Because there was so little to see on the landward side save for the lingering legacy of human profligacy, Damon looked out to sea while he walked on Karol Kachellek’s right-hand side. The ocean gave the impression of having always been the way it was: huge and serene. Where its waves lapped the shore they created their own dominion, shaping the sandy strand and discarding their own litter of wrack and rot-misshapen wood. He could just make out the shore of Lanai on the horizon, on the far side of the Kaiohi Channel.
“Why did you come out here, Damon?” Karol asked. “Are youscared of the Eliminators?”
“Should I be?” Damon countered—but his fosterer had no intention of rising to that one. “You wouldn’t talk to me on the phone,” Damon said after a pause. “Eveline hasn’t replied in any way at all—as if it would somehow pollute her glorious isolation in the wilderness of space even to tap out a few words on a keyplate.”
“She’s working. She gets very engrossed, and this is a difficult time for her. She’ll get back to you in her own time.”
“Sure. Unfortunately, the Eliminators seem to be keeping to their own timetable. Would it inconvenience her that much to take my call while Silas may still be alive?”
“She’ll talk to you,” Karol assured him. “I would have too, when I could find the time—no matter how much I hate that fancy VE you’ve got hooked up to your phone.”
“If you’d taken the call,” Damon pointed out, “we could have met in your VE instead of mine. That’s notone of my designs. Even if you’d called me, we could have fixed that at a keystroke.”
VEs weren’t really an issue, and Karol didn’t press the point. “Look, Damon,” he said, “the long and the short of it is that I didn’t call you back because I simply don’t have anything to tell you. Your father’s dead. He wasn’t an enemy of mankind. I have no idea why Eliminators or anyone else should want to kidnap or murder Silas. Eveline would say exactly the same—and she probably hasn’t called you because she doesn’t see any real need. I think you should let the police take care of this. I don’t think it serves any useful purpose for you to start stirring things up.”
“Am I stirring things up?” Damon asked. “It’s just a social visit.”
“I’m not talking about your coming here. I’m talking about your unsubtle friend Madoc Tamlin and that stupid note you took to the Ahasuerus Foundation. What on earth possessed you to do something like that?”
Damon was startled by the news that Karol knew about his meeting with Rachel Trehaine, and even more startled by the blond man’s seeming assumption that he had produced the note himself—but he took due note of the fact that Karol knew more about what was going on than his professed indifference had suggested. Was it possible, he wondered, that Karol and Eveline were trying to protecthim? Were they refusing to talk to him because they were trying to keep him out of this weird affair? Karol had never been entirely at ease with him, so it was difficult for Damon to judge whether the blond man was any more unsettled than usual, but there was something about his manner which smacked of uncomfortable dishonesty.
I must be careful of seeing what I want to see, Damon thought. I must be careful of wanting to find a juicy mystery, or evidence that my paternal idol had feet of tawdry clay.
“Has Ahasuerus contacted you about the note?” he asked. “You weren’t named in it—only Eveline.”
“Eveline and I don’t have any secrets from one another.”
Damon wondered whether that meant that Ahasuerus had contacted Eveline and that Eveline had contacted Karol. “Don’t you feel the same way about Eveline as you do about Silas?” he asked. “Isn’t she just someone you worked with for so long that habit has bound up every last vestige of feeling? Why shouldn’t you have secrets from one another?”
“I’m stillworking with her,” Karol replied, again choosing to evade the real question.
“Not directly. She’s off-planet, in L-Five.”
“Modern communications make it easy enough to work in close association with people anywhere in the solar system. We’re involved with the same problems, constantly exchanging information. In spite of the hundreds of thousands of miles that lie between us, Eveline and I are close in a way that Silas and I never were. We’re in harmony, dedicated to a common cause.”
“A common cause which I deserted,” Damon said, taking up the apparent thread of the argument, “in spite of all the grand plans which Conrad Helier had for me. Is thatwhy you and Eveline are trying to freeze me out of this? Is that why you resent my trying to stir things up?”
“I’m trying to do what your father would have wanted,” Karol told him awkwardly.
“He’s dead, Karol. In any case, you’re not him. You’re your own man now. You and I are perfectly free to build a relationship of our own. Silas could see that—Mary too.”
“Fostering you was a job your father asked me to do,” Karol retorted bluntly. “I’d have continued doing it, if there had been anything more I could do. I willcontinue, if there’s anything I can do in future—but you can’t expect me to forget that what youwanted was to get away, to abandon everything your father tried to pass on to you in order to run wild. You ran away from us, Damon, and changed your name; you declared yourself irrelevant to our concerns. Maybe it’s best if you stick to that course and let us stick to ours. I don’t know why you’re so interested in this Eliminator stuff, but I really do think it’s best if you let it alone.”
Damon didn’t want to become sidetracked into discussions of his irresponsible adolescence, or his not-entirely-respectable present. “Why should anyone accuse Conrad Helier of being an enemy of mankind?” he asked bluntly.
“He’s dead, Damon,” Karol said softly. “Nobody can hurt him, whatever lies they make up.”
“They can hurt you and Eveline. Proofs will follow, they say. Whatever they’re planning to say about Conrad Helier will reflect on you too—and would even if he were just another colleague you happened to work with once upon a time, to whose fate you were now indifferent.”
“Conrad never did anything that I would be ashamed of,” Karol said, his voice becoming even softer.
Damon let a second or two go by for dramatic effect and then said: “What if he werealive, Karol?”
The blond man had sufficient sense of drama to match Damon’s pregnant pause before saying: “If he were, he’d be able to work on the problem which faces us just now. That would be good. He’s present in spirit, of course, in every logical move I make, every hypothesis I frame, and every experiment I design. He made me what I am, just as he made the whole world what it is. You and I are both his heirs, and we’ll never be anything else, however hard we try to avoid the consequences of that fact.” He tried to fix Damon with a stern gaze, but stern gazes weren’t his forte.
The blond man paused before a rocky outcrop which was blocking their path, and knelt down as if to duck any further questions. Miming intense concentration, he scanned the tideline which ran along the wave-smoothed rock seven or eight centimeters above the ground. It was a performance far more suited to his natural inclinations than stern fatherly concern.
The wrack which clung to the rock was slowly drying out in the sun, but the incoming tide would return before it was desiccated. In the meantime, the limp tresses provided shelter for tiny crabs and whelks. Where the curtains of weed were drawn slightly apart barnacles had glued themselves to the stony faces and sea anemones nestled in crevices like blobs of purple jelly. The barer rock above the tide line was speckled with colored patches of lichen and tarry streaks which might—so far as Damon could tell—have been anything at all.
Karol took a penknife from his pocket and scraped some of the tarry stuff from the rock into the palm of his hand, inspecting it carefully. Eventually, he tipped it into Damon’s hand and said: “ That’sfar more important than all this nonsense about Eliminators.”