Stableford, Brian Emortals 01 Inherit the Earth

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"Please don't be deliberately obtuse, Silas," he said in the same bantering tone. "We're going to the land
of Cokaygne, where all is peace and harmony and everybody lives forever. But there can't be peace
unless we find a peaceful way of settling our differences, and there won't be harmony unless we can
establish a proper forum for agreeing on our objectives and our methods. That's all I want, Silas-just a
nice, brightly polished conference table to which we can all bring our little plans and projects, so that they
can all receive the blessing of the whole board of directors. As to who's doing the pulling, it's everyone
who's making anything new-and those who make the most are pulling the hardest."
When the flaring pain in his ankles died down of its own accord Silas felt a little better. "Conrad never
liked that kind of corpspeak," he growled, "or the philosophy behind it. If he were alive-which he
isn't-you'd never get him to knuckle under to that kind of system. He always hated the idea of having to
take his proposals and projects to panels of businessmen. He did it, when he needed finance-but he
stopped doing it the moment he could finance himself. He'd never have gone back to it. Never in a million
years."
"That's because he was a child of the old world," the monk said. "Things are different now, and although
it's a little ambitious to start talking in terms of a million years I really do believe that we have to start
thinking in terms of thousands. If Conrad Helier hadn't decided to drop out of sight, he'd be in a better
position to see how much things have changed. If he participated in the wider human society even to the
limited extent that Hywood and Kachellek do he'd still have his finger on the pulse of progress, but he
seems to have lost its measure. I think he's fallen victim to the rather childish notion that those who desire
to plan the future of the human race must remove themselves from it and stand apart from the history they
intend to shape. That's not merely unnecessary, Silas, it's downright silly-and we can't tolerate it any
longer."
Silas was busy fighting his anguish and couldn't comment. The other continued: "We don't have any
objection to vaulting ambition-as I said before, we admire and approve of it-but Helier and his associates
have to realize that there are much bigger fish in the pool now. We're just as determined to shape the
future of the world as he is, and we have the power to do it. We don't want to fight, Silas-we want to
work together. Helier is being unreasonable, and he must be made to see that. The simple fact is that if he
can't be a team player, we can't allow him to play here. That goes for Eveline Hywood and Karol
Kachellek too. People can't make themselves invisible by pretending to die, any more than they can
exclude themselves from their social obligations by refusing to answer their phones. We have to make
them see that-and in this instance, we includes you."
"I don't want to play," Silas told the man of many masks flatly. "I'm retired, and I intend to stay that
way. All I want is out of here. If you want me to beg, I'm begging. Tell your machine to give me back my
IT. At the very least, tell it not to grab me so hard every time I twitch. I couldn't break free if I tried."
"It won't be long now," the monk said. "If I'd realized in advance that Helier would play it this way I'd
have made things easier for you. My people could have found you two days ago, and I didn't want to
make it too easy. I really am sorry. I'll give Helier two more hours, and if nobody's found you by then I'll
tip off Interpol. They should be able to get the local police to you within twenty minutes-it's not as if you
were way out in the desert."
"Two fucking hours may seem like nothing to you," Silas muttered hoarsely, "but you aren't sitting where
I am."
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"Oh, pull yourself together, man. You're not going to die. You've got sore wrists and ankles, not a
ruptured ulcer. I'm trying to make you understand something important. I could almost believe that you
really have retired."
"I have, damn it! I got heartily sick of the whole fucking thing! I'm done working night and day in search
of the biotech Holy Grail. I'm a hundred and twenty-six years old, for God's sake! I need time to rest,
time to let the world go by, time without pressure. Eveline and Karol might have been entirely swallowed
up by Conrad's obsessions, but I haven't. I watched Mary die and I watched Damon grow up, both of
them so tightly bound by those obsessions that they were smothered. Damon had a life in front of him,
but the only way Mary could break free, in the end, was to die. Not me. I retired."
"You really don't see, do you?" said the fake monk patronizingly. "You've never been able to break free
from the assumptions of the twenty-first century. In spite of all that IT has achieved, you still take death
and decay for granted. You think that your stake in the world will end in ten or twenty or fifty years' time,
when the copying errors accumulated in your DNA will have filled out your body with so many
incompetent cells that all the nanomachines in the world won't be able to hold you together."
"It's true," Silas growled, surprising himself with the harshness of his voice. "Even men fifty of a hundred
years younger than I am are being willfully blind if they think that advances in IT will keep pushing back [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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