

The offices in question were close enough, and in territory familiar enough, for him to take the controls himself, but driving in downtown traffic was bad for his stress level at the best of times, and these were definitely not the best of times. He told the machine to set a course, but he didn’t retreat into the safe haven of the VE hood the way most nondrivers did. He just sat back with eyes front, rehearsing the questions he intended to ask, if it turned out that there was anyone prepared to give him some answers. He tilted his seat back slightly so that the traffic wouldn’t be too distracting.

The effect of the slight tilt was to fix his eyes on the shifting skyline way ahead of the traffic stream. At first, while the car seemed to be turning at every second intersection, the skyline kept changing, but once the pilot had found a reasonably straight route by which to follow its heading the Two Towers stuck out like a pair of sore thumbs—or a gateway to which the vehicle was being inexorably drawn.

The symbolism of the illusory gateway was not lost on Damon. The whole world was steering a course into the future with OmicronA on the left and PicoCon on the right. Ostensibly archrivals, the two megacorps and their various satellites were an effective cartel controlling at least 70 percent of the domestic nanotech business and 65 percent of the world’s. Now that PicoCon had the Gantz patents stitched up, its masters probably had 70 percent of the domestic biotech business too, insofar as it made any sense to separate biotech from nanotech when the distinction between organic and inorganic molecular machines was becoming more and more blurred with every year that went by.

Possession of the Gantz patents entitled PicoCon to the slightly higher tower, so the edifice that reared up on the right was just a little more massive than the one to the left, but both had been forged out of ocean-refined sand and both architects had done their utmost to take advantage of sparkling salt in catching and reflecting the sun’s bright light. Although PicoCon was the larger, it wasn’t necessarily the brighter. There was a curious defiance about the glow of OmicronA which refused to accept the metaphorical shade—but Damon knew that it was only an optical illusion. As a beacon signaling the advent of tomorrow the two corps were flames of the same furious fire.

Needless to say, the offices of the Ahasuerus Foundation weren’t in the same league. Ahasuerus didn’t even have its own building—just a couple of floors in one of the humbler structures right across the road from the PicoCon tower. By comparison with its taller neighbor the building looked as if it had been gantzed out of an unusually objectionable mudslide; there was not a glimmer of sea salt about its stern exterior and its windows were tinted brown. Most of its neighbors were equipped for a measure of continuing accretion, so that salt from windblown spray hadaccumulated on their slightly blurred surfaces, giving each of them a curious glittering sheen, but the building housing Ahasuerus had been comprehensively finished, and it seemed utterly self-satisfied in its relative dullness—although some observers might have reckoned it sinister as well as stern. Its car park was certainly dimmer and dingier than fashion prescribed.

Damon had already decided that the best course of action was to throw the burden of secrecy onto the foundation’s own security, so he simply marched up to the reception desk and summoned a human contact. When a smartly dressed young man eventually emerged from the i

“My name’s Damon Hart,” he said. “I’m the biological son of Conrad Helier and the foster son of Silas Arnett and Eveline Hywood. It might be to the advantage of the foundation if someone in authority were to read this document. It might also be to the advantage of the foundation if lesser mortals—including yourself—refrained from reading it. Personally, I don’t care at all; if you or anyone else wants to take the risk of looking at it, you’re welcome.”

That, he figured, should get the item as far up the chain of command as was feasible without the contents of the enigmatic message becoming common knowledge.

The fetcher-and-carrier disappeared into the i

Eventually, a woman came to collect him. She had silky red hair and bright blue eyes. For a moment Damon thought that she was genuinely young, and his jaw tightened as he concluded that he was about to be fobbed off, but the hair and eye colors were a little too contrived and a slight constriction in her practiced smile reassured him that she had undergone recent somatic reconstruction of the kind that was misleadingly advertised as “rejuvenation.” Her real age was likely to be at least seventy, if not in three figures.

“Mr. Hart,” she said, offering him the piece of paper, still folded, in lieu of a handshake. “I’m Rachel Trehaine. Won’t you come through.”

The corridors behind the security wall were bare; the doors had no nameplates. The office into which Rachel Trehaine eventually led Damon was liberally equipped with flat screens and fitted with shelves full of discs and digitapes, but it had no VE hood. “Perhaps I’d better warn you that I’m only a senior reader,” she said as she waved him to a chair. “I don’t have any executive authority. I’ve had an encrypted version of your document relayed to New York, but it may take some time to get a response from them. In the meantime, I’d like to thank you for bringing the matter to our attention—we had not been independently informed.”

“You’re welcome,” Damon assured her insincerely. “I hope you’ll show me the same courtesy of bringing to my attention any pertinent matters of which I might not have been independently informed.” He winced slightly as he heard the pomposity in his tone, realizing that he might have overrehearsed his opening speech.

“Of course,” said Rachel Trehaine, with the charming ease of a practiced dissembler. “I don’t suppose you have any idea—if only the merest suspicion—who this mysterious Operator might be, or why this attack on your family has been launched?”

“I thought you might know more about that than I do,” Damon said. “You’ll have complete records of any dealings between Ahasuerus and Conrad Helier’s research team.”

“When I say that I’m a senior reader,” she told him mildly, “I don’t mean that I have free access to the foundation’s own records. My job is to keep watch on other data streams, selecting out data of interest, collating and reporting. I’m a scientific analyst, not a historian.”

“I meant you plural, not you singular,” Damon told her. “Someone in your organization must be able to figure out which particular closeted skeleton Operator one-oh-one intends to bring out into the open. Why else would he have sent me to you?”

“Why would he—or she—have sent you anywhere at all, Mr. Hart? Why send you a personal message? It seems very odd—not at all the way that Eliminators usually operate.”

The delicate suggestion was, of course, that Damon was the source of the message—that he himself was Operator 101. As a scientific analyst Rachel Trehaine would naturally have considerable respect for Occam’s razor.

“That’s an interesting question,” Damon said agreeably. “When Inspector Yamanaka referred to the situation as a puzzle he was speaking metaphorically, but that message implies that the instigator of this series of incidents really iscreating a puzzle, dangling it before me as a kind of lure—just as I, in my turn, am dangling it before you. Operator one-oh-one wants me to go digging, and he’s offering suggestions as to where I might profitably dig. Given that Conrad Helier is dead, he can’t possibly be the Eliminators’ real target—and if their promise that Silas Arnett will be released after he’s given them what they want is honest, he isn’t the real target either. If the note is to be taken at face value, Operator one-oh-one might be building a file on Eveline Hywood, with particular reference to her past dealings with your foundation.”