Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [41]
Eventually, though, Karol had no alternative but to condescend to come to his foster son and offer his hand to be shaken. Damon took the hand readily enough and tried as best he could to import some real enthusiasm into the gesture. Karol Kachellek had always been distant; Silas Arnett had been the real foster father of the group to whose care Damon had been delivered in accordance with his father’s will, just as poor Mary Hallam had been the real foster mother. If Silas was gone forever, leaving Damon no living parents except Karol and Eveline, then he had probably left it too late to restore any meaningful family relationships.
“This isn’t a good time for visiting, Damon,” Karol said. “We’re very busy.” At least he had the grace to look slightly guilty as he said it. He raised a hand to smooth back his unruly blond hair. “Let’s walk along the shore while the light lasts,” he went on awkwardly. “It’ll be some time before the mud samples are ready for examination, and there won’t be any more coming in today. Things might be easier in three or four weeks, if I can get more staff, but until then. . . .”
“You’re very busy,” Damon finished for him. “You’re not worried, then, by the news?”
“I haven’t time to waste in worrying about Silas. I’m concerned for him, of course, but there’s nothing I can do to help and I don’t feel that I’m under any obligation to fret or to mourn. I understand that you’re bound to think of us as a pair, but he and I were never close.”
“You worked together for more than eighty years,” Damon pointed out, falling into step as the blond man settled into his long and economical stride.
“We certainly did,” agreed the blond man, with a conspicuous lack of enthusiasm. “When you’re my age you’ll understand that close company can breed antipathy as easily as friendship, and that the passage of time smothers either with insulating layers of habit and indifference.”
“I’m afraid I haven’t formed those insulating layers yet,” Damon said. “You’re not worried about yourself either, then? If the Eliminators took Silas they might come after you next.”
“Same thing—no time to waste. If we let Eliminators and their kin drive us to trepidation, they’ve won. I can’t see why Interpol is so excited about a stupid message cooked up by some sick mind. It should be ignored, treated with the contempt it deserves. Even to acknowledge its existence is an encouragement to further idiocies of the same kind.” While he talked Karol’s stride echoed his sermon in becoming more positive and purposeful, but Damon had no difficulty keeping up. Damon remembered that Karol always acted as if he had an end firmly in mind and no time to spare in getting there—it was sometimes difficult to believe that he was a hundred and twenty-two years old. Perhaps, Damon thought, he had to maintain his sense of purpose at a high pitch lest he lose it completely—as Silas seemed to have lost his once Damon had flown the nest.
They quickly passed beyond the limits of the harbor and headed toward the outskirts of the port, with the red orb of the setting sun almost directly ahead of them.
Mauna Loa was visible in the distance, looming over the precipitous landscape, but the town itself was oddly and uncomfortably reminiscent of the parts of Los Angeles where Damon had spent the greater part of his adolescence. Molokai had been one of numerous bolt-holes whose inhabitants had successfully imposed quarantine during the Second Plague War, but when it had tried to repeat the trick in the Crisis it had failed. The new pestilence had arrived here as surely as it had arrived everywhere else. Artificial wombs had been imported on the scale which the islanders could afford, but the population of the whole chain had been dwindling ever since. The internal technologies which guaranteed longevity to those who could afford them would have to become even cheaper before that trend went into reverse, unless there was a sudden saving influx of immigrants. In the meantime, that part of the port which