Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [102]
If you never play out of your league, Madoc thought, you never get promoted. All he said aloud, though, was: “Okay—I need to get a meeting set up as soon as possible. Damon will want the tape, and everything else I’ve got, whether he intends to fight or not.”
“Don’t be too sure of that,” Harriet advised him soberly. “Things have moved fast—he might not be in the same frame of mind as he was when he sent you off on this wild goose chase. Now that he’s had his little holiday, he might want to play Three Wise Monkeys too, and he might be prepared to cut you adrift and leave you to PicoCon’s tender mercies—or to the LAPD’s.”
Her concern seemed genuine, but Madoc couldn’t imagine that he needed it. You might know PicoCon, Old Lady, he thought, but you don’t know Damon. He’d never change sides on me. Madoc was as certain of that as he needed to be—and even if he hadn’t been, what choice did he have?
Twenty-two
A
fter sitting through the second tape of his “confessions,” Silas Arnett found himself looking out upon a pleasant outdoor scene: a wood, like the ones to the south of his house. A rich carpet of leaf litter was delicately dappled by sunlight streaming through the canopy. The gnarled boughs of the trees offered abundant perches to little songbirds whose melodies filled the air. It was a simulation of an ancient woodland, whose design owed more to nostalgia than historical accuracy.
Unfortunately, the pleasantness of the surroundings found no echo within his body. In the VE he was a mere viewpoint, invisible to himself, but that only served to place more emphasis on his sense of touch, which informed him that the conditions of his confinement were now becoming quite unbearable.
The subtle changes of position he was able to make were no longer adequate to counter the aching in his limbs. The chafing of the straps which bound his wrists and ankles was now a burning agony. It did no good to tell himself that by any objective standard these were very minor pains, no worse than those which constituted the everyday condition of millions in the days before IT. He, Silas Arnett, had grown fully accustomed to being able to control pain, and now that he could no longer do it he felt that he might easily die of sheer frustration.
A human figure came through the trees to stand before him. It was dressed in a monk’s habit, and Silas inferred that it was supposed to be male, but it was a modern secular monk, not a member of any religious order that might have been contemporary with an ancient forest. The ornament the monk wore around his neck was not a cross but a starburst: a symbol of the physicists’ Creation rather than the redemptive sacrifice of the Christ whose veneration was now confined to a handful of antiquarians.
The man pushed the hood back from his forehead and let its fold fall upon his shoulders. Silas didn’t recognize the exposed visage; it was a handsome, serene face which bore the modest signs of aging that most monks considered appropriate to their station.
Silas wasn’t fooled by the appearance. He knew that the mind behind the mask was the mind of his tormentor.
His “tormentor” had not, in the end, resorted to any very violent torture, but in his present condition Silas found it impossible to be grateful for that. Even had he been more comfortable, any gratitude he might have felt would have been tempered by the knowledge that even though he had not been cut or burned he had certainly been imprisoned, maligned, mocked, and misrepresented.
“That one looked even worse than the first one,” he said, gritting his teeth against his discomfort and hoping that talk might distract him from his woe. “It really doesn’t add anything. I can’t see why you bothered.”
“I didn’t,” said the monk.