Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [77]
“The empire of nature ended with the development of language,” the fake Arnett replied. “Ever since then, human beings have been the product of their technology. All talk of human nature is misguided romantic claptrap. The history of human progress has been the history of our transcendence and suppression of the last vestiges of instinctive behavior. If there was any maternal instinct left in 2070, its annihilation was a thoroughly good thing. To blame any present unhappiness or violence on the loss or frustration of any kind of genetic heritage is both stupid and ridiculous.”
There was an obvious cut at this point. The next thing Arnett’s image said was: “Who told you about all this? It can’t have been Karol or Eveline. Somebody must have put the pieces together—somebody with expert knowledge and a cunning turn of mind. Who?”
“That’s of no importance,” the other voice said. “There’s only one more matter which needs to be determined, and that’s the identity which Conrad Helier adopted after faking his death. We have reason to believe that he reappeared in the world after an interval of some twenty-five years, having undergone extensive reconstructive somatic engineering. We have reason to believe that he now uses the name Damon Hart. Is that true, Dr. Arnett?”
“Yes,” said the voice which sounded like Arnett’s, ringing false because his head was bowed and his lips hardly moved. “The person who calls himself Damon Hart is really Conrad Helier. It’s true.”
The tape ended there.
“I wonder how many other installments there are to come,” Damon said.
Singh’s lips moved as if he intended to reply, but he choked off the sound of the first syllable as his ears caught another sound, faint and distant.
Damon cocked his own ear, straining to catch and identify the sound. “Helicopters,” he said, when he had leaped to that conclusion. Singh, who was evidently a more cautious man than he, had not yet made the same leap—but when Damon said it he was ready to believe it.
“We have to go down,” Singh said. “There’s no time to lose!”
“They’re only little helicopters,” Damon said, using expertise gained from hours spent watching sportsmen whizz over the beaches of California. “The kind you can fold up and store away in the back of a van. They must be local—they wouldn’t have the range to get here from Lanai.” Instead of obeying Rajuder Singh’s urgent request to go to the elevator he moved toward the window that looked out in the direction from which the noise was coming.
“It doesn’t matter how small they are,” Singh complained, becoming increasingly agitated. “What matters is that they’re not ours. I don’t know how they got here, but they’re not here on any kind of routine business—and if they’re after somebody, it has to be you.”
Seventeen
D
amon knew, deep down, that he ought to do as Rajuder Singh said. The sensible thing to do was to move to the elevator and let it carry him down to the hidey-hole beneath the fake volcano, not merely because that was the way that safety lay, but also because he might find answers down there to some of his most urgent questions. He also knew, however, that Karol Kachellek’s estimation of his reflexive perversity had a good deal of truth in it. Obedience had never been his strong suit.
“There’s plenty of time,” he said to Rajuder Singh, although he knew that there wasn’t.
He peered out of the window, looking up at the crowns of the trees that fringed the flower garden. The thick foliage blocked out the greater part of the sky and anything that might be flying there—but not for long.
When the first tiny helicopter finally came into view, zooming over the topmost branches of the nearest trees, Damon’s first reaction was to relax. The machine wasn’t big enough to carry human passengers, or even a human pilot. The