Inherit the Earth

It’s over, Damon told himself again as he picked up the third box of groceries. He was testing himself, to see whether anxiety or relief would rise to the surface of his consciousness.

Diana was all ready to fight when he came back through the door, but Damon wasn’t about to oblige her. He put the box he’d carried from the elevator on the floor and stepped back to collect another. She knew that he was buying time, but she let him go back for the third without protest. The expression in her blue-gray eyes said that she wasn’t about to calm down, but she hadn’t gone back for another knife, so he had reason to hope that the worst was already over.

Once the last box was inside the apartment and the door was safely closed behind him, Damon felt that he was ready to face Diana. Fortunately, her tremulous rage was now on the point of dissolving into tears. She had dug her fingernails into her palms so deeply that they had drawn blood, but they were unclenching now. With Diana, violence always shifted abruptly into a masochistic phase; real pain was sometimes the only thing that could blot out the kinds of distress with which her internal technology was not equipped to deal.

“You don’t want me at all,” she complained. “You don’t want any livingpartner. You only want my virtual shadow. You want a programmed slave, so you can be absolute master of your paltry sensations. That’s all you’ve ever wanted.”

“It’s a commission,” Damon told her as soothingly as he could. “It’s not a composition for art’s sake, or for my own gratification. It’s not even technically challenging. It’s just a piece of work. I’m using your body template because it’s the only one I have that’s been programmed into my depository to a suitable level of complexity. Once I’ve got the basic script in place I’ll modify it out of all recognition—every feature, every contour, every dimension. I’m only doing it this way because it’s the easiest way to do it. All I’m doing is constructing a pattern of appearances; it’s not real.”

“You don’t have any sensitivity at all, do you?” she came back. “To you, the templates you made of me are just something to be used in petty pornography. They’re just something convenient—something that’s not even technically challenging. It wouldn’t make any difference what kind of tape you were making, would it? You’ve got my image worked out to a higher degree of digital definition than any other, so you put it to whatever use you can: if it wasn’t a sex tape it’d be some slimy horror show . . . anything they’d pay you money to do. It really doesn’t matter to you whether you’re making training tapes for surgeons or masturbation aids for freaks, does it?”

As she spoke she struck out with her fists at various parts of his imaging system: the bland consoles, the blank screens, the lumpen edit suite and—most frequently—the dark helmets whose eyepieces could look out upon an infinite range of imaginary worlds. Her fists didn’t do any damage; everything had been built to last.

“I can’t turn down commissions,” Damon told her as patiently as he could. “I need co

“And templating me was just another exercise? Building me into your machinery was just a way to practice. I’m just raw material.”

“It’s not you, Di,” he said, wishing that he could make her understand that he really meant it. “It’s not your shadow, certainly not your soul. It’s just an appearance. When I use it in my work I’m not using you.”

“Oh no?” she said, giving the helmet she’d been using one last smack with the white knuckles of her right hand. “When you put your suit of armor on and stick your head into one of those black holes, you leave thisworld way behind. When you’re there—and you sure as hell aren’t herevery often—the only contact you have with me is with my appearance, and what you do to that appearance is what you do to me. When you put my image through the kind of motions you’re incorporating into that sleazy fantasy it’s meyou’re doing it to, and no one else.”

“When it’s finished,” Damon said doggedly, “it won’t look or feel anything like you. Would you rather I paid a copyright fee to reproduce some shareware whore? Would you rather I sealed myself away for hours on end with a set of supersnoopers and a hired model? By your reckoning, that would be another woman, wouldn’t it? Or am I supposed to restrict myself to the design and decoration of cells for VE monasteries?”

“I’d rather you spent more time with the realme,” she told him. “I’d rather you lived in the actualworld instead of devoting yourself to substitutes. I never realized that giving up fighting meant giving up life.”

“You had no right to put the hood on,” Damon told her coldly. “I can’t work properly if I feel that you’re looking over my shoulder all the time. That’s worse than knowing that I might have to duck whenever I come through the door because you might be waiting for me with a deadly weapon.”

“It’s only a kitchen knife. At the worst it would have put your eye out.”

“I can’t afford to take a fortnight off work while I grow a new eye—and I don’t find experiences like that amusing or instructive.”

“You were always too much of a coward to be a first-ratefighter,” she told him, trying hard to wither him with her scorn. “You switched to the technical side of the business because you couldn’t take the cuts anymore.”

Damon had never been one of the reckless fighters who threw themselves into the part with all the flamboyance and devil-may-care they could muster, thinking that the tapes would make them look like real heroes. He had always fought to win with the minimum of effort and the minimum of personal injury—and in his opinion, it had always worked to the benefit of the tapes rather than to their detriment. Even the idiots who liked to consume the tapes raw, because it made the fights seem “more real,” had appreciated his efficiency more than the blatant showmanship of his rivals.

Because most of his opponents hadn’t cared much about skill or sensible self-preservation Damon had won thirty-nine out of his forty-three fights and had remained unbeaten for the last eighteen months of his career. He didn’t consider that to be evidence of stupidity or stubbor

Unfortunately, the new business wasn’t more challenging or more interesting for Diana. Watching a VE designer working inside a hood wasn’t an engaging spectator sport.

“If you’re hankering after the sound and fury of the streets,” Damon said tiredly, “you know where they are.”

It wasn’t the first time he’d said it, but it startled her. Her fists unclenched briefly as she absorbed the import of it. She knew him well enough to read his tone of voice. She knew that he meant it, this time.

“Is that what you want?” she said, to make sure. Her palms were bleeding; he could see both ragged lines of cuts now that she was relaxing.

Damon toyed with the possibility of parrying the question. It’s what you want, he could have said—but it would have been less than honest and less than brave.

“I can’t take it anymore,” he told her frankly. “It’s run its course.”

“You think you don’t need me anymore, don’t you?” she said, trying to pretend that she had reason to believe that he was wrong in that estimation. When she saw that he wasn’t going to protest, her shoulders slumped—but only slightly. She had courage too, and pride. “Perhaps you’re right,” she sneered. “All you ever wanted of me is in that template. As long as you have my appearance programmed into your private world of ghosts and shadows you can do anything you like with me, without ever having to worry whether I’ll step out of line. You’d rather live with a virtual image than a real flesh-and-blood person, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t even take that helmet off to eat and drink if you didn’t have to. If you had any idea how much you’ve changed since. . . .”