Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [47]
“You’ve had seventy years to surrender yourself to judgment by another court,” said the judge sourly. “This court is the one which has found the means to bring you to trial; it is the one which will judge you now. You will be given every opportunity to enter a defense before sentence is passed upon you.”
“I refuse to pander to your delusions. I’ve nothing to say.” Damon found it easy enough to believe that it was Silas Arnett speaking; the crudely drawn figure had his attitude as well as his voice.
“Our investigations will be scrupulous nevertheless,” the judge said. “They must be, given that the charges, if true, require sentence of death to be passed upon you.”
“You have no right to do that!”
“On the contrary. We hold that what society bestows upon the individual, through the medium of technology, society has every right to withdraw from those who betray their obligations to the commonweal. This court intends to investigate the charges laid against you as fully as it can, and when they are proven it will invite any and all interested parties to pursue those who ought to be standing beside you in the dock. None will escape, no matter what lengths they may have gone to in the hope of evading judgment. There is no station of civilization distant enough, no hiding place buried deeply enough, no deception clever enough, to place a suspect beyond our reach.”
What’s that supposed to mean? Damon wondered. Where do they think Conrad Helier is, if he’s still alive? Living under the farside of the moon? Or are they talking about Eveline? Are there Eliminators in the Lagrange colonies too?
“The people you’ve named are entirely innocent of any crime,” Arnett said anxiously. “You’re insane if you think otherwise.”
Damon tried to judge from the timbre of the voice the extent to which Silas’s pain-control system might have been dismantled. So far, he gave no real indication of having been forced to suffer dire distress. If there were indeed a reality behind this charade Silas Arnett’s body must by now be an empire at war, and he must be feeling all the violence of the conflict. The tireless molecular agents which benignly regulated the cellular commerce of his emortality must have gone down beneath the onslaught of custom-designed assassins: Eliminators in miniature, which had exterminated his careful symbiotes and left their detritus to be flushed out by his kidneys. Even if Silas had not yet been subjected to actual torture he must have felt the returning grip of his own mortality, and the deadly cargo of terror which came with it. Had the terror been carefully expurgated from his voice—or was all this mere sham?
The picture dissolved and was replaced by an image of Conrad Helier, which Damon immediately recognized as a famous section of archive footage.
“We must regard this new plague not as a catastrophe but as a challenge,” Helier stated in ringing tones. “It is not, as the Gaian Mystics would have us believe, the vengeance of Mother Earth upon her rapists and polluters, and no matter how fast and how far it spreads it cannot and will not destroy the species. Its advent requires a monumental effort from us, but we are capable of making that effort. We have, at least in their early stages, technologies which are capable of rendering us immune to aging, and we are rapidly developing technologies which will allow us to achieve in the laboratory what fewer and fewer women are capable of doing outside it: conceive and bear children. Within twenty or thirty years we will have what our ancestors never achieved: democratic control over human fertility, based in a new reproductive system. We have been forced to this pass by evil circumstance, but let us not undervalue it; it is a crucial step forward in the evolution of the species, without which the gifts of longevity and perpetual youth might have proved a double-edged sword. . . .”
The speech