Tamlin shrugged.
“You might also ask around about someone named Surinder Nahal,” Damon added. “He was a bioengineer contemporary with my co-parents. He seems to have been a rival of sorts—maybe the closest thing to an enemy they had. He’s disappeared too.”
Tamlin nodded, and then turned back abruptly to the fight as a roar went up from the watchers. Brady had rammed his advantage home, and poor Garon was on the ground, screaming.
Damon knew that it would all be feeding into the template: the reflexes and convulsions of pain, shock and horror, all ready-digitised, ripe for manipulation and refinement, for teasing into proper shape. By the time he—or someone like him—had finished with the tapes there’d be nothing of the kid left at all; there’d only be the actions and the reactions, dissected out and purified as a marketable commodity. It was all in rank bad taste, of course, but it was a living for all concerned. It was his own living, based in talents that were entirely and exclusively his own, using nothing that Conrad Helier had left to him in his will or his genes. Damon wanted very badly to be his own man. Taking money from the legacy to bankroll Tamlin’s investigations in the Underworld wasn’t a betrayal of that end; it was an utterly impersonal matter. It seemed wholly appropriate that Conrad Helier’s money should be used to find out what was going on—always assuming, of course, that something worthy of investigation was going on.
Tamlin had moved forward to help the stricken streetfighter—not because he was overly concerned for the boy’s health but because he wanted to make certain that the equipment was in good order.
“Give my regards to Diana,” Damon said, as he turned away. “Tell her I’m sorry, but that it’ll all work out for the best.”
He couldn’t tell whether Tamlin had heard him or not.
Damon stood on the quay in Kaunakakai’s main harbour and watched the oceanographic research vessel Kite sail smoothly towards the shore. The wind was light and her engines were silent but she was making good headway. Her sleek sails were patterned in red and yellow, shining brightly in the subtropical Sun. 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. He didn’t wave a greeting and he kept Damon waiting 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.
Eventually, Kachellek came over to Damon and offered his hand to be shaken. 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 dead Mary had been the real foster-mother.
“This isn’t a good time for visiting, Damon,” Kachellek 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,” he went on. “It’ll be a while 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 the time to worry about Eliminators and other assorted madmen. I can’t see why Interpol are 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.”
They soon passed beyond the limits of the harbour, and headed westwards towards the outskirts of the port. Mauna Loa was visible in the distance, looming over the precipitous landscape, but the town itself was uncomfortably reminiscent of the parts of L.A. where Damon had spent the greater part of his adolescence. Molokai had been one of the many bolt-holes whose inhabitants had tried to impose quarantine in the early 2100s, but the plague 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 that wasn’t large, and 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 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.
There was little to see on the landward side but the lingering legacy of human profligacy, so Damon looked out to sea while they walked. The ocean gave the impression of having always been the way it was: huge, blue 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. Lanai was visible on the horizon, on the far side of the Kaiohi Channel.
“You and Silas were friends for a long time,” Damon remarked. “Aren’t you concerned about his disappearance?”
The blond man shrugged. “We were colleagues, not friends,” he said. “When we ceased to be colleagues we ceased to mean anything to one another. People live for a long time nowadays, Damon, and it’s no longer the case that people you know for fifty or a hundred years have to play a major role in the unfolding narrative of your life. Whatever has happened to Silas, it doesn’t have anything to do with me.”
It was too stark and too brutal to be entirely convincing. Kachellek had never been entirely at ease with Damon, so it was difficult to judge whether he was any more unsettled than usual, but there was something about his dismissiveness which seemed dishonest.
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. “Do you feel the same way about Eveline?” he said, aloud. “Was she just someone you worked with for a while, before you went your separate ways?”
“I’m still working with her,” Kachellek replied.
“But she’s off-planet, in L-5.”
“Modem 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.” It was a horribly pompous speech; Kachellek was by no means a subtle man.
“A common cause which I deserted,” Damon said, bitterly. “In spite of all the grand plans which Conrad Helier had for me. You’re not him, Karol. You could have seen my point of view, if you’d wanted to. You and I could have built a relationship of our own.”
“Fostering you was a job your father asked me to do,” Kachellek retorted, bluntly. “I’d have continued doing it, if there had been anything more I could do. But what you wanted was to get away, to abandon everything your father tried to pass on to you, to run wild. You moved away from us, Damon, and changed your name; you declared yourself irrelevant to our concerns. I don’t owe you anything.”
Damon didn’t want to become sidetracked into discussions of his irresponsible adolescence, or his not-entirely-respectable present. “Why should someone accuse Conrad Helier of being an enemy of mankind?” he asked.