“Was she a very young woman?” Damon asked.
“There is little to distinguish her from dozens of other guests Mr. Arnett had entertained during the last few years,” Yamanaka replied diplomatically—perhaps meaning that if the kidnappers knew Arnett’s tastes and habits well enough, it would have been easy enough to get someone inside to facilitate their work.
“You think the people who took Silas also posted that message?” Damon said, pointing at the windowscreen.
“We think that it’s an interesting coincidence,” Yamanaka admitted. “There’s more. Another of your father’s contemporaries has an address in San Diego, but he’s proving equally difficult to trace.”
“Who?”
“A man named Surinder Nahal.”
Damon could understand why the pedantic inspector has chosen the word contemporaries. Conrad Helier and Surinder Nahal had been in the same line of work, but they’d never been colleagues. They’d been rivals—and there had been a certain amount of bad blood between them. Damon didn’t know exactly why; it hadn’t been an acceptable topic of conversation among his foster parents.
“Has he been abducted too?” Damon asked.
“Not as far as we know,” said Yamanaka, careful as ever.
The inspector’s associate had now drifted back to his side, having completed his superficial inspection of the apartment. “Karol Kachellek also claimed that he hadn’t seen Silas Arnett for many years,” Rolfe put in. “Eveline Hywood said the same. It seems that your surviving foster parents fell out with one another as well as with you.”
Damon realized that it would be foolish to swing from one extreme to the other—from taking it for granted that he was a suspect to taking it for granted that he wasn’t. The Interpol men were undoubtedly fishing for anything they could catch. “I dare say it’s true,” he said cautiously. “Silas’s decision to retire must have seemed to Karol and Eveline to be a failure of vocation almost as scandalous as my own: yet another betrayal of Conrad Helier’s sacred cause.”
Yamanaka nodded as if he understood—but Damon knew that he almost certainly didn’t. It was difficult to guess Yamanaka’s true age, because a man of his standing would have the kind of internal technology which was capable of slowing down the aging process to a minimum, as well as PicoCon’s latest cosmetic engineering, but he was probably no more than sixty. To the inspector, as to Damon, the glittering peak of Conrad Helier’s career would be the stuff of history. At school the young Hiru Yamanaka would have been dutifully informed that the artificial wombs which Conrad Helier had perfected, and the techniques which allowed such wombs to produce legions of healthy infants while the plague of sterility spread like wildfire across the globe, were the salvation of the species—but that didn’t mean that he could understand the appalling reverence in which Conrad Helier had been held by his closest coworkers.
“Do you have any idea why anyone would want to kidnap Silas Arnett?” Yamanaka asked Damon with unaccustomed bluntness.
“None at all,” Damon replied, perhaps too reflexively.
“Do you have any idea why anyone would want to blacken your father’s name?” The follow-up seemed as bland as it was blunt, but Damon knew that if Yamanaka was right in his estimation of the interesting coincidence this might be the key that tied everything together. A brusque none at all would not serve as an adequate answer. “I was encouraged in every possible way to see my father as the greatest hero and saint the twenty-second century produced,” Damon said judiciously, “but I know that there were some who had a very different opinion of him. I never knew him, of course, but I know there were people who resented the strength of his views and his high media profile. Some thought him unbearably arrogant, others thought he got more credit for the solution to the Crisis than was due to him. On the other hand, although I couldn’t follow in his footsteps—and never wanted to—I don’t disapprove of anything he did, or anything my foster parents did in pursuit of his ambitions. If you want my opinion, whoever posted this notice is sick as well as stupid. It certainly wasn’t Silas Arnett, and I find it difficult to believe that it might have been anyone who understood the nature and extent of Conrad Helier’s achievements. That includes Surinder Nahal.”
Sergeant Rolfe curled his lip, evidently thinking that this eye-to-eye interview was turning out to be a waste of valuable time.
“There were several witnesses to the death of Conrad Helier,” the inspector said matter-of-factly, “and his last days were recorded, without apparent interruption, on videotape which can still be accessed by anyone who cares to download it. The doctor who was in attendance and the embalmer who prepared the body for the funeral both confirm that they carried out DNA checks on the corpse, and that the gene map matched Conrad Helier’s records. If the man whose body was cremated on 27 January 2147 wasn’t Conrad Helier then the gene map on file in the Central Directory must have been substituted.” He paused briefly, then said: “You don’t look at all like your father. Is that deliberate, or is it simply that you resemble your mother?”
“I’ve never gone in for cosmetic reconstruction,” Damon told him warily. “I have no idea what my mother looked like; I don’t even know her name. I understand that her ova were stripped and frozen at the height of the Crisis, when they were afraid that the world’s entire stock might be wiped out by the plague. There’s no surviving record of her. At that time, according to my foster parents, nobody was overly particular about where healthy ova came from; they just wanted to get as many as they could in the bank. They were stripping them from anyone more than five years old, so it’s possible that my mother was a mere infant.”
“It’s possible, then, that your natural mother is still alive,” Yamanaka commented, with a casualness that was probably feigned.
“If she is,” Damon pointed out, “she can’t possibly know that one of her ova was inseminated by Conrad Helier’s sperm and that I was the result.”
“I suppose Eveline Hywood and Mary Hallam must both have been infected before their wombs could be stripped,” Yamanaka said, disregarding the taboos that would presumably continue to inhibit free conversation regarding the legacy of the plague until the last survivors of the Crisis had retired from public life. “Or was it just that Conrad Helier was reluctant to select one of your foster parents as a natural mother in case it affected the partnership?”
“I don’t think any of this is relevant to the matters you’re investigating,” Damon said. “The kidnapping is the important thing—the other thing was probably posted simply to confuse the matter.”
“I can’t tell as yet what might be relevant and what might not,” Yamanaka said unapologetically. “The message supposedly deposited by Operator one-oh-one might be pure froth, and there might be nothing sinister in the fact that I can’t contact Surinder Nahal—but if Silas Arnett really has been seized by Eliminators this could represent the beginning of a new and nastier phase of that particular species of terrorism. Eliminators already attract far too much media attention, and this story might well become headline news. I’d like to stay one step ahead of the dozens of newsmen who must have been commissioned to start digging—in fact, I need to stay at least one step ahead of them because they’ll certainly confuse the issue once they begin stirring things up. I’m sorry to have troubled you, Mr. Hart, but I thought it best that I contact you directly to inform you of what had happened. If you think of anything that might help us, it might be to your own advantage to let us know immediately.”
He’s implying that I might be in danger too, Damon thought. If he’s right, and the message is connected to Silas’s disappearance, this really might be the beginning of something nasty—even if it’s only a news-tape hatchet job. “I’ll ask around,” he said carefully. “If I discover anything that might help you, I’ll be sure to let you know.”
“Thank you, Mr. Hart,” the man from Interpol said, offering no clue as to exactly what he understood by Damon’s promise to ask around. “I’m grateful for
your cooperation.”
When he had closed the door behind his unwelcome visitors Damon pulled the carving knife out of the jamb, wondering what Sergeant Rolfe had made of it. Would Interpol be checking Diana’s record as carefully as they had checked his? Would they find anything there to connect her to the Eliminators? Probably not—but how well did he know her? How well had he ever known her? And where would she go, now that she was homeless again? Might she too become “untraceable,” like Silas Arnett and Surinder Nahal? Suddenly, he felt an urgent need of someone to talk to—and realized belatedly that since he had quit the fight game he had gradually transferred all his conversational eggs to one basket. Now that Diana was gone, there was no one who regularly passed the time of day with him except the censorious elevator, which didn’t even qualify as a worm-level AI.
All I want is a chance to work, he thought. All I need is the space to get on with my own projects. None of this is anything to do with me. But he knew, even as he voiced the thought within the virtual environment of his mind, that he didn’t have the authority to decide that he was uninvolved in this affair. Nor, he realized—slightly to his surprise—was he able to attain the level of indifference that would allow him simply to turn his back on the mystery. In spite of everything that had happened to spoil the relationship between himself and his foster parents, he still cared—about Silas Arnett, at least.
Oh, Silas, he thought, what on earth have you done? Who can you possibly have annoyed sufficiently to get yourself kidnapped? And why have the Eliminators turned their attention to a saint who’s been dead for nearly fifty years?
Four
D
amon knew that there was no point searching the apartment for the bugs that Sergeant Rolfe had planted while he was wandering around. Interpol undoubtedly had nanomachines clever enough to evade detection by his antique sweeper. Nor was he about to ask for help—Building Security had better sweepers but they also had a rather flexible view of the right to privacy that they were supposedly there to guarantee. He had enough demerits on his account already without giving formal notification of the fact that he was under investigation by a high-level law enforcement agency.
Instead, he donned his phone hood and started making calls.
It was, as he’d anticipated, a waste of time. Everybody in the world—not to mention everybody off-world—had a beltpack and a personal call-number, but that didn’t mean that anybody in the world was accessible twenty-four hours a day. Everybody in the world also had an AI answering machine, which functioned for most people as a primary status symbol as well as a protector of privacy, and which needed to be shown off if they were to perform that function adequately. The higher a man’s social profile was the cleverer his AI needed to be at fielding and filtering calls. Damon usually had no cause to regret the trend—customizing virtual environments for the AI simulacra to inhabit provided nearly 40 percent of his business—but whenever he actually wanted to make urgent contact with some people he found the endless routine of stagy reply sequences just as frustrating as anyone else.
Karol Kachellek’s simulacrum was standing on a photo-derived Hawaiian beach with muted breakers rolling in behind him. The unsmiling simulacrum brusquely reported that Karol was busy operating a deep-sea dredger by remote control and couldn’t be disturbed. It warned Damon that his call was unlikely to be returned for several hours, and perhaps not until the next day.
Damon told the sim that the matter was urgent, but the assurances he received in return were patently hollow.
Eveline Hywood’s simulacrum wasn’t even full length; it was just a detached head floating in what Damon took to be a straightforward replication of her lab. The room’s only decoration—if even that could be reckoned a mere ornament—was a window looking out upon a rich star field. It was the kind of panorama which people who lived with five miles of atmosphere above their heavy heads only ever got to see in virtual form, and it therefore functioned as a status symbol, even though Lagrangists were supposed to be above that sort of thing. The sim’s gray hair was trimmed to a mere fuzz, according to the prevailing minimalist philosophy of the microgee colonists, but its features were slightly more naturalistic than those Karol had contrived for his alter ego.
The sim told Damon that Eveline was working on a delicate series of experiments and wouldn’t be returning any calls for at least twenty-four hours. Again, Damon told the sim that the matter was urgent—but the sim looked back at him with a cold hauteur which silently informed him that nothing happening on Earth could possibly be urgent by comparison with the labor of a dedicated Lagrangist.
Damon doubted that the news about Silas and the strange declaration of Operator 101 had reached either of his foster parents as yet; unless Interpol had sent someone to see them face-to-face the information would be stuck in the same queue as his own calls, probably assigned an equally low priority by the two AI filtering devices.
Madoc Tamlin’s simulacrum had a lot more style, as did the surreal backcloth which Damon had designed for it, with a liquid clock whose ripples told the right time and a very plausible phoenix that rose afresh from its pyre every time the sim accepted a call. The sim gave no reason for Madoc’s unavailability, although the expression in its eyes carefully implied that being the kind of rakehell he was he was probably up to no good. Damon knew, though, that its promise that Madoc would get back to him within the hour was trustworthy.
When he lifted the hood again the one thing on Damon’s mind was getting to the bathroom, so it wasn’t until he’d done what he had to do and emerged again that he saw the envelope lying on the floor just inside the apartment door. The absurdity of it stopped him dead in his tracks and almost made him laugh. Nobody pushed envelopes under apartment doors—not, at any rate, in buildings as well supplied with spy eyes as this one.
Damon picked the envelope up. It wasn’t sealed.
He drew the enclosed piece of paper out and unfolded it curiously. The words printed on it might have been put there by any of a million near identical machines. They read:
DAMON
IT IS TRUE
CONRAD HELIER IS ALIVE
ARNETT WILL BE RELEASED WHEN HE HAS TESTIFIED
AHASUERUS AND HYWOOD HAVE THE REMAINING ANSWERS
OPERATOR 101
This time, Damon did laugh. This made the whole affair seem suddenly childish, like a silly game. He remembered the way Yamanaka had carefully called his attention to the unusual features of the original message, implying that it wasn’t really an Eliminator who had posted it. This was surely confirmation of the fact—no authentic Eliminator would post personal messages under someone’s door. This had to be a joke.
Damon slipped back under the hood and called Building Security.
The call was answered by a real person, just as the lease specifications promised. “This is thirteen four seven,” he said reflexively, although she could have read that from the automatic display.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Hart?” said the real person gravely. She had a broad halo of honey blond hair, a superabundance of facial jewelry, and an anxious expression, none of which were properly coordinated with her sober gray uniform.
“Somebody just slipped something under my door—within the last thirty minutes. Could you decant me the spy-eye tape that gives the clearest picture?”
He took her assent so much for granted that he almost severed the connection before she said: “I’m sorry, Mr. Hart, but that won’t be possible. We’ve suffered a slight system failure.” She sounded very embarrassed, as well she might. Setting aside such routine antisocial behavior as jamming the elevator open for a couple of minutes, the misdemeanor rate within the building was so low that Security was having a hard time justifying its proportion of the lease tax.
“What do you mean, a slight system failure?” Damon asked, although he had a pretty good idea.
“Well,” said the blond woman unhappily, “to tell the truth, it’s not that slight. In fact, it’s fairly gene
ral.”
Damon considered the implications of this news for a few moments before saying: “General enough to allow someone to walk into the building, take the elevator to the thirteenth, push something under a door, take the elevator back down again, and walk out undetected?”
“It’s possible,” she conceded, quickly adding: “It’s a very unusual situation, Mr. Hart. I’ve never known anything like it.”
Damon judged from her tone that she had encountered similar situations several times before, but had been instructed not to admit the fact to the tenants. This wasn’t the kind of building that software saboteurs would target, but it wasn’t the kind they’d leave alone either. Damon had crashed similar systems in the days when he’d been in training to be an all-around juvenile delinquent and taken pride in it. The only authentically unusual thing about this particular act of sabotage was that someone had taken advantage of it to pay a personal call. The blond woman, who was waiting impatiently for him to break the connection and let her get on with her work, obviously hadn’t cottoned on to that.
“Thanks,” he said reflexively. He didn’t give her time to say “You’re welcome,” although she probably wouldn’t have bothered.
When he’d slipped off the hood, Damon devoted a few moments to wondering who might want to make a joke at his expense, and why. Diana hadn’t had time to set it up, and it wasn’t her style—although she certainly knew enough amateur saboteurs capable of crashing Building Security. Madoc Tamlin knew many more, and he was one of the few people to whom he’d confided his original surname and his reasons for changing it, but Madoc wouldn’t stoop so low.
Inherit the Earth Page 4
