Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [122]
“Are you the Mirror Man?” Damon asked as he approached.
The ancient shook his head. “The Mirror Man’s off the project,” he said, evidently untroubled by the admission he was making in recognizing the description. “I’ve been appointed in his stead, to tidy things up—and to calm things down. Come in and make yourself at home.” He pronounced the final phrase with conscientiously lighthearted sarcasm.
“I’m a prisoner,” Damon pointed out as the other stood aside to let him pass, “not a guest.”
“If you’d only paused to listen to what the man had to say,” the old man replied mildly, “we’d have offered you a formal invitation. I think you’d have found it too tempting to refuse. You can call me Saul, by the way.” It wasn’t an invitation to intimacy; Damon guessed that if the man was called Saul at all it would be his surname, not his given name.
“Stay away from the road to Damascus,” Damon muttered as he surveyed the room into which he was being ushered. “Revelations can really screw up your life.”
The cabin’s interior was more luxurious than the exterior had implied, but it had a gloss of calculated primitivism. Authentic logs were burning within the proscenium arch of an inauthentic stone fireplace set upon a polished stone hearth. There were three armchairs arranged in an arc around the hearth, although there was no one waiting in the cabin except the old man.
There was a stick of bread on the table, together with half a dozen plastic storage jars and three bottles: two of wine, one of whiskey. Damon almost expected to see hunting trophies on the wall, but that would have been too silly. Instead there were old photographs mounted in severe black frames: photographs taken in the days when the wilderness had only been half spoiled.
“Are we expecting somebody else?” Damon asked.
“I hope so,” said Saul. “To tell you the truth, I’m rather hoping that your father might drop by. If he’s still on Earth, he’s had time to reach the neighborhood by now. If he’s stranded out in space, though . . . well, we’ll just have to wait and see.”
Damon didn’t bother with any tokenistic assertion of his father’s membership of the ultimate silent majority. Instead, he said: “Nobody came in response to your other invitations. Why should anyone come now?”
“Because the cat’s out of the bag,” the old man told him. “Eveline Hywood hurried the announcement through, in spite of everything. When the grim satisfaction has worn off, though, she’ll remember that this is only the beginning. Your father’s shown us that he won’t be bullied, and that he’s more than willing to fight fire with fire, tape for tape and appearance for appearance—but he can’t move to the next stage of his plan without clearing it with us because he now knows that we know what that next phase will be—and that if we think it’s necessary, we’ll close the whole thing down.”
“Who’s we?” Damon wanted to know—and was optimistic, for once, that he might be told.
“All of us. Not just PicoCon, by any means. Your father may think that he made the world, and we’re prepared to give him due credit for saving it, but we’re the ones who own it, and we’ve already made our peace. If he’s absolutely determined to return to the days when we were all on the same side, that’s fine by us—just so long as it’s our side that everybody’s on.”
Damon pulled one of the armchairs back from the fire before sitting down in it. He’d thought that he had recovered well enough from the shot in the back, but once he’d taken the weight off his feet he realized that nobody could get shot, even in today’s world, without a considerable legacy of awkwardness and fatigue. He stirred restlessly, unable to find a comfortable posture.
Saul drew back the neighboring chair