A long arm, which was certainly not Lenny Garon’s, reached around the jamb and lobbed something into the tiny room. It fell at Damon’s feet. He had only seen such objects in broadcast VR dramas, but he recognised it immediately as an explosive grenade.
There was nowhere in the room to hide and the door was already sliding shut again. Had Madoc Tamlin been a hero of the self-sacrificing kind he might have tried to bundle Damon along in front of him as he headed for the exit, keeping his own body between his friend and the threat of mortal injury, but he wasn’t that kind of hero—and Damon couldn’t blame him for it.
What Tamlin actually did was to dive past Damon and hurl himself at the slowly-closing slit which led to relative safety. He didn’t make it. He couldn’t even get his fingers into the crack before the escape-route was sealed off. The doorway was just as narrow as everything else in the apartment, and the door was very efficient.
Damon watched, dumbly, as Tamlin put his arms over his head and huddled up into a quasi-foetal position, evidently hoping that his internal technology might be good enough to pull him through the effects of the explosion, if only he could make himself a small enough target.
Damon was startled by his own composure as he bent down and picked up the grenade.
“It’s not real,” he said, after holding it for ten or twelve seconds. “It’s a fake.”
Tamlin wasn’t immediately convinced, but it didn’t take him long to realise that he must look incredibly foolish. He slowly unwound, and looked Damon in the face. There was no relief in his expression now, although it would not have been inappropriate.
“What kind of crazy man would throw a fake grenade into a place like this?” he asked, harshly.
“The kind who wanted to deliver a message,” Damon replied, dully.
Tamlin looked at the grenade, as if he expected Damon to unscrew the cap and produce a piece of paper from its hollow interior. “What message?” he asked, as he came slowly to his feet.
“It says: If we really wanted you dead, you’d be dead,” he explained, softly. “You don’t have to worry about it, Madoc—it’s for me.”
When Damon got back to his apartment Hiru Yamanaka was waiting for him. He was alone. He was sitting in a chair, looking comfortable, but Damon knew well enough that he must have spent the bulk of the time he’d been there prying, with more ruthless efficiency than Diana had ever contrived. He’d probably found evidence of half a hundred minor misdemeanors, but he would doubtless file them away, at least for the time being.
“That wasn’t very wise, Mr. Hart,” Yamanaka said. “You could have put yourself in danger.”
“If anyone really wanted me dead, I’d be dead,” Damon told him.
“Really dead, or only apparently dead?” Yamanaka asked, innocently.
“How’s the investigation?” Damon countered.
“All wrapped up,” the man from Interpol said. “The evidence was delivered to us on a plate when we stripped the systems in that house up in Oakland. It seems that Surinder Nahal had suffered the fate which so many of our old men fear. His internal technology hadn’t been able to maintain his brain to the same standard as his body, and he’d fallen prey to mental illness. Having belatedly conceived a paranoid hatred for his more famous contemporary Conrad Helier, he kidnapped Silas Arnett and employed a mixture of straightforward torture and deceptive videosynthesis to build an entirely false case against the man of whom he was so envious. All the evidence to prove it is now in place. We found Arnett’s body, by the way—and what was left of Karol Kachellek’s. Arnett seems to have died of injuries inflicted after his internal technology had been flushed out; Kachellek may or may not have drowned before the sharks tore him apart. My investigation wasn’t a complete failure, however—we were able to track down the original Operator 101 when she started complaining about the usurpation of her psuedonym. I gather that she’s rather looking forward to her day in court, in anticipation of being able to plead the Eliminator cause with all due eloquence before a large video-audience. I do hope the newstapes won’t make a martyr of her.”
“It’s a perverse world we’re living in, Mr. Yamanaka,” Damon said. “Appearances matter far more than reality. In fact, we’ve sophisticated our virtual realities to the point where the distinction between appearance and reality has broken down. Each layer of illusion that we penetrate merely reveals another layer of illusion.”
“You know that’s not true, Mr. Hart,” the policeman said. “No matter what practical difficulties people like you and I might encounter in getting to the bottom of things, there really is a bottom. The truth is there, no matter how well-camouflaged it might be. If I didn’t believe that, I’d be no use at all as an investigator.”
“Are you satisfied that you’ve reached the bottom of this business?” Damon asked him, knowing the answer already. “Have you sorted out the truth from the morass of disinformation in which it’s submerged?”
“Not yet,” Yamanaka replied. “But I won’t stop trying. Will you?”
“Did Rajuder Singh ever wake up?” Damon asked.
Yamanaka nodded. “He told us that Karol Kachellek asked him to take care of you because he thought you were in danger, and that he knows no more than that. He says he didn’t know that the Operator 101 message naming you didn’t go out until after Kachellek had called him. It’s probably true, and if it’s false we’ll never be able to prove it. Do you want him charged with false imprisonment?”
“No. Let the matter rest.”
“Is that what you intend to do?” Yamanaka asked, again.
“I should never have hared off on a wild goose chase in the first place,” Damon told him. “I guess I must still be unduly sensitive about the matter of my supposed birthright, and I was all strung out because of the business with Diana. But it’s all over now. My father’s dead, and so are most of my foster-parents. There’s only Eveline left, and she’s a quarter of a million miles away. Diana won’t be coming back. I can get on with my own life now, and that’s what I intend to do.”
“You’re a liar, Mr. Hart,” Yamanaka said, with an off-hand calmness which didn’t take the sting out of the words. “You know as well as I do that the messages I first brought to your attention weren’t just raking over burnt-out embers. They were building up to some other revelation, but then your father’s friends stepped in and took over the script, putting their own scapegoat—with a full complement of supplementary evidence—in place of the one the opposition intended to use.”
“I suppose they killed him just to make it look good,” Damon said, to test the water.
“You know how easy it is to synthesize appearances,” the policeman said. “That doesn’t just apply to images transmitted over the Web and VR tapes. A first-rate biological engineer can probably fake genetic appearances as easily as a good tape-doctor can fake visual ones. There are far too many bodies in this affair, Mr. Hart—too many dead men whose internal technology ought to have kept them alive but somehow didn’t. A corpus delicti isn’t sufficient evidence of death in a world like ours—a world, where flesh can be manufactured and shaped, where the physical appearances of the living can be modified by somatic engineering and where new identities can be so easily created by throwing bits of data into the chaotic flow of the Webstream.”
Damon recalled what Madoc Tamlin had said about things being better than they might be. While the old continued to die, the young still had a chance to inherit the empires of the world—so it was in the interests of the old to maintain that image of the world. It was the interests of the people with the very best internal technology to play down its power—to maintain the idea that what people called immortality wasn’t really immortality at all, or even emortality. It was in the interests of the people who owned the corps which owned the world to persuade their would-be heirs that patience was still the cardinal virtue, that their elders were liable to lose their memories and their minds and were still certain to die, in the end. But if all of that were mere appearance and mere illusion, what hope would there be for the impoverished young ambitious to claim a generous slice of the big cake? The Eliminators offered hope of a nasty kind, but Damon knew only too well that it was a false hope, a mere colourful folly. Damon knew—and he was sure he knew it because he was his own man, and not because he was his father’s son—that the one and only real hope in a world like that was of a very different kind.