Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [115]
“Who did kill him, do you think?” Madoc asked cautiously. “PicoCon?”
“I’m not sure that anybody did. I suspect that the orchestrator of this little pantomime is trying to establish that in today’s world a body, an autopsy, and a DNA analysis don’t add up to proof that someone is actually dead. The people behind this are convinced that Conrad Helier’s alive, and they refuse to be told that he’s not.”
“Where did they get a body with Surinder Nahal’s DNA?” Madoc wanted to know.
“Tissue-culture tanks that turn out steaks the size of a building could turn a half a liter of blood into a skeleton with a few vital organs and a covering of skin, without even needing rejuve technology to stretch the Hayflick limit. If Karol’s body ever gets fished out of the Pacific, I suspect it’ll be just as thoroughly beaten up and just as fake. None of which would prove anything about my father, who died in bed of natural causes—his cadaver would have gone to the medical examiner with every last anatomical detail in its proper place. As for Silas . . . well, it looks as if he really might be dead, but I don’t know what to believe anymore. What else have you got for me?”
“Not much,” Madoc admitted with an apologetic sigh. “The way the latest round of false testimony is being set in place, it looks as if this guy Nahal had some kind of grudge against your father and his cronies that he’d been nursing for a hundred years. It looks as if Nahal had Arnett snatched, and that he put out the counterfeit Operator one-oh-one stuff himself—although the word is already out that the woman who built up the Operator one-oh-one name and reputation has turned herself in to prove that her name’s been taken in vain. If you want stand-up proof that the real movers and shakers are PicoCon people, I don’t have any—and I don’t think you or I could ever come up with any. Do you think they killed Arnett so he couldn’t retract his confessions?”
Damon shrugged. “I haven’t been idling around while you’ve been battling it out with the LAPD,” he said. “I got kidnapped twice—once by Karol’s hirelings and once by some people who didn’t want Karol’s hirelings to put me away. The second crowd introduced me to the VE to end all VEs—a manufactured dream, of the kind the industry’s been trying to develop for a century and more. It might have been a trick, and I suppose it might have been a real dream—but if it wasn’t the spokesman for the movers and shakers gave me a message to pass on to my dead father. Then they stuck me in a derelict house with Lenny’s friend Cathy to wait for the bloodhounds.” After a slight pause he went on: “The Old Lady has to be right. No one but PicoCon could have access to VE tech that far ahead of the market—although the guy I talked to, whose image was all tricked out like some chrome-plated holovid robot, spun me some line about products not being made for the market anymore.”
“Lenny told me about Cathy,” Madoc said. “Was she in on Arnett’s kidnap?”
“I don’t think so—although they probably planted the centipedes that disabled Silas’s defenses in her luggage when they found out he’d invited her to stay. Her abduction was just a red herring. Whoever’s doing this—and I mean the individual in charge of the operation, not the corp—believes in having his fun while he works.”
“What was the message to your father?” Madoc asked curiously but tentatively. He obviously half expected to be told that it wasn’t his business.
Damon didn’t see any need to keep that particular secret. “Stop playing God,” he said bluntly. When Madoc raised his eyebrows, expecting further elaboration, he added: “Apparently, everybody who’s anybody wants to play God nowadays, and the big gods way up on Olympus are trying to figure out a set of protocols that will allow them all to play together. They want everybody to abide by the rules. If the story I was told can be taken seriously, this thing got started because my foster parents turned churlish when they were invited to join the club. So did the people at Ahasuerus. The alleged purpose of this little game is