Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [123]
Damon knew that he was being offered waiter service, but he didn’t want to take it. “I’ll help myself, if you don’t mind,” he said.
“Somehow,” said the old man, peering over the rim of his spectacles, “I just knew you were going to say that.”
Twenty-six
I
never delivered your message,” Damon said when he’d finished licking his fingers. He was sitting more comfortably now—comfortably enough not to want to get up for anything less than a five-star emergency. Saul was still standing up, hovering beside the table while he finished his own meal.
“Yes, you did,” the old man countered. “Hywood’s more sensitive than you give her credit for. You got through to her, far better than you got through to Kachellek.”
“Is Karol really dead?”
“I honestly don’t know. I doubt it very much. The business with Silas Arnett took us aback a bit, but I sincerely hope that it was merely a matter of playing to the grandstand: tape for tape, as I said, appearance for appearance. Our fake body’s better than your fake body and we got our tape to Interpol while you let yours go astray, so up yours. That has to be your father, don’t you think? Eveline’s as clever as she’s stubborn, but she isn’t angry or vengeful. But you’d have done it all, wouldn’t you? You’d have lashed out as soon as you came under attack—and even when you thought you’d won, you’d still have put out one last kick in the head for good measure. You’re Conrad Helier’s son all right.”
“The only father I ever had was Silas Arnett,” Damon said, trying to sound offhanded about it. He sipped from his glass. It was only tap water; he’d thought it best to avoid the whiskey and the wine.
“Was it Silas you ran away from?” Saul countered. “Is it Silas you’re still kicking against? I think he’s just your big brother, who happened to baby-sit a lot. Dead or not, in that household Conrad Helier was always your one and only father. He still is.”
That was too near to the knuckle to warrant any response.
“Why would you send the hired help to invite me up here?” Damon asked. “You already had me not forty-eight hours ago and you threw me back into the pond. You didn’t really need me to get your message across to Eveline.”
Saul smiled. “The Mirror Man thought that we did,” he said. “In any case, we had to let you go before we could invite you to join us in a suitably polite fashion. We are inviting you to join us, by the way. Partly because it would give us a link to the Lagrange-Five biotech cowboys, but mainly because we think you’re good. Now you’ve seen what virtual reality technics can really do, it’s time for you to get properly involved, don’t you think?”
“You’re offering me a job?”
“Yes.”
“With PicoCon?”
“Yes. You could go to OmicronA if you’d prefer—it comes to the same thing in the end.”
“I’m not sure I’m ready for that,” Damon said slowly.
“I think you are,” Saul told him, finally condescending to take the seat opposite Damon’s, leaving the one in between for whoever might turn up to take it. “I think you’re as thoroughly frustrated with a life of petty crime as Hiru Yamanaka is with the business of catching petty criminals. You must understand by now what drew you into that life—and if you understand that, you must understand how pointless it is.”
Damon said nothing to that. Saul didn’t press him for an answer but simply settled back in his chair as if he were preparing for a long heart-to-heart talk.
“We live in a world where crime has become much easier to detect than of old,” Saul observed. “A world so abundantly populated by tiny cameras that hardly anything happens unobserved. These ever present eyes are, of course, unconsulted unless and until the police have reason to believe that they might have recorded something significant, but everyone tempted to commit an antisocial act knows that he’s very likely to be found out.
“If our New utopia really were a utopia, of course, its citizens wouldn’t want to commit antisocial