Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [101]
“I can’t believe that cosmicorps play games like this,” Madoc said wonderingly. “PicoCon least of all—they’ve got more than enough real work to occupy them.”
“That’s a matter of perspective,” Harriet told him drily. “You could say that there’s a point at which any successful corporation becomes so big and so powerful that the profits take care of themselves, leaving the strategists with nothing to do but play games. Serious games, but games nevertheless. Attacking Conrad Helier’s memory seems a trifle unsporting, though—terrible ingratitude.”
“Ingratitude? Why? Helier’s team was always strictly biotech, as far as I can work out. I thought PicoCon’s fortune was based on inorganic nanotech. What did he ever do for them?”
“He gave them the world on a plate. PicoCon may be the engine churning out the best set pieces nowadays, but the New Reproductive System stabilized the board for them. The Crash put a belated end to unpoliced population growth, but Helier’s artificial wombs made certain that the bad old days would never come back again. If Helier hadn’t got the new apparatus up and running in time to become the new status quo, some clown would have engineered a set of transformer viruses to refertilize every woman under the age of sixty-five and we’d have been back to square one. You probably think the Second Plague War was a nasty affair, but that’s because you read about it in the kind of history books which only tell you what happened and skip lightly over all the might-have-beens. If it hadn’t been for Conrad Helier, you’d probably have had to live through the third round of the Not-Quite-Emortal Rich versus the Ever-Desperate Poor—and PicoCon would have spent the last half-century pumping out molecular missiles and pinpoint bombs instead of taking giant strides up the escalator to true emortality.”
Madoc had to think about this for a minute or two, but he soon saw the logic of the case. New technologies of longevity were an unqualified boon in an era in which population had ceased to grow, even though access to them was determined by wealth. In a world whose poorer people were still producing children in vast numbers, those same technologies would inevitably have become bones of fierce contention, catalysts of allout war.
“You don’t suppose,” he mused, “that Hywood and Kachellek might have done just that—engineered a set of viruses to refertilize the female population?”
“No, I don’t,” said Harriet. “Even if they were silly enough to work on the problem, they’d have the sense to bury their results. Anyway, the world now has the advantage of starting from a position of relative sanity instead of rampant insanity—if some such technology did come along I think ninety-nine women in every hundred would have the sense to say no. It would be interesting to know what Hywood and Kachellek have done—but it might be safer not to try to find out. As I said before, if they really did blow Kachellek’s boat to smithereens with him in it. . . .”
“If?” Madoc queried.
“It really is a game, Madoc. Bluff and counterbluff, lie and counterlie. The one thing of which we can be certain is that nothing is what it seems to be—not just on the surface but way down through the layers. PicoCon is making a big issue out of the possibility that Conrad Helier is only playing dead. Maybe Kachellek’s playing dead too. Maybe Surinder Nahal is only playing dead.”
“If that burned body really was his,” Madoc murmured, “he was putting on a very convincing act.”
“That might be the whole point of the exercise. Do you want me to get a message to Damon for you?”
“Can you do that? Without the cops knowing, I mean.”
“I think so—but you can’t bring him here. I’ve used up so much borrowed time that I’ll be dying way beyond my means whenever I go, but I still like to be careful. It’s a matter of professional pride. You’ll have to figure out a safe place—and he’ll