Brian Stableford - Inherit the Earth

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Inherit the Earth

Brian Stableford

ATOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK NEW YORK

NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen

property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher, and neither the author nor

the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either

products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

INHERIT THE EARTH

book, or portions thereof, in any form.

A much shorter and substantially different version of this novel entitled "Inherit the Earth"

appeared in the July 1995 issue of Analog.

Edited by David G. Hartwell A Tor Book Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10010

Tor Books on the World Wide Web. http://www.tor.com Tor is a registered trademark of Tom

Doherty Associates, LLC ISBN: 0-812-58429-5

First edition: September 1998 First mass market edition: July 1999

Printed in the United States of America 0987654321

For Jane, and all those who toil in the forge of the will

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Stanley Schmidt, the editor of Analog, for buying the shorter version of this

story, thus establishing its ideative seed and its commercial credentials. I am grateful to David

Hart-well for suggesting that I rewrite the final section so drastically as to obliterate any

lingering similarity to the ending of the earlier version, thus proving my versatility. I should

also like to pay my respects to Eric Thacker and Anthony Earnshaw, who provided their illustrated

novel Wintersol with a dedication that would otherwise have been ideal for this book: "To the

meek, who will only inherit the Earth by forging the Will."

PART ONE

Paranoia Fantasies

One

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Silas Arnett stood on the bedroom balcony, a wineglass in his hand, bathing in the ruddy light

of the evening sun. He watched the Pacific breakers tumbling lazily over the shingle strand. The

ocean was in slow retreat from the ragged line of wrack that marked the height of the tide. The

dark strip of dead weed was punctuated by shards of white plastic, red bottle tops and other

packaging materials not yet redeemed by the hungry beach cleaners. They would be long gone by

morning-one more small achievement in the great and noble cause of depollution.

Glimpsing movement from the corner of his eye, Silas looked up into the deepening blue of the

sky.

High above the house a lone wing glider was playing games with the wayward thermals disturbed by

the freshening sea breeze. His huge wings were painted in the image of a bird's, each pinion

feather carefully outlined, but the colors were acrylic-bright, brazenly etched in reds and

yellows. Now that the gaudier birds of old were being brought back from the temporary mists of

extinction mere humans could no longer hope to outdo them in splendor, but no actual bird had ever

been as huge as this pretender.

Silas frowned slightly as he watched the glider swoop and soar. The conditions were too

capricious to allow safe stunting, but the soaring man was careless of the danger. Again and again

he dived toward the chalky cliff face that loomed above the ledge on which the house was set, only

wheeling away at the last possible moment. Silas caught his breath as the glider attempted a loop

which no bird had ever been equipped by instinct to perform, then felt a momentary thrill of

irritation at the ease with which his admiration had been commanded.

Nowadays, a careless Icarus would almost certainly survive a fluttering fall from such a height,

provided that he had the best internal technology that money could buy. Even the pain would

quickly be soothed; its brutal flaring would merely serve as a trigger to unleash the resources of

his covert superhumanity. Flirtation with catastrophe was mere sport for the children of the

revolution.

Silas's sentimental education had taken place in an earlier era, when the spectrum of everyday

risks had been very different. His days with Conrad Helier had made him rich, so he now had all

the benefits that the best nanotech repairmen could deliver, but his reflexes could not be

retrained to trust them absolutely. The bird man was evidently young as well as rich:

authentically young. Whatever PicoCon's multitudinous ads might claim, the difference between the

truly young and the allegedly rejuvenated Architects of Destiny was real and profound.

"Why does the sun look bigger when it's close to the horizon?"

Silas had not heard his guest come up behind him; she was barefoot, and her feet made no sound

on the thick carpet. He turned to look at her.

She was wearing nothing but a huge white towel, wrapped twice around her slender frame. The

thickness of the towel accentuated her slimness-another product of authentic youth. Nanotech had

conquered obesity, but it couldn't restore the full muscle tone of the subcutaneous tissues;

middle age still spread a man's midriff, if only slightly, and no power on earth could give a man

as old as Silas the waist he had possessed a hundred years before.

Catherine Praill was as young as she looked; she had not yet reached her full maturity, although

nothing remained for the processes of nature to do, save to etch the features of her body a little

more clearly. The softness of her flesh, its subtle lack of focus, seemed to Arnett to be very

beautiful, because it was not an effect of artifice. He was old-fashioned, in every sense of the

word, and unrepentant of his tastes. He loved youth, and he loved the last vestiges which still

remained to humankind of the natural processes of growth and completion. He had devoted the

greater part of his life to the overthrow of nature's tyranny, but he still felt entitled to his

affection for its art.

"I don't know," he said, a little belatedly. "It's an optical illusion. I can't explain it."

"You don't know!" There was nothing mocking in her laughter, nothing contrived in her surprise.

He was more than a hundred years older than she was; he was supposed to know everything that was

known, to understand everything that could be understood. In her innocence, she expected nothing

less of him than infinite wisdom and perfect competence. Men of his age were almost rare enough

nowadays to be the stuff of legend.

He bowed his head as if in shame, then took a penitent sip from the wineglass as she looked up

into his eyes. She was a full twenty centimeters shorter than he. Either height was becoming

unfashionable again or she was exercising a kind of caution rare in the young, born of the

awareness that it was far easier to add height than to shed it if and when one decided that it was

time for a change.

"I gave up trying to hold all the world's wisdom in my head a long time ago," he told her. "When

all the answers are at arm's length, you don't need to keep them any closer." It was a lie, and

she knew it. She had grown up with the omniscient Net, and she knew that its everpresence made

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ignorance more dangerous, not less-but she didn't contradict him. She only smiled.

Silas couldn't decipher her smile. There was more than amusement in it, but he couldn't read the

remainder. He was glad of that small margin of mystery; in almost every other respect, he could

read her far better than she read him. To her, he must be a paradox wrapped in an enigma-and that

was the reason she was here.

Women of Cathy's age, still on the threshold of the society of the finished, were only a little

less numerous than men of his antiquity, but that did not make the two of them equal in their

exoticism. Silas knew well enough what to expect of Cathy-he had always had women of her kind

around him, even in the worst of the plague years-but men of his age were new in the world, and

they would continue to establish new precedents until the last of his generation finally passed

away. No one knew how long that might take; PicoCon's new rejuve technologies were almost entirely

cosmetic, but the next generation would surely reach more deeply into a man's essential being.

"Perhaps I did know the answer, once," he told her, not knowing or caring whether it might be

true. "Fortunately, a man's memory gets better and better with age, becoming utterly ruthless in

discarding the trivia while taking care to preserve only that which is truly precious." Pompous

old fool! he thought, even as the final phrase slid from his tongue-but he knew that Cathy

probably wouldn't mind, and wouldn't complain even if she did. To her, this encounter must seem

untrivial-perhaps even truly precious, but certainly an experience to be savored and remembered.

He was the oldest man she had ever known; it was entirely possible that she would never have

intimate knowledge of anyone born before him. It was different for Silas, even though such moments

as this still felt fresh and hopeful and intriguing. He had done it all a thousand times before,

and no matter how light and lively and curious the stream of his consciousness remained while the

affair was in progress, it would only be precious while it lasted.

Silas wondered whether Cathy would be disappointed if she knew how he felt. Perhaps she wanted

to find him utterly sober, weighed down by ennui-and thus, perhaps, even more worthy of her awe

and respect than he truly was.

He placed his hand on her shoulder and caressed the contour of her collarbone. Her skin, freshly

washed, felt inexpressibly luxurious, and the sensation which stirred him was as sharp- perhaps

even as innocent-as it would have been had he never felt its like before.

A practiced mind was, indeed, exceedingly adept at forgetting; it had wisdom enough not merely

to forget the trivial and the insignificant, but also that which was infinitely precious in

rediscovery.

"It must be strange," she said, insinuating her slender and naked arm around his waist, "to look

out on the sea and the sky with eyes that know them so well. There's so much in the world that's

unfamiliar to me I can't begin to imagine what it would be like to recognize everything, to be

completely at home." She was teasing him, requiring that he feed her awe and consolidate her

achievement in allowing herself to be seduced, "That's not what it's like," he said dutifully. "If

the world stayed the same, it might be more homely; but one of the follies of authentic youth is

the inability to grasp how quickly, and how much, everything changes-even the sea and the sky. The

line left behind by the tide changes with the flotsam; even the clouds sailing serenely across the

sky change with the climate and the composition of the air. The world I knew when I was young is

long gone, and depollution will never bring it back. I've lived through half a hundred worlds,

each one as alarming and as alien us the last. I don't doubt that a dozen more lie in ambush,

waiting to astonish me if I stay the course for a few further decades."

He felt a slight tremor pass through her and wondered whether it was occasioned by a sudden gust

of cool wind or by (he thrust of her eager imagination. She had known no other world than the one

into which recently acquired maturity had delivered her, but she must have had images in her mind

of the various phases of the Crisis. It was all caught in the Net, if only as an infinite jumble

of glimpses. Today's world was still haunted by the one which had gone madly to its destruction-

the one which Silas Arnett had helped to save.

She smiled at him again, as innocently as a newly hatched sphinx.

It's not my wisdom which makes me attractive to her, Silas thought. She sees me as something

primitive, perhaps feral. I was born of woman, and there was a full measure of effort and pain in

my delivery. I grew to the age she is now without the least ability to control my own pain, under

the ever present threat of injury, disease, and death. There's something of the animal about me

still.

He knew that he was melodramatizing for the sake of a little extra excitement, but it was true

nevertheless. When Silas had been in his teens there had been more than ten billion people in the

world, all naturally born, all naked to the slings and arrows of outrage and misfortune. Avid

forces of destruction had claimed all but a handful, and his own survival had to be reckoned a

virtual miracle. When Catherine Praill came to celebrate her hundred-and-twentieth birthday, by

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contrast, nine out of ten of her contemporaries would still be alive. Her survival to that age was

virtually assured, provided that she did not elect to waste herself in submission to extravagant

and extraordinary risks.

Silas looked up briefly, but the bird man was out of sight now, eclipsed by the green rim of the

cliff. He imagined Catherine costumed with brightly colored wings, soaring gloriously across the

face of the sinking sun-but he preferred her as she was now, soft and fresh and unclothed.

"Let's go inside," he said, meaning Let's make love while the sunlight lasts, while we can revel

in the fleeting changes of the colored radiance.

"Might as well," she said, meaning Yes, let's do exactly that.

Sexual intercourse never left Arnett deflated or disappointed. It never had, so far as he could

remember. It might have done, sometimes, when he was authentically young, but in the fullness of

his maturity lovemaking always left him with a glow of profound satisfaction and easeful

accomplishment. He knew that this seeming triumph probably had as much to do with the gradual

adjustment of his expectations as with the honing of his skills but he did not feel in the least

diminished by that hint of cynicism. He believed with all sincerity that he knew the true value of

everything he had-and his expert memory had scrupulously erased most of the prices he had been

forced to pay by way of its acquisition.

Cathy had drifted into a light sleep almost as soon as they had finished, and when her sleep had

deepened Arnett was able to disentangle his limbs from hers without disturbing her. He helped the

half-reflexive movements which eased her into a more comfortable position, and then he slowly

withdrew himself from the bed. Naked, he went back to the open window and on to the balcony.

The sun had set and the wing glider was long gone. Arnett relaxed into the luxury of being

unobserved. He put a high value on that privilege, as anyone would who had grown to maturity in a

world teeming with people, where the friction of social intercourse had only just begun to be

eased by access to the infinite landscapes of virtual reality.

He had chosen the house in which he lived precisely because it was hidden from all its neighbors

by the contours of the cliff. The house was not large, and far from fashionable-it was all above

ground, its walls as white as the chalkiest aspects of the cliff face, its angles stubbornly

square, its windows unrepentant panes of plain glass-but that was exactly why he liked it. It did

not blend in with its surroundings; its roots and all its other quasi living systems were hidden

away in closets and conduits. It was, after its own fashion, every bit as old-fashioned as he was,

although it was no more than twenty years old-almost as young as Catherine Praill.

Silas wondered whether Cathy would quickly drift away now that she had "collected" him, or

whether she would attempt to maintain their friendship, seeking further amusement and further

enlightenment in the patient acquaintance of one of the oldest men in the world. He didn't want

her to drift away. He wanted her to stay, or at least to return again and again and again-not

because her slowly evaporating youth was such a rare commodity, but because he had long ago

learned to appreciate constancy and to expand his pleasures to fit the time and space that were

available for their support.

A movement caught his eye: something which emerged very briefly from the gathering shadows at

the foot of the cliff face and then faded back into obscurity.

He was not immediately anxious, even though he guessed that it must be a human being who had

descended unannounced into his haven of privacy-but he stepped back from the balcony and went to

dress himself.

The bedroom was dark by now, but he had no difficulty finding what he needed. He pulled on the

various elements of his suitskin. Their seams reacted to his body heat, joining up with smooth

efficiency as if they were eager to begin their cleansing work. He stepped into a pair of

slippers, no stronger or more massive than was necessary to protect the suitskin's soles in an

indoor environment.

Silas didn't switch on the landing light until the door was safely closed behind him. He didn't

want to wake the girl from what he hoped were pleasant dreams. He went swiftly down to the hallway

and stepped into the tiny room beneath the staircase. He activated the house's night eyes,

bringing a dozen different images to the bank of screens mounted on the wall. He picked up the VE

hood, which would give him a far clearer view once he had selected the right pair of artificial

eyes-but there was no way to make the choice.

The foot of the cliff, limned in red, was stubbornly bare. The shadows in which he had glimpsed

movement were empty now.

One of the screens blanked out, and then another.

That did alarm him; in the circumstances, he couldn't believe that it was a mere malfunction. He

lifted the VE hood, but he still had no idea which connection he should make-and if the screens

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were going down, the hood would be just as useless as they were. Someone was blinding the house's

eyes, and must have come equipped to do it-but why? He had no enemies, so far as he knew, and the

rewards of burglary had long ago sunk to the level which made the risk unacceptable to anyone but

a fool. The quaint outward appearance of the house might, he supposed, have indicated to juvenile

vandals that it was poorly protected, but he couldn't imagine anyone scaling the cliff face in the

dark merely to do a little gratuitous damage.

He watched, helplessly, as the screens went out. When six more of the night eyes had been

blinded without his catching the briefest glimpse of a hand or a face, he knew that it was not the

work of children or foolish thieves. He became afraid-and realized as he did so how strange and

unfamiliar fear had become.

A rapid dance of his fingertips sealed all the locks that were not routinely engaged, activated

all the house's security systems and notified the police that a crime might be in progress. That,

at least, was what his instructions should have accomplished- but the confirmatory call which

should have come from the police didn't arrive; the telephone screen remained ominously inactive.

He knew that there was no point in putting the VE hood over his head and he lowered it onto its

cradle.

Several seconds dragged by while he wondered whether it was worth running to his study, where

the house's main workstation was, but when he emerged from the cupboard he didn't head in that

direction. Instead, he stood where he was, watching the door at the end of the hallway. It was

obvious that his links with the outside world had been severed, and that the door in question was

the only security left to him. He wondered whether the threat might be to her rather than to

himself, feeling a pang of bitter resentment because a near perfect day was about to be ruined at

the eleventh hour-but that was just a desperate attempt to pretend that the danger wasn't his

danger.

The simple truth was that his communication systems were very nearly the best that money could

buy, and that someone had nevertheless overridden them with ridiculous ease. Whatever reason they

had, it couldn't be trivial.

When the door burst in, Silas couldn't quite believe his eyes. In spite of the failure of his

artificial eyes and voice he had not believed that his locks could be so easily broken-but when he

saw the human figures come through, wearing black clothes and black masks, the outer layers of his

patiently accreted, ultracivilized psyche seemed to peel away. He knew that he had to fight, and

he thanked providence that he still knew how. In his innermost self, he was still primitive, even

feral. He had no weapon, and he could see the foremost of the invaders had some kind of snub-nosed

pistol in his hand, but he knew that he had to go forward and not back.

His rush seemed to take the intruder by surprise; the man's eyes were still slightly dazzled by

the bright light. Silas lashed out with his foot at the hand which held the gun, and felt his

slippered toes make painful connection-but the pain was immediately controlled by his internal

technology.

The gun flew away. It was the unexpectedness of the assault rather than its force that had

jolted it free, but the effect was the same. Silas was already bringing his flattened hand around

in a fast arc, aiming for the man's black-clad throat-but the intruder had evidently been trained

in that kind of fighting, and was more recently practiced in its skills. The blow was brutally

blocked and Silas felt unexpectedly fiery pain shoot along his forearm; it was controlled, but not

before he had flinched reflexively and left himself open to attack.

His hesitation probably made no difference; there would have been no time for a riposte and no

effective blow he could have dealt. There were three intruders coming at him now, and they hurled

themselves upon him with inelegant but deadly effect. He flailed his arms desperately, but there

was no way he could keep them all at bay.

With his arms still threshing uselessly, Silas was thrown back and knocked down. His head

crashed against the wall and the pain was renewed yet again. The pain was almost instantly

contained and constrained, but it could only be dulled. Merely deadening its fury could not free

his mind to react in artful or effective fashion. There was, in any case, no action he could take

that might have saved him. He was outnumbered, and not by fools or frightened children.

One of the intruders bent to pick up the fallen gun, and he began firing even as he plucked it

from the floor. Silas felt a trio of needles spear into the muscles of his breast, not far beneath

the shoulder. There was no pain at all now, but he knew that whatever poison the darts bore must

have been designed to resist the best efforts of his internal technology. These people had come

equipped to fight, and their equipment was the best. He knew that their motives must be similarly

sophisticated and correspondingly sinister.

It was not until the missiles had struck him and burrowed into his efficiently armored but still-

frail flesh, that Silas Arnett called to mind the deadliest and most fearful word in his

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vocabulary: Eliminators! Even as the word sprang to mind, though- while he still lashed out

impotently against the three men who no longer had to struggle to subdue him-he could not accept

its Implications.

I have not been named! he cried silently. They have no reason! But whoever had come to his

house, so cleverly evading its defenses, clearly had motive enough, whether they had reason enough

or not.

While his internal defenses struggled unsuccessfully to cope with the drug which robbed him of

consciousness, Silas could not evade the dreadful fear that death-savage, capricious, reasonless

death-had found him before he was ready to be found.

TWO

Damon Hart had never found it easy to get three boxes of groceries from the trunk of his car to

his thirteenth-floor apartment. It was a logistical problem with no simple solution, given that

his parking slot and his apartment door were both so far away from the elevator. Some day, he

supposed, he would have to invest in a collapsible electric cart which would follow him around

like a faithful dog. For the moment, though, such a purchase still seemed like another step in the

long march to conformism-perhaps the one which would finally seal his fate and put an end to the

last vestiges of his reputation as a rebel. How could a man who owned a robot shopping trolley

possibly claim to be anything other than a solid citizen of the New Utopia?

In the absence of such aid Damon had no alternative but to jam the elevator door open while he

transferred the boxes one by one from the trunk of the car. By the time he got the third one in,

the elevator was reciting its standard lecture on building policy and civic duty. While the

elevator climbed up to his floor he was obliged to listen to an exhaustive account of his domestic

misdemeanors, even though he hadn't yet clocked up the requisite number of demerits to be summoned

before the leasing council for a token reprimand. Unfortunately, he wasn't able to ride all the

way on his own; two middle-aged women with plastic faces and brightly colored suitskins got in at

the third and traveled up to the tenth, doubtless visiting another of their ubiquitous kind. They

pretended to ignore the elevator, but Damon knew that they were drinking in every word. He had

never been introduced to either one of them and had no idea what their names might be, but they

probably knew everything there was to know about him except his real name. He was the building's

only ex-streetfighter; in spite of their youth-and partly because of it-he and Diana had more real

misdemeanors credited to their law accounts than all the remaining inhabitants of their floor.

He managed to get all three boxes out of the elevator without actually jamming the door, but he

had to leave two behind while he carried the third to the door of his apartment. He set it down,

ringing his own doorbell as he turned away to fetch the second. When he came back with the second

box, however, he found that his ring had gone unanswered. The first box was still outside. Given

the number of spy eyes set discreetly into the corridor walls there was no way anyone would take

the risk of stealing any of its contents, but its continued presence was an annoyance

nevertheless. When Damon had placed the second box beside the first he fished out his key and

opened the door himself, poking his head inside with the intention of calling for assistance.

He closed his mouth abruptly when the blade of a carving knife slammed into the doorjamb, not

ten centimeters away from his ducking head. The blade stuck there, quivering.

"You bastard!" Diana said, rushing forward to meet him from the direction of his edit suite.

It didn't take much imagination to figure out what had offended her so deeply. The reason she

hadn't answered the doorbell was that she'd been too deeply engrossed in VE-in the VE that he'd

been in the process of redesigning when concentration overload had started his head aching. Damon

realized belatedly that he ought to have tidied the work away properly, concealing it behind some

gnomic password.

"It's not a final cut," he told her, raising his arms with the palms flat in a placatory

gesture. "It's just a first draft. It won't be you in the finished product-it won't be anything

like you."

"That's bullshit," Diana retorted, her voice still taut with pent-up anger. "First draft, final

cut-I don't give a damn about that. It's the principle of the thing. It's sick, Damon."

Damon knew that it might add further fuel to her wrath, but he deliberately turned his back on

her and went back into the corridor. He hesitated over the possibility of picking up one of the

boxes of groceries he'd already brought to the threshold, but he figured that he needed time to

think. He walked all the way back to the elevator, taking his time.

This is it, he thought, as he picked up the third box. This is really it. If she hasn't had

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enough, I have.

He couldn't help but feel that in an ideal world-or even the so-called New Utopia which was

currently filling the breach- there ought to be a more civilized way of breaking up, but his

relationship with Diana Caisson had always been a combative affair. It had been his combativeness

that first attracted her attention, in the days when he had wielded the knives-but he had only

done so in the cause of sport, never at the behest of mere rage.

A great deal had changed since then. He had switched sides; instead of supplying the raw

material to be cut, spliced, and subtly augmented into a salable VE product, he was now an

engineer and an artist. She had changed too, but the shift in her expectations hadn't matched the

shift in his. With every month that passed she seemed to want more and more from him, whereas he

had found himself wanting less and less from her. She had taken that as an insult, as perhaps it

was.

Diana thought that the time he spent building and massaging VEs was a retreat from the world,

and from her, which ought to be discouraged for the sake of his sanity. She couldn't see how

anyone could absorb themselves in the painstaking creation of telephone answering tapes and

pornypops-and because every stress and strain of their relationship had always become manifest in

her explosive anger, she had developed a profound hatred even for the more innocuous products of

his labor.

In the beginning, Diana's habit of lashing out had added a certain excitement to their passion,

but Damon had now reached a stage when the storm and the stress were nothing but a burden-a burden

he could do without. He had given up street-fighting; he was an artist now, through and through.

He had hoped that Diana would share and assist his adaptation to a new lifestyle and a new

philosophy-and he had to give her some credit for trying-but the fact remained that their move

into polite society had never really come close to working out. Diana even got steamed up when the

elevator took leave to remind her of the small print in the building rules.

It's over, Damon told himself again as he picked up the third box of groceries. He was testing

himself, to see whether anxiety or relief would rise to the surface of his consciousness.

Diana was all ready to fight when he came back through the door, but Damon wasn't about to

oblige her. He put the box he'd carried from the elevator on the floor and stepped back to collect

another. She knew that he was buying time, but she let him go back for the third without protest.

The expression in her blue-gray eyes said that she wasn't about to calm down, but she hadn't gone

back for another knife, so he had reason to hope that the worst was already over.

Once the last box was inside the apartment and the door was safely closed behind him, Damon felt

that he was ready to face Diana. Fortunately, her tremulous rage was now on the point of

dissolving into tears. She had dug her fingernails into her palms so deeply that they had drawn

blood, but they were unclenching now. With Diana, violence always shifted abruptly into a

masochistic phase; real pain was sometimes the only thing that could blot out the kinds of

distress with which her internal technology was not equipped to deal.

"You don't want me at all," she complained. "You don't want any living partner. You only want my

virtual shadow. You want a programmed slave, so you can be absolute master of your paltry

sensations. That's all you've ever wanted."

"It's a commission," Damon told her as soothingly as he could. "It's not a composition for art's

sake, or for my own gratification.

It's not even technically challenging. It's just a piece of work. I'm using your body template

because it's the only one I have that's been programmed into my depository to a suitable level of

complexity. Once I've got the basic script in place I'll modify it out of all recognition-every

feature, every contour, every dimension. I'm only doing it this way because it's the easiest way

to do it. All I'm doing is constructing a pattern of appearances; it's not real."

"You don't have any sensitivity at all, do you?" she came back. "To you, the templates you made

of me are just something to be used in petty pornography. They're just something convenient-

something that's not even technically challenging. It wouldn't make any difference what kind of

tape you were making, would it? You've got my image worked out to a higher degree of digital

definition than any other, so you put it to whatever use you can: if it wasn't a sex tape it'd be

some slimy horror show . . . anything they'd pay you money to do. It really doesn't matter to you

whether you're making training tapes for surgeons or masturbation aids for freaks, does it?"

As she spoke she struck out with her fists at various parts of his imaging system: the bland

consoles, the blank screens, the lumpen edit suite and-most frequently-the dark helmets whose

eyepieces could look out upon an infinite range of imaginary worlds. Her fists didn't do any

damage; everything had been built to last.

"I can't turn down commissions," Damon told her as patiently as he could. "I need connections in

the marketplace and I need to be given problems to solve. Yes, I want to do it all: phone links

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and training tapes, abstracts and dramas, games and repros, pornypops and ads. I want to be master

of it all, because if I don't have all the skills, anything I devise for myself will be tied down

by the limits of my own idiosyncrasy."

"And templating me was just another exercise? Building me into your machinery was just a way to

practice. I'm just raw material."

"It's not you, Di," he said, wishing that he could make her understand that he really meant it.

"It's not your shadow, certainly not your soul. It's just an appearance. When I use it in my work

I'm not using you."

"Oh no?" she said, giving the helmet she'd been using one last smack with the white knuckles of

her right hand. "When you put your suit of armor on and stick your head into one of those black

holes, you leave this world way behind. When you're there-and you sure as hell aren't here very

often-the only contact you have with me is with my appearance, and what you do to that appearance

is what you do to me. When you put my image through the kind of motions you're incorporating into

that sleazy fantasy it's me you're doing it to, and no one else."

"When it's finished," Damon said doggedly, "it won't look or feel anything like you. Would you

rather I paid a copyright fee to reproduce some shareware whore? Would you rather I sealed myself

away for hours on end with a set of supersnoopers and a hired model? By your reckoning, that would

be another woman, wouldn't it? Or am I supposed to restrict myself to the design and decoration of

cells for VE monasteries?"

"I'd rather you spent more time with the real me," she told him. "I'd rather you lived in the

actual world instead of devoting yourself to substitutes. I never realized that giving up fighting

meant giving up life."

"You had no right to put the hood on," Damon told her coldly. "I can't work properly if I feel

that you're looking over my shoulder all the time. That's worse than knowing that I might have to

duck whenever I come through the door because you might be waiting for me with a deadly weapon."

"It's only a kitchen knife. At the worst it would have put your eye out."

"I can't afford to take a fortnight off work while I grow a new eye-and I don't find experiences

like that amusing or instructive."

"You were always too much of a coward to be a first-rate fighter," she told him, trying hard to

wither him with her scorn. "You switched to the technical side of the business because you

couldn't take the cuts anymore."

Damon had never been one of the reckless fighters who threw themselves into the part with all

the flamboyance and devil-may-care they could muster, thinking that the tapes would make them look

like real heroes. He had always fought to win with the minimum of effort and the minimum of

personal injury-and in his opinion, it had always worked to the benefit of the tapes rather than

to their detriment. Even the idiots who liked to consume the tapes raw, because it made the fights

seem "more real," had appreciated his efficiency more than the blatant showmanship of his rivals.

Because most of his opponents hadn't cared much about skill or sensible self-preservation Damon

had won thirty-nine out of his forty-three fights and had remained unbeaten for the last eighteen

months of his career. He didn't consider that to be evidence of stupidity or stubbornness-and he'd

switched to full-time tape doctoring because it was more challenging and more interesting than

carving people up, not because he'd gone soft.

Unfortunately, the new business wasn't more challenging or more interesting for Diana. Watching

a VE designer working inside a hood wasn't an engaging spectator sport.

"If you're hankering after the sound and fury of the streets," Damon said tiredly, "you know

where they are."

It wasn't the first time he'd said it, but it startled her. Her fists unclenched briefly as she

absorbed the import of it. She knew him well enough to read his tone of voice. She knew that he

meant it, this time.

"Is that what you want?" she said, to make sure. Her palms were bleeding; he could see both

ragged lines of cuts now that she was relaxing.

Damon toyed with the possibility of parrying the question. It's what you want, he could have

said-but it would have been less than honest and less than brave.

"I can't take it anymore," he told her frankly. "It's run its course."

"You think you don't need me anymore, don't you?" she said, trying to pretend that she had

reason to believe that he was wrong in that estimation. When she saw that he wasn't going to

protest, her shoulders slumped-but only slightly. She had courage too, and pride. "Perhaps you're

right," she sneered. "All you ever wanted of me is in that template. As long as you have my

appearance programmed into your private world of ghosts and shadows you can do anything you like

with me, without ever having to worry whether I'll step out of line. You'd rather live with a

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virtual image than a real flesh-and-blood person, wouldn't you? You wouldn't even take that helmet

off to eat and drink if you didn't have to. If you had any idea how much you've changed since...."

The charges were probably truer than she thought, but Damon didn't see any need to be ashamed of

the changes he'd made. The whole point about the world inside a VE hood, backed up by the full

panoply of smartsuit-induced tactile sensation, was that it was better than the real world:

brighter, cleaner, and more controllable. Earth wasn't hell anymore, thanks to the New

Reproductive System and the wonders of internal technology, but it wasn't heaven either, in spite

of the claims and delusions of the New Utopians. Heaven was something a man could only hope to

find on the other side of experience, in the virtuous world of virtual imagery.

The brutal truth of the matter, Damon thought, was that everything of Diana Caisson that he

actually needed really was programmed into her template. The absence from his life of her

changeable, complaining, untrustworthy, knife-throwing, flesh-and-blood self wouldn't leave a

yawning gap. Once, it might have done-but not anymore. She had begun to irritate him as much as he

irritated her, and he hadn't her gift of translating irritation into erotic stimulation.

"You're right," he told her, trying to make it sound as if he were admitting defeat. "I've

changed. So have you. That's okay. We're authentically young; we're supposed to change. We're

supposed to become different people, to try out all the personalities of which we're capable. The

time for constancy is a long way ahead of us yet."

He wondered, as he said it, whether it was true. Were his newly perfected habits merely a phase

in an evolutionary process rather than a permanent capitulation to the demands of social

conformity? Was he just taking a rest from the kind of hyped-up sensation-seeking existence he'd

led while he was running with Madoc Tamlin's gang, rather than turning into one of the meek whose

alleged destiny was to inherit the earth? Time would doubtless tell.

"I want the templates back," Diana said sharply. "All of them. I'm going, and I'm taking my

virtual shadow with me."

"You can't do that," Damon retorted, knowing that he had to put on the appearance of a fight

before he eventually gave in, lest it be too obvious that all he had to do was remold her

simulacrum by working back from the modified echoes which he had built into half a dozen different

commercial tapes of various kinds. While he only required her image, he could always get her back.

"I'm doing it," she told him firmly. "You're going to have to start that slimy sideshow from

scratch, whether you pay for a ready-made template or rent some whore who'll let you build a new

one on your own."

"If I'd known that it had come to this," he said with calculated provocativeness, "I wouldn't

have had to struggle upstairs with three boxes of groceries."

From there, it was only a few more steps to a renewal of the armed struggle, but Damon managed

to keep the carving knife out of it. His aim-as always-was to win with the minimum of fuss. He

made her work hard to dispel her bad feeling in pain and physical stress, but she got there in the

end, without having to bruise her knuckles too badly, or cut her palms to pieces, or even make her

throat sore by screaming too much abuse.

Afterwards, while Diana was still slightly stoned by virtue of the anesthetic effect of her

internal technology, Damon helped her to pack up her things.

There wasn't that much to collect up; Diana had never been much of a magpie. She was a doer, not

a maker, and it was easy enough for Damon to see, in retrospect, that it was the doer in him that

she had valued, not the maker. Unfortunately, he had had enough of doing, at least for the time

being; his only hunger now was for making.

When the time came to divide the personal items that might have been reckoned joint property

Damon gave way on every point of dispute, until the time arrived when Diana realized that he was

purging his life of everything that was associated with her-at which point she began insisting

that he keep certain things to remember her by. After that, he began insisting that she kept her

fair share of things, precisely because he didn't want to be surrounded by things that were, in

principle, half hers. In all probability, it was not until then that the reality of the situation

really came home to her-but it was too late for her to scrub out the fight and start again in the

hope of rebuilding the broken bridge.

The possessions Diana was prevailed upon to take with her filled up the trunk she'd brought when

she moved in plus the three boxes Damon had used to transport the groceries and a couple of black-

plastic waste sacks. Even though there were two of them to do the work, there was far too much of

it not to pose a logistical problem when the time came to take them down to her car. They had to

jam the elevator door open in order to load the stuff inside, and they had to compound that

misdemeanor with another when they had to tell an old man who stopped the elevator on the eleventh

that there wasn't room to fit him in and that he'd have to wait. The elevator gave them hell about

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that one, but neither of them was in a fit state to care.

When they had packed the stuff away in the trunk and rear-seat space of her car, Damon tried to

bid her a polite good-bye, but Diana wasn't having any of it. She just scowled at him and: told

him it was his loss.

As he watched her drive off, muted pangs of regret and remorse disturbed Damon's sense of

relief, but not profoundly. When he walked back to the elevator his step was reasonably light.

When it came down again the man from the eleventh floor stepped out, scowling at him almost as

nastily as Diana, but Damon met the scowl with a serene smile. Although his past sins had not been

forgotten, the elevator never said a word as it bore him upward; it was not permitted to harbor

grudges. By the time it released him he was perfectly calm, looking forward to an interval of

solitude, a pause for reflection.

Unfortunately, he saw as soon as the elevator doors opened that he wasn't about to get the

chance. There were two men waiting patiently outside his apartment door, and even though they

weren't wearing uniforms he had experience enough of their kind to know immediately that they were

cops.

Three

Damon knew that it couldn't be a trivial matter. Cops didn't make house calls to conduct routine

interviews. In all probability they'd soon be conducting all their interrogations in suitably

tricked-out VEs; if the LAPD contract ever came up for tender he'd go for it like a shot. For the

time being, though, the hardened pros who had been in the job for fifty years and more were

sticking hard to the theory that meeting a man eye-to-eye made it just a little more difficult for

their suspects to tell convincing lies.

One of the waiting men was tall and black, the other short and Japanese. Cops always seemed to

work in ill-matched pairs, observing some mysterious sense of propriety carried over from the most

ancient movies to the most recent VE dramas, but these two didn't seem to be in dogged pursuit of

the cliché. Damon knew even before the short man held out a smartcard for his inspection that they

were big-league players, not humble LAPD.

The hologram portrait of Inspector Hiru Yamanaka was blurred but recognizable. Although Damon

had never seen an Interpol ID before he was prepared to assume that it was authentic; he handed it

back without even switching it through his beltpack.

"This is Sergeant Rolfe," said Yamanaka, obviously assuming that once his own identity had been

established his word was authority enough to establish the ID of his companion.

"Whatever it is," Damon said, as he unlocked the door, "I'm not involved. I don't run with the

gangs anymore and I don't have any idea what they're up to. These days, I only go out to fetch the

groceries and help my girlfriend move out."

The men from Interpol followed Damon into the apartment, ignoring the stream of denials.

Inspector Yamanaka showed not; a flicker of interest as his heavy-lidded gaze took in the knife

stuck into the doorjamb, but his sidekick took silently ostentatious offense at the untidy state

of the living room. Even Damon had to admit that Diana's decampment had left it looking a

frightful mess.

As soon as the door was shut Yamanaka said, "What do you know about the Eliminators, Mr. Hart?"

"I was never that kind of crazy," Damon told him affrontedly. "I was a serious streetfighter,

not a hobbyist assassin."

"No one's accusing you of anything," said Sergeant Rolfe, in the unreliably casual way cops had.

Damon's extensive experience of LAPD methods of insinuation encouraged him to infer that although

they didn't have an atom of evidence they nevertheless thought he was guilty of something. Long-

serving cops always had a naive trust in their powers of intuition.

"You only want me to help with your inquiries, right?"

"That's right, Mr. Hart," said Yamanaka smoothly.

"Well, I can't. I'm not an Eliminator. I don't know anyone who is an Eliminator. I don't keep

tabs on Eliminator netboards. I have no interest at all in the philosophy and politics of

Elimination."

It was all true. Damon knew no more about the Eliminators than anyone else-probably far less,

given that he was no passionate follower of the kind of news tape which followed their activities

with avid fascination. He was not entirely unsympathetic to those who thought it direly unjust

that longevity, pain control, immunity to disease, and resistance to injury were simply

commodities to be bought off the nanotech shelf, possessed in the fullest measure only by the

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Brian Stableford - Inherit the Earth

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