Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [88]
“I don’t know anything at all,” Catherine Praill repeated, her voice increasing its note of alarm. “I don’t understand why they brought me here. Are they holding us to ransom?”
She pronounced the word as if the possibility were almost unthinkable—a revenant crime from a more primitive world. Was it unthinkable, though? Was anything unthinkable now? In a world where every child had eight or ten parents, might not the potential rewards of kidnapping-for-cash come to outweigh the risks, especially given the awesome powers which these kidnappers seemed to possess?
“I don’t think so,” Damon told her. “It wouldn’t make much sense. But then—I don’t know anything either. It’s not for lack of information—I simply can’t separate the truth from the lies. I don’t know what to believe.”
“My foster parents will be worried. I didn’t have anything to do with Silas being kidnapped. The men from Interpol seemed to think that I did, but I didn’t. I would have helped them if I could.”
“It’s okay,” Damon told her. “Whoever brought us here, I don’t think they mean to do us any harm.”
“How do you know?” she demanded. “You said you didn’t know anything.”
“I don’t—but I think they took Silas because they were trying to force two of my other foster parents to abandon some plan they’ve cooked up, or at least to let them in on it. They thought that if they could attract enough public attention my foster parents would be intimidated—but my foster parents aren’t the kind to bend with the wind. I can’t figure out who did what, or why, and I can’t trust anything that anyone says to me, but . . . well, it wouldn’t make sense for them to harm us. I think they want me to do something for them, and I suspect that they only took you to add to the confusion.”
“I don’t understand,” said the blond girl, growing more distraught in spite of Damon’s attempt to soothe her fears. “Silas doesn’t have anything to do with his old friends—and I certainly don’t.”
“Nor do I,” Damon said, while he tested the handcuffs to make certain that there was no way of slipping out of them. “Unfortunately, the people who’ve imprisoned us refuse to believe that, of Silas or of me. I really don’t think they have anything against you, though. You just got caught up in it by accident.”
Damon believed what he’d told the girl, but he couldn’t help feeling a slight twinge of doubt as to whether all this was actually happening at all. It could be another VE, similar to the last although far more modest. How could he ever be sure, now, that he’d really woken up? How could he ever know whether there really had been a mirror man and a miraculous new VE technology, or whether it had all been a product of his own fertile imagination?
Even if this were real, he realized as he pursued the discomfiting thought, he might be snatched back into some such VE without a moment’s notice if clever nanomachines really had been implanted in his hindbrain, and if they were still there. In today’s world, it wasn’t only walls and phone links that couldn’t be trusted. How could any man know what kind of burden he was carrying around in the depths of his own being? He was carrying his own cargo of watchful nanomachines, charged with the duty of keeping his flesh free from invaders, but who could stand watch over the watchmen? In PicoCon’s empire, there could be no ultimate security, no ultimate secrecy—and it appeared that PicoCon’s empire was closer to its final conquest than he had ever imagined. What could now stand in its way, save for confusion? In a world where nothing could be sealed away in any kind of vault, everything that was to be hidden had to be hidden in plain view, camouflaged