Inherit the Earth Read online

  Several seconds dragged by while he wondered whether it was worth running to his study, where the house’s main workstation was, but when he emerged from the cupboard he didn’t head in that direction. Instead, he stood where he was, watching the door at the end of the hallway. It was obvious that his links with the outside world had been severed, and that the door in question was the only security left to him. He wondered whether the threat might be to her rather than to himself, feeling a pang of bitter resentment because a near perfect day was about to be ruined at the eleventh hour—but that was just a desperate attempt to pretend that the danger wasn’t his danger.

  The simple truth was that his communication systems were very nearly the best that money could buy, and that someone had nevertheless overridden them with ridiculous ease. Whatever reason they had, it couldn’t be trivial.

  When the door burst in, Silas couldn’t quite believe his eyes. In spite of the failure of his artificial eyes and voice he had not believed that his locks could be so easily broken—but when he saw the human figures come through, wearing black clothes and black masks, the outer layers of his patiently accreted, ultracivilized psyche seemed to peel away. He knew that he had to fight, and he thanked providence that he still knew how. In his innermost self, he was still primitive, even feral. He had no weapon, and he could see the foremost of the invaders had some kind of snub-nosed pistol in his hand, but he knew that he had to go forward and not back.

  His rush seemed to take the intruder by surprise; the man’s eyes were still slightly dazzled by the bright light. Silas lashed out with his foot at the hand which held the gun, and felt his slippered toes make painful connection—but the pain was immediately controlled by his internal technology.

  The gun flew away. It was the unexpectedness of the assault rather than its force that had jolted it free, but the effect was the same. Silas was already bringing his flattened hand around in a fast arc, aiming for the man’s black-clad throat—but the intruder had evidently been trained in that kind of fighting, and was more recently practiced in its skills. The blow was brutally blocked and Silas felt unexpectedly fiery pain shoot along his forearm; it was controlled, but not before he had flinched reflexively and left himself open to attack.

  His hesitation probably made no difference; there would have been no time for a riposte and no effective blow he could have dealt. There were three intruders coming at him now, and they hurled themselves upon him with inelegant but deadly effect. He flailed his arms desperately, but there was no way he could keep them all at bay.

  With his arms still threshing uselessly, Silas was thrown back and knocked down. His head crashed against the wall and the pain was renewed yet again. The pain was almost instantly contained and constrained, but it could only be dulled. Merely deadening its fury could not free his mind to react in artful or effective fashion. There was, in any case, no action he could take that might have saved him. He was outnumbered, and not by fools or frightened children.

  One of the intruders bent to pick up the fallen gun, and he began firing even as he plucked it from the floor. Silas felt a trio of needles spear into the muscles of his breast, not far beneath the shoulder. There was no pain at all now, but he knew that whatever poison the darts bore must have been designed to resist the best efforts of his internal technology. These people had come equipped to fight, and their equipment was the best. He knew that their motives must be similarly sophisticated and correspondingly sinister.

  It was not until the missiles had struck him and burrowed into his efficiently armored but still-frail flesh, that Silas Arnett called to mind the deadliest and most fearful word in his vocabulary: Eliminators! Even as the word sprang to mind, though—while he still lashed out impotently against the three men who no longer had to struggle to subdue him—he could not accept its implications.

  I have not been named! he cried silently. They have no reason! But whoever had come to his house, so cleverly evading its defenses, clearly had motive enough, whether they had reason enough or not.

  While his internal defenses struggled unsuccessfully to cope with the drug which robbed him of consciousness, Silas could not evade the dreadful fear that death—savage, capricious, reasonless death—had found him before he was ready to be found.

  Two

  D

  amon Hart had never found it easy to get three boxes of groceries from the trunk of his car to his thirteenth-floor apartment. It was a logistical problem with no simple solution, given that his parking slot and his apartment door were both so far away from the elevator. Some day, he supposed, he would have to invest in a collapsible electric cart which would follow him around like a faithful dog. For the moment, though, such a purchase still seemed like another step in the long march to conformism—perhaps the one which would finally seal his fate and put an end to the last vestiges of his reputation as a rebel. How could a man who owned a robot shopping trolley possibly claim to be anything other than a solid citizen of the New Utopia?

  In the absence of such aid Damon had no alternative but to jam the elevator door open while he transferred the boxes one by one from the trunk of the car. By the time he got the third one in, the elevator was reciting its standard lecture on building policy and civic duty. While the elevator climbed up to his floor he was obliged to listen to an exhaustive account of his domestic misdemeanors, even though he hadn’t yet clocked up the requisite number of demerits to be summoned before the leasing council for a token reprimand. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to ride all the way on his own; two middle-aged women with plastic faces and brightly colored suitskins got in at the third and traveled up to the tenth, doubtless visiting another of their ubiquitous kind. They pretended to ignore the elevator, but Damon knew that they were drinking in every word. He had never been introduced to either one of them and had no idea what their names might be, but they probably knew everything there was to know about him except his real name. He was the building’s only ex-streetfighter; in spite of their youth—and partly because of it—he and Diana had more real misdemeanors credited to their law accounts than all the remaining inhabitants of their floor.

  He managed to get all three boxes out of the elevator without actually jamming the door, but he had to leave two behind while he carried the third to the door of his apartment. He set it down, ringing his own doorbell as he turned away to fetch the second. When he came back with the second box, however, he found that his ring had gone unanswered. The first box was still outside. Given the number of spy eyes set discreetly into the corridor walls there was no way anyone would take the risk of stealing any of its contents, but its continued presence was an annoyance nevertheless. When Damon had placed the second box beside the first he fished out his key and opened the door himself, poking his head inside with the intention of calling for assistance.

  He closed his mouth abruptly when the blade of a carving knife slammed into the doorjamb, not ten centimeters away from his ducking head. The blade stuck there, quivering.

  “You bastard!” Diana said, rushing forward to meet him from the direction of his edit suite.

  It didn’t take much imagination to figure out what had offended her so deeply. The reason she hadn’t answered the doorbell was that she’d been too deeply engrossed in VE—in the VE that he’d been in the process of redesigning when concentration overload had started his head aching. Damon realized belatedly that he ought to have tidied the work away properly, concealing it behind some gnomic password.

  “It’s not a final cut,” he told her, raising his arms with the palms flat in a placatory gesture. “It’s just a first draft. It won’t be you in the finished product—it won’t be anything like you.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Diana retorted, her voice still taut with pent-up anger. “First draft, final cut—I don’t give a damn about that. It’s the principle of the thing. It’s sick, Damon.”

  Damon knew that it might add further fuel to her wrath, but he deliberately turned his back on her and went back
into the corridor. He hesitated over the possibility of picking up one of the boxes of groceries he’d already brought to the threshold, but he figured that he needed time to think. He walked all the way back to the elevator, taking his time.

  This is it, he thought, as he picked up the third box. This is really it. If she hasn’t had enough, I have.

  He couldn’t help but feel that in an ideal world—or even the so-called New Utopia which was currently filling the breach—there ought to be a more civilized way of breaking up, but his relationship with Diana Caisson had always been a combative affair. It had been his combativeness that first attracted her attention, in the days when he had wielded the knives—but he had only done so in the cause of sport, never at the behest of mere rage.

  A great deal had changed since then. He had switched sides; instead of supplying the raw material to be cut, spliced, and subtly augmented into a salable VE product, he was now an engineer and an artist. She had changed too, but the shift in her expectations hadn’t matched the shift in his. With every month that passed she seemed to want more and more from him, whereas he had found himself wanting less and less from her. She had taken that as an insult, as perhaps it was.

  Diana thought that the time he spent building and massaging VEs was a retreat from the world, and from her, which ought to be discouraged for the sake of his sanity. She couldn’t see how anyone could absorb themselves in the painstaking creation of telephone answering tapes and pornypops—and because every stress and strain of their relationship had always become manifest in her explosive anger, she had developed a profound hatred even for the more innocuous products of his labor.

  In the beginning, Diana’s habit of lashing out had added a certain excitement to their passion, but Damon had now reached a stage when the storm and the stress were nothing but a burden—a burden he could do without. He had given up streetfighting; he was an artist now, through and through. He had hoped that Diana would share and assist his adaptation to a new lifestyle and a new philosophy—and he had to give her some credit for trying—but the fact remained that their move into polite society had never really come close to working out. Diana even got steamed up when the elevator took leave to remind her of the small print in the building rules.

  It’s over, Damon told himself again as he picked up the third box of groceries. He was testing himself, to see whether anxiety or relief would rise to the surface of his consciousness.

  Diana was all ready to fight when he came back through the door, but Damon wasn’t about to oblige her. He put the box he’d carried from the elevator on the floor and stepped back to collect another. She knew that he was buying time, but she let him go back for the third without protest. The expression in her blue-gray eyes said that she wasn’t about to calm down, but she hadn’t gone back for another knife, so he had reason to hope that the worst was already over.

  Once the last box was inside the apartment and the door was safely closed behind him, Damon felt that he was ready to face Diana. Fortunately, her tremulous rage was now on the point of dissolving into tears. She had dug her fingernails into her palms so deeply that they had drawn blood, but they were unclenching now. With Diana, violence always shifted abruptly into a masochistic phase; real pain was sometimes the only thing that could blot out the kinds of distress with which her internal technology was not equipped to deal.

  “You don’t want me at all,” she complained. “You don’t want any living partner. You only want my virtual shadow. You want a programmed slave, so you can be absolute master of your paltry sensations. That’s all you’ve ever wanted.”

  “It’s a commission,” Damon told her as soothingly as he could. “It’s not a composition for art’s sake, or for my own gratification. It’s not even technically challenging. It’s just a piece of work. I’m using your body template because it’s the only one I have that’s been programmed into my depository to a suitable level of complexity. Once I’ve got the basic script in place I’ll modify it out of all recognition—every feature, every contour, every dimension. I’m only doing it this way because it’s the easiest way to do it. All I’m doing is constructing a pattern of appearances; it’s not real.”

  “You don’t have any sensitivity at all, do you?” she came back. “To you, the templates you made of me are just something to be used in petty pornography. They’re just something convenient—something that’s not even technically challenging. It wouldn’t make any difference what kind of tape you were making, would it? You’ve got my image worked out to a higher degree of digital definition than any other, so you put it to whatever use you can: if it wasn’t a sex tape it’d be some slimy horror show . . . anything they’d pay you money to do. It really doesn’t matter to you whether you’re making training tapes for surgeons or masturbation aids for freaks, does it?”

  As she spoke she struck out with her fists at various parts of his imaging system: the bland consoles, the blank screens, the lumpen edit suite and—most frequently—the dark helmets whose eyepieces could look out upon an infinite range of imaginary worlds. Her fists didn’t do any damage; everything had been built to last.

  “I can’t turn down commissions,” Damon told her as patiently as he could. “I need connections in the marketplace and I need to be given problems to solve. Yes, I want to do it all: phone links and training tapes, abstracts and dramas, games and repros, pornypops and ads. I want to be master of it all, because if I don’t have all the skills, anything I devise for myself will be tied down by the limits of my own idiosyncrasy.”

  “And templating me was just another exercise? Building me into your machinery was just a way to practice. I’m just raw material.”

  “It’s not you, Di,” he said, wishing that he could make her understand that he really meant it. “It’s not your shadow, certainly not your soul. It’s just an appearance. When I use it in my work I’m not using you.”

  “Oh no?” she said, giving the helmet she’d been using one last smack with the white knuckles of her right hand. “When you put your suit of armor on and stick your head into one of those black holes, you leave this world way behind. When you’re there—and you sure as hell aren’t here very often—the only contact you have with me is with my appearance, and what you do to that appearance is what you do to me. When you put my image through the kind of motions you’re incorporating into that sleazy fantasy it’s me you’re doing it to, and no one else.”

  “When it’s finished,” Damon said doggedly, “it won’t look or feel anything like you. Would you rather I paid a copyright fee to reproduce some shareware whore? Would you rather I sealed myself away for hours on end with a set of supersnoopers and a hired model? By your reckoning, that would be another woman, wouldn’t it? Or am I supposed to restrict myself to the design and decoration of cells for VE monasteries?”

  “I’d rather you spent more time with the real me,” she told him. “I’d rather you lived in the actual world instead of devoting yourself to substitutes. I never realized that giving up fighting meant giving up life.”

  “You had no right to put the hood on,” Damon told her coldly. “I can’t work properly if I feel that you’re looking over my shoulder all the time. That’s worse than knowing that I might have to duck whenever I come through the door because you might be waiting for me with a deadly weapon.”

  “It’s only a kitchen knife. At the worst it would have put your eye out.”

  “I can’t afford to take a fortnight off work while I grow a new eye—and I don’t find experiences like that amusing or instructive.”

  “You were always too much of a coward to be a first-rate fighter,” she told him, trying hard to wither him with her scorn. “You switched to the technical side of the business because you couldn’t take the cuts anymore.”

  Damon had never been one of the reckless fighters who threw themselves into the part with all the flamboyance and devil-may-care they could muster, thinking that the tapes would make them look like real heroes. He had always fo
ught to win with the minimum of effort and the minimum of personal injury—and in his opinion, it had always worked to the benefit of the tapes rather than to their detriment. Even the idiots who liked to consume the tapes raw, because it made the fights seem “more real,” had appreciated his efficiency more than the blatant showmanship of his rivals.

  Because most of his opponents hadn’t cared much about skill or sensible self-preservation Damon had won thirty-nine out of his forty-three fights and had remained unbeaten for the last eighteen months of his career. He didn’t consider that to be evidence of stupidity or stubbornness—and he’d switched to fulltime tape doctoring because it was more challenging and more interesting than carving people up, not because he’d gone soft.

  Unfortunately, the new business wasn’t more challenging or more interesting for Diana. Watching a VE designer working inside a hood wasn’t an engaging spectator sport.

  “If you’re hankering after the sound and fury of the streets,” Damon said tiredly, “you know where they are.”

  It wasn’t the first time he’d said it, but it startled her. Her fists unclenched briefly as she absorbed the import of it. She knew him well enough to read his tone of voice. She knew that he meant it, this time.

  “Is that what you want?” she said, to make sure. Her palms were bleeding; he could see both ragged lines of cuts now that she was relaxing.

  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. . . .”