“You’re offering me a job?”

“Yes.”

“With PicoCon?”

“Yes. You could go to OmicronA if you’d prefer—it comes to the same thing in the end.”

“I’m not sure I’m ready for that,” Damon said slowly.

“I think you are,” Saul told him, finally condescending to take the seat opposite Damon’s, leaving the one in between for whoever might turn up to take it. “I think you’re as thoroughly frustrated with a life of petty crime as Hiru Yamanaka is with the business of catching petty criminals. You must understand by now what drew you into that life—and if you understand that, you must understand how pointless it is.”

Damon said nothing to that. Saul didn’t press him for an answer but simply settled back in his chair as if he were preparing for a long heart-to-heart talk.

“We live in a world where crime has become much easier to detect than of old,” Saul observed. “A world so abundantly populated by tiny cameras that hardly anything happens unobserved. These ever present eyes are, of course, unconsulted unless and until the police have reason to believe that they might have recorded something significant, but everyone tempted to commit an antisocial act knows that he’s verylikely to be found out.

“If our New utopia really were a utopia, of course, its citizens wouldn’t want to commit antisocial acts, but the sad fact is that almost all of them do. In many cases, the desire to commit such acts is actually increasedby the awareness that such acts are so readily detectable. In operating as a deterrent, the high probability of detection also acts as a challenge. Everyone knows that spy eyes can be evaded and sometimes deceived—and everyone is ready to do it whenever an opportunity arises. No matter how intensive and efficient Building Security becomes, petty thefts will still occur—not because people need to steal, or because they’re avid to acquire whatever it is that they happen to be stealing, but simply because stealing proves that they’re still freeand that the spy eyes haven’t got the better of them. That’s natural, as an immediate reaction, but it’s no agenda for a lifelong career.”

“Tell that to the Eliminators,” Damon said. “They’re the ones who take it to extremes—extremes you’re not too proud to exploit if it suits you. The Mirror Man likesthe Eliminators.”

“It’s not a view I share,” Saul told him with a slight sigh. “I do understand them, because I’m of the same generation as most of them, but I think they’re foolish as well as wicked. They know that they’ve been condemned by evil fate to die, while some of those who come after them will be spared that necessity, so it’s not entirely surprising that some say to themselves: murderers were once condemned to die for their crime; why should I, who am condemned to die, refrain from murder? Why should I not enjoy the privilege of my fate? Why should I not accept the opportunity to make the only contribution I can to the coming world of immortals— the exclusion of someone who is unworthy of immortality?It’s not surprising—but it iswrong, and ultimately self-destructive.

“Operator one-oh-one, I gather, is 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. Perhaps you ought to watch her—and find a little of your own futility mirrored in hers. It’s time to set bitterness and its corollary hostility aside along with other childish things, Damon. Even present technology will give you a hundred and fifty years of adulthood, if you’ll only condescend to look after yourself. The technology of a hundred years hence might give you three hundred years more. Think what you might do, if you began now; think what you might help to build, if you decide to become one of the builders instead of one of the vandals.”

Damon knew that it all made sense, but he’d had a few thoughts of his own on the matter in spite of the hectic pace of the last few days, and he wasn’t ready to roll over just yet. “A little while ago,” he said, “I talked to a boy named Lenny Garon. You probably taped the conversation. I told him exactly what you’ve just told me: to look after himself, to keep his place on the escalator that might one day give him the chance to live forever. Afterwards, though, I got to wondering whether I might be taking too much for granted.

“We’ve all grown used to the familiar pattern, haven’t we? Every couple of years PicoCon or OmicronA pumps out a new fleet of nanotech miracles, which slow down the aging process just a little bit more or take rejuve engineering just a little bit deeper, chipping away at the Hayflick limit and the Miller effect and all the other little glitches that stand in the way of true emortality. Each new generation of products works its way down through the marketplace from the rich to the not-so-rich, and so on, every expansion of the consumer base adding cash to the megacorp coffers. But what if someone already hasthe secret of true emortality? What if the upper echelons of PicoCon already possess a nanotech suite which, so far as they can judge, will let them live forever? What if they decided, when they first obtained the secret, that it was a gift best reserved for the favored few rather than put on general release? After all, even under the New Reproductive System the stability of the population relies on people dying in significant numbers year after year, and megacorp planning depends on the steady flow of profits feeding a never-ending demand, a never-ending hunger. I could understand the temptation to hoard the gift away, couldn’t you?

“The only trouble is that everyone who was in on the secret—and everyone who subsequently discovered it—would have to be trustworthy. They’d have to be in the club. The men in control couldn’t have loose cannons threatening to go off at any moment, with no way of knowing where the blast would go. If there were a person like that around, the gods would have to silence him—but they’d have to find him first. As you’ve so carefully pointed out, a person like me can easily be exposed to thoroughgoing scrutiny in a world where every wall has eyes and ears . . . but some people really can stay out of sight, if they know where the darkest shadows are.

“It’s interesting to follow these flights of fancy occasionally, isn’t it, Mr. Saul? I still don’t know for sure why PicoCon is so desperate to locate a man who’s been dead for fifty years, do I?”

“That’s an interesting fantasy, Damon,” Saul replied. “Isn’t it a trifle paranoid, though? The idea that big corporations hold back all the best inventions in order to maintain their markets is as old as capitalism itself.”

“We live in a postcapitalist era, Mr. Saul,” Damon said earnestly. “The market isn’t everything—not anymore. We have to start thinking in terms of millennia rather than centuries. Gods have nobler goals in mind than vulgar profits—and you can spell profitsany way you like.”

Saul laughed at that, and there didn’t seem to be anything forced about the laughter. “I suppose that sophisticated biotechnics and clever nanomachinery are so similar to magic that we havebegun behaving rather like the magicians of legend,” he admitted. “We have a tendency to be jealous and secretive; some of us, at least, have learned to love deceit for its own sake. Has your father’s team behaved any differently?”

“I think Eveline would argue that your end is merely her means,” Damon countered. “She’d say that what the Mirror Man told me—and what you’re telling me now—is just advertising, bait on a line to reel me in. She’d argue that you don’t really have any long-term objectives except preserving your advantages and maintaining your comforts—that you’re obsessed about controlling things because you couldn’t bear to be controlled. She sees the megacorps as an anchor holding progress back rather than a cutting edge hastening its progress forward.”