Inherit the Earth

“The Ahasuerus Foundation is not involved in industrial espionage,” she informed him as stiffly and as flatly as she was bound to do.

“It’s not simply a matter of there being a new team in town, is it?” Damon went on softly. “The real problem is that they’re trying to redefine the game. They’re moving the goalposts and rewriting the rules. They’re worried about your willingness to play by the new rules because they’re worried about the terms of your charter—about the responsibility you owe to Adam Zimmerman. Is it possible, do you think, that they’re anxious that letting Adam Zimmerman out of the freezer might be tantamount to letting the cat out of the bag?”

“What’s that supposed to mean, Mr. Hart?”

“Let me put it this way, Dr. Trehaine. It might well be that the people with the very best internal technology would consider it desirable, or even necessary, to play down its power: to maintain the belief that what people insist on calling immortality not only isn’t immortality but isn’t even true emortality. It might well be that the people who control the IT megacorps consider it desirable or necessary to persuade their would-be heirs that patience is still the cardinal virtue—that in order to inherit the earth they only have to wait until their elders lose their memories, their minds, and, in the end, their lives. If that reality were mere appearance and illusion—if all the patience in the world wouldn’t be enough to allow the young to come into their inheritance—what hope would there be for people like me? What is there to wait for, if my generation can neverbecome the inheritors of Earth?”

“If you think that we already have true emortality, Mr. Hart,” Rachel Trehaine said drily, “you’re mistaken. I can say that with certainty.”

“I’m not sure how much your certainty is worth, Dr. Trehaine,” Damon told her bluntly, “but even if you’re right—what about the escalator? If IT really is advancing quickly enough to put true emortality in the hands of people now alive, what will it be worth to the young?While each generation thinks that it has a chance to be the first to the top of the mountain, the philosophy of Elimination will remain the province of outsiders—but as soon as it becomes generally known that the summit has been claimed, and claimed in perpetuity, the Eliminators might become a valuable asset to those whose uneasy heads are only a few funerals away from the crown.

“You’re the professional data analyst, Dr. Trehaine—you’re in a far better position than I am to balance all the variables in the equation. How do youlike the Eliminators? How far away are we, in your estimation, from an undeclared war between the young and the old? And what, if you were a rising star in the Pico-Con/OmicronA constellation, would you want to do about it?”

“I think you’re being ridiculously melodramatic,” said Rachel Trehaine calmly. “We live in a civilized world now. Even if everyone knew that they were truly emortal, they’d have better sense than to go to war for ownership of the world. They’d know perfectly well that any such war might easily end up destroying the prize they were fighting for. Wouldn’t it be better to live forever, happily and comfortably, in a world you didn’t own than to risk death in order to possess a handful of its ashes?”

“You might think that,” Damon said, “and so might I—but we’ve moved in rather different social circles during the last twenty years, and I can assure you that there are plenty of people out there who are willing to kill, even at the risk of being killed. There are plenty of people who value real freedom over comfort and safety—people who would never be content to live in a world they have no power to change.”

“There are other worlds,” Rachel Trehaine said mildly. “Now that we’ve saved Earth, the new frontiers in space are opening up again. The arks launched before the Crash are still en route—and if Eveline Hywood and her panspermist friends are right, the galaxy must be full of worlds that have ecospheres of their own, including many that are ripe for colonization.”

“That’s the optimistic view,” Damon agreed. “As far as we know for sure, though, there isn’t an acre of worthwhile real estate anywhere in the universe outside of Earth. As far as we know for sure, this world is theworld. No matter how many people decide to live in glorified tin cans like the domes of Mars and Lagrange-Five, Earthmight be the only inheritance that has any real market value—the only thing worth fighting for.”

“Perhaps your years as a streetfighter have given you an unduly jaundiced view of your fellow men, Mr. Hart,” said the data analyst. “Perhaps you haven’t yet become sufficiently adult to realize how utterly juvenile such boys’ games are.”

“I realize that you don’t much like playing games, Dr. Trehaine,” Damon countered, “but you must have noticed that not everyone shares your distaste.”

“What, exactly, do you want from me?” she asked.

“An opinion. An honestopinion, if you’re willing to provide it, regarding Frederick Gantz Saul’s argument that no one should fight the world’s present owners for control of the world.”

“What ishis argument?” she countered, although Damon had already judged—on the basis of their eye-to-eye contact—that she knew perfectly well what Saul was offering the independent thinkers who hadn’t yet fallen in line with his plans for the remaking of the world.

“He says that the nanotech revolution has only just begun, and that it can’t be carried forward to its proper conclusion by the forces of commercial competition. He says that the future of the world now needs to be pla

“We already have biotech which will transform animal egg cells into huge tissue cultures of almost any design the genetweakers can dream up, and modify viable organisms in thousands of interesting and useful ways. If research like yours eventually bears fruit, we’ll be able to modify human beings in exactly the same way, engineering ova in artificial wombs so that they won’t need elaborate IT to provide all the extra features—like emortality—that we consider necessary and desirable. According to Saul, that revolution will be completed by gantzing biotech/nanotech hybrids, which will enable us to work miracles of transformation with any and all inorganicstructures.

“Saul calls himself a true Gaian—not a Gaian Mystic, but someone with a realunderstanding of the implications of the Gaia hypothesis. The whole point of that hypothesis, according to Saul, is that it’s wrong to think of the inorganic environment as something given, as a framework within which life has to operate. Just as Earth’s atmosphere is a product of life, he says, so are its oceans and its rocks: everythingat the surface is part of the same system—and when we take control of that system, as we very soon will, it won’t simply be a matter of juggling Earth’s biomass; we’ll have more transformative power than the so-called continental engineers ever dreamed of. Earth’s crust will be ours to sculpt as we wish—or, rather, as Earth’s ownerswish.

“But that, according to Saul, is only the begi