Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [24]
“It won’t be easy to check her out. The Lagrangists don’t play by our rules, and they have their own playspace way out on the lunatic fringe of the Web.”
“Don’t worry too much about that. I can’t imagine that Eveline’s involved in the kidnapping or the Eliminator messages, even if she does have some relevant information. What do you know about Ahasuerus?”
“The original guy or the foundation?”
“I presume that the reference is to the foundation, rather than the legend,” Damon said, refusing to treat the issue as a joke.
“Not much,” Madoc admitted. “Been around for the best part of two hundred years. Major players in the longevity game, funding research here, there, and probably everywhere. Reputation ever-so-slightly shady because of a certain bad odor attached to their start-up capital, although it beats me why anybody should care after all this time. Every fortune in the world can be traced back to some initial act of piracy, isn’t that what they say? What was it they used to call the Ahasuerus guy, way back when?”
“The Man Who Stole the World,” Damon said.
“Yeah—that’s right. Zimmer, was it? Or Zimmerman?”
“Zimmerman.”
“Right.” Madoc nodded, as if he were the one answering instead of the one who’d asked. “Well, if he did steal the world, we seem to have got it back again, don’t we?”
Damon didn’t want to get sidetracked. “I’ll dig up what I can about connections between Ahasuerus and my father,” he said, “although it’d be no surprise at all to find that they’d had extensive dealings. Ahasuerus must have had dealings with every biotech team in the world if they’ve been handing out cash to longevity researchers since the days before the Crash.
Madoc stroked his chin pensively. It seemed that his green eyes now glowed a little more powerfully than they had before. “What that note implies,” he said, “is that Arnett was taken because he knows something about Conrad Helier—something dirty. I don’t suppose you have any idea what that is, do you?”
“If I did,” Damon told him, “I’d probably want to sit on it awhile longer, just in case this business can be wrapped up quickly and quietly—but as it happens, I don’t. I was only ever told about Saint Conrad the Savior, in whose holy footsteps I was supposed to follow.”
“Were you ever given any cause to think that he might not be dead?”
“Quite the reverse,” Damon said. “According to his disciples, it was a major point of principle with Saint Conrad that an overcrowded world of long-lived individuals had to develop an etiquette, if not an actual legal requirement, whereby a dutiful citizen of the New Utopia would postpone the exercise of his—or her—right of reproduction until after death. If my foster parents are to be believed, my very existence is proof of Conrad Helier’s demise; if he were still alive, he’d be guilty of an awkward hypocrisy.”
“It’s Conrad Helier you’re really interested in, isn’t it?” Madoc suggested, running his neatly manicured fingernails speculatively back and forth along the edge of the smartcard that Damon had given him. “This Arnett guy is a side issue. You want to know if your natural father really is alive, and if the Eliminators really have grounds for resenting his continued presence in the world.”
“Concentrate on finding Silas Arnett, for the time being,” Damon said flatly.
Madoc nodded meekly. “I’ll put the Old Lady herself onto it,” he said. “She doesn’t take this kind of work normally, but she likes me. I can talk her into it.”
“I don’t want you hiring someone just because she’s a living legend,” Damon told him sharply. “I want someone who can get the job done.”
“Trust me,” Madoc advised him, with the casual air of a man who was as trustworthy as his own artificial graffiti. “Harriet’s the best. I know these things. Have I ever let you down?”
“Once or twice.”
Madoc only grinned at that, refusing to take the complaint seriously. “How are things otherwise?” he asked as he put the smartcard away. “Honest toil living up to your expectations?” Damon knew that what Madoc really wanted to know was whether he and Diana were