Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [60]
“Where are you taking me?”
Grayson laughed, as if he were taking what pleasure he could in holding on to his petty secrets. “You’ll see soon enough,” he promised.
Damon abandoned the fruitless inquisition for the time being, instructing himself to take more careful stock of his situation.
He could see Maui away to port, and he assumed that if he were seated on the other side of the plane he’d be able to see Lanai as well, but there was nothing directly below but the Pacific. Damon’s knowledge of the local geography was annoyingly vague, but he figured that on their present heading—which seemed to be slightly east of south—they’d be over Kahoolawe at much the same time that they ought to have been coming down at Honolulu. If they kept going twice as long they might eventually hit the west coast of Hawaii. How many other islands there might be to which they might be headed Damon had no idea, but there were probably several tiny ones and the plane was small enough to land on any kind of strip.
He tried to make a list of the possibilities. Who might want him out of the way badly enough to bribe Grayson? Surely not Operator 101, who had sent him a note inviting him to investigate—nor Rachel Trehaine, who presumably thought of him as an irrelevance. There was, of course, another and more obvious possibility. Karol Kachellek had hired the pilot—it was most probable, therefore, that he had decided that Damon ought to be removed from the field of play until the game was over. Grayson might well have been instructed to take Damon to a place of safety, not merely to keep him from harm but also to keep him from asking any more awkward and embarrassing questions.
Damon had to admit that this was not an unattractive hypothesis, insofar as it suggested that no one was intending to flush out his IT and force him to confess that he was an enemy of humankind, but he felt no relief. To the contrary, as soon as he had convinced himself of its likelihood he felt exceedingly annoyed. The fact that his foster father might think that he had the right, and also the responsibility, to do such a thing was a terrible slur on his adulthood and his ability to look after himself.
“Whatever Karol’s paying you,” he shouted to Grayson, “I’ll double it if you take me to Honolulu.”
“Too late, mate,” Grayson shouted back. “I’m on the wrong side of the law now—once you cross the border you have to keep on going. Don’t worry—nobody’s going to hurt you.”
“This is for my own good, is it?”
“We all have to lend one another a helping hand,” Grayson told him, perhaps faking his malicious cheerfulness in order to cover up his anxiety at the thought that he was indeed beyond the bounds of the law. “If things work out with the IT fountain of youth, we could all be neighbors for a long, long time.”
It was difficult to be patient, or even to try, but Damon had no alternative.
It turned out that the journey wasn’t that much longer than it would have been had Grayson actually gone to Honolulu, but the plane eventually passed beyond the southern tip of Lanai and missed Kahoolawe too. The pilot headed for a much smaller and more densely forested island top to the west of Kahoolawe. It was dominated by what appeared to be a single volcanic peak, but Damon wasn’t convinced that it was genuine.
Back in the early twenty-first century the precursors of today’s self-styled continental engineers had enjoyed a honeymoon of fashionability by virtue of the greenhouse effect and the perceived threat of a significant rise in the world’s sea level. When global warming hadn’t produced a new Deluge, even in Shanghai and the South Seas, they’d deflected the results of their research into building artificial islands aimed at the tourist trade. Such islands had initially had to be anchored to subsurface structures by mechanical holdfasts because Leon Gantz’s techniques of biotech cementation hadn’t been around in those days, but anyone who cared to employ gantzers on a sufficiently lavish scale could now make better provision. Building mountains underwater was just as easy as