Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [86]
“What is he doing?” Damon wanted to know.
“I’d rather not be the one to fill you in on the details,” the mirror man told him blithely. “As long as you’re curious, I know you’ll keep niggling away at Kachellek and Hywood. We might need you to do that if our latest moves don’t do the trick. If Helier still won’t come to the conference table we’ll need you to keep nagging away on our behalf until he does.”
“And if I won’t?”
“You won’t be able to help yourself,” the mirror man told him, with insulting confidence. “You can’t kill curiosity—it has nine lives. In any case, your father will have to take you back into the fold. He can’t leave you alone and exposed after all that’s happened. We’ve called attention to you—whatever they believe or don’t believe, the Eliminators are interested in you now. Your worthiness is under examination. We don’t approve of the Eliminators, of course—not officially—but we like the fact that they take things seriously. We like the fact that they raise the important question: who is worthy of immortality? That’s what this is all about, you see. What kind of people ought to inherit the earth, in perpetuity? What kind of people must we become, if we intend to live forever? Eliminator violence is just childish jealousy, of course—but the question remains to be answered. We don’t want to eliminate Conrad Helier, or the Ahasuerus Foundation, but we do want them to understand that if they want to play games they have to play by the rules. If we’re going to live forever, we all have to play as a team.”
Damon had found it so uncomfortable to stare into the apparition’s reflective face that he had spent most of the conversation staring into space or at his own hands, but now he looked directly at the convex mirrors which were the mercurial man’s robotic eyes.
“You don’t seem to me to be much of a team player,” he said. “You seem to me to be trying to play God, just as you’ve accused Conrad Helier of doing. ‘As flies to wanton boys—’ ”
“We haven’t killed anyone,” the mirror man said, cutting him off in midquote. “Like Conrad Helier, we take a certain pride in that. As for playing God—well, there was a time when your father could say ‘If we don’t who will?’ but that time is over. This is Olympus, Damon—the place is positively lousy with would-be gods, and that’s why we all have to work together. That’s what your father has to understand. You have to persuade him that it’s true, if no one else will.”
“I can’t.”
The mirror man dismissed his stubbornness with a casual gesture. He stood up, his movement impossibly fluid and graceful. No real body could have moved like that. “Are you ready to fly?” he asked, implying with his tone that Damon wasn’t.
Damon hesitated, but he stood up without taking the helping hand that the mirror man had extended toward him.
“This is just a VE,” he said. “No matter how clever it is, it’s just a VE. I can step over that ledge, if I want to. No harm can come to me, if I do none to myself.”
“That’s right,” the mirror man told him. “In this world, all your dreams can come true. In this world, you can do anything you have a mind to do.” His hand was still extended, but Damon still refused to take it. Had he done so, it would have been a gesture of forgiveness, and he wasn’t the forgiving type.
Damon remembered the sermon he’d preached to Lenny Garon, about the danger of believing that all injuries could be mended, and the wisdom of not taking too many risks in life lest one miss the escalator to emortality. He didn’t think of himself as a hypocrite, but he knew full well that he hadn’t ever practiced what he’d preached—and he hoped that his long practice would come to his rescue now. He wasn’t about to let the mirror man’s challenge pass unmet, and he wasn’t about to accept the mockpaternal helping hand. If he were to fly, he would fly alone.