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"I have no idea," she said. Damon had to presume that she was lying, but that was only to be expected,
given that this was far from being a secure call. They both had to proceed on the assumption that anyone
with any interest in this convoluted affair might be listening in. If she wanted to give him any clues, she
would have to do it very subtly indeed. Unfortunately, he and Eveline had been virtual strangers even
while they were living under the same roof; they had no resources of common understanding to draw on.
Damon had opened his mouth to ask the next question before he realized that Eveline had only paused
momentarily. "You might be better able to guess than I am," she added. "After all, this whole affair is
really an attack on you, isn't it?"
"It seems to have turned out that way," he admitted. But it didn't start like that, he thought. That's a
deflection, a diversionary tactic-for which you and my father's other so-called friends are partly
responsible. You called the bet and raised the stakes. I'm just caught in the crossfire.
"Please be careful, Damon," Eveline said. "I know that we've had our differences, but I really do care
about you a great deal."
Damon was glad to hear it. It was an encouragement to continue. Eveline could have shut him out
completely, but it seemed that she didn't want to do that-or didn't dare to. "Could it have something to do
with this stuff that you and Karol are investigating-these para-DNA life-forms?" he asked, biting the
bullet. He expected her spoken answer to be a denial, of course, but he also expected it to be a lie. So
far as he could judge, Karol's dabbling with the black deposit on the rocks of Molokai's shoreline was
the only thing which could possibly make this a "very bad time."
"How could it have anything to do with that?" Eveline asked, frowning as if in puzzlement-but her
synthesized stare was gimlet sharp. A flat denial would have instructed him to let the matter lie; the
question was actively inviting further inquiry. Damon knew that he had to select his words very carefully,
but he felt slightly reassured by the fact that his foster mother might be making a vital concession.
"I'm not sure," he said, in a calculatedly pensive manner. "Karol said there were two possibilities
regarding its origins: up and down. He was looking at the bottom of the sea while you're looking for
evidence of its arrival from elsewhere in the solar system." But he had a third alternative in mind when he
said it, Damon left unsaid, and there is a third alternative, isn't there? The third alternative was sideways,
and he searched Eveline's steady gaze for some confirmatory sign that she knew what he was driving at.
"That's right," Eveline said conversationally. "We're expecting two of our probes to start relaying
valuable information back from the outer solar system within a matter of days. Karol's people will
continue to work on the seabed samples, of course, but my own estimate of the probabilities is that
they're unlikely to find anything. I think the Oort Cloud is the likelier source-but I've always had
panspermist leanings, as you know. It's very difficult to be perfectly objective, even when you've been a
scientist for more than a hundred years."
"It would be more interesting, in a way, if it had come from one of the black smokers," Damon said,
hoping that she would not mind being challenged. "For one planet to be able to produce two different
forms of life suggests an authentic creative verve. I always thought panspermia was a rather dull
hypothesis, with its suggestion that wherever we might go in the universe we'll only find more of the
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same."
"Sometimes," Eveline said, "the truth is dull. You can design virtual environments as gaudy and as weird
as you like, but the real world will always be the way the real world is." She looked around as she said it
at the scrupulously dull and slavishly imitative VE with which she had surrounded herself.
"Speaking of dull truths," Damon said, "I suppose you and my late father didn't really cause the Crash?"
"No, we didn't," she answered predictably. "When they find Silas, he'll put the record straight. He didn't
really say any of those things-it's all faked. Just another virtual reality, as fantastic and ridiculous as any
other. It's all lies-you know it is." Her eyes weren't fixed on his now; if he was reading her correctly, she
was dismissing this topic and asking him to move on.
"Do you think there might be a new plague?" he asked mildly. "Might this para-DNA invader throw up
something just as nasty as the old meiotic disrupters and chiasmalytic transformers?"
"That's extremely unlikely," she answered, just as mildly. "So far as we can tell, para-DNA is entirely
harmless. Organisms of this kind will inevitably compete for resources with life as we know it, but there's
no evidence at all of any other kind of dangerous interaction and it would be surprising if there were.
Para-DNA is just something which happened to drift into the biosphere from elsewhere-almost certainly
from the outer solar system, in my opinion. It's fascinating, but it's unlikely to pose any serious threat."
"Are you absolutely sure of that?" Damon asked, watching the luminous eyes.
"You know perfectly well that there's no absolute certainty in science, Damon," Eveline answered
equably. "Investigations of this kind have to be carried out very carefully, and we have to wait until we [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]