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job. How much damage could you do to PicoCon, do you think, if you and your partner decided to
talk?"
The tall man didn't react to the mention of PicoCon. "All you had to do was listen," he complained.
"You could have saved us all a hell of a lot of trouble."
"If you were the ones who took Silas in the first place," Damon pointed out, "and posted that stupid
provocative note under my door, you went to a hell of a lot of trouble yourselves, all because you
wouldn't listen when we told you that Conrad Helier is dead."
"Sure," said the tall man scornfully. "Helier's dead, and para-DNA is a kind of extraterrestrial tar, just
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like Hywood says. All you ever had to do was listen-but now it's getting ugly and it's all your fault."
"What does Eveline say about para-DNA?" Damon wanted to know.
"If you spent more time listening to the news and less playing cloak-and-dagger, you'd know. She made
an announcement to the entire world, press conference and all. Para-DNA is extraterrestrial-the first
representative of an entirely new life system, utterly harmless but absolutely fascinating. We are not alone,
the universe of life awaits us, etcetera, etcetera. Now we know where you got your impulsive nature
from, don't we?"
"Are you saying that para-DNA isn't extraterrestrial-or that it isn't harmless?"
"I don't know," the tall man informed him, as if it were somehow Damon's fault that he didn't know. "All
I know is that if it's on the news, it's more than likely to be lies, and that if the name Hywood's attached
to it then it must have something to do with our little adventure. I may be only the hired help but I'm not
stupid. Whatever all this is about, your people aren't responding sensibly. It doesn't take a genius to
figure that Hywood was supposed to talk to my employers before she started shooting her mouth off to
the whole wide world, but she decided to kick off early instead. The whole damn lot of you are so damn
touchy. Must be hereditary."
Damon didn't bother to point out that Eveline Hywood wasn't his mother. Conrad Helier was his real
father, and Conrad Helier's closest associates had provided the nurture to complement his nature. It had
never occurred to him before that his contentiousness might be a legacy of his genes or his upbringing, but
he could see now that someone considering his reactions to this strange affair alongside those of his foster
parents might well feel entitled to lump them all together.
The helicopter now began its descent toward a densely wooded slope which, while nowhere near as
precipitate as the slope of the virtual mountain where he had talked to the robot man, nevertheless
seemed wild enough and remote enough to suit anyone's idea of perfect privacy.
It was just as well that the helicopter could land in a thirty-meter circle, because the space where it
touched down wasn't significantly bigger. The tall man undid Damon's safety harness before he could do
it himself and said: "Can you get down?"
"I'm fine," Damon assured him. No thanks to you. You're not coming?"
"I'm far from fine-and that's entirely down to you," the man with the bruise countered. "We have to
disappear. It wasn't exactly a pleasure meeting you, but at least I'll never see you again."
"You know," said Damon as the pilot reached back to open the door beside him, "you really have a
problem. Apart from being an incompetent asshole, you have this moronic compulsion to blame other
people for your own mistakes." He got the distinct impression that the tall man would have hit him, if only
he'd dared.
"Thanks," said Damon to the pilot as he lowered himself to the ground. He ducked down low the way
everybody always did on TV, although he knew that he was in no real danger from the whirling rotor
blades.
There was a cabin on the edge of the clearing that looked at first glance as if it must have been two
hundred years old if it were a day-but Damon saw as soon as he approached it that its "logs" had been
gantzed out of wood pulp. He judged that its architect had been a relatively simple-minded AI. The
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edifice probably hadn't been there more than a year and shouldn't have been there at all. Given that the
nearest road was halfway to Fillmore, though, it was certainly private; it probably had no electricity
supply and no link to the Web. It was a playpen for the kind of people who thought that they could still
get back in touch with "nature."
The man who was waiting for Damon stayed inside until the helicopter had risen from the ground, only
showing himself in the doorway of the cabin when no one but Damon could see his face. Damon saw
immediately that he was an old man, well preserved by nanotech without being prettified by rejuve
cosmetology. His hair was white and he was wearing silver-rimmed eyeglasses. Nobody had to wear
spectacles for corrective purpose anymore, so Damon assumed that he must have become used to
wearing them in his youth, way back in the twenty-first century, and had kept them as a badge of antique
eccentricity.
"Are you the Mirror Man?" Damon asked as he approached.
The ancient shook his head. "The Mirror Man's off the project," he said, evidently untroubled by the
admission he was making in recognizing the description. "I've been appointed in his stead, to tidy things
up-and to calm things down. Come in and make yourself at home." He pronounced the final phrase with
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