Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [31]
The car came gently to a standstill and Damon realized that the traffic stream in both directions had ground to a halt. A quick look around told him that every emergency light in sight was on red and he groaned. Some idiot saboteur had hacked into the control system and thrown a software spanner into the works. He sighed and tried hard to relax. Usually, such glitches only took a few minutes to clear—but one of the reasons they had become so common of late was that rival parties of smart and prideful kids were trying just as hard to set new records as the city was.
By the time the car got moving again, Damon was not finding it at all difficult—in spite of his own checkered history—to sympathize with the hypothetical proposition he had put to Rachel Trehaine. Anyone who did come up with an authentic emortality serum might well be tempted to reserve it for the socially conscientious, while allowing all the lonely and resentful individuals who had nothing better to do with their time than fuck things up to fade into oblivion.
Seven
I
’m sorry we couldn’t bring flowers,” Madoc Tamlin said to Lenny Garon, “but they reckon flowers compromise the sterile regime and promote nosocomial infections. It’s bullshit, but what can you do?”
Lenny Garon made the effort to produce a polite smile. Madoc couldn’t help contrasting the boy’s stubbornly heroic attitude with that of Diana Caisson, who hadn’t smiled all day and didn’t seem likely to start now. He wouldn’t have brought her along if he’d had any choice, but even though the hospital was nearly the last place in the world she wanted to be she’d insisted on tagging along. It seemed that what proverbial wisdom said about misery loving company was true—and when Diana was miserable, she certainly had enough to go around.
“I shouldn’t be here,” the novice streetfighter said, as if the hospital’s insistence on keeping him in were a slur on his manhood. “The intestine’s not leaking anymore and the nanotech’s taking care of the peritonitis. I was just unlucky that the cut reached my spleen—it was nothing, really. They’ll probably let me out in a couple of hours if I kick up a fuss.”
“It would have been nothing if you’d had IT as good as Brady’s,” Madoc told him cynically. “Pretty soon, you will. You have talent. It’s raw, but it’s real. Just a couple more fights and you’ll be ready to turn the tables. You hurt Brady too, you know—he might not be in the next bed, but he knows he was in a fight. One day, you’ll go even further than he has—if you stick at it.”
“Did you give the tapes to Damon Hart?”
Madoc couldn’t help glancing at Diana to see what effect the mention of Damon’s name had, and was unfortunate enough to catch her eye.
“Why should he give the tapes to Damon Hart?” she snapped at the boy, without taking her accusative eyes off Madoc.
“I thought that’s why he came to the fight,” Garon retorted innocently.
Madoc had a stoical expression all ready for display. He hadn’t had a chance to warn the boy to be discreet, and it was inevitable that the cat would be let out of the bag. Now it was his turn to be stubbornly heroic in the face of adversity. He waited for the storm to break.
“You didn’t tell me Damon was there,” Diana said, far less frostily than Madoc had anticipated. “What did he want?”
Madoc realized that her anger had been deflected by a false assumption. She assumed that Damon had sought out Madoc in order to talk about her. She must be hopeful that he had been consumed by regret and wanted Madoc to act as an intermediary in arranging a reconciliation. Madoc had already divined from the rambling odysseys of complaint he’d been forced to endure that what she wanted above all else was for Damon to “see sense” and realize that life without her was hardly worth living. Unfortunately, Madoc’s opinion was that Damon had been perfectly sensible in realizing