“Not so much a war of the rich against the poor, then, as a war of the few against the many.”

“No. If it was any kind of plague war at all it was a war to end that kind of warfare. It was humankind against the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—the last stand against the negative Malthusian checks.”

“So if it wasdeliberate, the people responsible would have had your wholehearted support?”

“You don’t understand, Damon,” Karol said, in a tone of voice that Damon had heard many times before. “People don’t talk about it nowadays, of course, because it’s not considered a fit topic for polite conversation, but the world before the Crash was very different from the one in which you grew up. There were a lot of people prepared to say that the population explosion hadto be damped down one way or another—that if the sum of individual choices didn’t add up to voluntary restraint, then war, famine, and disease would remain necessary factors in human affairs. People were already living considerably longer, as a matter of routine, than their immediate ancestors. PicoCon and OmicronA were only embryos themselves in those days, but their mothercorps were already promising a more dramatic extension of the life span by courtesy of internal technology. It was easy enough to see that matters would get very fraught indeed as those nanotechnologies became cheaper and more efficient.

“The world was full of new viruses. A lot of them were arising naturally—more than ten billion people crammed into polluted supercities constitute a wonderland of opportunity for virus evolution—and a lot more were being tailored in labs for use as transgenic vectors, pest controllers, so-called beneficial fevers, and so on. All kinds of things came out of that cauldron, far more of them by accident than by design. It really doesn’t matter a damn, and didn’t then, how the Crash was started;the brute fact of it forced us all to concentrate our attention and energies on the problem of how to respondto it.

“We came through it, and we got the world moving again. It’s a changed world and it’s a better world, and Conrad Helier was one of its chief architects. Maybe you think we made a lot of money out of the world’s misfortune, but by comparison with PicoCon, OmicronA, and the other cosmicorps we’ve always been paupers. What we did, we did for the common good. Conrad was a fine man—a greatman—and this crazy attempt to blacken his name is the product of a sick mind.”

Damon reminded himself that Karol Kachellek had been born in 2071, only four years after Silas Arnett but fifteen years after Conrad Helier. Karol was only thirty years short of the current world record for longevity, but he still thought of Conrad Helier as the product of an earlier generation: a generation that was now lost to history. Conrad Helier had been a more powerful father figure to Karol Kachellek than he ever could have been to Damon.

“Were you actually present when my father died, Karol?” Damon asked quietly.

“Yes I was. I was by the side of his hospital bed, watching the monitors. His nanomachines were at full stretch, trying to repair the internal damage. They were PicoCon’s best, but they just weren’t up to it. He’d suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage and there were more complications than I could count. We like to think of ourselves as potential emortals, but we’re not even authentically immune to disease and injury, let alone the effects of extreme violence. There are dozens of potential physiological accidents with which the very best of today’s internal technology is impotent to deal. Kids of your generation, who feel free to take delight in savage violence because its effects are mostly reparable, are stupidly playing with fire. The proximal cause of your father’s death was a massive stroke—but if the lunatic who made that tape intends to build a case on the seeming implausibility of that cause of death he’s barking up the wrong tree. If Conrad had wanted to fake his death, he’d have chosen something far more spectacular.”

“How did you know he was dead?” Damon asked. He couldn’t help comparing the lecture that Karol had just given him with the one he’d given Lenny Garon; the depth of his estrangement from his foster parents didn’t seem quite so abyssal now.

“I told you,” Kachellek replied, with ostentatious patience. “I was watching the monitors. I also watched the doctors trying to resuscitate him. I wasn’t actually present at the postmortem, but I can assure you that there was no mistake.”

Damon didn’t press the point. If Conrad Helier had faked his death, Karol Kachellek would surely have been in on the conspiracy, and he was hardly likely to relent in his insistence now.

“I’m going back to Los Angeles as soon as I can,” Damon said quietly. “Maybe you ought to come with me. The people who took Silas might have designs on you too. Interpol can offer you far better protection on the mainland than they can in a desolate and underpoliced spot like this.”

“I can’t possibly go to Los Angeles,” Karol said mulishly. “I’ve got important work to do here.”

I have work to do too, Damon thought. I know what skills it took to put that tape together, technically and in terms of its narrative implications. Through Madoc I have access to some first-rate outlaw Webwalkers, including Old Lady Tithonia herself. I can get to the bottom of this, if I try hard enough, no matter how insistent Karol and Eveline are in trying to keep me out of it. Maybe I can get to the bottom of it sooner than Interpol. Maybe I can get to the bottom of it quickly enough to take a hand in the game myself.

That bold and positive thought was, however, quickly followed by a host of shadowy doubts. Perhaps he could get to the bottom of the matter faster than Interpol—but might that not be exactly what Operator 101 wanted? Why would the mysterious Operator bother to push a note under his door unless he was intendedto take a hand in the game? What, exactly, did the writer of that note want him to do? Might he not be lending unwitting assistance to the persecutor of his foster parents, collaborating in the assassination of his biological father’s reputation? Rebel though he certainly was, did he really want to take his rebellion to the point of joining forces with his family’s enemies—and if not, how could he be sure that he wouldn’t do so simply by uncovering the truth?

The night air was surprisingly cold, given that the day had been so hot. The wind was brisker than it had been earlier, and it had reversed its direction now that the sea was warmer than the land. The palm trees planted in a neat row in the forecourt of the hotel were waving their fronds murmurously.

Once he was back in his room Damon tried to book a seat to Honolulu on the first flight out in the morning, but it wasn’t scheduled to leave until eleven and he didn’t want to wait that long. He called Karol to ask about the possibility of arranging a charter.

“No problem,” Karol said, showing evident relief at the thought that he wouldn’t have to face any more of Damon’s questions. “Name your time.”

Damon was tempted to name first light, but he was too tired. His IT was supposed to have the capacity to keep him going for seventy-two hours without sleep, if necessary, but when he’d tried to use the facility in the past it had brought home to him the truth of the adage that the flesh was not the person. His mind needed rest, even if his body could be persuaded that it didn’t. Whatever faced him tomorrow, he wanted to be fully alert and mentally agile.

“Make it eighty-thirty,” he said.

“It’ll be waiting,” Karol promised—and then added: “It willbe all right, Damon. Silas will be okay. We all will.”

Even though he knew full well that the promises were empty, Damon was glad that Karol had taken the trouble to make them.