Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [116]
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Madoc demanded obligingly.
“It means that self-appointed gods inevitably begin to see everything as a game,” Damon told him. “When you can do anything at all, you can only decide what to do at any particular moment on aesthetic grounds. Once you get past the groundwork of Creation, what is there to do with what you’ve made but play with it?”
Madoc picked up the thread of the argument readily enough. “Is that what your foster parents are doing? Playing a game with the world they made?”
Damon shrugged his shoulders. “If they are,” he said, “they’re being very secretive about it. Karol dropped a few hints, but the guys he hired to remove me from the action were giving nothing away. I suppose it’s only natural that after I dropped out they’d want me to get down on my knees and beg before they let me in again.”
“But you don’t want to get back in. You’ve got a life of your own now.”
“It’s not that simple anymore,” Damon said.
“It is if you want it to be.”
“I suppose I can simply refuse to play messenger no matter how hard I’m pressed,” Damon conceded, working through that train of thought. “I could go home, get back into my hood and pick up where I left off, building Planet X for those game players, designing phone tapes, putting Di into the pornotape and taking her out again, using her and then erasing all the recognizable aspects of her individuality. I could just get on with my work and hope that I’ll be allowed to get on with it in peace—except that after my little trip to Olympus, I’m no longer sure that kind of thing is worth doing. The chrome-plated cheat who told me I could fly was lying—but I think he was trying to persuade me that if only I were willing to come aboard I might be able to learn to fly.”
Madoc couldn’t follow that, but Damon was too preoccupied with his own train of thought to pause for fuller explanations. “The trouble is,” he went on, “that when you’ve looked up at Olympus and down into the ultimate abyss, it puts everything else into a new perspective—even though you know full well that it’s only a VE, just one more small step on the way to realizing all our dreams. That’s who the real movers and shakers were supposed to be, in the original poem: not statesmen or corpsmen, but dreamers of dreams.”
“Realizing our dreams is a long hard road for people like you and me,” Madoc pointed out. “Our kind of work might look a little shabby compared with PicoCon’s, but how else are people like us going to work our way up? Unless, of course, you’ve decided that now you’ve broken into your father’s money you might as well use it all. You don’t have to—just because you’re not a virgin anymore it doesn’t mean you’re a whore.” He sounded genuinely concerned for the matter of principle that seemed to be at stake.
“I want to know, Madoc,” Damon said softly. “I want to know exactly what’s going on—and you can’t find out for me. PicoCon has all the answers; maybe I should try to get aboard.”
“A corpsman? Not you, Damon. Not that.”
Damon shrugged again. “Maybe I should go to Lagrange-Five, then, and make my peace with Eveline. She might have been a lousy mother, but she’s the only one I have left . . . and she must know what all this is about, whether my father’s alive or not.”
“Nobody needs mothers anymore,” Madoc opined. “All that went out with the sterility plagues—but if you choose your friends wisely, they’ll be with you all the way. Whether you use the money or not, you can still be Damon Hart. If you and I stick together, we can still take on the world.”
Damon knew that they were talking at cross-purposes—that Madoc’s anxieties weren’t connecting with his at all. Even so, the underlying substance of Madoc’s argument was closer to the heart of the matter than Madoc probably knew.
Damon was still trying to figure out what his next step ought to