Damon shook his head. “Para-DNA,” he said. “Utterly harmless but absolutely fascinating, etcetera, etcetera—until more and more of it turns up and it begins to reveal its true versatility. And what then, Silas? Conrad can’t possibly be backslider enough to start killing people.”
“No,” Silas said unhappily. “But he doesn’t have any compunctions at all about destroying property. That, I assume, is what attracted the attention and fervent interest of Frederick GantzSaul and the present controllers of the Gantz patents. Hence the warning shots fired across our bows. Hence this meeting, in the course of which Mr. Saul will no doubt commission both of us to explain to Conrad and Eveline that the fun’s over: that Eveline’s preemptive move to established the extraterrestrial credentials of para-DNA has to be our last. I assume he’s about to tell us that if the plan goes forward one more inch he and his friends will come after us hard, with authentically lethal force.”
Damon looked at Saul, who was still looking at Silas. “You shouldn’t have retired, Silas,” Saul remarked. “You should have stayed on the inside, to maintain a bridge to sanity.”
“Conrad’s not mad,” Silas was quick to retort. “His anxieties were real enough. He’s afraid that the earthbound majority of the human race is on the brink of exporting its spirit of adventure to virtual environments, by courtesy of PicoCon’s VE division and all the bright young men of Damon’s generation. The fashionability of VE games, VE dramas, and telephone VEs is already helping to move a substantial part of everyday human existence and everyday communication into a parallel dimension where artifice rules—and the cleverer the VE designers and the AI answering machines become, the more secure that reign will be.
“Conrad thinks that people shouldn’t be living in the ruins of the old world, contentedly huddling together in the better parts of the old cities, binding themselves ever more tightly to their stations in the Web like flies mummified in spider silk. Nor does he think it’s rebellion enough against that kind of a world for the disaffected young to use derelict neighborhoods as adventure playgrounds where they can carve one another up in meaningless ritual duels. He thinks that if we can’t maintain some kind of historical momentum, we’ll stagnate. He thinks that we have to build and keep on building, to grow and keep on growing, to expand the human empire and keep on expanding it, to make progress. If people need a spur to urge them on, he’s more than willing to provide it. I don’t say that’s right, but it’s not mad.
“Like the viruses which caused the Crash, Conrad intends para-DNA to be nonlethal weaponry—nothing more than a nuisance. It’s supposed to attack the structure of the cities and the structure of the Web; it’s supposed to make it impossible for the human race to dig itself a hole and live in manufactured dreams. It wouldn’t attack people, and it certainly wouldn’t murder people wholesale, but it would always be there:a sinister, creeping presence that would 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, Earth, the solar system . . . all these things have to be managed, guarded, and guided. According to Conrad, we ought to be looking toward the realalien worlds instead of—or at least as well as—synthesizing comfortable simulacra. Whatever you or I might think of his methods, he’s not mad.”
“I can see why PicoCon thinks it’s necessary to rein you in, though,” Damon observed. “I can understand why the people who actually ownthe earth and all the edifices gantzed out of its surface would like the right of veto over schemes like that.”
“Maybe,” said Silas. “But I think Conrad mightargue that the current owners of the Gantz patents ought to be down on their bended knees thanking him for introducing an element of built-in obsolescence to their endeavors. Mr. Saul would presumably prefer it if the meek inherited the earth, because he thinks that a meek consumer is a good consumer. He and his kind are interested in what people want, and the more stable and predictable those wants become, the better he’ll like it—but Conrad’s more interested in what people need.”
Damon looked at Saul, who seemed quite untroubled by anything Silas had said.
“At the end of the day, though,” Damon pointed out, “Pico-Con calls the shots, here andin outer space. The secret couldn’t be kept—and now that it’s out, Conrad, Eveline, and Karol have no alternative but to abandon the plan.”
“That’s not for me to decide,” Silas said obdurately. “I’m not here to negotiate.”
“Of course not,” said Saul with a hint of malicious mockery. “But you can carry an olive branch, can’t you? One way or another, now that you’ve joined the ranks of the unsleeping dead, you’ll be able to transmit our offer of a just and permanent peace to Conrad Helier?”
“Just and permanent?” Silas echoed, presumably to avoid giving a straighter answer.
“That’s what we want,” Saul said. “It’s also, in our opinion, what we all need. We don’t want to bludgeon Conrad Helier—or the Ahasuerus Foundation for that matter—into reluctant and resentful capitulation. We really would like them to see things our way. That’s why we’re mortally offended by their refusal even to talkto us. Yes, we do have the power to impose our will—but we’d far rather reach a mutually satisfactory arrangement. I think Conrad Helier has seriously mistaken our position and our goals, and the true logic of the present situation here on Earth.”
All Silas said in reply to that was: “Go on.”
“Your anxiety regarding the possibility of people giving up on the real world in order to live in manufactured dreams is an old one,” Saul said mildly. “The corollary anxiety about the willingness of their effective rulers to meet the demand for comforting dreams is just as old—and so is Conrad’s facile assumption that the best way to counter the trend is to import new threats to jolt the meek inheritors of Earth out of their meekness and expel them from their utopia of comforts. Frankly, I’m as disappointed by Conrad’s recruitment to such an outmoded way of thinking as I am by the Ahasuerus Foundation’s retention of theirequally obsolete attitude of mind.
“I can understand the fact that you don’t approve of me, either personally or in terms of what I represent. One of my grandfathers was part of the consortium which funded Adam Zimmerman’s scheme to take advantage of a worldwide stock-market crash—one of the men who really did steal the worldor corner the future, according to your taste in clichés. The other was the man whose pioneering work in biotechnological cementation made it possible to build homes out of desert sand and exhausted soil that were literally dirtcheap, thus giving shelter to millions, but you probably think that the good he did was canceled out by the enormity of the fortune that flowed from the generations of patents generated and managed by his sons—my uncles. I am the old world order personified: one of a double handful of men who really did own the world by the end of the twenty-first century.
“Oddly enough, the fact that we still own it today has a good deal to do with Conrad Helier. Had he not put the New Reproductive System in place so quickly, the devastations of the Crash might have extended even to us; as it was, his efficiency allowed rather more of the old world order to be saved than he might have thought ideal. Nor has he put an end to the ancient system of inheritance, as his own legacy to Damon clearly demonstrates. When I and my fellow owners die—as, alas, we still must, in spite of all the best efforts of the Ahasuerus Foundation—we shall deliver the earth into safe hands, which can be trusted to keep it safe for as long as they may live. Eventually, there will arise a generation who will keep it safe forever.