Читать книгу Resurrection Inc. - Kevin J. Anderson, Брайан Герберт - Страница 14

Francois Nathans paused alone in the doorway of an apartment building across from Resurrection, Inc. Carefully adjusting his disguise, he let his eyes grow accustomed to the sunshine before he emerged onto the crowded street. The wind had picked up, ruffling the pedestrians’ hair as they moved back and forth. A lost piece of paper curled along the ground, brushing up against many legs that paid it no heed.

Nathans stood, waiting for the subtle transition to happen, for him to become an anonymous pedestrian. As far as anyone else could see, he was just another employee of a local business park, living in an island of apartment buildings surrounded by office complexes. Nathans breathed the outside air and set out, confident.

More and more often Nathans found himself using the passage from his private offices in the deep lower levels of Resurrection, Inc. to Apartment 117 in the complex across the street. It felt good to be alone, away from the pressures, and he had found no greater isolation than when he was surrounded by a thousand strangers.

Nathans wore a stiff denim jacket and black pants with silver stitching. Before leaving his office, he had changed his hairpiece to a longish spiky-blond style, since it felt like a “blond” day to him. As always, a fresh hairpiece felt good against his cleanly shaven scalp. Nathans selected a woven straw hat that cast his eyes into shadow, letting him stare with secret interest and curiosity at the other people on the street.

In no hurry, he watched the activity around him, pondering where to go for his walk. People always fascinated him, sometimes infuriated him, but never bored him. He stood under the hum of the smog scrubbers, contemplating, as an Enforcer hovercar moved slowly over the heads of the pedestrian traffic on the street; its black shadow looked like a shark swimming through the crowd.

Nathans stared proudly for a long moment at the massive Resurrection building across the street. First the discovery of fire. Then the Industrial Revolution. Then Resurrection, Incorporated.

He couldn’t remember if he had thought of that one, or if it was Stromgaard. Probably not Stromgaard—the elder Van Ryman had adequate business sense, and plenty of money to back the formation of Resurrection, Inc., but he just had no … charisma, or the relentless enthusiasm to carry the corporation to its true potential. After seven successful years Nathans had more or less usurped Stromgaard Van Ryman’s position, pacifying the other man by letting him take charge of the new religion they were then forming, the neo-Satanists.

Nathans smiled a little, remembering his glory days, when he had tried to cajole start-up money for the Servant corporation from Stromgaard’s pockets. Nathans had his own fortune, of course, but nobody knew about that, and he had to find a more obvious backer.

He had seen that the technology for reanimating the dead was nearly at hand—biomechanics, bioelectronics, and bio-organics had all developed extensively, but no one had integrated the separate subfields into a direct application. While others spent halfhearted attempts at creating human-style androids, and gave up in despair at the complexity and the cost, Nathans conceived of Servants as a cost-effective alternative.

Medical science had been unable to breach the barrier of death, to bring people back to life. The brain itself proved to be as large a puzzle for the neuro-engineers as the rest of the body had been to the biomechanics. But Nathans never even attempted to bring the mind back to life; he didn’t want to resurrect people—he needed only the strong arms and legs to do work.

Nathans had gathered up the most brilliant researchers, the mavericks who wanted free reign in the lab and who wanted to be judged by their results and not by tedious paperwork. He brought the researchers together, gave them a combined focus and a challenge—if they could figure out how to do the resurrection process, each one of them could literally have anything he or she wanted.

The team admirably did as they were asked and also came up with a few extra useful items, such as the technique of surface-cloning, which had in itself proven useful on a number of occasions. A few members of the first team were now perfectly wealthy and perfectly happy off on islands someplace, Tierce in Fiji, Bombador and Smythe still living together in Samoa. Swensen now had her own genuine nineteenth-century farm deep in the isolated rural sections of Minnesota, working her fingers to the bone for the sheer joy of it. And poor Ferdinand, the maladjusted one, who had worked a different shift just to avoid the other members of the team—as his reward he had begged to become an Interface, and now spent his entire time catheterized, fed by IVs but linked to The Net and swimming in ecstasy in mankind’s greatest collection of knowledge.

They had served him well, all of them, and Nathans sincerely hoped that each had gotten something to make him or her happy.

Nathans started to walk aimlessly, traveling in whatever direction the crowd’s currents decided to take him. As he looked around, he remembered how horrified the common people had been by the first Servants. But after a year or two, the initial superstitious horror became a more rational fear: for a few months’ salary of one blue-collar Union employee, a corporate owner could purchase a lifetime Servant instead—and Servants worked harder, worked longer hours, did not take breaks, never called in sick, never goofed off, and never dreamed of going on strike. As an even greater economic incentive, Servant laborers required less-strict safety standards, and never complained of poor factory conditions.

But the blues themselves had proven even more stubbornly ignorant than Nathans had expected. Looking at the forlorn, aimless people scattered in the crowd—in greater numbers every day—made him feel depressed and enraged. He wanted to shout at them, force them to see how they were wasting themselves. Why hadn’t they seen what was coming? If they had so much as tried to train themselves, they could have moved into some other job—anything that required the smallest amount of thinking could not be done by a Servant. Rodney Quick had done it; after looking into Rodney’s confidential datafile, Nathans was impressed at how the tech had worked his way up from a blue-collar background, using his own head and nothing more. Not at all like the other apathetic clods.

For the time being, the blue allotment paid for their existence, but the next generation would have to fend for themselves, find a way to survive by using their brains rather than just being assembly-line oxen, or they would perish.

The point of freeing mankind from manual labor was so people could spend their time thinking, philosophizing, educating themselves through the vast databases available through The Net. But the idea had backfired on him, and the people who had been freed from their workhorse lives refused to consider the infinite possibilities before them. With life so full, with so many things to do, with all the information in The Net for the taking if only they made the effort, the blues whined about being bored, with nothing to do.

It should have worked. it all seemed so simple and clear-cut. Because of their additional free time, the blues should have been demanding more art and music and entertainment, thereby creating the need for more artists and more musicians, all of whom could come from their own ranks. But the pornographic or slapstick drivel they demanded as entertainment was a long way from his expectations.

He had insisted on giving the blues the benefit of the doubt, naively believing that they did want the finer things in life but had been denied them because of social inequalities or economic pressures. But their dismal response appalled and offended him. He had spent a lot of time poring over The Net’s databases, but he could find no justification for the voluntary ignorance of the general public—they simply didn’t want to better themselves.

And that had forced him to make an important transition in his own philosophy: perhaps these people were the lower end of the human spectrum, atavisms from the Middle Ages, members of the species adapted for a different time in the human clock—and now their time was up. Survival of the fittest, applied to human society.

Nathans stopped at a display of groomed rosebushes nearly exploding with roses. An Enforcer guarded the hedge and watched closely as Nathans bent to smell one of the blooms. The plants had been boosted to produce dozens more flowers than they normally would; the roots would burn out, exhausted, in only a few years, yet it would be a spectacular flash of glory. But someone always had to pull out the weeds to let the flowers grow.

Nathans fervently considered this to be the next step in the evolution of mankind, a societal evolution to hone mental capabilities and to selectively breed out those who had no imagination, no personal drive, no powers of reason. Nathans thought it was a grand and subtle plan, for the ultimate benefit of Homo sapiens. Perhaps it seemed harsh, but he believed a more humane solution would have far more destructive consequences.

Subversive groups like the Cremators undermined his power, threw obstacles in the path of this social plan. Involuntarily his fingers clenched, and Nathans almost grasped one of the thorny stems of the boosted rosebush. Carefully he stood up again, smiled at the Enforcer, and made himself walk casually away. Nathans managed to control his frustrated anger, fighting down the urge to stretch out his foot and trip someone.

The Cremators baffled him. He had the greatest resources available in the entire Metroplex, probably in the world, and still there had never been a successful attempt by the Enforcers, or Resurrection, Inc., to locate a single member of the group. Nathans could not understand how anyone could manage to elude his intensive demands for information, but the Cremators had done their cover-up work better than anyone could have conceived.

He could not deny that certain pre-Servants had vanished without a trace, or that the public rumors about the Cremators had not been generated by the rumor division of the Enforcers Guild. But not only did the Cremators steal his potential Servants away—even worse, they increased the public fear and paranoia about Servants in general. Nathans was helpless, and furious that he was helpless.

He strolled along, passive, so in tune with the organism of the crowd that he rarely even bumped elbows with another person. Nathans pushed through a knot of congestion where five street vendors had set up their rickety tables. He stopped to look, perhaps to chat. It always pleased him to see that some of the blues used their spare time to make and create things.

He paused pensively in front of a jeweler’s stall. In several trays were various rings, pendants, earrings, studs, buckles, all made from polished and skillfully modified debris: scrap metal, acrylic-coated paper, wood splinters suspended in colored resins. One of the pendants in the glittering, unarranged chaos caught his eye—a neo-Satanist star-in-pentagram made from twisted copper wire and epoxied onto a wafer-thin disk of porcelain.

Nathans reached forward to pick it up, carefully inspecting the work with a bemused expression on his face. While keeping an eye on everything else that happened at her table, the craftswoman dickered heatedly with another customer about an inexpensive clip-on nose stud. Nathans studied her carefully as he appeared to consider the pendant, still keeping his face in the shadow of his hat brim.

The jewelry vendor had long brown hair braided with a rainbow of different-colored ribbons, like the striking plumage of an extinct bird. She had strung herself with a tangled mass of jewelry, most of which seemed to be her own creations. The woman’s face was wide, not very attractive; she had a few pimples, a few freckles, a few moles. But she had a pretty smile, and she actually wore a tie-dyed T-shirt, harking back to the wave of hippie nostalgia that had swept the Metroplex a few years before.

Giving up on the other sale, she plucked the nose stud from the dissatisfied customer’s fingers and abruptly turned away from him to face Nathans. “Like that one?”

“Yes I do. It’s very interesting,” he said, sounding complimentary but uncertain. It was all a game; they both knew it.

“Are you a neo-Satanist, then?”

“Are you?” Nathans answered quickly, taking her off guard.

“No. I don’t go for that sort of stuff,” she said without vehemence, careful not to scare off a prospective customer. “But it’s okay, I mean. We’re all different, right?”

“Then why do you make a pendant like this, if you’re not part of the religion?”

She shrugged, flipping one of her braids back. “I try to do lots of different things. And I have to make what the market demands, or else why bother sitting out here quibbling prices all day long? There’s a lot of interest in this stuff. That’ll be my third one sold today—if, of course, you decide to buy it.”

Nathans appreciated her frankness. He and Stromgaard and Vincent had formed neo-Satanism with a consciously mischievous intent, as a simple joke at first and then an appallingly real joke as the stupid blues ate it up. If someone was foolish enough to be taken in by such a ridiculous and absurd religion, if someone would freely give money and fanatical energy to something that was such an apparent sham, then didn’t that person deserve to be defrauded, a disgrace to the human race?

“Of course I’ll take it,” he answered the jeweler. “But you’ll have to wrap it up for me, please.” Before she could quote him a price, Nathans removed his Net card and swept it through her reader, transferring money from one of his fictitious sources into the woman’s home account. The jeweler handed him the pendant in a white paper bag taken from a fast-food center. She nodded at the fair, but not overly generous, price he had credited her.

“Good enough. Thanks for not haggling!” she said. “It’s such a pain in the ass.”

Nathans tucked the bag inside the denim jacket. “Have a nice day.”

He walked off again past the line of vendors, paying little attention to the flower sellers, the caricature artists, the middle-aged man selling cookies. Looking, smelling, experiencing, sensing the instincts of the mass mind of the public, he could almost feel his mental batteries charging.

Nathans particularly liked the singers, especially those who had written their own songs. A new style of mournful street spontaneity had grown popular, called the “blues’ blues.” A man and his sister sat together on a blanket, loudly singing improvised words to the music from a Tchaikovsky tape. Nathans stood listening while the others paused and then moved in. He quickly slid his Net card through the singers’ reader, giving them a small donation. They didn’t break their refrain to thank him, and that pleased him even more.

He walked again, looping around slowly, not anxious to return to Resurrection, Inc. Today he didn’t really feel up to going past Soapbox Derby, though he never tired of listening to the people ranting there. Sure, most of the invective predictably attacked Resurrection, but Nathans felt gratified to see the people thinking at least, planning ways to change the world order. If they kept it up, they might actually succeed in raising their own social consciousness. Otherwise, they would be doing nothing more than assembling furniture, cleaning rooms, lifting boxes, and washing dishes, not thinking of anything beyond their own paycheck.

Out of curiosity, with a faint predatory smile on his face, Nathans slowly came up behind one of the wandering blues. The man’s sluggish movements and dead lack of expression clearly tagged him for what he was. Feeling the game build slowly, Nathans shadowed him, not trying to hide his movements but somewhat appalled (yet not really surprised) when the blue didn’t even realize he was being followed.

As they moved on, Nathans began to grow almost nauseated by the man’s aimless course, his dejected stance. Nathans wanted to shout, to shake the man and insist that his life didn’t have to be like this—was he a machine that without a mechanical job he was lost? Didn’t humanity have the power to think, letting a man occupy himself with great things instead of trivial “busy” jobs?

Nathans narrowed his eyes, fixing his stare at the back of the man’s head. It was going to be difficult for his own subtle revolution to come about, his own important alteration of society, his vision of the bright and optimistic future. Nothing could happen until most of these pathetic people went away.