Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [14]
Damon realized that it would be foolish to swing from one extreme to the other—from taking it for granted that he was a suspect to taking it for granted that he wasn’t. The Interpol men were undoubtedly fishing for anything they could catch. “I dare say it’s true,” he said cautiously. “Silas’s decision to retire must have seemed to Karol and Eveline to be a failure of vocation almost as scandalous as my own: yet another betrayal of Conrad Helier’s sacred cause.”
Yamanaka nodded as if he understood—but Damon knew that he almost certainly didn’t. It was difficult to guess Yamanaka’s true age, because a man of his standing would have the kind of internal technology which was capable of slowing down the aging process to a minimum, as well as PicoCon’s latest cosmetic engineering, but he was probably no more than sixty. To the inspector, as to Damon, the glittering peak of Conrad Helier’s career would be the stuff of history. At school the young Hiru Yamanaka would have been dutifully informed that the artificial wombs which Conrad Helier had perfected, and the techniques which allowed such wombs to produce legions of healthy infants while the plague of sterility spread like wildfire across the globe, were the salvation of the species—but that didn’t mean that he could understand the appalling reverence in which Conrad Helier had been held by his closest coworkers.
“Do you have any idea why anyone would want to kidnap Silas Arnett?” Yamanaka asked Damon with unaccustomed bluntness.
“None at all,” Damon replied, perhaps too reflexively.
“Do you have any idea why anyone would want to blacken your father’s name?” The follow-up seemed as bland as it was blunt, but Damon knew that if Yamanaka was right in his estimation of the interesting coincidence this might be the key that tied everything together. A brusque none at all would not serve as an adequate answer. “I was encouraged in every possible way to see my father as the greatest hero and saint the twenty-second century produced,” Damon said judiciously, “but I know that there were some who had a very different opinion of him. I never knew him, of course, but I know there were people who resented the strength of his views and his high media profile. Some thought him unbearably arrogant, others thought he got more credit for the solution to the Crisis than was due to him. On the other hand, although I couldn’t follow in his footsteps—and never wanted to—I don’t disapprove of anything he did, or anything my foster parents did in pursuit of his ambitions. If you want my opinion, whoever posted this notice is sick as well as stupid. It certainly wasn’t Silas Arnett, and I find it difficult to believe that it might have been anyone who understood the nature and extent of Conrad Helier’s achievements. That includes Surinder Nahal.”
Sergeant Rolfe curled his lip, evidently thinking that this eye-to-eye interview was turning out to be a waste of valuable time.
“There were several witnesses to the death of Conrad Helier,” the inspector said matter-of-factly, “and his last days were recorded, without apparent interruption, on videotape which can still be accessed by anyone who cares to download it. The doctor who was in attendance and the embalmer who prepared the body for the funeral both confirm that they carried out DNA checks on the corpse, and that the gene map matched Conrad Helier’s records. If the man whose body was cremated on 27 January 2147 wasn’t Conrad Helier then the gene map on file in the Central Directory must have been substituted.” He paused briefly, then said: “You don’t look at all like your father. Is that deliberate, or is it simply that you resemble your mother?”
“I’ve never gone in for cosmetic reconstruction,” Damon told him warily. “I have no idea what my mother looked like; I don’t even know her