Architects of Emortality - Brian Stableford [145]
It was where money was, and it was where stewardship of the earth was exercised with scrupulous care. Michael knew that this imagistic room was more securely cloaked than any other in all the world, whether bedded in the hardware of the UN police or the so-called World Government. Whatever was said here remained here, consigned to the abyssal core of the Hidden Archive—but those who met here did not think of it as the conference chamber of the Secret Masters, the Gods of Olympus, or the Hardinist Cabal. It was merely a place where businessmen could meet and consider matters of mutual concern. It was just a room with bare walls and a rectangular table, devoid of all unnecessary ostentation, except a little extra polish.
“Thank you, Michael,” said the chairman. “All things considered, you did a good job. If you hadn’t taken the decision to follow Wilde, the police would certainly have tried—and might have contrived—to keep a little more from us than they actually did. It would have been annoying, to say the least, if we hadn’t been able to secure the equipment in that ingenious theater for our exclusive use. There are tricks we can actually use in that setup. They’re trivial tricks by comparison with what we’ll eventually learn from the girl and her lovely hair, but trivial tricks are often the most rewarding, in purely commercial terms.” “I wish the distractions had worked a little better,” Michael said, feeling that it was safe, in view of the chairman’s generosity, to indulge in a little judicious self-criticism. “I can’t help feeling that if only I’d framed my reckless hypotheses a little more cleverly, I might have persuaded Wilde to fall for one or other of them. He is a sucker for a good story, and it might have been better if he hadn’t been quite so accurate in his subsequent guesses.” “Wilde’s a fool,” opined a white-haired man who must have been two hundred and twenty if he were a day. “It doesn’t matter how accurate he is—no one will ever take his opinions seriously.” “Rightly so, Mr. Hart,” observed a female of equal apparent antiquity. “People know full well that it’s men like him who invent disparaging terms like vidveg, and they’re absolutely right to feel insulted. They’re correct in their estimation of him as a vain, patronizing poseur. Nobody watching the final act of that farce live identified with him—they all identified with the policewoman.
We don’t have to put any substantial amount of spin on the commercial resumes; she’s already the star, and her act only needs a little cleaning up. Wilde will come across as a spokesman for a lunatic and a lunatic himself; the only people who’ll listen to what he says are people who are out on a limb anyway—irrelevant people. The show can’t work against us, in the short run or the long. There’ll be no substantial comeback about the extirpation. The vast majority will thank us, as they always do.” How was it possible, Michael wondered, to be so old and yet so calm? Why were these people immune to the kinds of resentments which Jafri Biasiolo and Oscar Wilde had stored up against the undying inheritors of Earth? It was, he realized, people like Oscar Wilde who made up such disparaging epithets as “MegaMall” It was people like Oscar Wilde who charged the people whose duty and vocation it was to run the world with being hidebound monsters of greed, incapable of any but quantitative reckoning. In fact, only people like those gathered around this conference table could properly understand the quality of life. By virtue of that understanding, they were neither afraid to die nor resentful of their appointed heirs.
“We were right to let it go all the way,” another dutiful soul put in. “It would have been a pity to put a stop to it fifty years ago. The obsessive secrecy of true madmen is a great asset to the sane;