“With your help,” Yamanaka said, “I might be able to dig a little deeper. You’re in a better position to put pressure on Eveline Hywood, and pry into her affairs, than I could ever be. Together, we might be able to penetrate this sham and figure out what the real dispute is all about. My guess is that it’s about para-DNA. The people who launched this attack on your father’s inner circle intended to expose the fact that it’s fake—something cooked up in a lab, just like the viruses that caused the Crash.”
“You’re dreaming, Mr. Yamanaka,” Damon told him equably. “You’re living in a virtual reality of your own design. Para-DNA is a product of nature; my guess is that it drifted in from outer space. Anyone who said otherwise would be a liar—an obvious liar.”
Yamanaka didn’t scowl or shrug his shoulders; he just got up from the chair and quietly adjusted his clothing before heading for the door. Damon was expecting a Parthian shot, though, and he wasn’t disappointed.
“I’m disappointed in you, Mr. Hart,” Yamanaka said, as he let himself out. “I thought that you were really determined to be your own man, and to escape the tentacles of your father’s schemes and ideals. I thought that you might at least have a healthy resentment of that trick they pulled in naming you. No matter how many denials are broadcast, you’ll never be entirely safe from the Eliminators. Don’t you resent the fact that they’re still manipulating you, even after all these years?”
“You know what people say,” Damon countered, unwilling to let the policeman have the last word. He hesitated just long enough to conjure up a quantum of suspense and dramatic tension before adding: “If you can’t beat them, join them.”
The contact was so long in coming that he had almost stopped expecting it. Months passed: months which he spent in splendid isolation, creating imaginary worlds for anyone and everyone who would pay him to do it, making no discrimination between Madoc Tamlin’s black market tapes and those commissioned by legitimate corporations. He didn’t bother to keep a close watch on the news; by the time he heard that Eveline Hywood had confirmed that para-DNA was an alien invader carried into the inner Solar System by comets from the Oort Cloud, such excitement as the announcement had generated was already dying down. Nobody tried to call her a liar—no one, at any rate, who could get a hearing from the people who put the newstapes together.
Appropriately enough, the contact, when it finally came, was made in the one place where he thought his privacy really was guaranteed: in an imaginary world he was in the process of building. He was designing a sharespace for use in an adventure game, but it wasn’t nearly ready to be opened up for sharing. It was a big commission, requiring him to design the natural phenomena, flora and fauna of a hypothetical alien world orbiting a distant sun, whose visitors might undergo all kinds of vivid adventures, individually or in groups. He had his VR-apparatus hooked up to the Web so that he could decant commercially-available templates for adaptation and integration, but nothing was supposed to be able to come down the cable unless he summoned it. When he realised that there was someone else wandering around in his creation he felt a strange sense of violation which was even more shocking, in its way, than the appearance of the stranger. The appearance was, after all, a mere fiction; although it looked exactly like the pictures he had seen of his late father, it could have been anyone at all.
“Hello, son,” the image of Conrad Helier said, softly. “We meet at last.” As he spoke he looked around at the multicolored alien jungle and all the vivid insects with which Damon was busy populating it; his gaze seemed slightly disapproving, as if he found it all rather tawdry and inartistic.
Damon couldn’t entirely disagree with such a judgment, if it were indeed implied; he had been instructed—in so many words—to paint in gaudy and lushly unnatural colours, to think of Douanier Rousseau rather than Corot or Constable.
“You people really are full of surprises,” Damon said, determined to hold his own in what was bound to be a problamatic discussion. “I suppose sophisticated biotechnics and clever nanomachinery are so similar to magic that you’ve all started behaving like the magicians of legend: jealous, secretive, loving deceit for its own sake.”
“Not for its own sake,” the other said, with a sorrowful shake of the head. “The opposition are secretive, and fiercely jealous of their secrets, because their power is based in products and profits, patents and petty monopolies. To them, knowledge is capital to be hoarded and guarded, invested at the highest available rates of interest.”
“And you’re different, I suppose?”
“Yes we are,” Conrad Helier retorted, firmly. “Their end is our means. They don’t have any long-term objectives except preserving their advantages and maintaining their comforts. They only want to control things because they couldn’t bear to be controlled. Even though they’re effectively immortal, they’re still thinking in terms of today and tomorrow. They’ll grow out of it, in time—but until they do they’re a heavy anchor holding progress back. We’re planners and builders. We think in terms of centuries and millennia. We’re practising to be masters of evolution, but in the meantime we’re trying to be midwives of history. We’re not interested in money for its own sake, or power for its own sake. We’re interested in what money and power will enable us to do.”
“And pretending to die was just a career move, I suppose?”
“If you want to put it that way. It wasn’t difficult. I simply manufactured a second body—a clone, if you will—complete with all faults, for the benefit of the autopsy. You’d be surprised how easy it is to contrive a simple gypsy switch, even in a hospital, when no one’s expecting it.”
“And you did the same for Karol Kachellek and Surinder Nahal. What about Silas? Did you manage to get him back in time, or did the opposition really kill him?”
“We got him back. They released him once their pitch had been ruined. That’s one good thing about the way the game is being played—nobody fights to the death any more. Emortals tend to be scrupulously careful about that sort of thing.”
Damon remembered the fake grenade, and he nodded. “I guess that’s progress,” he admitted. “It might introduce an element of farce, but it’s better to play war-games than fight authentically bloody wars.”
“It was no part of our plan to involve you,” Conrad Helier’s simulacrum said, “but once you’d involved yourself we had to treat you as a player. You do understand that, don’t you?”
“I understand,” Damon said. “I caught on pretty quickly, didn’t I?”