Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [9]
Damon toyed with the possibility of parrying the question. It’s what you want, he could have said—but it would have been less than honest and less than brave.
“I can’t take it anymore,” he told her frankly. “It’s run its course.”
“You think you don’t need me anymore, don’t you?” she said, trying to pretend that she had reason to believe that he was wrong in that estimation. When she saw that he wasn’t going to protest, her shoulders slumped—but only slightly. She had courage too, and pride. “Perhaps you’re right,” she sneered. “All you ever wanted of me is in that template. As long as you have my appearance programmed into your private world of ghosts and shadows you can do anything you like with me, without ever having to worry whether I’ll step out of line. You’d rather live with a virtual image than a real flesh-and-blood person, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t even take that helmet off to eat and drink if you didn’t have to. If you had any idea how much you’ve changed since. . . .”
The charges were probably truer than she thought, but Damon didn’t see any need to be ashamed of the changes he’d made. The whole point about the world inside a VE hood, backed up by the full panoply of smartsuit-induced tactile sensation, was that it was better than the real world: brighter, cleaner, and more controllable. Earth wasn’t hell anymore, thanks to the New Reproductive System and the wonders of internal technology, but it wasn’t heaven either, in spite of the claims and delusions of the New Utopians. Heaven was something a man could only hope to find on the other side of experience, in the virtuous world of virtual imagery.
The brutal truth of the matter, Damon thought, was that everything of Diana Caisson that he actually needed really was programmed into her template. The absence from his life of her changeable, complaining, untrustworthy, knife-throwing, flesh-and-blood self wouldn’t leave a yawning gap. Once, it might have done—but not anymore. She had begun to irritate him as much as he irritated her, and he hadn’t her gift of translating irritation into erotic stimulation.
“You’re right,” he told her, trying to make it sound as if he were admitting defeat. “I’ve changed. So have you. That’s okay. We’re authentically young; we’re supposed to change. We’re supposed to become different people, to try out all the personalities of which we’re capable. The time for constancy is a long way ahead of us yet.”
He wondered, as he said it, whether it was true. Were his newly perfected habits merely a phase in an evolutionary process rather than a permanent capitulation to the demands of social conformity? Was he just taking a rest from the kind of hyped-up sensation-seeking existence he’d led while he was running with Madoc Tamlin’s gang, rather than turning into one of the meek whose alleged destiny was to inherit the earth? Time would doubtless tell.
“I want the templates back,” Diana said sharply. “All of them. I’m going, and I’m taking my virtual shadow with me.”
“You can’t do that,” Damon retorted, knowing that he had to put on the appearance of a fight before he eventually gave in, lest it be too obvious that all he had to do was remold her simulacrum by working back from the modified echoes which he had built into half a dozen different commercial tapes of various kinds. While he only required her image, he could always get her back.
“I’m doing it,” she told him firmly. “You’re going to have to start that slimy sideshow from scratch, whether you pay for a ready-made template or rent some whore who’ll let you build a new one on your own.”
“If I’d known that it had come to this,” he said with calculated provocativeness, “I wouldn’t have had to struggle upstairs with three boxes of groceries.”
From there, it was only a few more steps to a renewal of the armed struggle, but Damon managed to keep the carving knife out of it. His aim—as always—was to win with the minimum of fuss. He made her work hard to dispel her bad feeling in pain and physical stress, but she got there in the end, without having to