The last scheduled flight from Honolulu was due out at nine. Karol Kachellek—who was an important man on Molokai—had no difficulty at all in requisitioning a light aircraft and a pilot to fly it out of Kaunakakai. Damon wasn’t in the least flattered that his foster-father took the trouble; he could see how keen Kachellek was to see the back of him.

Damon would rather have sat up front in the cockpit of the plane but he wasn’t given the choice. He was ushered into one of the four passenger seats by the pilot, who was a stocky man with greying temples and an Australian accent. Presumably he thought the grey made him look more dignified; he looked to have money enough to have corrected it if he’d wanted to.

“We’ll be up and down in no time at all,” the pilot told him, before taking his own seat. “Might be a little rough in the wind, though—better keep your belt on.”

Damon thought nothing of this instruction to begin with, and he was so deep in thought that ten or twelve minutes had elapsed before he finally took note of the fact that the Sun—which should have been dead ahead of the plane’s course—was way over to starboard.

“Hey!” he called to the pilot. “What’s our course?”

The pilot made no reply. That was when Damon tested his safety-harness and found that it was locked tight. He called out again, demanding to know what was going on, but the pilot wouldn’t even turn around to look at him. He realised, cursing himself for not having done so before, that he was being kidnapped.

Damon’s knowledge of the local geography was vague, but he figured that if they were heading south they’d be over Lanai at much the same time that they ought to have been coming down at Honolulu. How many other islands there might be to which they might be headed he had no idea, but there were probably several, and the plane was small enough to land on any kind of strip.

“Was this Karol’s idea?” he shouted to the pilot? “Or are you working for someone else entirely?”

He wasn’t surprised when there was no reply. He had nothing but his powers of reason to aid him, and he had not enough data to work with. Furious thought merely served to multiply the questions facing him. If Karol Kachellek had instructed the pilot to kidnap him, what motive could he possibly have? Was he trying to hide Damon away, either to keep him from harm or to keep him from asking awkward questions? If the pilot was working under orders from elsewhere, who might be interested in kidnapping him? The people who already held Silas Arnett? If so, why? Did they think he had information which could be used to supplement what they had supposedly winkled out of Silas? Did they intend to force some kind of confession out of him by similar means?

It was difficult to be patient, but in the end there was no alternative. The journey wasn’t significantly longer than it should have been but they overflew Lanai and headed for a much smaller island beyond it, dominated by a single volcanic peak. The plane came down just as the Sun had begun to slide beyond the horizon.

When the pilot came back to release Damon from the trick harness he was carrying a gun: a wide-barreled pepper-box calculated to inflict widespread but superficial injuries. Were it to go off, Damon would lose a lot of blood very quickly, but his nanomachines would be able to seal off the wounds without mortal damage being done.

“No need to worry, Mr. Hart,” the stout man said. “Nobody means to do you harm. You’ll be safe here until carnival’s over.”

“Safe from whom?” Damon asked. “What exactly is the carnival? Who’s doing all this?”

He wasn’t surprised when he received no answers to any of these questions.

The air outside the plane seemed oppressively humid. Damon allowed himself to be guided across the landing-strip to a jeep parked in the shadow of a thick clump of trees. The man waiting in the driving seat was as short as the pilot but much slimmer and—if appearances could be trusted—much older. His skin was the kind of dark coffee colour that most people who lived in tropical regions preferred. He wasn’t carrying a gun.

“I’m sorry about this, Mr. Hart,” he said, “but we weren’t sure that we could persuade you to come here of your own accord. Until we can get to the people who have Arnett, everyone connected with your family is in danger.” To the pilot he said: “You can go now. Take the plane down to Hilo, just in case.”

“Who are you?” Damon demanded.

“Get in, Mr. Hart,” the old man said. “My name, for what it’s worth, is Rajuder Singh. I knew your father and your foster-parents, long ago, but I doubt that any of them ever mentioned my name. Karol Kachellek still keeps in touch.”

“Did Karol arrange this?”

“It’s for your own protection. Please get in, Mr. Hart.”

Damon climbed into the vehicle. The jeep glided into the trees and was soon deep in a ragged forest of thin-boled conifers. The forest was very quiet, after the fashion of artificially-regenerated forests everywhere; the trees, genetically engineered for rapid growth in the unhelpful soil, were not fitted as yet to play host to the rich fauna which ancient natural forests had once entertained. A few tiny insects splashed on the windshield of the jeep as it moved through the gathering night but there was no sound of birdsong. The road was rough and far from straight, but the driver evidently knew it well.

“Did Karol Kachellek instruct the Australian to bring me here?” Damon asked, again.

“Yes he did,” Singh said, blandly. “He had to make a decision in a hurry—he didn’t expect you to come to Molokai. Our people will bring the situation under control in time, but things have moved a little too fast. I’m afraid that you’re in more danger than you know, Mr. Hart—I’ll show you why in a few minutes’ time.”

“Who, exactly, are our people?”

Rajuder Singh smiled. “Friends and allies,” he said, unhelpfully. “Not many of us left, nowadays—but we keep the faith.”

“Conrad Helier’s faith?”

“That’s right, Mr. Hart. You’d be one of us yourself, I dare say, if you hadn’t chosen a different path.”

“Are you saying that there’s some kind of conspiracy involving my foster-parents? Some kind of grand plan in which you and Karol and Eveline are involved?”

“Just a group of friends and co-workers,” the other replied, lightly. “No more than that—but someone seems to be attacking us, and we have to look after our own.”

“You think that Surinder Nahal is attacking you?”

“We really don’t know—yet. For now, it’s necessary to be careful. This is a bad time, but that’s presumably why our unknown adversary chose it.”

Damon remembered that Karol Kachellek had been equally insistent that this was a bad time. Why, he wondered, was the present moment any worse than any other time?

The twilight was so brief that the stars were shining long before the vehicle reached its destination, which was a sizeable bungalow set in a clearing. Damon was oddly relieved to observe that it was topped by an unusually large satellite-dish; however remote this place might be it was part of the Web; all human civilization was its neighbourhood.

Rajuder Singh showed him into a spacious living-room. When Damon opened his mouth to speak he held up his hand, and swiftly crossed the room to a wall-mounted display-screen. “This is the same netboard which carried Operator 101’s earlier messages,” he said, while his fingers brought the screen to life.

Damon stared dumbly at the words which appeared there.

“It was dumped shortly before you boarded the plane at Kaunakakai,” Singh told Damon, when the import of the words had had time to sink in. “Karol thought you might be inclined to argue if he showed it to you there and then. He seems to think that you always do the opposite of anything he suggests.”

Damon could understand why Kachellek might have formed that impression. “It’s crazy,” he said, referring to the message. “It’s completely crazy.”

“Yes it is,” said the other. “I can’t understand why anyone would want to attack you in this way. Can you?” It occurred to Damon that the people he had ordered Madoc Tamlin to investigate might resent the fact—and might possibly be scared that the buying-power of Conrad Helier’s inheritance might pose a greater threat to their plan than Interpol or the friends and allies of Conrad Helier himself.

“Unfortunately,” Singh observed, “such slanders can sometimes take effect before convincing rebuttals can be assembled. You see why we thought it best to remove you from harm’s way. I’m sorry that you’ve been caught up in all this—it really has nothing to do with you.”

“What has it to do with?” Damon asked, his voice taut with frustration. “What are you people up to? Why is this such a bad time for all this to blow up?”

“I can’t tell you that,” Singh said, with a note of apology in his voice that almost sounded sincere.

“I’ll find out anyway,” Damon told him—but he was wary enough not to let bravado lead him to give too much away. It might be inadvisable to boast about Madoc Tamlin’s capabilities to people who might be just as reluctant to be found out as Operator 101.

The words displayed on Singh’s screen suddenly disappeared, to be replaced by an urgently-flashing message which simply said: READ NOW. The system had undoubtedly been programmed with nets set to trawl the cyberspatial sea for items of a particular kind, and one of them had just made contact. “Excuse me,” Singh murmured, as he moved to claim his prize.

When Singh touched the console beneath the screen the flashing words were replaced by an image of a man sitting on a perfectly ordinary chair. Damon recognised Silas Arnett. He was not under any obvious restraint, but there was a curious expression in his eyes, and both of his hands were heavily bandaged. He began speaking in a flat monotone.

Damon knew immediately that the image and the voice were both fakes, derived from the kind of template he used routinely in his work.

“The situation was out of hand,” the false Arnett said, dully. “All attempts to limit environmental spoliation by legislation had failed, and all hope that the population would stabilize or begin to decline as a result of individual choice was gone. We were still winning the battle to provide enough food for everyone, even though the distribution system left seven or eight billions lacking, but we couldn’t cope with the sheer physical presence of so many people in the world. Internal technology was developing so rapidly that it was obvious to anyone with half a brain that off-the-shelf emortality was less than a lifetime away, and that it would revolutionize the economics of medicine. Wars over lebensraum were being fought on every continent, with all kinds of weapons, including real plagues: killing plagues.

“When Conrad first put it to us that what the world needed more desperately than anything else was a full stop to reproduction—an end to the whole question of individual choice in matters of fecundity—nobody said ‘No! That’s horrible!’ We all said ‘Yes, of course—but can it be done?’ When Conrad said ‘There’s always a way,’ no one challenged him on the grounds of propriety. I couldn’t see how we might go about designing a plague of sterility, because there were no appropriate models in nature—how could there be, when the logic of natural selection demands fertility and fecundity?—and I couldn’t envisage a plausible physiology, let alone a plausible biochemistry, but Conrad’s way of thinking was quite different from mine. Even in those days, all but a few of the genes we claimed to have ‘manufactured’ were actually the chance products of mutation of extant genes—we had little or no idea how to go about creating genes from scratch to have entirely novel effects—but Conrad had a weird kind of genius for that kind of thing. He knew that he could figure out a way.

“I wonder, sometimes, how may other groups must have had conversations very like ours. ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could design a virus that would sterilize almost everyone on Earth?’... ‘Yes, wouldn’t it—what a shame there’s no place to start.’ Was there anywhere in the world in the 2070s where bioengineers gathered where such conversations didn’t take place? Maybe some of the others took it further; maybe they even followed the same thread of possibility that Conrad pointed out to us. Maybe Conrad wasn’t the only one who could have done it, merely the one who hit the target first. I don’t know—but I do know that if you’d put that kind of loaded pistol into the hand of any bioengineer of the period the overwhelming probability is that the trigger would have been squeezed.

“We didn’t discriminate: we set out to sterilise everybody. Everybody in the world. And we succeeded. That’s what saved the world; if the population had continued to increase and nanotech emortality had spread like wildfire through a world which was still vomiting babies from billions of wombs, nothing could have restrained the negative Malthusian checks. Famine, war and killing plagues would have run riot. As things were, famine was held at bay, the wars cooled off and the killing plagues were countered one by one. What happened in the last three decades of the twenty-first century wasn’t a tragedy at all—but the fact that it was seen as a tragedy, and a terrible threat to the future of the species, increased its beneficial effects. The Great Plague was a common enemy, and it created such a sense of common cause, focused on the development of artificial wombs and the securing of adequate supplies of sperms and ova, that for the first time in history the members of the human race were all on the same side.

“We’re still living on the legacy of that break in history, in spite of attempts made by madmen like the Eliminators to set us all at one another’s throats again. We’re still all on the same side, all engaged in the same ongoing quest—and Conrad Helier did that. You have no conception of the debt which the world owes to that man.”

“You don’t regret what you did, then?” asked a whispery voice from offstage.

“No,” said Arnett’s simulacrum, dispiritedly. “If you’re looking for some sign of repentance, forget it. What we did was necessary, and right.”

“And yet you’ve kept it secret all these years. When you were first accused of having done this, you denied it. When you realised that further denial was useless, you attempted to take sole responsibility—not out of pride, but out of a desire to protect your collaborators. The truth had, in the end, to be extracted from you. Why is that, if you aren’t ashamed of what you did?”

“Because there are people in the world like you. Because the world is overly full of people whose moral horizons are narrow and bleak. For every man who would have understood our reasons, there would have been half a hundred who would have said How dare you do this to me? How dare you take away my freedom of self-determination, even for the good of the world?’ Too many people would have seen sterilization as a theft, as a loss of power. Many young people, bom into a world of artificial wombs, find it faintly repulsive that women ever had to give birth, but too many members of the older generations still feel that they were robbed, changed without their consent. Karol Kachellek and Eveline Hywood are still doing important work; they never wanted to be sidetracked by the kind of publicity the revelations which you’ve forced out of me would generate—will generate, I suppose.”

“What right did you have to make decisions for all mankind?” the second synthetic voice asked, still maintaining its stage-whisper tone. “What right did you have to play God?”

“What gave us the right,” Arnett’s image replied, the voice as relentlessly dull as it had been throughout, “was our understanding. Conrad had the vision, and the artistry required to develop the means. The responsibility fell to him—you might as well ask what right he had to surrender it to others, given that those others were mostly ill-educated egomaniacs whose principal short-term aim was to slaughter their neighbours. Someone had to be prepared to take control, or the world was doomed. When you know that people won’t accept the gift of their own salvation, you have only two choices: to force it on them, or leave them to destruction. It was better for the world to be saved—and it was better for the world to believe that it had been saved by a fortunate combination of miracles rather than by means of a conspiracy. Conrad always wanted to do what was best for the world, and keeping our actions secret was simply a continuation of that policy.”

“What of the unhappiness caused by the frustration of maternal instinct?” asked the interrogative voice, in a voice devoid of any real indignation. “What of the misery generated by the brutal wrench which you administered to human nature? There are many—and not merely those who survived the Crash—who would argue that ours is now a perverted society, and that the reckless fascination with violence which is increasingly manifest in younger generations is a result of the perversion of human nature occasioned by universal sterilization.”

“The empire of nature ended with the development of language,” the fake Arnett replied. “Ever since then, human beings have been the product of their technology. All talk of human nature is misguided romantic claptrap. The history of human progress has been the history of our transcendence and suppression of the last vestiges of instinctive behaviour. If there was any maternal instinct left in 2070, its annihilation was a good thing. To blame any present unhappiness or violence on the loss or frustration of any kind of genetic heritage is stupid and ridiculous.”

There was an obvious cut at this point. The next thing Arnett’s image said was: “Who told you about all this? It can’t have been Karol or Eveline. Somebody must have put the pieces together—somebody with expert knowledge and a cunning turn of mind. Who?”

“That’s of no importance,” the other voice said. “There’s only one more matter which needs to be determined, and that’s the identity which Conrad Helier adopted after faking his death. We have reason to believe that he reappeared in the world after an interval of some twenty-five years, having undergone extensive reconstructive somatic engineering. We have reason to believe that he now uses the name Damon Hart. Is that true, Dr. Arnett?”

“Yes,” said a voice which sounded like Arnett’s, ringing false because his head was bowed and his lips hardly moved. “The person who calls himself Damon Hart is really Conrad Helier. It’s true.”

Damon heard the sound of the helicopter before Silas Arnett’s image faded from the screen, and immediately rounded on his companion. Singh had heard it too, and he was seized by sudden alarm. He backed away, and reached for his jacket pocket. He began to say something. The expression on his face suggested that it would be something reassuring, but Damon wasn’t about to be reassured. He didn’t know for sure whose side Rajuder Singh was on, but he wasn’t prepared to take it for granted that it was his own.

Before Singh had any chance to say what he intended to say or to grip whatever it was he had reached for, Damon was onto him. The blow he aimed with the edge of his right hand was delivered with practised efficiency The old man went down with a sharp gasp of surprise. Damon pinned him to the floor and put his own hand into the pocket.

He pulled out a tiny dart-gun. It was incapable of inflicting any lethal injury but it could have paralysed him for several minutes before his internal technology mobilised itself to cancel out the effects of whatever toxin the darts bore—long enough for Singh to have made his escape from the house, if that was what he had intended to do.

Singh pried his right hand loose and tried to grab the gun, wailing: “You don’t understand!”

Damon lifted the weapon out of his captive’s reach but didn’t hit him again; he couldn’t be sure that the man bore him any ill will. “Damn right I don’t,” he muttered, through clenched teeth.

The noise of the helicopter was deafening now. It couldn’t land because the clearing wasn’t big enough but it was hovering close to the house. Damon presumed that it was unshipping men, who would burst in at any moment—but whose men would they be?

“Who are you really working for?” Damon demanded of Rajuder Singh, making his voice as harsh as he could. “Tell me now, or I’ll cut you up so badly it’ll take all the nanotech you’ve got six weeks and more to put you back together, old man.”

Singh must have known something of Damon’s past, and something of his reputation. His eyes flickered wildly from side to side, as if in search of inspiration. Damon produced the knife he always carried in his boot, for old time’s sake. It had a doubly-serrated edge, designed to tear flesh in the ugliest possible way. He stroked Singh’s cheek with it, and watched the blood fountain out.

“I can take your eyes out before they get here,” Damon said. “And if by chance they aren’t the cops, I can do a lot worse.”

“It’s not what you think!” the slender man gasped, seemingly desperate to spit the words out. “I really am with Karol and your father! Truly I am. If that’s the enemy, you have to—”

Damon didn’t find out what Singh would have wanted him to do if it had been the enemy—whoever “the enemy” might be—because the windows imploded with a deafening roar and two gas-grenades came bouncing across the carpet, pumping smoke.

“Oh shit,” Damon said, lifting his arm reflexively as if to shield his nose and mouth from the fumes. He knew that it would do no good; this wasn’t the first time he had been gassed by the cops. He shut his eyes tightly but he knew that it was going to sting horribly anyway, and he wasn’t in the least comforted by the thought that the men outside were probably doing it in the hope of saving him from coming to any harm at the hands of his captors.

Bitter experience told him to hold off as long as possible and then to take a good deep breath, but it wasn’t easy to persuade his reflexes to fall into line. He suffered several seconds of severe discomfort before he was finally able to let go and fall unconscious.

When Damon woke up he knew by the muted roar of the engines that he was aboard an aeroplane—not some glorified boxkite like the one the Australian had piloted, but a real intercontinental jet. He found that he was stretched out across three seats in the first-class compartment. Hiru Yamanaka was sitting on the opposite side of the aisle, watching him solicitously.

The Interpol man waited politely and patiently for Damon to gather himself together. “I’m sorry about the gas, Mr. Hart,” he said, eventually. “We didn’t realise that you had the situation under control, and we didn’t know who was holding you. When we saw the message that was dumped immediately after your plane took off we feared the worst. Did you see it, by any chance?”

“I saw it,” Damon said, sourly. “Have you interrogated Rajuder Singh yet?”

“Not yet. We confirmed his identity easily enough, but he’ll be out for a long while. He seems to have had a heart attack. Perhaps you frightened him. His internal technics will pull him through, but they won’t let him wake up for a couple of days. Nothing we can do about that without imperilling his life.”

Damon accepted a bottle of mineral water from Yamanaka’s perennial sidekick, but waved away the offer of plastic-packaged food. He sipped slowly from the neck of the bottle, but didn’t immediately raise himself to a sitting position. His head was still aching—but his mind was working well enough to alert him belatedly to the significance of what Yamanaka had said about the message advertising his peril.

“Did you say that the notice naming me was posted after the plane took off?” he said, to make sure.

“Almost immediately afterwards. That’s why we feared that the two events were linked.”

“Singh claimed that it was dumped beforehand—that Karol told the pilot to take me to... where was I?”

“Kahoolawe.”

“Whatever—that Karol told him to take me there because he’d seen the message. If he knew about the message before it was dumped...” He stopped abruptly, wondering how best to proceed. One of the legacies of his chequered past was a deep-seated reluctance to tell the cops anything he didn’t actually have to, and he still harboured the ambition of getting to the bottom of this before Interpol did.

“That’s very interesting,” the Interpol man said. “There’s no evidence of Singh’s involvement with the Eliminators, incidentally, or anyone else of a criminal disposition. In fact, his record is unblemished to a degree that’s rather remarkable in such an old man. He’s an ecological engineer and has been for well over a century. He knew your father, although that was a long time ago.”

“How did you get on to him so quickly?” Damon asked.

“We were keeping a close watch over you, Mr. Hart, even before Operator 101’s third message went out. We were already tracking the plane. Did they but know it, Mr. Kachellek and Mr. Singh had no chance of stealing you away unobserved.”

Did they but know it, Damon echoed, silently. The trouble is that it’s impossible to figure out how much they do know, and what their real purpose might be. He knew that it was possible for internal technology to fake medical emergencies as well as taking action to solve them, but he didn’t know whether it was unduly paranoid to suspect that Rajuder Singh had done some such thing in order to avoid—or delay—having to answer awkward questions.

“Did you catch the pilot?” Damon asked Yamanaka.

“Alas, no. The plane landed at Hilo on full automatic. He must have bailed out. We’re pursuing our investigations on Hawaii and Oahu, but the situation there is very confused because of another incident.”

“What incident?” Damon asked, warily.

“An explosion aboard the Kite. Rescuers have picked up a dozen survivors so far, but there’s no sigh of Karol Kachellek. That’s a pity—we’d hoped to ask him a few more questions about this business.”

Either the unknown enemy is stepping up the violence of his campaign. Damon thought, or... It wasn’t easy to find words to couch the alternative. “You seem to have a talent for losing geneticists,” he observed, drily. “Is Eveline still where she’s supposed to be, out in L-5?”

“I believe so. For the moment, I’m more concerned with the whereabouts of Silas Arnett and the identity of the persons who have been broadcasting the messages. It may not mean anything, but we’ve received communications from someone who claims to be the real Operator 101, disowning all the recent notices posted under that alias. It’s rather difficult to check his story, of course, as he insists on maintaining his anonymity.”

“I saw a tape of Silas’s supposed confession,” Damon said. “It wasn’t him, you know—the whole thing was a fake worked up from a template. It wasn’t even a particularly slick job. I could have done it better. In fact—”

He stopped, not wanting to put ideas into Yamanaka’s head—but they were already there.

“In fact,” the Interpol man said, smoothly, “it was a painfully obvious fake, especially at the end. Which raises interesting questions about the whole series of broadcasts. If they’re supposed to look like fakes, what are we being tempted to believe, and why? Given that it’s been made so very obvious that this whole case is trumped up, might we not consider it more seriously than we would had it been more expertly compiled?”

Yamanaka didn’t mention the possibility—which had occurred to Damon while he watched the last tape—that the various messages had been put out from more than one source: that the third and fourth had been put out with the intention of discrediting the first and second by piling up lies and confusions. The fact that the man from Interpol didn’t mention it didn’t mean, however, that he wasn’t aware of it; he had used the plural when talking about persons who had put out the messages.

“What did your DNA analyses tell you?” Damon asked, gruffly, as he sat up gingerly, touching his fingertips to his forehead. “You must have the results by now—and I’ll bet you weren’t content with superficial tissues, either. You probably drained some spinal fluid, maybe even bone marrow. What’s the verdict? Am I my father, or my father’s son?”

“We’re completely satisfied that you’re not Conrad Helier,” Yamanaka told him, serenely. “If the records can be trusted, you and he have exactly the degree of genetic similarity that would be expected were you father and son. There’s some uncertainty, of course, as to whether the data relating to your father’s genome has been rigged to give that impression—but that kind of data is routinely filed in so many places that it would have been exceedingly difficult to alter them all. We also have a detailed record of your childhood and adolescence—it would have taken a great deal of effort to fake all that.”

“It’s not faked,” Damon assured the policemen. “I remember it quite clearly. I didn’t spring into the world full-grown. In this instance, the transparent lie really is just a transparent lie, not a cunningly-wrought truth.”

“I assume, then, that we must construe it as a provocative move of some kind,” Yamanaka said, evenly. “It may have been intended to startle a reaction from someone. Perhaps your kidnapping was that reaction—but it’s also possible, I suppose, that it was part of the provocative move. What do you think, Mr. Hart?”

“What I think,” Damon said, “is that your coming to my apartment in person was a provocative move on your part. You wanted to set me off, didn’t you? I suppose you’re delighted with the success of your strategy—I wasn’t involved before, but I’m certainly involved now.”

“You credit me with too much cleverness,” Yamanaka said, with a modesty that was surely feigned. “I had no idea then whether you were involved or not, and I’m still not sure. I don’t now where Karol Kachellek fits in, or Surinder Nahal—or Madoc Tamlin.”

“Madoc Tamlin?” Damone echoed, trying to conceal his dismay. Clearly the Interpol man was no fool—but what was he trying to imply now?

“He’s been asking a lot of questions,” Yamanaka observed. “He’s using your money to buy the answers. When you saw the second message you called him and you extended his authorization. You presumably believe that you’re pulling his strings—but I have to consider other possibilities too. I have to consider the possibility that your strings are being pulled. This is a very convoluted puzzle, Mr. Helier, and Madoc Tamlin has some very convoluted friends.”

“So have you, Mr. Yamanaka,” Damon countered.

The man from Interpol didn’t deny it. 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 I dare say that he was right about the effect the Crash had, of bringing people together so that for the first and only time in human history they were all on the same side. The world isn’t like that any more, is it? In a way, that’s rather a pity, don’t you think?”

“Not really,” Damon replied. “A world devoid of conflicts would be a very tedious place to live. It’s good to know that we might live for a very long time—but it’s also good to know that we might not. Without an element of danger, life might easily become insipid.” He felt a lot better now, and he was able to sit up.

“I take your point,” Yamanaka conceded, graciously, “but you must remember that you and I are young men, who 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. 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 Yamanaka might read into any answer he gave, so he prudently gave none at all. He just wants to use me as a pawn, he thought. Maybe I could have stayed out of it, if I hadn’t gone to Madoc the minute he alerted me to what was going on, but I’m in now for better or for worse, and I have to play it through—not for Interpol, and not for my father’s true blue friends, but myself.

“Sometimes,” Yamanaka added, in the same off handedly 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 have to do to keep it is mostly amongst themselves.”

“My father never owned more than the tiniest slice of the world,” he said, awkwardly conscious of the fact that he had said my father instead of Conrad Helier. “He was never a corporation man.”

“Your father remade and reshaped the world by designing the New Reproductive System,” Yamanaka replied, softly. “The corporation men who owned it might well have hated him for that, even though he never actually succeeded in toppling their commercial empire. Men of business always fear and despise Utopians. They probably hate him still, almost as much as the Eliminator diehards hate them.”

“But he’s been dead for fifty years,” Damon pointed out. “Corporation men wouldn’t waste time demonizing the dead.”

“His collaborators are still alive,” Yamanaka countered. “Or were, until this plague of evil circumstance began.”

When the plane landed in Los Angeles Damon was invited to accompany Hiru Yamanaka and his associate to the local Interpol headquarters, but he declined. Despite stem warnings regarding Interpol’s inability to guarantee his safety he insisted on going back to his apartment—and in the end, Yamanaka agreed to take him there.

“The claims made by the so-called real Operator 101 are, of course, receiving a full measure of publicity,” the policeman told him. “They have not gone uncontradicted, but would-be assassins might be not inclined to believe the contradictions. You really would be safer in another location.”

“You can’t take me into custody,” Damon said, obstinately. “I haven’t done anything wrong. If I thought I needed bodyguards, I could hire some very experienced street-fighters.”

“That would be unwise,” Yamanaka said, blandly. “My advice is to leave Madoc Tamlin and your former friends out of this. They’re essentially unreliable.”

Damon had his own views on that particular matter, but he didn’t object when Yamanaka’s taciturn companion didn’t get back into the car when they dropped him outside the cap-stack.

“Just a precaution,” the policeman said, as they rode the elevator to the thirteenth floor. “I won’t camp outside your door, but I’ll be around.”

Damon knew how easy it was to mount eyes and ears in the walls of the corridor, and he didn’t doubt that anyone approaching his apartment would be under constant surveillance. Yamanaka hadn’t made any false promises about respecting his privacy.

When he’d taken time out to visit the bathroom and order some food from the kitchen Damon stationed himself before the windowscreen. He wasn’t unduly surprised or alarmed when Madoc Tamlin’s phone insisted that he was unavailable. He half-expected to get the same response from Eveline Hywood, but in fact she answered immediately. She even came on camera, so that the time delay occasioned by the fact their words and gestures had to traverse a quarter of a million miles wouldn’t be quite as disconcerting.

“Damon,” she said, pleasantly. “It’s good to see you. I’ve been worried about you. Is there any news of Karol or Silas?” She was obviously well informed about what had been going on.

“They haven’t been found yet—dead or alive,” he told her. “Interpol insists that it’s only a matter of time. Do you have any idea what’s going on, Evelyn?”

“Someone is evidently intent on blackening your father’s name. I can’t imagine why. These self-appointed Eliminators seem to be getting completely out of hand. There are none up here, mercifully; L-5 isn’t perfect, but it’s a haven of perfect sanity compared to Earth.”

Damon didn’t bother to question her certainty as to whether L-5 was really Eliminator-free. For the moment, he was inclined to the opinion that the aggrieved Operator 101 really was the victim of a pseudonym-hijack and that this whole affair was a struggle between two very different groups.

“Why not, Eveline?” he asked, softly. “What brought your adversaries crawling out of the woodwork now?”

“I have no idea,” she said. He couldn’t tell whether she was lying. “You might be better able to guess than I am. After all, this whole affair is really an attack on you, isn’t it?”

It is now, he thought. But it didn’t start that way. That’s a deflection, a diversionary tactic, for which my father’s so-called friends are at least partly and perhaps wholly responsible.

“Could it have something to do with this stuff that you and Karol are investigating—these para-DNA life-forms?” he asked, abruptly. That was the only thing that was happening now, so far as he could judge—the only thing which made it a “bad time.”

“How could it?” she asked, frowning. Was she puzzled, he wondered, or annoyed by the accuracy of this guess?

“Karol said there were two possibilities regarding its origins: up and down. He was looking at the bottom of the sea while you’re looking for evidence of its arrival from elsewhere in the Solar System. But he seemed to have a third alternative in mind when he said it—and there is a third alternative, isn’t there?” He knew that he didn’t have to spell it out that the third alternative was sideways; Eveline understood well enough what he meant.

“I’m still very worried about you, Damon,” Eveline said, scrupulously ignoring his question. “I wish you were safe. I’m sure it will all work out, though, if you only give it time. When they find Silas, he’ll put the record straight.”

“What about Surinder Nahal?” he asked. “Could he really be the one behind this stupid carnival? Does he really think my father orchestrated the Crash as well as the recovery? Why hasn’t he said so before?”

“I don’t know, Damon,” she said, with exaggerated patience. “It’s all lies. You know that.”

“Is there going to be a new plague?” he asked, abruptly switching tack again. “Is para-DNA going to throw up something just as nasty as the old meiotic disrupters and chias-malytics?”

“That’s ludicrously melodramatic,” she answered, calmly. “So far as we can tell, para-DNA is quite harmless. Organisms of this kind compete for resources with life as we know it, but there’s no evidence of any other kind of interaction and it would be surprising if there were. Para-DNA is just something which happened to drift into the biosphere from elsewhere—probably from the outer Solar System. It’s fascinating, but it’s not dangerous.”

“Are you sure it came from the farther reaches of the Solar System?” Damon asked, determined not to let the matter lie.

“Not yet,” she answered, equably. “Investigations of this kind take time, and we have to be very careful to have all the data in place before we draw conclusions.”

“Yes,” Damon said, in a neutral tone which was meant to imply far more than the words could say. “I understand that.” He really thought he did. That part, at least, he thought he had figured out.

“Please be careful, Damon,” Eveline said. “In spite of our past disagreements, we all love you. We’d really like to have you back one day, when you’ve got all the nonsense out of your system.”

I believe you would, he thought. In fact, I believe you think you will. All he said out loud was: “I’ll be careful. Don’t worry about me. You’ve got better things to do.”

He tried to reach Madoc Tamlin, but he failed. He still didn’t read anything sinister into that, until he received an incoming call from Hiru Yamanaka informing him that Diana Caisson had been arrested for questioning about her possible implication in the suspicious death of Surinder Nahal.

At first, Yamanaka refused to let Damon talk to Diana, although he admitted that she had asked repeatedly to see him. The Interpol man also refused to discuss the details of the case which he was supposedly building against her, although he confirmed that she had been captured while fleeing with a companion from a house where Nahal’s body had been found, and that the police were still searching for Madoc Tamlin, who had been conclusively identified as the companion in question. It was not until Interpol received confirmation from the Oakland police that the body discovered in the house had been dead for some considerable time before Diana and Madoc Tamlin had arrived there that he relented.

“Will you let her go now?” Damon asked, as he was taken down to the holding cells beneath Interpol’s L.A. headquarters.

“I can hold her for a while longer,” Yamanaka told him. “I’ll charge her with illegal entry if I have to. I’d like to talk to your friend Tamlin before I let her go, if only to cross-check her claim that she doesn’t know why they went there. I do wish you hadn’t involved Tamlin in this business; it’s an unhelpful complication. When you offer money for information you attract all manner of spiders—not just the clever crackers who spend all their real-time poking around the Web but the poisonous ones who prey on anyone and everyone.”

“He seems to have located Surinder Nahal before you did,” Damon pointed out. “Did he lead you to him, by any chance?”

“No, he didn’t,” Yamanaka replied, in a faintly offended tone.

“You were acting on information received, weren’t you?” Damon guessed. “The people who tipped you off were the ones who got to Nahal before Madoc did. They’re one step ahead of all of us, aren’t they? Do you have any real idea yet who they are?”

“Some of them are one-time friends of your father’s, Mr. Hart,” Yamanaka said, perhaps feeling the need to demonstrate once again that he wasn’t a fool. “I think they knew that Silas Arnett had been kidnapped before we began looking for him, but that they preferred to try to handle things on their own—just as you did. Independence of thought and action seems to run in the family—and the Eliminators are far from being the only secret society supported and sustained by the Web.”

There was no time for further talk; Yamanaka let him into the cell where Interpol was keeping Diana. She seemed to be glad to see him, even though she hadn’t forgiven him anything. There was a noticeable tension in their embrace.

“This is crazy,” she said. “They must know we didn’t kill the guy. We didn’t even know the body was there.”

“They know you didn’t kill him,” Damon reassured her. “What on earth possessed you to go there? Why was Madoc fool enough to let you?”

“He asked me to help him,” Diana said defensively. “He didn’t tell me what he was doing. He just wanted me to talk my way into the place—spin a line to persuade the guy to open his door. It wasn’t necessary; the door was open when we got there. We didn’t even have time to start stripping data from the guy’s systems. The cops must have done that after they picked us up; whatever there was, they’ve got. Can you get me out, Damon? You owe me that much.”

While she talked, Diana moved her hands nervously back and forth. Damon didn’t doubt that the walls had eyes which could see every last gesture, but he was fairly sure the patient watchers wouldn’t be able to decode the signals she was sending. In a world where any environment might be bugged, people like Madoc Tamlin were careful to develop private codes of communication, known only to their closest friends. Diana clearly wasn’t an expert in the use of this one, but she knew enough to spell out a name, repeating it to make sure he got it.

The name she was signing was “Lenny.” There was only one Lenny she could mean.

“I’ll get you a lawyer,” Damon promised. “I don’t think they’re really interested in pressing charges—they just need an excuse to talk to Madoc for a while. They want to know what he found out, just for curiosity’s sake. It’ll be OK. You’ll be out in no time.”

As expected, Yamanaka was waiting for him outside.

“What did you find out?” the policeman inquired, politely.

“Nothing you didn’t overhear,” Damon assured him, not expecting to be believed. “How are things going at your end?”

“As your girlfriend said, we stripped the data from the systems in the house in Oakland and we’re going through it with a fine-toothed comb. It’s possible that Arnett was held there, but he’s certainly not there now and we can’t be sure. The fact that Nahal died in problematic circumstances gives us carte blanche to root through everything he left behind—if he is behind this puppet-show, we’ll uncover every last detail of it eventually. It’s just a matter of time.”

Damon was alert enough to note the peculiar circumlocution. “What do you mean, problematic circumstances?he asked. “I thought he’d been murdered.”

“According to the medical examiner,” Yamanaka said, “he wasn’t—not directly, at any rate. He seems to have died of natural causes. The only mystery is why his internal technology didn’t prevent it, but it’s probable that he was simply too old. We’re so used to nanotech magic that we’ve come to expect miracles which even the cleverest machinery can’t deliver.”

My father died of natural causes too, Damon thought, and I dare say that poor Karol will turn up drowned. Rajuder Singh hasn’t recovered consciousness yet, and perhaps he never will. If Silas is dead, too, that only leaves Eveline unaccounted for. Except, of course, for me.

“We live in a very complicated world,” Damon said, matching the Interpol’s man’s oddly irritating philosophical manner. “We’re so good at creating virtual realities that we’ve almost lost the trick of distinguishing appearance from reality. Maybe we expect more of social machinery like Interpol than Interpol can possibly be expected to deliver.”

“Are you talking about truth, or justice?” Yamanaka countered.

“Both,” said Damon, drily.

When he left Interpol headquarters Damon immediately headed for the most crowded streets in the city. He was reasonably sure that Yamanaka’s taciturn companion was still looking out for him, and that he wouldn’t be easy to shake off. He bought a new suit of clothes and left the old one behind, just in case Yamanaka had planted any discreet bugs on his person, and he stopped off at a public gym for a shower, just in case there was anything in his hair that shouldn’t have been there. His internal technology was good enough to take care of anything that had got under his skin. He looked up Lenny Garon’s address on the gym’s directory-terminal.

When he left the gym he struck lucky. A software glitch put half the local traffic signals out of action for a full five minutes—time enough to snarl up twenty thousand vehicles and create a jam which would require at least an hour to clear. The pavements jammed up almost as badly as the gridlocked vehicles, and tempers soared all along the line. Damon kept on ducking and dodging until he was certain that he was free and clear of all humanly possible pursuit, and then began the painstaking business of making his way across town without leaving a Webtrack.

“Is it about my tape?” Lenny Garon said, anxiously blinking his one good eye, as he let Damon into his squalid capsule. “Did something go wrong with the mesh?” Tamlin plainly hadn’t let him in on any secrets.

“Your tape’s fine,” Tamlin reassured him, once Damon was safely inside. “Just take a walk, will you? The two of us have something private to discuss. I’ll pay you a couple of hundred in rent, but you have to forget you ever saw us, OK?”

The kid was appropriately impressed. “Be my guest,” he said. As he disappeared into the corridor, he called back: “I hear you’re an enemy of mankind now. Good going.”

As the door slid shut behind the boy Damon looked around the room, wondering that people still had to live like this in a world whose population explosion had fizzled out long ago. While the greater part of L.A. slowly rotted down into dust its poorer people still huddled together in neighborhoods of high-rise blocks full of narrow rooms with fold-down beds, kitchens the size of cupboards and even smaller bathrooms. Perhaps people had grown over-accustomed to crowding during the years before the Crash, and now couldn’t live without it; that made more sense, in a way, than conventional explanations about buildings needing services and the proximity principles of supply and transport.

“What the hell is happening, Damon?” Tamlin asked, when the door was firmly closed and Lenny Garon’s footfalls had died into silence.

“You tell me.”

Tamlin shook his head again. “Damned if I know. How bad is the trouble I’m in?”

“Nothing much. They know Nahal was dead before you got there. All you did was find a body. They’d be grateful if it weren’t for the fact that somebody else had already tipped them off about it. They still want to talk to you, but they’ll be polite.”

Tamlin’s relief on hearing this news was very evident. “Who killed him?” he asked.

“Nobody. At the very worst, somebody flushed out his internal technology, the way Silas Arnett’s kidnappers did. Perhaps it’s suppose to look like justice. What did you find out, Madoc?”

“Not much,” Tamlin admitted. “The way the spiders are spinning, it looks as if this guy Nahal had some kind of grudge against your father and his cronies. Maybe he’d been nursing it for a hundred years, or maybe it’s just something that came back to haunt him in his old age. It looks as if Nahal had Arnett snatched, and that he put out the Operator 101 stuff himself—although the word is out that he isn’t the same guy who built up the Operator 101 name and reputation. He was difficult to trace, but not too difficult. I’m sorry about Diana—she wouldn’t stay home. You know how she is. I didn’t tell her anything.”

Damon had taken note of the emphases. “You said looks?” he queried.

“That’s right,” Tamlin confirmed. “I’ve no proof, but I have this itchy feeling that looks are all there is. Even before I found the door open and the guy lying dead... I think it was left all neat and tidy for someone to find—the cops, I guess. I get the impression that somebody’s busy clearing up their case for them. Whoever it is, they’re cleverer than any people I know, and have more money. That’s what I think, anyhow.”

“It’s what I think too,” Damon said. “You warned me when I asked you to help that all the best outlaw Webwalkers were in the pockets of the corps. I didn’t think it was relevant, but it is. All we could ever buy was a slice of the same pie they were feeding the authorities.”

Tamlin shook his head, wonderingly. “What’s it got to do with the corps?” he asked.

“Nothing, except insofar as the real owners and movers of the corps are hidden. The trouble with a world in which it’s difficult to keep secrets is that everyone tries so much harder. The Web is an open book to those who know how to turn its keys, and nanomachinery makes all kinds of unobtrusive eavesdropping as simple as falling off a log—and very, very cheap. There’s only one option for anyone who wants to move behind the scenes, and that’s to throw up multiple smokescreens. The only way to hide the truth is to dissolve it in an ocean of bluff and double-bluff. You and I wouldn’t even be clever enough to figure out who the players in this game might be, if it weren’t for the accident of biology that connected me to one of them—and even that would be irrelevant if it hadn’t been for the vanity which made my father instruct his trusty hirelings to do everything possible to turn me into a replica modeled on the same template.”

“Why did they say you were Conrad Helier? They couldn’t possibly expect people to believe that.”

“They didn’t. The third and fourth messages were calculatedly transparent lies, intended to discredit any truth that might have been lurking in the first two. My father’s team also wanted to give themselves an excuse for taking me out of the game—or dragging me further into it, on their side rather than the opposition’s. They didn’t approve of my sending you out digging for information—but they cocked up the abduction because they were in too much of a hurry.”

“Are you saying that your father really is alive, and that he really did cause the Crash?”

For a moment, Damon was tempted to tell his friend exactly what he did believe—but only for a moment. When the moment was past he knew that he’d made a crucial decision.

“No,” he said, after only the slightest pause. “He’s dead all right, and if the viruses which caused the Crash were manufactured, he didn’t do it. We just got caught in the crossfire of an old war which should have been laid to rest fifty years ago. It really doesn’t matter a damn who wins and who loses. Anyhow, Surinder Nahal has been cast in the role of guilty party, and now he’s dead the case will be closed.”

“You don’t think Nahal did it, do you?” Tamlin said, just to be sure.

“No,” Damon said, “I don’t think he did. I think my father’s friends want to keep the real guilty party out of sight, so that the only files that’ll be examined and picked apart will be Nahal’s—and those will be very carefully doctored. That way, they can shape the disclosures to suit themselves.” That much, he figured, was almost certainly true—but it was only a part of the truth. What the hidden movers wanted to keep hidden was something more significant than the possibility that Conrad Helier had designed and released the viruses which caused the Crash.

“Things could be worse,” Tamlin opined—still, apparently, buoyed up by the relief of knowing that Interpol had no particular grudge against him. “At least the bastards are still dying, one by one. Imagine how much worse it’d be if they really could live forever. No matter how far or how fast our generation went, we’d always be one step behind them. It’ll all be ours one day, though—we just have to be patient.”

Tamlin had always had an uncanny knack of putting his finger on the heart of a problem, although he was perversely prone to misinterpret the significance of what he saw. Damon was about to congratulate him on his cock-eyed perspicacity, with all due irony, but as he opened his mouth he saw Tamlin’s expression change to one of horror and alarm. He turned abruptly to see the apartment door sliding noiselessly into its bed.

A long arm, which was certainly not Lenny Garon’s, reached around the jamb and lobbed something into the tiny room. It fell at Damon’s feet. He had only seen such objects in broadcast VR dramas, but he recognised it immediately as an explosive grenade.

There was nowhere in the room to hide and the door was already sliding shut again. Had Madoc Tamlin been a hero of the self-sacrificing kind he might have tried to bundle Damon along in front of him as he headed for the exit, keeping his own body between his friend and the threat of mortal injury, but he wasn’t that kind of hero—and Damon couldn’t blame him for it.

What Tamlin actually did was to dive past Damon and hurl himself at the slowly-closing slit which led to relative safety. He didn’t make it. He couldn’t even get his fingers into the crack before the escape-route was sealed off. The doorway was just as narrow as everything else in the apartment, and the door was very efficient.

Damon watched, dumbly, as Tamlin put his arms over his head and huddled up into a quasi-foetal position, evidently hoping that his internal technology might be good enough to pull him through the effects of the explosion, if only he could make himself a small enough target.

Damon was startled by his own composure as he bent down and picked up the grenade.

“It’s not real,” he said, after holding it for ten or twelve seconds. “It’s a fake.”

Tamlin wasn’t immediately convinced, but it didn’t take him long to realise that he must look incredibly foolish. He slowly unwound, and looked Damon in the face. There was no relief in his expression now, although it would not have been inappropriate.

“What kind of crazy man would throw a fake grenade into a place like this?” he asked, harshly.

“The kind who wanted to deliver a message,” Damon replied, dully.

Tamlin looked at the grenade, as if he expected Damon to unscrew the cap and produce a piece of paper from its hollow interior. “What message?” he asked, as he came slowly to his feet.

“It says: If we really wanted you dead, you’d be dead,” he explained, softly. “You don’t have to worry about it, Madoc—it’s for me.”

When Damon got back to his apartment Hiru Yamanaka was waiting for him. He was alone. He was sitting in a chair, looking comfortable, but Damon knew well enough that he must have spent the bulk of the time he’d been there prying, with more ruthless efficiency than Diana had ever contrived. He’d probably found evidence of half a hundred minor misdemeanors, but he would doubtless file them away, at least for the time being.

“That wasn’t very wise, Mr. Hart,” Yamanaka said. “You could have put yourself in danger.”

“If anyone really wanted me dead, I’d be dead,” Damon told him.

“Really dead, or only apparently dead?” Yamanaka asked, innocently.

“How’s the investigation?” Damon countered.

“All wrapped up,” the man from Interpol said. “The evidence was delivered to us on a plate when we stripped the systems in that house up in Oakland. It seems that Surinder Nahal had suffered the fate which so many of our old men fear. His internal technology hadn’t been able to maintain his brain to the same standard as his body, and he’d fallen prey to mental illness. Having belatedly conceived a paranoid hatred for his more famous contemporary Conrad Helier, he kidnapped Silas Arnett and employed a mixture of straightforward torture and deceptive videosynthesis to build an entirely false case against the man of whom he was so envious. All the evidence to prove it is now in place. We found Arnett’s body, by the way—and what was left of Karol Kachellek’s. Arnett seems to have died of injuries inflicted after his internal technology had been flushed out; Kachellek may or may not have drowned before the sharks tore him apart. My investigation wasn’t a complete failure, however—we were able to track down the original Operator 101 when she started complaining about the usurpation of her psuedonym. I gather that she’s rather looking forward to her day in court, in anticipation of being able to plead the Eliminator cause with all due eloquence before a large video-audience. I do hope the newstapes won’t make a martyr of her.”

“It’s a perverse world we’re living in, Mr. Yamanaka,” Damon said. “Appearances matter far more than reality. In fact, we’ve sophisticated our virtual realities to the point where the distinction between appearance and reality has broken down. Each layer of illusion that we penetrate merely reveals another layer of illusion.”

“You know that’s not true, Mr. Hart,” the policeman said. “No matter what practical difficulties people like you and I might encounter in getting to the bottom of things, there really is a bottom. The truth is there, no matter how well-camouflaged it might be. If I didn’t believe that, I’d be no use at all as an investigator.”

“Are you satisfied that you’ve reached the bottom of this business?” Damon asked him, knowing the answer already. “Have you sorted out the truth from the morass of disinformation in which it’s submerged?”

“Not yet,” Yamanaka replied. “But I won’t stop trying. Will you?”

“Did Rajuder Singh ever wake up?” Damon asked.

Yamanaka nodded. “He told us that Karol Kachellek asked him to take care of you because he thought you were in danger, and that he knows no more than that. He says he didn’t know that the Operator 101 message naming you didn’t go out until after Kachellek had called him. It’s probably true, and if it’s false we’ll never be able to prove it. Do you want him charged with false imprisonment?”

“No. Let the matter rest.”

“Is that what you intend to do?” Yamanaka asked, again.

“I should never have hared off on a wild goose chase in the first place,” Damon told him. “I guess I must still be unduly sensitive about the matter of my supposed birthright, and I was all strung out because of the business with Diana. But it’s all over now. My father’s dead, and so are most of my foster-parents. There’s only Eveline left, and she’s a quarter of a million miles away. Diana won’t be coming back. I can get on with my own life now, and that’s what I intend to do.”

“You’re a liar, Mr. Hart,” Yamanaka said, with an off-hand calmness which didn’t take the sting out of the words. “You know as well as I do that the messages I first brought to your attention weren’t just raking over burnt-out embers. They were building up to some other revelation, but then your father’s friends stepped in and took over the script, putting their own scapegoat—with a full complement of supplementary evidence—in place of the one the opposition intended to use.”

“I suppose they killed him just to make it look good,” Damon said, to test the water.

“You know how easy it is to synthesize appearances,” the policeman said. “That doesn’t just apply to images transmitted over the Web and VR tapes. A first-rate biological engineer can probably fake genetic appearances as easily as a good tape-doctor can fake visual ones. There are far too many bodies in this affair, Mr. Hart—too many dead men whose internal technology ought to have kept them alive but somehow didn’t. A corpus delicti isn’t sufficient evidence of death in a world like ours—a world, where flesh can be manufactured and shaped, where the physical appearances of the living can be modified by somatic engineering and where new identities can be so easily created by throwing bits of data into the chaotic flow of the Webstream.”

Damon recalled what Madoc Tamlin had said about things being better than they might be. While the old continued to die, the young still had a chance to inherit the empires of the world—so it was in the interests of the old to maintain that image of the world. It was the interests of the people with the very best internal technology to play down its power—to maintain the idea that what people called immortality wasn’t really immortality at all, or even emortality. It was in the interests of the people who owned the corps which owned the world to persuade their would-be heirs that patience was still the cardinal virtue, that their elders were liable to lose their memories and their minds and were still certain to die, in the end. But if all of that were mere appearance and mere illusion, what hope would there be for the impoverished young ambitious to claim a generous slice of the big cake? The Eliminators offered hope of a nasty kind, but Damon knew only too well that it was a false hope, a mere colourful folly. Damon knew—and he was sure he knew it because he was his own man, and not because he was his father’s son—that the one and only real hope in a world like that was of a very different kind.

“With your help,” Yamanaka said, “I might be able to dig a little deeper. You’re in a better position to put pressure on Eveline Hywood, and pry into her affairs, than I could ever be. Together, we might be able to penetrate this sham and figure out what the real dispute is all about. My guess is that it’s about para-DNA. The people who launched this attack on your father’s inner circle intended to expose the fact that it’s fake—something cooked up in a lab, just like the viruses that caused the Crash.”

“You’re dreaming, Mr. Yamanaka,” Damon told him equably. “You’re living in a virtual reality of your own design. Para-DNA is a product of nature; my guess is that it drifted in from outer space. Anyone who said otherwise would be a liar—an obvious liar.”

Yamanaka didn’t scowl or shrug his shoulders; he just got up from the chair and quietly adjusted his clothing before heading for the door. Damon was expecting a Parthian shot, though, and he wasn’t disappointed.

“I’m disappointed in you, Mr. Hart,” Yamanaka said, as he let himself out. “I thought that you were really determined to be your own man, and to escape the tentacles of your father’s schemes and ideals. I thought that you might at least have a healthy resentment of that trick they pulled in naming you. No matter how many denials are broadcast, you’ll never be entirely safe from the Eliminators. Don’t you resent the fact that they’re still manipulating you, even after all these years?”

“You know what people say,” Damon countered, unwilling to let the policeman have the last word. He hesitated just long enough to conjure up a quantum of suspense and dramatic tension before adding: “If you can’t beat them, join them.”

The contact was so long in coming that he had almost stopped expecting it. Months passed: months which he spent in splendid isolation, creating imaginary worlds for anyone and everyone who would pay him to do it, making no discrimination between Madoc Tamlin’s black market tapes and those commissioned by legitimate corporations. He didn’t bother to keep a close watch on the news; by the time he heard that Eveline Hywood had confirmed that para-DNA was an alien invader carried into the inner Solar System by comets from the Oort Cloud, such excitement as the announcement had generated was already dying down. Nobody tried to call her a liar—no one, at any rate, who could get a hearing from the people who put the newstapes together.

Appropriately enough, the contact, when it finally came, was made in the one place where he thought his privacy really was guaranteed: in an imaginary world he was in the process of building. He was designing a sharespace for use in an adventure game, but it wasn’t nearly ready to be opened up for sharing. It was a big commission, requiring him to design the natural phenomena, flora and fauna of a hypothetical alien world orbiting a distant sun, whose visitors might undergo all kinds of vivid adventures, individually or in groups. He had his VR-apparatus hooked up to the Web so that he could decant commercially-available templates for adaptation and integration, but nothing was supposed to be able to come down the cable unless he summoned it. When he realised that there was someone else wandering around in his creation he felt a strange sense of violation which was even more shocking, in its way, than the appearance of the stranger. The appearance was, after all, a mere fiction; although it looked exactly like the pictures he had seen of his late father, it could have been anyone at all.

“Hello, son,” the image of Conrad Helier said, softly. “We meet at last.” As he spoke he looked around at the multicolored alien jungle and all the vivid insects with which Damon was busy populating it; his gaze seemed slightly disapproving, as if he found it all rather tawdry and inartistic.

Damon couldn’t entirely disagree with such a judgment, if it were indeed implied; he had been instructed—in so many words—to paint in gaudy and lushly unnatural colours, to think of Douanier Rousseau rather than Corot or Constable.

“You people really are full of surprises,” Damon said, determined to hold his own in what was bound to be a problamatic discussion. “I suppose sophisticated biotechnics and clever nanomachinery are so similar to magic that you’ve all started behaving like the magicians of legend: jealous, secretive, loving deceit for its own sake.”

“Not for its own sake,” the other said, with a sorrowful shake of the head. “The opposition are secretive, and fiercely jealous of their secrets, because their power is based in products and profits, patents and petty monopolies. To them, knowledge is capital to be hoarded and guarded, invested at the highest available rates of interest.”

“And you’re different, I suppose?”

“Yes we are,” Conrad Helier retorted, firmly. “Their end is our means. They don’t have any long-term objectives except preserving their advantages and maintaining their comforts. They only want to control things because they couldn’t bear to be controlled. Even though they’re effectively immortal, they’re still thinking in terms of today and tomorrow. They’ll grow out of it, in time—but until they do they’re a heavy anchor holding progress back. We’re planners and builders. We think in terms of centuries and millennia. We’re practising to be masters of evolution, but in the meantime we’re trying to be midwives of history. We’re not interested in money for its own sake, or power for its own sake. We’re interested in what money and power will enable us to do.”

“And pretending to die was just a career move, I suppose?”

“If you want to put it that way. It wasn’t difficult. I simply manufactured a second body—a clone, if you will—complete with all faults, for the benefit of the autopsy. You’d be surprised how easy it is to contrive a simple gypsy switch, even in a hospital, when no one’s expecting it.”

“And you did the same for Karol Kachellek and Surinder Nahal. What about Silas? Did you manage to get him back in time, or did the opposition really kill him?”

“We got him back. They released him once their pitch had been ruined. That’s one good thing about the way the game is being played—nobody fights to the death any more. Emortals tend to be scrupulously careful about that sort of thing.”

Damon remembered the fake grenade, and he nodded. “I guess that’s progress,” he admitted. “It might introduce an element of farce, but it’s better to play war-games than fight authentically bloody wars.”

“It was no part of our plan to involve you,” Conrad Helier’s simulacrum said, “but once you’d involved yourself we had to treat you as a player. You do understand that, don’t you?”

“I understand,” Damon said. “I caught on pretty quickly, didn’t I?”

“Yes, you did—quickly enough to make a father proud. Not that you could avoid your destiny forever, of course. No one can. You ought to be able to adapt more readily than most. You are my son, after all.”

Damon didn’t entirely like the tone of these remarks. Even now, he didn’t want to be taken for granted. “Was Silas’s supposedly fake confession true?” he asked, abruptly. “Did you design the viruses which caused the Crash?”

“I designed one of them. To this day, I don’t know who designed them all, and it’s certainly possible that some of them really did arise naturally. We didn’t kill anybody, Damon—we just took away the supposed right which people claimed to multiply themselves to the point at which the side-effects of their living destroyed the ecosphere. That statement Silas quoted is perfectly accurate: we had to play God, because the position was vacant.”

“And you’re still doing it—but you have to move in mysterious ways, because you’re not unopposed.”

“Again, if you want to put it that way—yes. Somebody has to make plans, Damon. Somebody has to ask the big questions. If everybody were prepared to join in, we’d be only too happy to let them—but there are too many people in the world who only value the moment and aren’t prepared to think about the more distant consequences of their actions. You understand that very well, I think.”

Damon felt a surge of resentment, but he didn’t try to contradict the phantom. “You designed para-DNA too, didn’t you?” he asked, instead.

“I didn’t do it on my own—but it is a laboratory product. We think that the Earth needs an alien invader, Damon: an all-purpose alien invader which can turn its hand to all kinds of purposes.”

“Why? What’s the point?”

“Because we can’t afford to export our spirit of adventure to virtual reality, and there’s a very real danger that we might do just that—as evidenced by the fact that you and I have to meet like this in order to avoid the millions of microscopic eyes with which the real world is dusted. People shouldn’t be living in the ruins of the old world contentedly huddling together in the better parts of the old cities and binding themselves ever more tightly to our particular stations in the Web like flies mummified in spidersilk. Nor is it rebellion enough against that kind of a world for the disaffected young to use derelict neighbourhoods as adventure playgrounds where they can carve one another up in meaningless ritual duels. We have to maintain some kind of movement, because without movement there’ll be no momentum. People have to build and keep on building, to grow and keep on growing. We have to make progress, Damon—and if people need a spur to urge them on, I’m more than willing to provide it.”

“And para-DNA is your spur. Another plague, like the ones the God of the Old Testament rained down on stubborn Egypt in order to secure the release of His people from captivity.” Damon’s voice dripped sarcasm.

“It’s not nearly as devastating as the slaughter of the first-born,” his father’s simulacrum pointed out. “Like the viruses which caused the plague, para-DNA is no killer—but it’ll be a terrible nuisance. It’ll attack the structure of the cities and the structure of the Web; it’ll make it impossible for the human race to dig itself a hole and live in manufactured dreams. It won’t attack people, and it certainly won’t murder people wholesale, but it’ll always be there: a sinister, creeping presence that will keep on cropping up where it’s least expected and where it’s least welcome, to remind people that there’s nothing—nothing, Damon—that can be taken for granted. Long life, the New Reproductive System, the Earth, the Solar System ... all these things have to be managed, guarded and guided. We ought to be looking towards the real alien worlds instead of—or at least as well as—synthesizing comfortable simulacra; my people are just trying to make sure that happens. As I said, it’s a long-term plan; nothing melodramatic will happen for a few years, but we couldn’t afford to have the plan aborted before we even got it off the ground. We have to keep up appearances for a long time yet. I’m sure you understand that. Why else would you turn down Mr. Yamanaka’s tempting offer to turn traitor?”

“Why did the corps try to sabotage the plan?” Damon wanted to know. “It sounds to me as if you’ll be stimulating a lot of economic activity.”

“The corporations don’t like us. They really would prefer it if the meek inherited the Earth. The corporations are only interested in what people want, and the more stable and predictable those wants are the better the corporation men like it. We’re interested in what people need, and that makes us difficult to figure. They don’t think of us as competition because we’re not aiming for profit and our risk calculations aren’t made by accountants, but we’re an irritating thorn in their side. They’re not about to launch an all-out crusade against us because it wouldn’t make economic sense, but they’re always prepared to make a small investment in a good spoiling tactic. They probably figure that they’ve won a tiny victory by forcing a few more of our personnel into effective invisibility, but that goes to show what small-minded cowards they are. In the end, they can’t win—because they’re not really playing to win—they’re only playing for money.”

“Playing God must be addictive,” Damon observed, neutrally, “but it’s only one more game, isn’t it? All this talk of yours is just rhetoric—mere appearance.”

“When human beings have properly adapted to what we now are,” Conrad Helier’s image replied, twisting its synthetic lips into a conscientiously ironic smile, “we’ll all be playing God, because it’ll be the only game in town. It’s not a position that can be left unfilled—not any more. We have the power and we have the time, so we have to take the responsibility.”

“And where do I fit into your grand plan? Or did you only use my name in your patched-up package of disinformation to get back at me for deserting the fold?”

“You decided to be a player, Damon. We had to put you in a position where you couldn’t do us any harm, for safety’s sake. Anything you say about us from now on is bound to seem suspect—and I can assure you that there’ll be no record of this conversation to prove that it ever took place. But if you want a place in the scheme, you only have to step aboard. Go out to L-5, Damon—join Eveline and work with her. It’s the place to be, nowadays and for the next forty or fifty years. After that ... anything’s possible, Damon. Anything’s possible, for you and for anyone, if you can only cultivate the skill and find the drive.”

“And that’s what you expect of me, isn’t it? That’s what you’ve always expected.”

“It’s a natural next step. You’ve got the senseless violence out of your system, and you’ve already shed your links to that particular phase of your past, one by one. There are only two possible futures before you now: either you become a corporation man, building gaudy fantasies like this to amuse the meek; or you become a real outlaw, and a real inheritor of Earth.”

Damon looked his enigmatic visitor squarely in his deceptive eyes, and said: “You’re not my father at all, are you? This is just one more phase of the game, one more layer of illusion.” He was aware of the desperate edge in his voice, and of the fact that he was being perverse for the sake of it. As Mr. Yamanaka had said, there was a truth lurking at the bottom of the swamp of deceits, and in his own mind Damon was morally certain that he had reached that truth. However false this appearance might be, and however absurd its context, he was completely convinced that the voice with which this man was speaking was his father’s voice, and that it was speaking as plainly and as honestly as it could.

“Does it really matter who or what I am?” the invader asked, quietly. “The specifics of the case are trivial; what really matters is the one thing that’s obvious no matter who’s alive and who’s dead, not who made what and why. Anything is possible, Damon, if you can only figure out what you want to do. If you want to, you can hide out in virtual space all your life; a lot of people will, now that the option’s there. If you’d rather be a man than a rabbit, though, don’t be ashamed of trying to play God in earnest, because there really isn’t any other game worth playing.”

“I don’t owe you anything,” Damon said, equally quietly. “Whoever you are, or pretend to be, I don’t owe you anything. I’m my own man.”

“You owe it to yourself to be and do everything you can,” said the person wearing Conrad Helier’s face. “Some day you will. All I’m asking you to do is to start now instead of leaving it until the day after tomorrow.”

With that, Conrad Helier’s simulacrum turned and walked away into the imaginary wilderness—into an unreasonably vivid forest like none that had ever been seen on the face of the Earth. Brightly-coloured insects fluttered into the virtual space he had vacated, impossibly pretty and precious. A semi-human dryad stepped out of the bole of one of the trees, blinking in the sudden sunlight. She wore Diana Caisson’s face, but there was nothing of the real Diana in her make-up; she was only a phantom, like the insects and the trees.

Like the invader before her, the dryad soon disappeared into a riot of colour and confusion—but Damon knew before then that whatever he chose to do today and tomorrow, he would never be rid of the challenge that had been set before him. As his father had said, the only thing to be decided was when he would begin.