Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [72]
The viewpoint swung around to bring Eveline Hywood’s face into embarrassingly intimate focus. “It’s the privilege of gods to move in mysterious ways,” she said laconically. “Let’s not tie ourselves down with self-administered commandments that we’ll surely have occasion to break and break again.”
Conrad Helier’s disciples had, in fact, bound themselves with edicts and promises—and had kept them, after a fashion. Silas believed that he had kept them better than most, in spite of the heresies which had crept upon his mind and condemned him, in the end, to confusion. He had kept almost all his promises, if only in order to ensure that whatever else he lost, he would have clean hands.
Now he was looking out at the factory again, at the robot butchers working clinically, tirelessly, and altruistically for the greater good of ambitious humankind. He presumed that the image was meant to be symbolic, but he refused to try to figure out exactly what it was symbolic of, and why it had been laid before him now.
The robot butchers tirelessly plied their gleaming instruments for a few seconds more, and then dissolved into a vision of cars racing through city streets, speeded up until they were little more than colored blurs, racing ceaselessly past.
But it is true, he reflected, that some of those of us who are left over from the old world remain anchored to that world by our habits of mind. Some of the old haven’t yet become accustomed to the new outlook, and perhaps I’m one of them—but we can’t be expected to shed the superficialities of our heritage as easily as a snake sheds its skin. We do evolve—but we can’t do it overnight. Conrad would have understood that. Whoever is using his face must be younger than Conrad, and younger than me—but not as young as Damon. He surely belongs to the new old, not to the true old.
The scene changed again; this time it was an episode of some popular soap opera, but the characters were mercifully silent. As they exchanged insults and bared their overwrought souls they were rendered impotent and absurd by silence. A girl slapped a man across the face; without the sound track there was no telling why, but the blow wasn’t halfhearted. These days, blows rarely were. Nobody pulled their punches for fear of hurting people, because everybody knew that people couldn’t be hurt—even “primitives” had some degree of artificial insulation from actual bodily harm. Hardly anyone went entirely unaugmented in the world, and the prevailing view was that if they wanted to do so, they had to accept the risks.
All the old inhibitions were dying, Silas reminded himself, in an appropriately grim fashion. A radically different spectrum of dos and don’ts was establishing itself in the cities of what would soon be the twenty-third century.
Silas’s head, isolated within its own private pocket universe, took off from the cape, mounted atop a huge sleek rocket. His eyes were looking up into the deepening sky, and the sound which filled his ears was a vast, angry, undeniable roar of pure power, pure might.
It went on, and on, and on. . . .
In the end, Silas couldn’t help but call out to his tormentors, to beg them to answer his questions, even to lecture him like a recalcitrant schoolboy if they felt the need. He knew as he did it that he was proving them right, demonstrating that the limits of his freedom extended far beyond the straps binding him to his ignominy, but he no longer cared. He wanted and needed to know what they were doing to him, and why, and how long it would last.
He wanted, and needed, to understand, no matter what price he had to pay in patience and humility and craven politeness.
Sixteen
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