Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [92]
“How old is the woman who claims to be the original Operator one-oh-one?” Damon asked curiously.
“She’s a hundred and five now,” Yamanaka told him, “but that’s a side issue. My most urgent concern is the safety of Silas Arnett. Now that those confessions have been released. . . .”
“They were fakes,” Damon told him.
“Painfully obvious fakes,” Yamanaka agreed, “which could easily have been made without Dr. Arnett’s active involvement. That’s what worries me. If his kidnappers didn’t actually need him, but only needed to remove him from the scene, they might have killed him before they removed him from his house. Now that we’ve found Dr. Nahal’s body, there seems to be more than adequate cause for concern.”
“You don’t really think I had anything to do with that, do you?” Damon asked gruffly.
“You commissioned Madoc Tamlin to look for Dr. Nahal.
When the local police discovered Tamlin at the murder scene he attacked them with a crowbar and ran away.”
“I commissioned Madoc to collect some information,” Damon said defensively. “I can’t believe he’d involve himself in a murder—that’s not his style at all. You can’t be serious about holding Diana as an accomplice.”
The man from Interpol wouldn’t confirm or deny his seriousness. Instead, he said: “Dr. Arnett’s supposed confession was an interesting statement, wasn’t it? Food for thought for everyone—and food which will be all the more eagerly swallowed for being dressed up that way.”
“It was rubbish,” Damon said.
“I dare say that Dr. Arnett was correct about the effect the Crash had, however,” Yamanaka went on. “The way he spoke in his second statement about bringing people together was really quite moving. The idea that for the first and only time in human history all humankind was on the same side, united against the danger of extinction, is rather romantic. The world isn’t like that anymore, alas. That’s a pity, don’t you think?”
“Not really,” Damon replied, wondering where this was leading. He knew that the Japanese were supposed to have made a fine art of beating around the bush before coming to the point, but the man from Interpol hadn’t previously shown any particular inclination to circumlocution. “A world devoid of conflicts would be a very tedious place to live.”
“I take your point,” Yamanaka conceded, “but you are a young man, and even I can barely imagine what the world was like before and during the Crash. I wonder, sometimes, how different things might seem to the very old: to men like Rajuder Singh, Surinder Nahal, and Karol Kachellek, and women like Eveline Hywood and the real Operator one-oh-one. They might be rather disappointed in the world they made, and the children they produced from their artificial wombs, don’t you think? They were hoping to produce a utopia, but . . . well, no one could convincingly argue that the meek have inherited the world—at least, not yet.”
Damon didn’t know what the policeman might read into any answer he gave, so he prudently gave none at all.
“Sometimes,” Yamanaka added, in the same offhandedly philosophical tone, “I wonder whether anyone can inherit the world, now that people who owned it all in the days before the Crash believe that they can live forever. I’m not sure that they’ll ever let go of it deliberately . . . and such fighting as they’ll have to do to keep it will be mostly among themselves.”
He thinks he’s figured it out, Damon thought, with a twinge of grudging admiration. He’s asking for my help in finding the evidence. And why shouldn’t I cooperate, if people are actually dying? Why shouldn’t I tell him what I know . . . or what I believe? “My father never owned more than the tiniest slice of the world,” he