Inherit the Earth

“You may think it terrible that effective ownership of the entire earth should remain forever in the hands of a tiny Olympian elite, but ownership is also stewardship. While the earth was effectively common land it was in the interest of every individual to increase his own exploitation of it at the expense of others—and the result was an ecocatastrophe which would have rendered the planet uninhabitable if the Crash had not been precipitated in the nick of time.

“We ca

“True progress ca

“When your new nanotech VEs hit the marketplace, that isn’t going to be easy,” Damon observed. “Or did the Mirror Man’s little lecture about products not being made for the market mean that you intend to bury the technology?”

“What my colleague was trying to explain,” Saul said, “is that we’re not developing such technologies solely with a view to putting new products in the marketplace. We have much broader horizons in mind, but we’re not going to bury anything—not even para-DNA. We have more faith in humankind than Conrad Helier does. We don’t believe that the people of Earth, however meek they may become, will want to retreat into manufactured dreams twenty-four hours a day. We don’t believe that people will settle for cut-price contentment when they still have the prospect of real achievement before them—and we dobelieve that they still have the prospect of real achievement. We think Conrad Helier’s aims can better be served by a carrot than a stick—and that’swhy we’re so very anxious to bring him to the conference table. We never wanted to bury para-DNA; what we’d really like to do is to investigate the contribution it might make to our own methods of breaking down the distinction between the organic and the inorganic.”

“You want to buyit?” Silas said in a tone which implied that he didn’t believe that a man like Conrad Helier—unlike the inheritors of the Gantz patents—would ever sell out to PicoCon.

“Not necessarily,” said Saul wearily. “In fact, I have grave doubts as to whether it has any potential at all that our own people don’t already have covered—but I do want to talk about its potential, and its appropriate uses. It’s not impossible that we might actually be able to assist in Conrad’s great crusade. In fact, I think it’s more than likely that we can. If only he would condescend to listen, I think we can show him a future far brighter and infinitely more promising than the one he presently has in mind.”

Damon could see that this was not what Silas had expected. He had had no clear idea what to expect on his own account, but he had to admit that Saul’s line of argument had taken him by surprise. Like Silas, he had been thinking entirely in terms of threats—who could blame either of them, after the violent farce of the last few days?—and he was not quite willing to believe, as yet, that there was nothing within the iron glove but a velvet fist. He was, however, prepared to listen—and so, it appeared, was Silas, both on his own behalf and that of Conrad Helier.

“All right,” said Silas, flushing slightly as he glanced at Damon—as if he were in search of approval, or at least of understanding. “Tell me what you’re offering. If it seems worthwhile, I’ll do everything within my power to make sure that Conrad, Eveline, and Karol pay proper attention—but it had better be good.”

“It is,” said Frederick Gantz Saul. “It certainly is.”

Twenty-seven

D

amon eased his car through the midmorning traffic, which was flowing normally through well-behaved control lights. He couldn’t help feeling a slightly exaggerated sense of his own mortality, in spite of the profuse official denials that had been issued to confirm that he was notConrad Helier, enemy of mankind. While there were people around who worked on the assumption that everything on the news was likely to be a lie, such denials were likely to be less effective than sly denunciations of the kind that Saul’s people had put out while they were still playing rough.

He knew that it was well within the capability of any twelve-year-old or hundred-and-twelve-year-old Webwalker to discover his address and car registration. He knew too that one of the problems of longevity was that it preserved a substantial fraction of the madness to which people were subject alongside the sanity which only the majority achieved. The downside of efficient IT was that it did a far better job preserving the body than it did preserving the mind—and some kinds of madness, albeit not the nastiest kinds, really were allin the mind.

At present, that downside was limited; the most powerful nanotechnologies were so recent in their provenance that even under the New Reproductive System less than a sixth of the population of California consisted of centenarians. In fifty years’ time, however, that percentage would have trebled, and most of the 15 percent of current centarians would still be alive. Nobody knew how many of those would still be compos mentis; Morgan Miller had been dead for nearly a hundred and eighty years, but the effect named after him had not yet revealed the full extent of its horror. True emortality required more than the continual revitalization of somatic cells; it required the continued revitalization of the idiosyncratic neuronal pathways that were the foundation of every individual self, every unique personality.

According to Frederick Gantz Saul, there would be crazy people around for some time yet—but not forever. In time, according to Saul, sanity would prevail; foolishness, criminal behavior, and disaffection would fade into oblivion and everyone would be safe. Damon still had not made up his mind whether to believe that, let alone whether to believe Saul’s further assertion that the sanity and safety in question would not be a kind of stagnation.

The heightened sense of mortality should have worn off once he was off the street, but it didn’t. It accompanied him in the elevator and didn’t let up when he stepped out into the LA offices of the Ahasuerus Foundation. Damon hadn’t made an appointment, and he wouldn’t have felt utterly crushed if he’d been told to go away by the AI receptionist, but Rachel Trehaine didn’t even keep him kicking his heels for the customary ten minutes of insult time. He had expected to find her in a frosty mood, but she was positively welcoming—presumably because she was curious.