Inherit the Earth Read online

  BRIAN STABLEFORD

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  INHERIT THE EARTH

  Copyright © 1998 by Brian Stableford

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  A much shorter and substantially different version of this novel entitled “Inherit the Earth” appeared in the July 1995 issue of Analog.

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  Edited by David G. Hartwell

  Designed by Nancy Resnick

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

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  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

  ISBN 978-0-312-86493-4

  First Edition: September 1998

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Jane, and all those who toil in the forge of the will

  Acknowledgments

  I am grateful to Stanley Schmidt, the editor of Analog, for buying the shorter version of this story, thus establishing its ideative seed and its commercial credentials. I am grateful to David Hartwell for suggesting that I rewrite the final section so drastically as to obliterate any lingering similarity to the ending of the earlier version, thus proving my versatility. I should also like to pay my respects to Eric Thacker and Anthony Earnshaw, who provided their illustrated novel Wintersol with a dedication that would otherwise have been ideal for this book: “To the meek, who will only inherit the Earth by forging the Will.”

  One

  S

  ilas Arnett stood on the bedroom balcony, a wineglass in his hand, bathing in the ruddy light of the evening sun. He watched the Pacific breakers tumbling lazily over the shingle strand. The ocean was in slow retreat from the ragged line of wrack that marked the height of the tide. The dark strip of dead weed was punctuated by shards of white plastic, red bottle tops and other packaging materials not yet redeemed by the hungry beach cleaners. They would be long gone by morning—one more small achievement in the great and noble cause of depollution.

  Glimpsing movement from the corner of his eye, Silas looked up into the deepening blue of the sky.

  High above the house a lone wing glider was playing games with the wayward thermals disturbed by the freshening sea breeze. His huge wings were painted in the image of a bird’s, each pinion feather carefully outlined, but the colors were acrylic-bright, brazenly etched in reds and yellows. Now that the gaudier birds of old were being brought back from the temporary mists of extinction mere humans could no longer hope to outdo them in splendor, but no actual bird had ever been as huge as this pretender.

  Silas frowned slightly as he watched the glider swoop and soar. The conditions were too capricious to allow safe stunting, but the soaring man was careless of the danger. Again and again he dived toward the chalky cliff face that loomed above the ledge on which the house was set, only wheeling away at the last possible moment. Silas caught his breath as the glider attempted a loop which no bird had ever been equipped by instinct to perform, then felt a momentary thrill of irritation at the ease with which his admiration had been commanded.

  Nowadays, a careless Icarus would almost certainly survive a fluttering fall from such a height, provided that he had the best internal technology that money could buy. Even the pain would quickly be soothed; its brutal flaring would merely serve as a trigger to unleash the resources of his covert superhumanity. Flirtation with catastrophe was mere sport for the children of the revolution.

  Silas’s sentimental education had taken place in an earlier era, when the spectrum of everyday risks had been very different. His days with Conrad Helier had made him rich, so he now had all the benefits that the best nanotech repairmen could deliver, but his reflexes could not be retrained to trust them absolutely. The bird man was evidently young as well as rich: authentically young. Whatever PicoCon’s multitudinous ads might claim, the difference between the truly young and the allegedly rejuvenated Architects of Destiny was real and profound.

  “Why does the sun look bigger when it’s close to the horizon?”

  Silas had not heard his guest come up behind him; she was barefoot, and her feet made no sound on the thick carpet. He turned to look at her.

  She was wearing nothing but a huge white towel, wrapped twice around her slender frame. The thickness of the towel accentuated her slimness—another product of authentic youth. Nanotech had conquered obesity, but it couldn’t restore the full muscle tone of the subcutaneous tissues; middle age still spread a man’s midriff, if only slightly, and no power on earth could give a man as old as Silas the waist he had possessed a hundred years before.

  Catherine Praill was as young as she looked; she had not yet reached her full maturity, although nothing remained for the processes of nature to do, save to etch the features of her body a little more clearly. The softness of her flesh, its subtle lack of focus, seemed to Arnett to be very beautiful, because it was not an effect of artifice. He was old-fashioned, in every sense of the word, and unrepentant of his tastes. He loved youth, and he loved the last vestiges which still remained to humankind of the natural processes of growth and completion. He had devoted the greater part of his life to the overthrow of nature’s tyranny, but he still felt entitled to his affection for its art.

  “I don’t know,” he said, a little belatedly. “It’s an optical illusion. I can’t explain it.”

  “You don’t know!” There was nothing mocking in her laughter, nothing contrived in her surprise. He was more than a hundred years older than she was; he was supposed to know everything that was known, to understand everything that could be understood. In her innocence, she expected nothing less of him than infinite wisdom and perfect competence. Men of his age were almost rare enough nowadays to be the stuff of legend.

  He bowed his head as if in shame, then took a penitent sip from the wineglass as she looked up into his eyes. She was a full twenty centimeters shorter than he. Either height was becoming unfashionable again or she was exercising a kind of caution rare in the young, born of the awareness that it was far easier to add height than to shed it if and when one decided that it was time for a change.

  “I gave up trying to hold all the world’s wisdom in my head a long time ago,” he told her. “When all the answers are at arm’s length, you don’t need to keep them any closer.” It was a lie, and she knew it. She had grown up with the omniscient Net, and she knew that its everpresence made ignorance more dangerous, not less—but she didn’t contradict him. She only smiled.

  Silas couldn’t decipher her smile. There was more than amusement in it, but he couldn’t read the remainder. He was glad of that small margin of mystery; in almost every other respect, he could read her far better than she read him. To her, he must be a paradox wrapped in an enigma—and that was the reason she was here.

  Women of Cathy’s age, still on the threshold of the society of the finished, were only a little less numerous than men of his antiquity, but that did not make the two of them equal in their exoticism. Silas knew well enough what to expect of Cathy—he had always had women of her kind around him, even in the worst of the plague years—but men of his age were new in the world, and they would continue to establish new precedents until the last of his generation finally passed away. No one knew how long that might take; PicoCon’s new rejuve technologies were almost entirely cosmetic, but the next generation would surely reach more deeply into a man’s essential being.

 
“Perhaps I did know the answer, once,” he told her, not knowing or caring whether it might be true. “Fortunately, a man’s memory gets better and better with age, becoming utterly ruthless in discarding the trivia while taking care to preserve only that which is truly precious.” Pompous old fool! he thought, even as the final phrase slid from his tongue—but he knew that Cathy probably wouldn’t mind, and wouldn’t complain even if she did. To her, this encounter must seem untrivial—perhaps even truly precious, but certainly an experience to be savored and remembered. He was the oldest man she had ever known; it was entirely possible that she would never have intimate knowledge of anyone born before him. It was different for Silas, even though such moments as this still felt fresh and hopeful and intriguing. He had done it all a thousand times before, and no matter how light and lively and curious the stream of his consciousness remained while the affair was in progress, it would only be precious while it lasted.

  Silas wondered whether Cathy would be disappointed if she knew how he felt. Perhaps she wanted to find him utterly sober, weighed down by ennui—and thus, perhaps, even more worthy of her awe and respect than he truly was.

  He placed his hand on her shoulder and caressed the contour of her collarbone. Her skin, freshly washed, felt inexpressibly luxurious, and the sensation which stirred him was as sharp—perhaps even as innocent—as it would have been had he never felt its like before.

  A practiced mind was, indeed, exceedingly adept at forgetting; it had wisdom enough not merely to forget the trivial and the insignificant, but also that which was infinitely precious in rediscovery.

  “It must be strange,” she said, insinuating her slender and naked arm around his waist, “to look out on the sea and the sky with eyes that know them so well. There’s so much in the world that’s unfamiliar to me I can’t begin to imagine what it would be like to recognize everything, to be completely at home.” She was teasing him, requiring that he feed her awe and consolidate her achievement in allowing herself to be seduced.

  “That’s not what it’s like,” he said dutifully. “If the world stayed the same, it might be more homely; but one of the follies of authentic youth is the inability to grasp how quickly, and how much, everything changes—even the sea and the sky. The line left behind by the tide changes with the flotsam; even the clouds sailing serenely across the sky change with the climate and the composition of the air. The world I knew when I was young is long gone, and depollution will never bring it back. I’ve lived through half a hundred worlds, each one as alarming and as alien as the last. I don’t doubt that a dozen more lie in ambush, waiting to astonish me if I stay the course for a few further decades.”

  He felt a slight tremor pass through her and wondered whether it was occasioned by a sudden gust of cool wind or by the thrust of her eager imagination. She had known no other world than the one into which recently acquired maturity had delivered her, but she must have had images in her mind of the various phases of the Crisis. It was all caught in the Net, if only as an infinite jumble of glimpses. Today’s world was still haunted by the one which had gone madly to its destruction—the one which Silas Arnett had helped to save.

  She smiled at him again, as innocently as a newly hatched sphinx.

  It’s not my wisdom which makes me attractive to her, Silas thought. She sees me as something primitive, perhaps feral. I was born of woman, and there was a full measure of effort and pain in my delivery. I grew to the age she is now without the least ability to control my own pain, under the ever present threat of injury, disease, and death. There’s something of the animal about me still.

  He knew that he was melodramatizing for the sake of a little extra excitement, but it was true nevertheless. When Silas had been in his teens there had been more than ten billion people in the world, all naturally born, all naked to the slings and arrows of outrage and misfortune. Avid forces of destruction had claimed all but a handful, and his own survival had to be reckoned a virtual miracle. When Catherine Praill came to celebrate her hundred-and-twentieth birthday, by contrast, nine out of ten of her contemporaries would still be alive. Her survival to that age was virtually assured, provided that she did not elect to waste herself in submission to extravagant and extraordinary risks.

  Silas looked up briefly, but the bird man was out of sight now, eclipsed by the green rim of the cliff. He imagined Catherine costumed with brightly colored wings, soaring gloriously across the face of the sinking sun—but he preferred her as she was now, soft and fresh and unclothed.

  “Let’s go inside,” he said, meaning Let’s make love while the sunlight lasts, while we can revel in the fleeting changes of the colored radiance.

  “Might as well,” she said, meaning Yes, let’s do exactly that.

  Sexual intercourse never left Arnett deflated or disappointed. It never had, so far as he could remember. It might have done, sometimes, when he was authentically young, but in the fullness of his maturity lovemaking always left him with a glow of profound satisfaction and easeful accomplishment. He knew that this seeming triumph probably had as much to do with the gradual adjustment of his expectations as with the honing of his skills but he did not feel in the least diminished by that hint of cynicism. He believed with all sincerity that he knew the true value of everything he had—and his expert memory had scrupulously erased most of the prices he had been forced to pay by way of its acquisition.

  Cathy had drifted into a light sleep almost as soon as they had finished, and when her sleep had deepened Arnett was able to disentangle his limbs from hers without disturbing her. He helped the half-reflexive movements which eased her into a more comfortable position, and then he slowly withdrew himself from the bed. Naked, he went back to the open window and on to the balcony.

  The sun had set and the wing glider was long gone. Arnett relaxed into the luxury of being unobserved. He put a high value on that privilege, as anyone would who had grown to maturity in a world teeming with people, where the friction of social intercourse had only just begun to be eased by access to the infinite landscapes of virtual reality.

  He had chosen the house in which he lived precisely because it was hidden from all its neighbors by the contours of the cliff. The house was not large, and far from fashionable—it was all above ground, its walls as white as the chalkiest aspects of the cliff face, its angles stubbornly square, its windows unrepentant panes of plain glass—but that was exactly why he liked it. It did not blend in with its surroundings; its roots and all its other quasi living systems were hidden away in closets and conduits. It was, after its own fashion, every bit as old-fashioned as he was, although it was no more than twenty years old—almost as young as Catherine Praill.

  Silas wondered whether Cathy would quickly drift away now that she had “collected” him, or whether she would attempt to maintain their friendship, seeking further amusement and further enlightenment in the patient acquaintance of one of the oldest men in the world. He didn’t want her to drift away. He wanted her to stay, or at least to return again and again and again—not because her slowly evaporating youth was such a rare commodity, but because he had long ago learned to appreciate constancy and to expand his pleasures to fit the time and space that were available for their support.

  A movement caught his eye: something which emerged very briefly from the gathering shadows at the foot of the cliff face and then faded back into obscurity.

  He was not immediately anxious, even though he guessed that it must be a human being who had descended unannounced into his haven of privacy—but he stepped back from the balcony and went to dress himself.

  The bedroom was dark by now, but he had no difficulty finding what he needed. He pulled on the various elements of his suitskin. Their seams reacted to his body heat, joining up with smooth efficiency as if they were eager to begin their cleansing work. He stepped into a pair of slippers, no stronger or more massive than was necessary to protect the suitskin’s soles in an indoor environment.

  Silas didn’t switc
h on the landing light until the door was safely closed behind him. He didn’t want to wake the girl from what he hoped were pleasant dreams. He went swiftly down to the hallway and stepped into the tiny room beneath the staircase. He activated the house’s night eyes, bringing a dozen different images to the bank of screens mounted on the wall. He picked up the VE hood, which would give him a far clearer view once he had selected the right pair of artificial eyes—but there was no way to make the choice.

  The foot of the cliff, limned in red, was stubbornly bare. The shadows in which he had glimpsed movement were empty now.

  One of the screens blanked out, and then another.

  That did alarm him; in the circumstances, he couldn’t believe that it was a mere malfunction. He lifted the VE hood, but he still had no idea which connection he should make—and if the screens were going down, the hood would be just as useless as they were. Someone was blinding the house’s eyes, and must have come equipped to do it—but why? He had no enemies, so far as he knew, and the rewards of burglary had long ago sunk to the level which made the risk unacceptable to anyone but a fool. The quaint outward appearance of the house might, he supposed, have indicated to juvenile vandals that it was poorly protected, but he couldn’t imagine anyone scaling the cliff face in the dark merely to do a little gratuitous damage.

  He watched, helplessly, as the screens went out. When six more of the night eyes had been blinded without his catching the briefest glimpse of a hand or a face, he knew that it was not the work of children or foolish thieves. He became afraid—and realized as he did so how strange and unfamiliar fear had become.

  A rapid dance of his fingertips sealed all the locks that were not routinely engaged, activated all the house’s security systems and notified the police that a crime might be in progress. That, at least, was what his instructions should have accomplished—but the confirmatory call which should have come from the police didn’t arrive; the telephone screen remained ominously inactive. He knew that there was no point in putting the VE hood over his head and he lowered it onto its cradle.