Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [94]
“Karol’s error of judgment wasn’t a kidnapping at all,” Damon said. “It was just a domestic misunderstanding. As for the second incident, I was asleep the whole time, from the moment I was gassed until the moment I woke up where Rachel Trehaine found me.”
“Even so, Mr. Hart,” Yamanaka observed, as a parting shot, “you seem to have become extraordinarily accident-prone lately. It might be unwise to trust your luck too far.”
Damon didn’t want to extend the conversation any further. He accepted a ride back to his apartment building, but the uniformed officer who drove the car didn’t attempt to continue the interrogation.
When he’d taken time out to visit the bathroom and order some decent cooked food from the kitchen dispenser, Damon checked his mail. He wasn’t unduly surprised or alarmed to find that there was nothing from Madoc Tamlin, although there were three messages from Diana Caisson, all dispatched from the building he’d just come from. There was nothing from Molokai, but there was, at long last, a curt note from Lagrange-5, saying that Eveline Hywood would be available to take his call after nineteen hundred hours Greenwich Mean Time.
Damon subtracted eight hours and checked the clock, which informed him that he had half an hour still in hand. He double-checked the date to make sure that he had the right one—he’d lost an entire day between the time he’d been snatched from Karol Kachellek’s secret hideaway and the morning he’d been picked up in Venice Beach.
By the time he’d changed and eaten a makeshift meal the half hour was almost up. He decided that he couldn’t be bothered twiddling his thumbs until the hour struck, so he slipped inside his hood.
It would have been typical of Eveline to refuse the call until the appointed hour actually arrived, but she didn’t. It wasn’t an AI sim that answered the phone, but that didn’t mean that the conversation would be eye-to-eye. The image floating in the familiar VE environment was being directly animated by Eveline Hywood, but it still had to be synthesized to edit out the hood she was wearing. Damon knew that Eveline would be giving no secrets away, in what she said or the way she looked, but he still wanted to hear what she had to say.
“Damon,” she said pleasantly. “It’s good to see you. I’ve been very worried about you. Is there any news of Karol or Silas?” Eveline knew perfectly well that if there had been any news it would have been relayed to her instantly, but she was putting on a show of concern. Damon noticed that the last time she had undergone somatic adjustment for her progressive myopia she had had her irises retinted. Her natural eye color was dark brown, but her irises were now lightened almost to orange. Given that the melanin content of her skin had been carefully maintained, the modified eyes gave her stare a curiously feline quality. It was easy enough to believe that she might be the prime mover in whatever plot had caused such intense annoyance to the recently self-appointed overlords of Earth.
“They’re still missing,” Damon confirmed. “I expect they’ll turn up eventually, dead or alive. That’s out of our hands, alas. Do you have any idea what’s going on, Eveline?” He knew that he’d have to wait a little while for her answer; their words and gestures had a quarter of a million miles to traverse. The time delay wasn’t sufficient to cause any real difficulties, and Eveline must be thoroughly accustomed to it, but Damon knew that he would find it disconcerting to begin with. While he waited, he looked at her appraisingly, trying to figure out exactly what kind of person she was. He had never managed to do that while they were living under the same roof.
He wondered why Eveline had designed the VE as a duplicate of her actual environment. Was she underlining the fact that she lived in deep space: the only foreign country left where things had to be done differently? In L-5, even a room decked out as simply as possible had to have