Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [84]
“None of this makes sense,” Damon complained. “None of it was necessary. You’re just playing games.”
“Perhaps we are,” the mirror man admitted, “but we aren’t the only ones. Your father started this, Damon—our moves have been made in response to his, and he’s still responding to ours. He should have come to the conference table the night we took Silas Arnett hostage, but he called our bluff. I suppose you realize that the second tape of his supposed confessions was theirs, not ours? It was a move we hadn’t anticipated—a sacrifice we thought he wouldn’t be prepared to make. We didn’t anticipate that Karol Kachellek would send you off to the island either, but that may have worked out to our advantage. Naming you was a rather crude response, but the Operator one-oh-one pseudonym was about to become useless and it seemed politic to increase the general confusion. We’re suitably impressed by your father’s initiative and his fighting spirit, but it doesn’t alter the situation. He shouldn’t try to keep us out. He mustn’t try to keep us out, Damon. It’s not that we want to stop what he’s doing—but we can’t let him do it alone. The world has changed, Damon. We can’t tolerate loose cannons. The day of little conspiracies, like your father’s and Adam Zimmerman’s, is long gone. Now they have to submit to the same discipline as the rest of us.”
“I don’t have the least idea what you’re talking about,” Damon said, “and I still believe that Conrad Helier’s been dead for nearly fifty years.” The latter statement was a straightforward stalling move, intended to slow things down while he tried to fathom the implications of what the mirror man was saying.
“We have confidence in your ability to figure it out,” the apparition told him. “We also have confidence in your ability to see reason. You’re fully entitled to resent the way we’ve used you, but we hope that you might be prepared to forgive us.”
“I’m not the forgiving type,” Damon retorted, although he knew that it wasn’t the diplomatic thing to say.
The mirror man ignored the futile threat. “What do you think of the quality of the VE?” he asked.
“It’s forced me to revise my estimate of what can and can’t be done,” Damon admitted. “I didn’t think any kind of bodysuit would ever get this close to reproducing the minutiae of tactile experience. It makes the kind of work I do seem rather childish.”
“It’s next-generation technology. Now that you know it can be done, can you guess how?”
“Not exactly. I suppose it has to be done with some kind of new nanotech, using a synthesuit that’s even thinner than a suit-skin.”
“It’s an interesting idea, but it’s headed in the wrong direction. You’re not in any kind of bodysuit. You’re lying down on a perfectly ordinary bed, fast asleep. This is a lucid dream.”
Damon quelled a reflexive response to deny the possibility. He knew that research into the mechanisms of dreaming had been going on for more than a hundred years, attended all the while by speculations about taped dreams that would one day be bought off the supermarket shelf just like VE paks, but he’d always believed the sceptics who said that such speculations were unreasonably wild, and that the plausibility of the notion was just an accountable illusion, like the plausibility of telepathy. “You’re right about one thing,” he said drily. “If you can do that, I ought to be able to work out who you are. There can’t be more than a handful of research teams who’ve got within a light-year of that kind of device.”
“It’s all done by IT,” the mercury man told him equably. “It’s easy enough to operate the switch in the hypothalamus which prevents instructions to the motor nerves generated in dreams getting through to the body, while preserving