Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [42]
Because there was so little to see on the landward side save for the lingering legacy of human profligacy, Damon looked out to sea while he walked on Karol Kachellek’s right-hand side. The ocean gave the impression of having always been the way it was: huge and serene. Where its waves lapped the shore they created their own dominion, shaping the sandy strand and discarding their own litter of wrack and rot-misshapen wood. He could just make out the shore of Lanai on the horizon, on the far side of the Kaiohi Channel.
“Why did you come out here, Damon?” Karol asked. “Are you scared of the Eliminators?”
“Should I be?” Damon countered—but his fosterer had no intention of rising to that one. “You wouldn’t talk to me on the phone,” Damon said after a pause. “Eveline hasn’t replied in any way at all—as if it would somehow pollute her glorious isolation in the wilderness of space even to tap out a few words on a keyplate.”
“She’s working. She gets very engrossed, and this is a difficult time for her. She’ll get back to you in her own time.”
“Sure. Unfortunately, the Eliminators seem to be keeping to their own timetable. Would it inconvenience her that much to take my call while Silas may still be alive?”
“She’ll talk to you,” Karol assured him. “I would have too, when I could find the time—no matter how much I hate that fancy VE you’ve got hooked up to your phone.”
“If you’d taken the call,” Damon pointed out, “we could have met in your VE instead of mine. That’s not one of my designs. Even if you’d called me, we could have fixed that at a keystroke.”
VEs weren’t really an issue, and Karol didn’t press the point. “Look, Damon,” he said, “the long and the short of it is that I didn’t call you back because I simply don’t have anything to tell you. Your father’s dead. He wasn’t an enemy of mankind. I have no idea why Eliminators or anyone else should want to kidnap or murder Silas. Eveline would say exactly the same—and she probably hasn’t called you because she doesn’t see any real need. I think you should let the police take care of this. I don’t think it serves any useful purpose for you to start stirring things up.”
“Am I stirring things up?” Damon asked. “It’s just a social visit.”
“I’m not talking about your coming here. I’m talking about your unsubtle friend Madoc Tamlin and that stupid note you took to the Ahasuerus Foundation. What on earth possessed you to do something like that?”
Damon was startled by the news that Karol knew about his meeting with Rachel Trehaine, and even more startled by the blond man’s seeming assumption that he had produced the note himself—but he took due note of the fact that Karol knew more about what was going on than his professed indifference had suggested. Was it possible, he wondered, that Karol and Eveline were trying to protect him? Were they refusing to talk to him because they were trying to keep him out of this weird affair? Karol had never been entirely at ease with him, so it was difficult for Damon to judge whether the blond man was any more unsettled than usual, but there was something about his manner which smacked of uncomfortable dishonesty.
I must be careful of seeing what I want to see, Damon thought. I must be careful of wanting to find a juicy mystery, or evidence that my paternal idol had feet of tawdry clay.
“Has Ahasuerus contacted you about the note?” he asked. “You weren’t named in it—only Eveline.”
“Eveline and I don’t have any secrets from one another.”
Damon wondered whether that meant that Ahasuerus had contacted Eveline and that Eveline had contacted Karol. “Don’t you feel the same way about Eveline as you do about Silas?” he asked. “Isn’t she just someone you worked with for so long that habit has bound up every last vestige of feeling? Why shouldn’t you have secrets from one another?”
“I’m still working with her,” Karol replied, again choosing to evade the real question.
“Not directly. She’s off-planet, in L-Five.”
“Modern communications make it easy enough to work