Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [58]
“Wouldn’t be tolerated in Los Angeles,” Damon agreed, with a slight smile. “If the city couldn’t take care of it immediately the corps would race one another to get a man out there. OmicronA would be determined to win, in order to demonstrate that Pico-Con’s ownership of the patents is merely an economic technicality. The staff in the California offices pride themselves on being hands-on people, always willing to get involved in local issues.”
“I bet they do,” Karol muttered tersely. “Nanotech hands by the trillion, at work in every last nook and cranny of the great showcase of the global village—it’s different here, of course. No Silicon Valley-type monuments to the Third Industrial Revolution, no social cachet. We’re still the backwoods—the kind of wilderness that isn’t even photogenic. Nobody gives a damn about what happens out here, especially the people who live here.”
“You live here,” Damon pointed out. He refrained from adding an observation to the effect that Karol could have packed his own bucket and spade, pausing to repair the potholes on his way back to the lab. After all, Karol was very busy just now.
“Here and hereabouts,” Karol admitted grimly.
Damon relented slightly. “Actually,” he said, “the corps are selectively blind even on their own doorstep. Until the deconstructionists move into the LA badlands in earnest nobody’s going to tidy them up. Filling in a hole downtown counts as an ad—filling one in where the gangs have their playgrounds wouldn’t win a nod of approval from anyone. You know how corpthink goes: no approval, no effort.”
“If only the world were as simple as that,” Karol said sadly. “The real problem is that too many people spend their entire lives sweating blood for the best possible causes and end up being denounced as enemies of mankind.”
That was more like the Karol he knew of old, and Damon was perversely glad to see the real man surfacing again, filling in his psychological potholes with great globs of biotech-cemented mud. Karol wasn’t sweating yet because the sun was too low in the eastern sky, but Damon knew that he’d be sweating by noon—not blood, to be sure, but beads of good, honest toil. Para-DNA had no chance of keeping its secrets, no matter how fervently it clung to the fugitive backwoods of the global village, and no matter how hard it tried to disguise itself as the detritus of a twentieth-century oil spill. Moves like that couldn’t possibly divert the curiosity of a true scientist.
As the jeep lurched onto the lawn beside the strip a flock of brightly colored birds grudgingly flew away, mewling their objections. Damon couldn’t put a name to the species but he had no doubt that Karol could have enlightened him had he cared to ask.
The two of them said their good-byes brusquely, as if to make sure that they both understood that their mutual mistrust had been fully restored, but there was a manifest awkwardness in their lack of warmth. Damon suspected that if he’d only known exactly what to say, he might have made a better beginning of the process of reconciliation, but he wasn’t certain that he wanted to try. Karol might be showing belated signs of quasi-parental affection, but he hadn’t actually told Damon anything significant. Whatever suspicions Karol had about the identity and motives of Silas Arnett’s kidnappers he was keeping to himself.
Damon would rather have sat up front in the cockpit of the plane, but he wasn’t given the choice. He was ushered into one of the eight passenger seats by the pilot, who introduced himself as Steve Grayson. Grayson was a stocky man with graying temples and a broad Australian accent. Maybe he thought the gray made him look more dignified, or maybe it was a joke reflecting his surname; at any rate, he was certainly no centenarian and he could have had his hair color reunified without recourse to the new