Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [113]
L-E-N-N-Y, the flicker had spelled out.
There was only one Lenny the signal could possibly refer to, and only one reason why Madoc might want him to visit the Lenny in question. Whether Madoc was with him or not, Lenny Garon had to have the VE pak which Madoc had stolen from under the noses of the LAPD—the one piece of the mirror man’s carefully constructed puzzle which had been prematurely swept from the field of play.
Damon didn’t imagine for a moment that whatever the VE tape had to show him would be any more reliable than the VE tapes of Silas Arnett’s bogus confessions, but just for once he wanted to be a step ahead of all the people who were trying to push him around. Just for once, he wanted to be able to do things his way—whatever his way turned out to be, when he’d had time to think and time to make a plan.
Damon knew that he had to advise Madoc to turn himself in, but he had told Diana the truth when he said that he might have to go away, perhaps even to rebuild bridges linking him to his estranged family. Everything depended on what Madoc had found out about Silas’s kidnappers and about what had really happened to Surinder Nahal.
Twenty-four
T
he capstack in which Lenny Garon lived was not one of the more elegant applications of gantzing technology—as was only to be expected, given that it dated back to a time before PicoCon had acquired the Gantz patents and begun the synergistic combination of Leon Gantz’s exclusively organic technology with their own inorganic nanotech. In those days, gantzers had looked for models in nature which their trained bacteria might be able to duplicate without too much macrotech assistance, and they had come up with the honeycomb: six-sided cells laid out in rows nested one on top of another.
The pattern had the strength to support tall structures—Lenny’s stack was forty stories high—but the resultant buildings had zigzag edges that looked decidedly untidy. The individual apartments came out like long square tubes with triangular-sectioned spaces behind each sidewall, into which all the supportive apparatus of modern life had to be built. Bathrooms and kitchens tended to be consigned to this inconvenient residuum, so that the square section only needed one dividing wall separating living room and bedroom.
All this might have seemed charming, in a minimalist sort of way, had it not been for the fact that the entire edifice in which Lenny Garon lived had been gantzed out of pale gray concrete rubble and dark gray mud. Beside the more upmarket blocks that had been tastefully decorated in lustrous pigments borrowed from flowering plants or the wing cases of beetles, Lenny’s building looked like a glorified termite mound.
“Thanks for coming, Damon,” Lenny said, anxiously blinking his eyes as he checked the corridor while letting Damon into a capsule that was only slightly more squalid than the rest. “I really appreciate your giving me the benefit of your experience.”
It took Damon a moment or two to realize that the boy was putting on a show for the eyes and ears that even walls as shabby as these must be expected to contain, in case anyone should ever consult them with a view to identifying accessories to a crime. He didn’t bother to add his own line to the silly charade.
“Thanks, Lenny,” Madoc said to the anxious streetfighter, once Damon was safely inside. “Now take a walk, will you. I’ll pay you a couple of hundred in rent, but you’ll have to forget you ever saw us, okay?”
Lenny was evidently disappointed by the abrupt dismissal, but he was appropriately impressed by the notion that he could sublet his apartment by the hour for real money. “Be my guest,” he said—but he dawdled at the door before opening up again. “I hear you’re an enemy of mankind now, Damon. Good going—anything I can do, you only have to ask.”
“Thanks,” Damon said. “I will.”
As the door slid shut behind the boy Damon looked around the room, wondering why people still chose to live this way