Karol reddened even more deeply under his foster son’s steady gaze. “It’s all lies, Damon,” he said awkwardly. “You can’t possibly believeany of that stuff. They forcedSilas to say what he did, if he said it at all. We can’t even be sure that it really washis voice. It could all have been synthesized.”
“It doesn’t much matter whether it’s all lies or not,” Damon told him grimly. “It’s going to be talked about the world over. Whoever made that tape is cashing in on the newsworthiness of the Eliminators, using their crazy crusade to ensure maximum publicity for those accusations. The tape doctor didn’t even try to make them sound convincing. He settled for crude melodrama instead, but that might well be effective enough for his purposes if all he wants is to kick up a scandal. Why put in those last few lines, though? Why take the trouble to include a section of tape whose sole purpose is to establish the possibility that Silas might have known his captor? What are we supposed to infer from that?”
“I don’t know,” Karol said emphatically. His manner was defensive, but he really did sound sincere. “I really don’t understand what’s happening. Who would want to do this to us, Damon? Why—and why now?”
Damon wished that he had a few answers to offer; he had never seen any of his foster parents in such a state of disarray. He felt obliged to wonder whether the tape could have been quite as discomfiting if there had been no truth at all in its allegations, but he was certain that Karol’s blustering couldn’t all be bluff. He really didn’t understand what was happening or who was behind it, or why they’d chosen to unleash the whirlwind at this particular time. Maybe, given time, he could work it all out—but for the moment he was helpless, to the extent that he was even prepared to accept guidance from Damon the prodigal, Damon the betrayer.
“Tell me about Surinder Nahal,” Damon said abruptly. “Does hehave motive enough to be behind all this?” He was avid to seize the chance to ask some of the questions he’d been storing up, hoping that for once he might get an honest reply, and that seemed to be the best item with which to begin. Karol was far more likely to know something useful about a rival gene-tweaker than the disappearance of an eighteen-year-old girl.
However far Karol was from recovering his usual icy calm, though, he still had ingrained habit to come to his aid. “Why him?” he parried unhelpfully.
“Come on, Karol, think,” Damon said urgently. “Silas isn’t the only one who’s gone missing, is he? If nothing was wrong, Madoc would have found Nahal by now and let me know. If he isn’t part of the problem, he must be part of the solution. Maybe his turn in the hot seat is coming next—or maybe he’s the one feeding questions to the judge. How bad is the grudge he’s nursing?”
“Surinder Nahal was a bioengineer back in the old days,” Kachellek said, with a slight shrug of his shoulders. “His field of endeavor overlapped ours—he was working on artificial wombs too, and there was a difference of opinion regarding patents.”
“How strong a difference of opinion? Do you mean that he accused Conrad Helier of obtaining patents that ought to have been his?”
“You don’t know what it was like back then, Damon. The queue outside the patent office was always five miles long, and every time a significant patent was granted there were cries of Foul!all along the line—not that it mattered much, the way the corps were always rushing to produce copycat processes just beyond the reach of the patents and throwing lawsuits around like confetti. The Crash put an end to all that madness—it focused people’s minds on matters of realimportance. There’s nothing like a manifest threat to the future of the species to bring people together. In 2099 the world was in chaos, on the brink of a war of all against all. By 2110 peace had broken out just about everywhere, and we were all on the same side again.
“Sure, back in ninety-nine Surinder Nahal was hopping mad with us because we were ten places ahead of him in the big queue—but it didn’t last. Ten years later we were practically side by side in the struggle to put the New Reproductive System in place. There was a little residual bad feeling because he thought he hadn’t been given his fair share of credit for the ectogenetic technology that was finally put in place, but nothing serious. I haven’t heard of him in fifty years; if I’d ever thought about him at all I’d have presumed that he was retired, like Silas. I can’t believe that a man like him could be responsible for all this—he was a scientist, like us. It makes no sense. It must be someone from. . . . ” He stopped as soon as he had fully formulated the thought in his own mind.
“Someone from what?” Damon asked sharply—but it was too late. The moment of his foster father’s vulnerability had passed, killed by the lengthy development of his judgment of Surinder Nahal. Karol had no intention of finishing his broken sentence; he deliberately turned away so that he didn’t have to answer Damon’s demanding stare. Whatever conclusion he had suddenly and belatedly jumped to, he clearly intended to act on it himself, in secret. Damon tried to make the charitable assumption that Karol had only stopped dead because he was standing in a room whose walls might easily be host to a dozen curious eyes and ears, but he couldn’t help feeling that it was a personal slight nevertheless: a deliberate act of exclusion.
“Is it possible,” Damon said, trying not to sound toohostile, “that the viruses which caused the plague of sterility really were manufactured, by someone?Was it really a Third Plague War, as the judge said? Could the Crash have been deliberately caused?” He didn’t expect an honest answer, but he figured that if a man like Hiru Yamanaka could set such store by eye-to-eye interrogation, there must be something in the theory.
Karol met his eye again, pugnaciously. “Of course it could,” he snapped, as if it ought to have been perfectly obvious. “History simplifies. There weren’t two plague wars, or even three—there was only one, and it involved more battles than anyone ever acknowledged. All that stuff about one war launched by the rich against the poor and another by the poor against the rich is just news-tape PR, calculated to imply that the final score was even. It wasn’t.”
Damon wasn’t at all surprised by this judgment, although he hadn’t expected to hear it voiced by a man like Karol Kachellek. He was familiar with the thesis that allwars were waged by the rich, with the poor playing the part of cannon fodder.
“Are you saying that allthe new and resurgent diseases were deliberately released?” Damon asked incredulously. “All the way back to AIDS and the superbacs?”
“No, of course I’m not,” Karol said, scrupulously reining in his cynicism. “There were real problems. Species crossovers, antibiotic-immune strains, new mutations. There really was a backlash against early medical triumphs, generated by natural selection. I don’t doubt that there were accidental releases of engineered organisms too. There’s no doubt that the first free transformers were spontaneous mutations that allowed genetherapy treatments to slip the leash of their control systems and start a whole new side branch in the evolutionary tree. Maybe ninety-nine out of every hundred of the bugs that followed in their wake were products of natural selection—and nine out of ten were perfectly harmless, even benign—but the people who made good transformers by the score were perfectly capable of making not-so-good ones too.”
“And they could get paid to do it, I suppose? They weren’t too proud to take defense funding.”
“ Everybodytook defense funding in the twenty-first century, Damon. Purely for the good of science, you understand—for the sake of the sacred cause of progress. There must have been thousands who wrung their hands and howled their lamentations all the way to the bank—but they took the money anyway. That’s not the point. The point is that nobody knows for sure where anyof the bad bugs came from—not even the ones whose depredations were confidently labeled the First and Second Plague Wars. The principal reason why the Crash wasn’t called a plague war at the time was that nobody was excluded from it. No one seemed to have any defense ready; everybody seemed to be a victim. That doesn’t mean that no one had any reason to release viruses of that type. As Conrad said in that clip the Eliminator dropped into his little comedy, it forcedus to do what we’d needed to do for a hundred years but never contrived to do—to bring human fertility under careful control.”