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By Root 1299 0

in question was only clutching a thick wad of cash. It’s possible that some of the transformers really did arise naturally—in which case we needn’t have bothered—but I always thought the Gaian Mystics were fools to insist beforehand that Ma Nature would find a way, and even bigger fools to insist afterwards that she had. The arguments in the second of my fake confessions were good ones: we didn’t kill anybody; we just took away a power which should never have been claimed as a right. When the multiplication of the species reached the point at which the ecosphere stood in imminent danger of irreversible injury, the increase had to be halted, and the reproduction of individuals had to be limited in the interests of the whole community. The Crash had to happen. Conrad tried to make it as painless as possible. If you’d been in his place you’d have done it too.”

“So why not take credit for it? Why not admit it, instead of letting the despised Gaian Mystics credit it to the Earth Mother? Why let it hang over your reputation like the sword of Damocles, waiting for a rival megacorp or a maverick Eliminator to cut it loose?”

“The fallout would have interfered with our work. If Conrad had tangled himself up with the necessity to plead his case in the media, he wouldn’t have been able to get the New Reproductive System up and running so quickly. Sometimes, hypocrisy is unavoidable.”

Damon curled his lip righteously. “And it still is, isn’t it?” he said. “Otherwise, Conrad would be able to stand up and take due credit for his latest parlor trick. He designed para-DNA, didn’t he? Eveline’s so-called discovery is just one more Big Lie—a lie that Mr. Saul’s friends were trying to nip in the bud. That’s what the whole pantomime was intended to do: squash your plan before it had a chance to interfere with theirs.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Silas said sourly. “As soon as I retired, I was out of it. After that, neither Eveline nor Karol would give me the time of day. You’ll have to ask Saul for recent intelligence of Conrad’s plans.”

Saul had taken his own seat by now. “You’re too modest, Silas,” he said. “You knew the way things were heading. Isn’t that why you left?”

“G for Gantz,” Silas repeated. “Is that really what this has all been about? Keep your sticky hands off my toys?”

“No, it isn’t,” Saul replied sharply. “It isn’t a petty matter at all. I only wish your friends had realized that.”

“You’re losing me,” Damon observed.

Saul said nothing, stubbornly waiting for Silas to take the responsibility. “You’re right, Damon,” Silas said eventually. “Para-DNA is a laboratory product. We worked on it for years: a non-DNA life system capable of forming its own ecospheres in environments more extreme than the ones DNA can readily cope with. At first we were talking in terms of bridging the gap between the organic and the inorganic—a whole new nanotech combining the best features of both. The early talk about applications was all about seeding Mars and the asteroids, perhaps as a step in terraformation but not necessarily. Conrad was disappointed about the failure of our probes to find extraterrestrial life, and doubly disappointed by the fact that all the pre-Crash arks that set out in search of new Ararats seemed to have failed in their quest. It was another little flaw in the universal design which Conrad set out to correct. He didn’t think of it as playing God—merely compensating once again, in a wholly human way, for the vacancy of the divine throne.”

“But that was only the first plan, wasn’t it?” Saul put in.

“Yes,” Silas admitted. “Eventually, Conrad began considering other possible applications. There were a lot of people who were glad that the probes and the arks hadn’t turned up anything at all: people who’d always thought of alien life in terms of competition and invasion, as a potential threat. Conrad despised that kind of cowardice—but there’s something about the view of Earth you get from Lagrange-Five and all points farther out that gives people a jaundiced view of the people at the bottom of the gravity well.