Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [130]
“Like the viruses which caused the Crash, Conrad intends para-DNA to be nonlethal weaponry—nothing more than a nuisance. It’s supposed to attack the structure of the cities and the structure of the Web; it’s supposed to make it impossible for the human race to dig itself a hole and live in manufactured dreams. It wouldn’t attack people, and it certainly wouldn’t murder people wholesale, but it would always be there: a sinister, creeping presence that would keep on cropping up where it’s least expected and where it’s least welcome, to remind people that there’s nothing—nothing, Damon—that can be taken for granted. Long life, the New Reproductive System, Earth, the solar system . . . all these things have to be managed, guarded, and guided. According to Conrad, we ought to be looking toward the real alien worlds instead of—or at least as well as—synthesizing comfortable simulacra. Whatever you or I might think of his methods, he’s not mad.”
“I can see why PicoCon thinks it’s necessary to rein you in, though,” Damon observed. “I can understand why the people who actually own the earth and all the edifices gantzed out of its surface would like the right of veto over schemes like that.”
“Maybe,” said Silas. “But I think Conrad might argue that the current owners of the Gantz patents ought to be down on their bended knees thanking him for introducing an element of built-in obsolescence to their endeavors. Mr. Saul would presumably prefer it if the meek inherited the earth, because he thinks that a meek consumer is a good consumer. He and his kind are interested in what people want, and the more stable and predictable those wants become, the better he’ll like it—but Conrad’s more interested in what people need.”
Damon looked at Saul, who seemed quite untroubled by anything Silas had said.
“At the end of the day, though,” Damon pointed out, “Pico-Con calls the shots, here and in outer space. The secret couldn’t be kept—and now that it’s out, Conrad, Eveline, and Karol have no alternative but to abandon the plan.”
“That’s not for me to decide,” Silas said obdurately. “I’m not here to negotiate.”
“Of course not,” said Saul with a hint of malicious mockery. “But you can carry an olive branch, can’t you? One way or another, now that you’ve joined the ranks of the unsleeping dead, you’ll be able to transmit our offer of a just and permanent peace to Conrad Helier?”
“Just and permanent?” Silas echoed, presumably to avoid giving a straighter answer.
“That’s what we want,” Saul said. “It’s also, in our opinion, what we all need. We don’t want to bludgeon Conrad Helier—or the Ahasuerus Foundation for that matter—into reluctant and resentful capitulation. We really would like them to see things our way. That’s why we’re mortally offended by their refusal even to talk to us. Yes, we do have the power to impose our will—but we’d far rather reach a mutually satisfactory arrangement. I think Conrad Helier has seriously mistaken our position and our goals, and the true logic of the present situation here on Earth.”
All Silas said in reply to that was: “Go on.”
“Your anxiety regarding the possibility of people giving up on the real world in order to live in manufactured dreams is an old one,” Saul said mildly. “The corollary anxiety about the willingness of their effective rulers to meet the demand for comforting dreams is just as old—and so is Conrad’s facile assumption that the best way to counter the trend is to import new threats to jolt the meek inheritors of Earth out of their meekness and expel them from their utopia of comforts. Frankly, I’m as disappointed by Conrad’s recruitment to such an outmoded way of thinking as I am by the Ahasuerus Foundation’s retention of their equally obsolete