Inherit the Earth

“That’s what Frederick Gantz Saul offered Conrad Helier, in exchange for effective ownership and control of para-DNA. That’s what he must have offered your employers in order to bring them meekly into line. It’s what he’ll offer everyone who ever looks as if they mightbe getting out of line—but I’d be willing to bet that he’ll always be prepared to show them the stick before offering the carrot, just to make sure that he has their full attention. So what I need to know, Dr. Data Analyst, is: is it true?Or is it, perhaps, just a clever line of patter, intended to defuse all opposition to a state of affairs that puts Saul and his friends in almost total control of what might—so far as we know for sure—be the only world there is or ever will be.”

“And you want an honest opinion?” Rachel Trehaine challenged him. “ Myhonest opinion, as an individual rather than an employee of the Ahasuerus Foundation.”

“If you think I’ve given you enough in exchange,” he said, “I’d be very grateful.”

“Unfortunately,” she said, “you’ve already put your finger on the root of the problem. However expert we may be as data analysts, we can’t possibly know for sure how good our extrapolations are. Only time will tell whether Saul’s promises can be redeemed. In the meantime, they’re pie in the sky. On the other hand, what other choice have you got? If you don’t buy into hisdream, all you have is the prospects of a teenage streetfighter permanently engaged in a rebellion he can’t win. If you don’t want to work directly for PicoCon you can always join Eveline Hywood in Lagrange-Five, or make your way to whichever far-flung hidey-hole your father found for himself, but you know better than to think that they can continue to avoid toeing the line. They’re old enough to know better—and so are you.”

Damon had kept his eyes locked on hers while she delivered this speech, but he let them fall now.

“What did you expect me to say?” she asked him not unkindly. “What else couldI say?”

“I thought I ought to make sure,” Damon told her, trying to sound grateful for her effort. “I didn’t know how far out of line Ahasuerus was. I suppose I was wondering whether there was something you knew that I didn’t, or something you might see that I’d missed—something which would put the matter into a less dismal light.”

“If Saul’s right,” she told him, “the light’s not dismal at all. You may not be able to have a substantial share in the earth, but how many people ever could? The point is that you—or your heirs—might still be able to claim a substantial share of the universe. For all his faults, Saul tells a hell of a story—and it mightbe true. Shouldn’t we at least hope that it is?”

“I suppose we should,” Damon admitted grudgingly.

Twenty-eight

M

adoc Tamlin went out onto the bedroom balcony and lifted his face to bathe in the light of the afternoon sun. The breakers tumbling over the shingle had just begun their retreat from the ragged line of wrack and plastic that marked the high tide. In the distance, he could see Le

High above the house a young wing glider was wheeling in search of a thermal. His angelic wings were painted like a flamingo’s, each pink-tinted pinion feather brightly outlined. Madoc had never seen a real flamingo, but he knew that they were smaller by far than the bird boy. Natural selection had never produced a bird as large as the human glider, but modern technology had taken over where mutation had left off, in every sphere of human existence.

Madoc smiled as he watched the glider swoop low and then soar, having found his thermal. He willed the flier to attempt a loop or some equally daring stunt, but the conditions weren’t right and the boy hadn’t yet obtained the full measure of his skill. In time, no doubt, he would dare anything—flirtation with danger was at least half the fascination that attracted men to flight.

Damon was lucky to have inherited a house like this, Madoc thought—all the more so if, as Damon continued to insist, Silas Arnett’s death had been no more real than Surinder Nahal’s. It was a pity that Damon didn’t seem to appreciate what he had—but that had always been Damon’s problem.

“Who was on the phone?”

Madoc hadn’t heard Diana Caisson come up behind him; her bare feet made no sound on the thick carpet.

“Damon,” he said, without turning to look at her. He knew that she would be wearing nothing but a bath towel.

“When’s he coming?”

Still Madoc wouldn’t turn to face her. “He’s not,” he said.

“What?”

“He’s not coming.”

“But I thought. . . .” Diana trailed off without finishing the sentence, but shewasn’t finished. Madoc watched her cheeks go red, and he saw her fist clench harder than any streetfighter’s fist. He’d seen her draw blood before, and he didn’t expect to see anything less this time.

Madoc knew what Diana had thought. She’d thought that Damon had offered them temporary use of the house he’d inherited from Silas Arnett as a roundabout way of fixing up a meeting. She was still waiting for Damon to “see the light”: to realize that he couldn’t bear to be without her and that he had to mend his ways in order to win her back. When Damon had returned the full set of master tapes which he’d plundered for his various VE productions, she’d recklessly assumed that it was the first step on the way to a reconciliation: a gesture of humility.

Madoc knew different. Damon had never been one for seeing the lights that other people suspended for him. He liked to chase his own fox fires.

“What didhe say?” Diana asked.

Madoc thought for a moment that she might be trying—unsuccessfully—to suppress her a

“Will he be coming later in the week?”

“No, Di. When he says that he doesn’t intend using the place at all, that’s exactly what he means. He’s busy.”

“Busy!” Her voice had risen to a screech. “He’s just inherited two small fortunes, to add to the one he already had but somehow never got around to mentioning. He doesn’t have to make any more telephone tapes, or any more game tapes, or any more fight tapes, or any more pornotapes . . . not that he ever did, it seems. He can do anything he damn well likes!” Diana had not yet begun to accept that she was fighting a losing battle, because she hadn’t yet begun to understand why she had never had a chance of wi

“That’s right,” Madoc told her as gently as he could. “He can do anything he likes—and what he likes, as it happens, is setting himself up in business.”

“He could have done that in Los Angeles!”

“He thinks Los Angeles is way too crowded. There’s no real privacy here. If he were going to stay here, he said, he might as well take the job that PicoCon offered him. He wants to work where he can feel free.”

“And what, exactly, is he going to work at?” Her fingernails were drawing blood now, and were sinking even further into her flesh in response to the anesthetic ministrations of her IT.

“I don’t know. Not VE, he says. Biotech, I suppose—that’s what he was trained for, before he ran away to join the circus. As to what kind of biotech, I wouldn’t know.”