Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [125]
“The only trouble is that everyone who was in on the secret—and everyone who subsequently discovered it—would have to be trustworthy. They’d have to be in the club. The men in control couldn’t have loose cannons threatening to go off at any moment, with no way of knowing where the blast would go. If there were a person like that around, the gods would have to silence him—but they’d have to find him first. As you’ve so carefully pointed out, a person like me can easily be exposed to thoroughgoing scrutiny in a world where every wall has eyes and ears . . . but some people really can stay out of sight, if they know where the darkest shadows are.
“It’s interesting to follow these flights of fancy occasionally, isn’t it, Mr. Saul? I still don’t know for sure why PicoCon is so desperate to locate a man who’s been dead for fifty years, do I?”
“That’s an interesting fantasy, Damon,” Saul replied. “Isn’t it a trifle paranoid, though? The idea that big corporations hold back all the best inventions in order to maintain their markets is as old as capitalism itself.”
“We live in a postcapitalist era, Mr. Saul,” Damon said earnestly. “The market isn’t everything—not anymore. We have to start thinking in terms of millennia rather than centuries. Gods have nobler goals in mind than vulgar profits—and you can spell profits any way you like.”
Saul laughed at that, and there didn’t seem to be anything forced about the laughter. “I suppose that sophisticated biotechnics and clever nanomachinery are so similar to magic that we have begun behaving rather like the magicians of legend,” he admitted. “We have a tendency to be jealous and secretive; some of us, at least, have learned to love deceit for its own sake. Has your father’s team behaved any differently?”
“I think Eveline would argue that your end is merely her means,” Damon countered. “She’d say that what the Mirror Man told me—and what you’re telling me now—is just advertising, bait on a line to reel me in. She’d argue that you don’t really have any long-term objectives except preserving your advantages and maintaining your comforts—that you’re obsessed about controlling things because you couldn’t bear to be controlled. She sees the megacorps as an anchor holding progress back rather than a cutting edge hastening its progress forward.”
“And she’d be echoing Conrad Helier every inch of the way—but she’d be wrong. The point is, what do you think?”
“I think that you and the Mirror Man really do believe that you’re the new gods and I think you’re as jealous as any god of old. You want to plan the future, and you want to make sure that everyone will play his allotted part in the plan—or at least that no one’s in a position to put a spoke in your wheel.”
“I didn’t ask you what you think I believe. I asked you what you think.”
Damon had known exactly what he was being asked—but he wasn’t sure that he’d made up his mind about that. “I doubt that you’ll ever get everyone to agree about the objectives of the game,” he ventured. “I think it might be healthier if you didn’t even try. After the last couple of days, though, I think one thing you do need to get settled is that the game shouldn’t be played with real bullets—even certified-nonlethal ones. There’s a lot to be said for conflict, if it maintains the dynamic tension that generates social change. There’s even something to be said for combat, so long as it isn’t mortal, but the distinction between cuts that heal and cuts that don’t isn’t as easy to make as some people imagine. I don’t approve of Elimination either, but I don’t want a two-tier system. Everybody should get a chance at real life, whether they’re team players or not.”
Damon never found out what Saul’s reply to that would have been, and he wasn’t sorry when the interruption came. He needed time to think about the offer Saul had made him, and he knew that there