Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [121]
“What does Eveline say about para-DNA?” Damon wanted to know.
“If you spent more time listening to the news and less playing cloak-and-dagger, you’d know. She made an announcement to the entire world, press conference and all. Para-DNA is extraterrestrial—the first representative of an entirely new life system, utterly harmless but absolutely fascinating. We are not alone, the universe of life awaits us, etcetera, etcetera. Now we know where you got your impulsive nature from, don’t we?”
“Are you saying that para-DNA isn’t extraterrestrial—or that it isn’t harmless?”
“I don’t know,” the tall man informed him, as if it were somehow Damon’s fault that he didn’t know. “All I know is that if it’s on the news, it’s more than likely to be lies, and that if the name Hywood’s attached to it then it must have something to do with our little adventure. I may be only the hired help but I’m not stupid. Whatever all this is about, your people aren’t responding sensibly. It doesn’t take a genius to figure that Hywood was supposed to talk to my employers before she started shooting her mouth off to the whole wide world, but she decided to kick off early instead. The whole damn lot of you are so damn touchy. Must be hereditary.”
Damon didn’t bother to point out that Eveline Hywood wasn’t his mother. Conrad Helier was his real father, and Conrad Helier’s closest associates had provided the nurture to complement his nature. It had never occurred to him before that his contentiousness might be a legacy of his genes or his upbringing, but he could see now that someone considering his reactions to this strange affair alongside those of his foster parents might well feel entitled to lump them all together.
The helicopter now began its descent toward a densely wooded slope which, while nowhere near as precipitate as the slope of the virtual mountain where he had talked to the robot man, nevertheless seemed wild enough and remote enough to suit anyone’s idea of perfect privacy.
It was just as well that the helicopter could land in a thirty-meter circle, because the space where it touched down wasn’t significantly bigger. The tall man undid Damon’s safety harness before he could do it himself and said: “Can you get down?”
“I’m fine,” Damon assured him. “No thanks to you. You’re not coming?”
“I’m far from fine—and that’s entirely down to you,” the man with the bruise countered. “We have to disappear. It wasn’t exactly a pleasure meeting you, but at least I’ll never see you again.”
“You know,” said Damon as the pilot reached back to open the door beside him, “you really have a problem. Apart from being an incompetent asshole, you have this moronic compulsion to blame other people for your own mistakes.” He got the distinct impression that the tall man would have hit him, if only he’d dared.
“Thanks,” said Damon to the pilot as he lowered himself to the ground. He ducked down low the way everybody always did on TV, although he knew that he was in no real danger from the whirling rotor blades.
There was a cabin on the edge of the clearing that looked at first glance as if it must have been two hundred years old if it were a day—but Damon saw as soon as he approached it that its “logs” had been gantzed out of wood pulp. He judged that its architect had been a relatively simple-minded AI. The edifice probably hadn’t been there more than a year and shouldn’t have been there at all. Given that the nearest road was halfway to Fillmore, though, it was certainly private; it probably had no electricity supply and no link to the Web. It was a playpen for the kind of people who thought that they could still get back in touch with “nature.”
The man who was waiting for Damon stayed inside until the helicopter had risen from the ground, only showing himself in the doorway of the cabin when no one but Damon could see his face. Damon saw immediately that he was an old man, well preserved