Inherit the Earth (4 page)

“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 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
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.

D
amon 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 rich, but he certainly wasn’t sufficiently hung up about it to become a terrorist crusader on behalf of “equality and social justice for all.”

The Eliminators were on the lunatic fringe of the many disparate and disorganized communities of interest fostered by the Web; they were devoted to the business of giving earnest consideration to the question of who might actually
deserve
to live forever. Some of their so-called Operators were in the habit of naming those whom they considered “unworthy of eternity,” via messages dispatched to netboards from public phones or illicit temporary linkpoints. Such messages were usually accompanied by downloadable packages of “evidence” which put the case for elimination. Damon had scanned a few such packages in his time; they were mostly badly composed exercises in hysteria devoid of any real substance. The first few freelance executions had unleased a tide of media alarm back in the seventies—a blaze of publicity whose inevitable effect had been to glamorize the entire enterprise and conjure into being a veritable legion of amateur assassins. Things had quieted down in recent years, but only because the Operators had become more careful and the amateur assassins more cunning. Being named by a well-known Operator wasn’t a cast-iron guarantee that a man would be attacked—and perhaps killed, in spite of all that his internal technology could contrive—but it was something that had to be taken seriously. It didn’t require much imagination on Damon’s part to figure out that Interpol must be keen to nail some guilty parties and impose some severe punitive sanctions,
pour encourager les autres
—but he couldn’t begin to figure out why their suspicions might have turned in his direction.

“There’s really no need to be so defensive,” Yamanaka told him. “We find ourselves confronted by a puzzle, and we hope that you might be able to help us to understand what’s going on.”

The sergeant, meanwhile, had begun to drift around the apartment, looking at the pictures on the wall, scanning the discs on
the shelves and eyeing Damon’s VE equipment as if its abundance and complexity were a calculated affront to his stubborn fleshiness.