“I know what the Miller effect is,” the monk assured him. “I’m thoroughly familiar with allthe brave attempts that have been made to produce a biotech fountain of youth—even those made way back at the dawn of modern history, when Adam Zimmerman was barely cold in his cryonic vault. I know that there’s a fundamental difference between slowing aging down and stopping it, and I know that there’s an element of paradox in every project which aims to reverse the aging process. I’m not claiming that anyonenow alive can become truly emortal no matter how fast the IT escalator moves. I might have to settle for two hundred years, Damon Hart for two-fifty or three hundred. Even embryos engineered in the next generation of Helier wombs for maximum resistance to aging might not be able to live much beyond a thousand years—only time will tell. But that’s not the point.

“The point, Silas, is that even if you and I won’t be able to play parent to that new breed, Damon’s generation will. Conrad Helier and I must be reckoned mortalgods—but the children for whom we hold the world in trust will be an order of magnitude less mortal than we. The world we shape must be shaped for them, not for old men like you. Those who have had the role of planner thrust upon them must plan for a thousand years, not for ten or a hundred.

“Conrad Helier understands that well enough, even if you don’t—but he still thinks that he can play a lone hand, sticking to his own game while others play theirs. We can’t allow that. We aren’t like the corpsmen of old, Silas—we don’t want to tell you and him what to do and we don’t want ownership of everything you and he produce, but we do want you both to join the club. We want you both to play with the team. What you did in the Crash was excusable, and we’re very grateful to you for delivering the stability of the New Reproductive System, but what Conrad Helier is doing now has to be planned and supervised by all of us. We have to fit it into ourschemes.”

“Exactly what isit that you think Conrad’s followers are doing?” Silas asked curiously.

“If you don’t know,” the monk replied tartly, “they must have been so deeply hurt by your decision to retire that they decided to cut you out entirely. Even if that’s so, though, I’d be willing to bet that all you have to do is say you’re sorry and ask to be let back in. You really should. I can understand that you felt the need to take a holiday, but people like us don’t retire. We know that the only way to make life worth living is to play our part in the march of progress. We may not have true emortality, but we have to try to be worthy of it nevertheless.”

“Cut the Eliminator crap,” Silas said tersely. “You’re not one of them.”

“No, I’m not,” the monk admitted, “for which you should be duly thankful. I do like the Eliminators, though. I don’t altogether approve of them—there’s too much madness in their method, and murder can no longer be reckoned a forgivable crime—but I like the way that they’re prepared to raise an issue that too many people are studiously avoiding: who isworthy of immortality? They’re going about it backwards, of course—we’ll never arrive at a population entirely composed of the worthy by a process of quasi-Darwinian selection—but we allneed to think about the myriad ways in which we might strive to be worthy of the gifts of technological progress. We are heirs to fabulous wealth, and the next generation will be heirs to an even greater fortune. We have to make every effort to live up to the responsibilities of our inheritance. That’s what this is all about, Silas. We don’t want to eliminate your estranged family—but they have to acknowledge the responsibilities of their inheritance. The fact that they played a major role in shaping that inheritance doesn’t let them off the hook.”

“And if they won’t?” Silas wanted to know.

“They have to. The position of God isn’t vacant anymore. The privilege of Creation has to be determined by negotiation. Conrad Helier may be a hundred and thirty-seven years old, but he’s still thinking and still learning. Once we get through to him, he’ll understand.”

“You don’t know him as well as I do,” Silas said, having finally become incapable of guarding his tongue so carefully as never to let any implication slip that Conrad Helier might not be dead.

“There’s time,” his captor assured him. “But not, I fear, for any further continuation of this conversation. I don’t know who, for the moment, but somebodyhas finally managed to locate you. I hope we’ll meet again, here or in some other virtual environment.”

“If we ever meet in real space,” Silas hissed with all the hostility and bravado he could muster, “you’d better make sure that your IT is in good shape. You’ll need it.”

The woodland blanked out, leaving him adrift in an abstract holding pattern. He heard a door crash inwards, battered down by brute force, and he heard voices calling out the news that he was here. He felt a sudden pang of embarrassment as he remembered that he was nearly naked, and knew that he must present a horribly undignified appearance.

“Get me out of this fucking chair!” he cried, making no attempt at all to censor the pain and desperation from his voice.

The hood was raised from his eyes and tilted back on a pivot, allowing him to look at his cell and his rescuer. The light dazzled him for a moment, although it wasn’t very bright, and he had to blink tears away from the corners of his eyes.

There was no way to identify the man who stood before him, looking warily from side to side as if he couldn’t believe that there were no defenders here to fight for custody of the prisoner; the newcomer’s suitskin had a hood whose faceplate was an image-distorting mask. He was carrying a huge handgun that didn’t look like a standard police-issue certified-nonlethal weapon.

“I think it’s okay,” Silas told the stranger. “They left some time ago. Just cut me loose, will you?”

The stranger must have been looking him directly in the face, but no eyes were visible behind the distorting mask.

“Who are you?” Silas asked as it dawned on him belatedly that his troubles might not be over.

The masked man didn’t reply. A second man came into the room behind him, equally anonymous and just as intimidatingly armed. Meanwhile, the first man extended his gun—holding its butt in both hands—and fired at point-blank range.

Silas hadn’t time to let out a cry of alarm, let alone to feel the pain of the damage that must have followed the impact or to appreciate the full horror of the fact that without his protective IT even a “certified-nonlethal” shot might easily be the death of him.

Twenty-three

D

amon was intending to call Interpol anyway, so the fact that his phone hood lit up like a firework display commanding him to do exactly that didn’t even make a dent in his schedule. It did worry him, though; no one got a five-star summons like that unless there was something far more important on the agenda than his ex-girlfriend’s bail bond.

Hiru Yamanaka took Damon’s incoming call personally. Interpol’s phone VE was stern and spare but more elaborate than Damon had expected. Mr. Yamanaka was reproduced in full, in an unnaturally neat suitskin uniform, sitting behind an imposing desk. The scene radiated calm, impersonal efficiency—which meant, Damon thought, that it was as inaccurate in its implications as the most blithely absurd of his own concoctions.

“What’s happened?” Damon asked without preamble.

“Thank you for calling, Mr. Hart,” the inspector said with a determined formality that only served to emphasize the falseness of his carefully contrived inscrutability. “There are several matters I’d like to discuss with you.” The inspector’s eyes were bleak, and Damon knew that things must have taken a turn for the worse—but he also knew that Yamanaka would want to work to a carefully ordered script. The inspector knew that Damon was holding out on him, and he didn’t like it.