Karol Kachellek didn’t come up to the deck until the boat was coming about, carefully shedding speed so that she could drift to the quay under the gentle tutelage of her steersman. Kachellek saw Damon waiting but he didn’t wave a greeting—and he took care to keep his unwelcome visitor waiting even longer while he supervised the unloading of a series of cases which presumably held samples or specimens.
Two battered trucks with low-grade organic engines had already limped down to the quayside to pick up whatever the boat had brought in. Kachellek ostentatiously helped the brightly clad laborers load the cases onto the trucks. He was the kind of man who took pride in always doing his fair share of whatever labor needed to be done.
Eventually, though, Karol had no alternative but to condescend to come to his foster son and offer his hand to be shaken. Damon took the hand readily enough and tried as best he could to import some real enthusiasm into the gesture. Karol Kachellek had always been distant; Silas Arnett had been the real foster father of the group to whose care Damon had been delivered in accordance with his father’s will, just as poor Mary Hallam had been the real foster mother. If Silas was gone forever, leaving Damon no living parents except Karol and Eveline, then he had probably left it too late to restore any meaningful family relationships.
“This isn’t a good time for visiting, Damon,” Karol said. “We’re very busy.” At least he had the grace to look slightly guilty as he said it. He raised a hand to smooth back his unruly blond hair. “Let’s walk along the shore while the light lasts,” he went on awkwardly. “It’ll be some time before the mud samples are ready for examination, and there won’t be any more coming in today. Things might be easier in three or four weeks, if I can get more staff, but until then. . . .”
“You’re very busy,” Damon finished for him. “You’re not worried, then, by the news?”
“I haven’t time to waste in worrying about Silas. I’m concerned for him, of course, but there’s nothing I can do to help and I don’t feel that I’m under any obligation to fret or to mourn. I understand that you’re bound to think of us as a pair, but he and I were never close.”
“You worked together for more than eighty years,” Damon pointed out, falling into step as the blond man settled into his long and economical stride.
“We certainly did,” agreed the blond man, with a conspicuous lack of enthusiasm. “When you’re my age you’ll understand that close company can breed antipathy as easily as friendship, and that the passage of time smothers either with insulating layers of habit and indifference.”
“I’m afraid I haven’t formed those insulating layers yet,” Damon said. “You’re not worried about yourself either, then? If the Eliminators took Silas they might come after you next.”
“Same thing—no time to waste. If we let Eliminators and their kin drive us to trepidation, they’ve won. I can’t see why Interpol is so excited about a stupid message cooked up by some sick mind. It should be ignored, treated with the contempt it deserves. Even to acknowledge its existence is an encouragement to further idiocies of the same kind.” While he talked Karol’s stride echoed his sermon in becoming more positive and purposeful, but Damon had no difficulty keeping up. Damon remembered that Karol always acted as if he had an end firmly in mind and no time to spare in getting there—it was sometimes difficult to believe that he was a hundred and twenty-two years old. Perhaps, Damon thought, he had to maintain his sense of purpose at a high pitch lest he lose it completely—as Silas seemed to have lost his once Damon had flown the nest.
They quickly passed beyond the limits of the harbor and headed toward the outskirts of the port, with the red orb of the setting sun almost directly ahead of them.
Mauna Loa was visible in the distance, looming over the precipitous landscape, but the town itself was oddly and uncomfortably reminiscent of the parts of Los Angeles where Damon had spent the greater part of his adolescence. Molokai had been one of numerous bolt-holes whose inhabitants had successfully imposed quarantine during the Second Plague War, but when it had tried to repeat the trick in the Crisis it had failed. The new pestilence had arrived here as surely as it had arrived everywhere else. Artificial wombs had been imported on the scale which the islanders could afford, but the population of the whole chain had been dwindling ever since. The internal technologies which guaranteed longevity to those who could afford them would have to become even cheaper before that trend went into reverse, unless there was a sudden saving influx of immigrants. In the meantime, that part of the port which remained alive and active was surrounded by a ragged halo of concrete wastelands.
Because there was so little to see on the landward side save for the lingering legacy of human profligacy, Damon looked out to sea while he walked on Karol Kachellek’s right-hand side. The ocean gave the impression of having always been the way it was: huge and serene. Where its waves lapped the shore they created their own dominion, shaping the sandy strand and discarding their own litter of wrack and rot-misshapen wood. He could just make out the shore of Lanai on the horizon, on the far side of the Kaiohi Channel.
“Why did you come out here, Damon?” Karol asked. “Are you scared of the Eliminators?”
“Should I be?” Damon countered—but his fosterer had no intention of rising to that one. “You wouldn’t talk to me on the phone,” Damon said after a pause. “Eveline hasn’t replied in any way at all—as if it would somehow pollute her glorious isolation in the wilderness of space even to tap out a few words on a keyplate.”
“She’s working. She gets very engrossed, and this is a difficult time for her. She’ll get back to you in her own time.”
“Sure. Unfortunately, the Eliminators seem to be keeping to their own timetable. Would it inconvenience her that much to take my call while Silas may still be alive?”
“She’ll talk to you,” Karol assured him. “I would have too, when I could find the time—no matter how much I hate that fancy VE you’ve got hooked up to your phone.”
“If you’d taken the call,” Damon pointed out, “we could have met in your VE instead of mine. That’s not one of my designs. Even if you’d called me, we could have fixed that at a keystroke.”
VEs weren’t really an issue, and Karol didn’t press the point. “Look, Damon,” he said, “the long and the short of it is that I didn’t call you back because I simply don’t have anything to tell you. Your father’s dead. He wasn’t an enemy of mankind. I have no idea why Eliminators or anyone else should want to kidnap or murder Silas. Eveline would say exactly the same—and she probably hasn’t called you because she doesn’t see any real need. I think you should let the police take care of this. I don’t think it serves any useful purpose for you to start stirring things up.”
“Am I stirring things up?” Damon asked. “It’s just a social visit.”
“I’m not talking about your coming here. I’m talking about your unsubtle friend Madoc Tamlin and that stupid note you took to the Ahasuerus Foundation. What on earth possessed you to do something like that?”
Damon was startled by the news that Karol knew about his meeting with Rachel Trehaine, and even more startled by the blond man’s seeming assumption that he had produced the note himself—but he took due note of the fact that Karol knew more about what was going on than his professed indifference had suggested. Was it possible, he wondered, that Karol and Eveline were trying to protect him? Were they refusing to talk to him because they were trying to keep him out of this weird affair? Karol had never been entirely at ease with him, so it was difficult for Damon to judge whether the blond man was any more unsettled than usual, but there was something about his manner which smacked of uncomfortable dishonesty.
I must be careful of seeing what I want to see, Damon thought. I must be careful of wanting to find a juicy mystery, or evidence that my paternal idol had feet of tawdry clay.
“Has Ahasuerus contacted you about the note?” he asked. “You weren’t named in it—only Eveline.”
“Eveline a
nd I don’t have any secrets from one another.”
Damon wondered whether that meant that Ahasuerus had contacted Eveline and that Eveline had contacted Karol. “Don’t you feel the same way about Eveline as you do about Silas?” he asked. “Isn’t she just someone you worked with for so long that habit has bound up every last vestige of feeling? Why shouldn’t you have secrets from one another?”
“I’m still working with her,” Karol replied, again choosing to evade the real question.
“Not directly. She’s off-planet, in L-Five.”
“Modern communications make it easy enough to work in close association with people anywhere in the solar system. We’re involved with the same problems, constantly exchanging information. In spite of the hundreds of thousands of miles that lie between us, Eveline and I are close in a way that Silas and I never were. We’re in harmony, dedicated to a common cause.”
“A common cause which I deserted,” Damon said, taking up the apparent thread of the argument, “in spite of all the grand plans which Conrad Helier had for me. Is that why you and Eveline are trying to freeze me out of this? Is that why you resent my trying to stir things up?”
“I’m trying to do what your father would have wanted,” Karol told him awkwardly.
“He’s dead, Karol. In any case, you’re not him. You’re your own man now. You and I are perfectly free to build a relationship of our own. Silas could see that—Mary too.”
“Fostering you was a job your father asked me to do,” Karol retorted bluntly. “I’d have continued doing it, if there had been anything more I could do. I will continue, if there’s anything I can do in future—but you can’t expect me to forget that what you wanted was to get away, to abandon everything your father tried to pass on to you in order to run wild. You ran away from us, Damon, and changed your name; you declared yourself irrelevant to our concerns. Maybe it’s best if you stick to that course and let us stick to ours. I don’t know why you’re so interested in this Eliminator stuff, but I really do think it’s best if you let it alone.”
Damon didn’t want to become sidetracked into discussions of his irresponsible adolescence, or his not-entirely-respectable present. “Why should anyone accuse Conrad Helier of being an enemy of mankind?” he asked bluntly.
“He’s dead, Damon,” Karol said softly. “Nobody can hurt him, whatever lies they make up.”
“They can hurt you and Eveline. Proofs will follow, they say. Whatever they’re planning to say about Conrad Helier will reflect on you too—and would even if he were just another colleague you happened to work with once upon a time, to whose fate you were now indifferent.”
“Conrad never did anything that I would be ashamed of,” Karol said, his voice becoming even softer.
Damon let a second or two go by for dramatic effect and then said: “What if he were alive, Karol?”
The blond man had sufficient sense of drama to match Damon’s pregnant pause before saying: “If he were, he’d be able to work on the problem which faces us just now. That would be good. He’s present in spirit, of course, in every logical move I make, every hypothesis I frame, and every experiment I design. He made me what I am, just as he made the whole world what it is. You and I are both his heirs, and we’ll never be anything else, however hard we try to avoid the consequences of that fact.” He tried to fix Damon with a stern gaze, but stern gazes weren’t his forte.
The blond man paused before a rocky outcrop which was blocking their path, and knelt down as if to duck any further questions. Miming intense concentration, he scanned the tideline which ran along the wave-smoothed rock seven or eight centimeters above the ground. It was a performance far more suited to his natural inclinations than stern fatherly concern.
The wrack which clung to the rock was slowly drying out in the sun, but the incoming tide would return before it was desiccated. In the meantime, the limp tresses provided shelter for tiny crabs and whelks. Where the curtains of weed were drawn slightly apart barnacles had glued themselves to the stony faces and sea anemones nestled in crevices like blobs of purple jelly. The barer rock above the tide line was speckled with colored patches of lichen and tarry streaks which might—so far as Damon could tell—have been anything at all.
Karol took a penknife from his pocket and scraped some of the tarry stuff from the rock into the palm of his hand, inspecting it carefully. Eventually, he tipped it into Damon’s hand and said: “That’s far more important than all this nonsense about Eliminators.”
“What is it?” Damon asked.
“We don’t have a name for the species yet—nor the genus, nor even the family. It’s a colonial organism reminiscent in some ways of a slime mold. It has a motile form which wanders around by means of protoplasmic streaming, but the colonies can also set rock-hard, setting their molecular systems in sugar like sporulating bacteria or algae that have to withstand ultralow temperatures. In its dormant state it’s as indestructible as any life-form can be, able to survive all kinds of extremes. Its genetic transactions are inordinately complicated and so far very mysterious—but that’s not surprising, given that it’s not DNA-based. Its methods of protein synthesis are quite different from ours, based in a radically different biochemical code.”
Damon had given up genetics ten years before and had carefully set aside much of what his foster parents had tried so assiduously to teach him, but he understood the implications of what Kachellek was saying. “Is it new,” he asked, “or just something we managed to overlook during the last couple of centuries?”
“We can’t be absolutely certain,” Karol admitted scrupulously. “But we’re reasonably certain that it wasn’t here before. It’s a recent arrival in the littoral zone, and as of today it hasn’t been reported anywhere outside these islands.”
Damon wondered whether as of today meant that Karol had reason to expect a new report tomorrow or the day after, perhaps when the mud samples he’d loaded onto the lorry had been sieved and sorted. “So where did it come from?” he asked.
“We don’t know yet. The obvious contenders are up, down. . . .” The blond man seemed to be on the point of adding a third alternative, but he didn’t; instead he went on: “I’m looking downward; Eveline’s investigating the other direction.”
Damon knew that he was expected to rise to the challenge and follow the line of argument. The Kite had been dredging mud from the ocean bed, and Eveline Hywood was in the L-5 space colony. “You think it might have evolved way down in the deep trenches,” Damon said. “Maybe it’s been there all along, ever since DNA itself evolved—or maybe not. Perhaps it started off in one of those bizarre enclaves that surround the black smokers where the tectonic plates are pulling apart and has only just begun expanding its territory, the way DNA did a couple of billion years ago—or maybe it was our deep-sea probes that brought it out and gave it the vital shove.
“On the other hand, maybe it drifted into local space from elsewhere in the universe, the way the panspermists think that all life gets to planetary surfaces. We have probes out there too, don’t we—little spaceships patiently trawling for Arrhenius spores and stirring things up as they go. Maybe it’s been in the system for a long, long time, or maybe it arrived the day before yesterday . . . in which case, there might be more to come, and soon. I can see why you’re interested. How different from DNA is its replicatory system?”
“We’re still trying to confirm a formula,” Karol told him. “We’ve slipped into the habit of calling it para-DNA, but it’s a lousy name because it implies that it’s a near chemical relative, and it’s not. It coils like DNA—it’s definitely a double helix of some kind—but its subunits are quite different. It seems highly unlikely that the two coding chemistries have a common ancestor, even at the most fundamental level of carbon-chain evolution. It’s almost certainly a separate creation.
“That’s not so surprising; whenever and wherever life first evolved there would surely have been several competing systems, and there’s no reason to suppos
e that one of them would prove superior in every conceivable environment. The hot vents down in the ocean depths are a different world. Life down there is chemosynthetic and thermosynthetic rather than photosynthetic. Maybe there was always room down there for more than one chemistry of life. Perhaps there are other kinds still down there. That’s what I’m trying to find out. In the meantime, Eveline’s looking at dust samples brought in by probes from the outer solar system. The Oort Cloud is full of junk, and although it’s very cold there now it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that life evolved in the outer regions of the solar system when the sun was a lot younger and hotter than it is now, or that spores of some kind could have drifted in from other secondary solar systems. We don’t know—yet.”
“You don’t think this stuff poses any kind of threat, do you?” said Damon, intrigued in spite of himself. “It’s not likely to start displacing DNA organisms, is it?”
“Until we know more about it,” Karol said punctiliously, “it’s difficult to know how far it might spread. It’s not likely to pose any kind of threat to human beings or any of our associated species, given the kind of nanotech defenses we can now muster, but that’s not why it’s important. Its mere existence expands the horizons of the imagination by an order of magnitude. What are a few crazy slanderers, even if they’re capable of inspiring a few crazy gunmen, compared with this?”
“If it is natural,” said Damon, “it could be the basis of a whole new spectrum of organic nanomachines.”
“It’s not obvious that there’d be huge potential in that,” Karol countered. “So far, this stuff hasn’t done much in the way of duplicating the achievements of life as we know it, let alone doing things that life as we know it has never accomplished. It might be woefully conventional by comparison with DNA, capable of performing a limited repertoire of self-replicating tricks with no particular skill; if so, it would probably be technologically useless, however interesting it might be in terms of pure science. We’re not looking to make another fortune, Damon—when I say this is important, I don’t mean commercially.”
Inherit the Earth Page 10
