Architects of Emortality Part 10

The hour of Rappaccini's judgment-the judgment of the reckless father by the resentful son-was at hand. Whether he were here or elsewhere, Walter thought, there was nowhere left for him to run. If fools like Oscar Wilde were not so foolish after all, there was nowhere left where he might even stand and fight.

Finale: Eden Approached from the East

Charlotte woke with a start, jolted out of a fugitive dream by a sudden flash of light. Behind the tiny plane, in the east, the dawn was breaking; a fleeting sequence of reflections had diverted a ray of golden light from the tip of the wing to the viewport beside her head and then to the strip of chrome around the forward port.

Ahead of her, in the west, the sky was still dark blue and ominous, but the stars were already fading into the backcloth of the day. Charlotte roused herself and craned her neck to look out of the viewport at her side. Beneath the plane, the sea was becoming visible as fugitive rays of silvery light caught the tops of lazy waves.

In these lat.i.tudes, the sea was relatively unpolluted by the vast amount of synthetic photosynthetic substances pumped out from such artificial islands as those which crowded the Timor Sea. By day it was stubbornly blue, although its eventual conquest by the Stygian darkness of Liquid Artificial Photosynthesis was probably inevitable. Even now, this region of the ocean could not be thought of as an authentic marine wilderness; the post-Crash restocking of the waters had been too careful and too selective. The so-called seven seas were really a single vast system, which was already half-gentled by the hand of man. The continental engineers, despite the implications of their name, had better control of evolution's womb than extinction's rack.

Even the wrathful volcanoes that had created the Hawaiian islands were now quite tame, sufficiently manipulable that they could be forced to yield upon demand the little virgin territories which the likes of Walter Czastka and Gustave Moreau had rented for their experiments in Creation.

Charlotte felt her eyes growing heavy again; although she had slept, she still felt drained by the efforts and displacements of the previous day. She found, somewhat to her distress, that her memory of the rambling arguments which Oscar Wilde had laid before her was already becoming vague. She knew that she had to pull herself together in order to be ready for the final act of the drama, and she tried to do it. Reflexively, she rubbed the surface of her suitskin, her hand traveling from her shoulder to her thigh by way of her ribs. The smart fabric needed no such stimulation in order to continue its patient work of absorption and renewal, but the touch had some psychological utility. When she had stretched the muscles in her arms and legs she could imagine her internal technology springing back to life, priming her metabolism for the long day to come.

She turned to the seat in which Oscar Wilde had placed himself when they boarded the plane, but it was empty. So was the seat that Michael Lowenthal had occupied. They had both retired to the bunks to make themselves more comfortable while they rested.

She saw that her beltphone was still plugged into the aircraft's comcon, and that text was parading across the screen, presumably at the command of Hal Watson's fingertips.

"Hal?" she said. I'm awake." "Good morning, Sergeant," came the prompt reply. "I was about to wake you.

You've certainly taken your time about it, but you're only twenty minutes from Kauai now, and your autopilot has requested a landing slot-although there's nothing for you to do there." Because she was slightly befuddled by sleep, it took Charlotte a second or two to work out what he meant by the last remark.

"McCandless is dead!" she said finally.

"Quite dead," Hal replied. "The local police-who were, of course, on standby all night while a host of spy eyes kept watch on him-had him removed to an intensive care unit as soon as he showed signs of illness, but there was absolutely nothing to be done for him. The biotechnologists inspecting the organisms which killed the previous victims haven't yet come up with the kind of general antidote that Wilde talked about, although they've promised it by noon. That leaves us with no chance at all of getting it out to you in time to save Walter Czastka, if he is indeed the next intended victim." Charlotte was much quicker to see the implications of that remark.

"They didn't get her, did they?" she said.

"No, they didn't." Charlotte knew that she ought at least to feign astonishment and outrage, but all she actually felt was a sense of bitter resignation.

"How?" she asked dully. "How could they possibly fail to intercept her?" "She'd already left the house when the local police first got there," said Hal dispiritedly. "That was long before McCandless began to show signs of distress.

He told them she'd gone for a moonlight swim, and still refused to believe that she wasn't exactly what she seemed to be. There were mechanical eyes set to follow her, of course, mounted on hoverflies and flitterbugs-but as soon as they entered the water they were mopped up by a shoal of electronic fish. By the time they were replaced by more robust ent.i.ties she was beyond the scope of their location faculties. The flying eyes watching avidly for her to surface couldn't possibly have missed her, so we must infer that she had a breathing apparatus secreted offsh.o.r.e and some kind of mechanized transport." "A submarine?" said Charlotte incredulously.

"We'd have detected anything as big as that," said Hal. "More likely a simple towing device of some kind." "But we know where she's going, don't we?" Charlotte said. "When she comes out of the water again on Walter Czastka's island, we should be able to stop her from reaching him. In any case, he knows how dangerous she is, even if McCandless didn't." "He certainly knows," Hal agreed. "The thing is-does he care? I can't get a peep out of him. His sim is stonewalling all communications. If he knows why she's after him, he certainly isn't going to tell us-and I've trawled every remaining record relating to Maria Inacio, however obliquely. There's no clue as to what might have happened to her. She probably never said a word to anyone-except, we must presume, Jafri Biasiolo. The Kauai police have dispatched four helicopters to wait for her, but Czastka's sim has forbidden them permission to land.

They're prepared to remain airborne until they actually catch sight of her-at which point his permission becomes irrelevant, because they'll be pursuing a fugitive." "What about me?" Charlotte asked urgently. "Can I get there in time?" "Who can tell? There'll be a helicopter ready for you and Lowenthal when you land, and there's also a machine awaiting Oscar Wilde, although he may prefer to make use of the police vehicle if you and Lowenthal are willing to take him along. Notionally, the whole operation is under my command-which, in effect, puts you in immediate control as my proxy. I'm hoping that if Biasiolo really has set things up to provide a ringside seat for Wilde, the woman won't proceed to stage six until you and he arrive. In theory, of course, Wilde will be unable to land unless Czastka relents and gives him permission, but he's probably not as enthusiastic to stick to the letter of the law as the commander at Kauai.

"In case you haven't noticed, by the way, you're surrounded by caster flies. So are the copters from Kauai. For every flitterbug we've got on Czastka's island, the news tapes probably have a dozen. The whole of the morning news, bar fifteen seconds of other headlines, was given over to the five murders, described in the minutest detail. Having identified the text on the first condolence card, they're headlining it Flowers of Evil-except for that crank French station which is still trying to maintain the purity of the native tongue. As soon as we failed to apprehend the woman on Kauai the MegaMall took the gloves off-however this works out, we're not going to look good. In fact, we're going to look very, very bad. If she were to succeed in killing Czastka too..." "Have you considered evacuating him?" "Of course I have-but I can't do it against his will. He's sealed himself in. If I ordered the helicopters to land and seize him, I'd look even more stupid than I already do if they couldn't actually get to him to execute the order. He really does seem to be intent on securing his own destruction. He may not actually want to die, but he's perversely determined not to be saved." "As he said before, all he actually needs to do is to keep the house sealed," Charlotte pointed out. "If we can't get in, neither can she. He must know that-he's perfectly safe, as long as he doesn't open the door to her, unless she has an atom bomb as well as a submarine. If all she has is nanotech, it's his against hers-and his ought to win, given that they have the home-ground advantage." "It all sounds so simple, put like that," Hal agreed. Charlotte could tell that he had no more confidence in the calculation than she had. All the evidence said that the woman had no chance at all of getting to Czastka, but even Hal couldn't quite believe that Rappaccini's grand plan was going to fizzle out into a soggy anticlimax.

"We located the real Julia Herold, by the way," Hal continued. "She's a dead ringer for the fake. She really was on Kauai while the Inacio clone was making her way around the world-and, for that matter, while her double was carefully forging a relations.h.i.+p with Stuart McCandless in her name. She spends a lot of time in VE, and she's rather careless about security of her sims and systems. If you want more details, I've downloaded everything to the copter that's waiting on Kauai-and to the machine in front of you, although you won't have time to look at it before you land. It's all in place: every detail of the woman's journey; every dollar of the money trail. It's a magnificent job of case building, although no one will ever believe that, given that we failed to apprehend the killer on Kauai." Charlotte wished that she were capable of feeling more sympathy for Hal's plight, but she still had her own to worry about-and she was distracted by the fact that Michael Lowenthal had just risen from his bunk. The emissary from Olympus climbed into the seat formerly occupied by Oscar Wilde and said: "What's new?" Charlotte took a deep breath and began to tell him.

* * * "This is the text on the condolence card the woman left at McCandless's house," Charlotte told Michael Lowenthal, displaying the words on the screen.

Farewell, happy fields, Where joy forever dwells! Hail, horrors! hail, Infernal world! and thou, profoundest h.e.l.l, Receive thy new possessor, one who brings A mind not to be changed by place or time. The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heaven of h.e.l.l, a h.e.l.l of Heaven.

"Very apt," said Lowenthal dryly. "Should we wake Dr. Wilde, do you think, and plead with him for an interpretation?" It was a rhetorical question.

"It's from Paradise Lost," Charlotte said.

"John Milton," Lowenthal was quick to say, avid to seize a rarely accessible corner of the intellectual high ground. "Not the nineteenth century. Earlier." "The seventeenth," said a m.u.f.fled voice from the rear. "Written then, allegedly, to 'justify the ways of G.o.d to men'-but by the nineteenth, some had begun to adjudge that Milton had been of the Devil's party without knowing it and had made a hero of Satan and a villain of G.o.d in spite of his own intention. Which pa.s.sage is it, exactly, that Rappaccini has taken the trouble to quote?" Charlotte was tempted to tell Wilde to come forward and read it for himself, but did not want to be churlish. She read it aloud.

"It hardly needs interpretation," Wilde observed-not altogether accurately, if Michael Lowenthal's expression could be taken as a guide. Charlotte understood what Wilde meant, though. The words could be read as a valedictory speech by Rappaccini/Moreau: a warning, a threat, and a statement of intent.

"When this is all over," Lowenthal said to the still-invisible Wilde, "you can write a book about it-and then we'll see how many of the world's busy citizens have the time and inclination to download it to their screens." "Soon," said Wilde, "all the world's children will have the time-and I hope that they will also have the inclination. I suspect that their fascination with the artistry of death will be all the greater because death will be, for them, a matter of aesthetic choice. When everyone has the opportunity to extend life indefinitely, the determination to cling onto it for the sake of stubbornness alone will inevitably come to seem absurd. Some will choose to die; those who do not will feel obliged to make something of their lives. I hope, Michael, that you will take your place in the latter company." By the time he had finished his speech, Wilde had slipped into the seat behind Lowenthal-the one which the man from the MegaMall had occupied the previous evening. Glancing back and forth from one to the other, Charlotte decided that although there was nothing to choose between them on the grounds of physical perfection, Wilde had emerged more rapidly from sleep to claim the fullest advantage of his brightness and beauty. The authentically young man who now sat beside her was still afflicted by the temporary stigmata of frustration and mental weariness.

"You seem to have slept well, Oscar," Charlotte said.

"I usually do, my dear," he said. "You'll probably find, as you get older-especially at those times when you replenish your youth without losing the wisdom of maturity-that deep sleep will come more easily." "We've all had the biofeedback training," Lowenthal said dismissively. "We all know the drill." Charlotte felt a sudden surge of anxiety about the appearance of her own face.

She altered the lateral viewport to full reflection and studied her lax features and bleary eyes with considerable alarm. The face she wore was not entirely the gift of nature; she had had all the conventional manipulations in infancy, but she had always refused to be excessively pernickety about matters of beauty, preferring to retain a hint of naturalness on the grounds that it gave her character and individuality. Oscar Wilde had all of that and phenomenal beauty, and he was a hundred and thirty-three years old. Somehow, it didn't seem quite fair. She worked her facial muscles feverishly, recalling the elementary exercises that everyone learned at school and almost everyone neglected thereafter. Then she straightened her hair.

Oscar Wilde looked politely away as she did so, tutting over the condition of the fading green carnation which still protruded from the false collar of his suitskin.

As Charlotte took stock of the reward of her efforts she noticed the faint wrinkles which were just becoming apparent in the corners of her eyes. She knew that they could be removed easily enough by the most elementary tissue manipulation, and she would not have given them a second thought two days before, but now they served as a reminder of the biological clock that was ticking away inside her: the clock that would need to be reset when she was eighty or ninety years old, and again when she turned a hundred and fifty... and then would wind down forever, because her brain would be unable to renew itself a third time without wiping clean the mind within.

For Michael Lowenthal, she knew, it would be different. No one, least of all Lowenthal himself, knew as yet exactly how different it would be, but there was reason to believe that he might live for three or four hundred years without needing any kind of nanotech restructuring, and reason to hope that he might go on for a further half-millennium, and on and on... Barring accidents, suicide, and murder.

But who would be the suicides and murderers, in a world of beautiful ancients? Who would kill or choose to die, if they could live forever? "The mind is its own place," Charlotte quoted silently, "and in itself can make a Heaven of h.e.l.l, a h.e.l.l of Heaven." She pa.s.sed a hand across her face, as if to wipe away the tried laxity of the muscles and the embryonic wrinkles. Fifty or sixty years to rejuve number one, she told herself, and no point yet in counting.

By the time she switched the viewport back to transparency, the island toward which they had been headed was below them, and their plane was descending toward the trees, preparing to alter the orientation of its engines so that it could complete its descent in helicopter fas.h.i.+on.

Like all the Hawaiian islands, Kauai had been blighted by the ecocatastrophes of the twenty-first century and the fallout from the plague wars. Most of its ecosystems had been stripped down almost to the prokaryot level, but it was small enough to have been comprehensively rehabilitated. The biodiversity loss had been enormous, and the current genetic variety of the island was probably only a few percent of what it had been in pre-Crash days, but the painstaking work done by natural selection in the cause of diversification was beginning to bear fruit on a prolific scale. The trees over which the aircraft pa.s.sed while making for the landing field almost qualified as authentic wilderness.

Charlotte checked the equipment in her belt, making dutiful preparations for the dash from one vehicle to another. She had already invited Oscar Wilde to accompany her rather than taking the helicopter chartered by the late Gustave Moreau, but he had declined the offer. She was not displeased by the thought of putting a little distance between herself and one of her annoying companions-although, had she been given a choice, she would have kept Wilde and banished Lowenthal.

As soon as they had set down at the heliport, Charlotte opened the c.o.c.kpit door and leapt down to the blue plastic ap.r.o.n. Michael Lowenthal made haste to follow her, but Wilde had perforce to take his time. Uniformed officers hurried toward her, directing her to a police helicopter that was waiting less than a hundred meters away. Its official markings were a delight to Charlotte's eyes, holding as they did the impression of authority. From now on, she told herself, she would no longer be a pa.s.senger but a determined pursuer: an active instrument of justice.

One of the local men tried to tell her that there was no need for her to join the dragnet, and that she could watch it all on screens, but there was no way she was going to be turned aside now. She strode toward the police helicopter very purposefully, brus.h.i.+ng off the attentions of the Kauai men as if they were buzzing flies, and Michael Lowenthal trotted along in her wake, barely keeping pace with her in spite of the fact that his stride was longer.

"You can strand him here if you want to," Lowenthal said, jerking his head in the direction of Oscar Wilde, who was walking to another, somewhat smaller, machine. "He needs clearance for takeoff. You could ground him for the duration." "Hal could," Charlotte corrected him as she climbed into the helicopter, taking note of the numerous flitter-bugs clinging to the hull. "I'm just a sergeant. In any case, he might come in useful. Why don't you take the opportunity to drop out? Your employers surely can't think that they have any particular cause for concern-and they can watch the whole thing through the flying eyes." "I talked to them last night," Lowenthal told her. "They want me to stay with it. They're still anxious-and that's as much your fault as anyone's. All that stuff about advertising for a new generation of Eliminators. They've probably had their own PR teams working through the night, figuring out the best way to spin the story once the final shot's been fired." The helicopter lifted as soon as they were both strapped in. The automatic pilot had been programmed to take them to Czastka's island without delay. Charlotte reached into the equipment locker under the seat and brought forth a handgun.

She loaded it and checked the mechanism before clipping it to her belt.

"Do you think you'll have a chance to use that?" Lowenthal asked. Charlotte noticed that the interpolation of the words a chance put a distinct spin on the question.

"It would be within the regulations," Charlotte answered tautly. "I couldn't even be rude to her when I spoke to her at McCandless's house, but now the proofs in place I'm ent.i.tled to employ any practical measure which may be necessary to apprehend her. Don't worry-the bullets are certified nonlethal.

They're loaded with knock-out drops. We're the police, remember." "Have you ever fired one before?" he asked curiously. "Outside a VE, I mean." She chose to ignore the question rather than answer it-as honesty would have forced her to do-in the negative.

The copter was traveling at a speed which was only a little greater than that attained by their previous conveyance, but they remained so low that their progress seemed far more rapid. The sea was the deep sapphire blue color renowned in ancient tradition, modestly reflecting the clarity of the cloudless morning sky. The waves, aided by the onrus.h.i.+ng downdraft of their blades, carved the roiling water into all manner of curious shapes.

High in the sky above them a silver airs.h.i.+p was making its stately progress from Honolulu to Yokohama, but the other police helicopters, dispatched before their arrival on Kauai, were out of sight beyond the horizon. Oscar Wilde's charter craft was half a kilometer behind them, but it was keeping pace.

Like their previous craft, the helicopter had only one comcon. Charlotte tuned in to a broadcast news report. There were pictures of Gabriel King's skeleton, neatly entwined with winding stems bearing black flowers in horrid profusion.

They had not come from Rex Carnevon-they were obviously taken from Regina Chai's footage. Given that Hal would not have released them, they must have been forwarded by somebody he had been obliged to copy in on the investigation: Michael Lowenthal's employers. The tape had been reedited so that the camera lingered lasciviously over its appreciation of the horrid spectacle.

The King tape was swiftly followed by footage of Michi Uras.h.i.+ma's similarly embellished skeleton. The AI voice-over was already speculating, in that irritatingly insinuating fas.h.i.+on that AI voice-overs always had, that the UN police had been caught napping by the murderous tourist. The word negligence was not actually mentioned, but the tone of the coverage suggested that it would not be long delayed in the wings. Charlotte was tempted to purge the skin of the craft of the news-tape eyes that had hitched a ride thereon, but there was no point. There would be hundreds more flying under their own power.

Charlotte knew that although the information which had pa.s.sed back and forth between Hal and herself would have been routinely cloaked, it could be uncloaked easily enough if anyone cared to take the trouble. Although the conversation she, Wilde, and Lowenthal had conducted in the restaurant at the UN complex was probably safe from retrospective eavesdroppers, very little they had said to one another since boarding the maglev would be irrecoverable. Their conversational exchanges after they had quit the car in the hills near the Mexican border would all be contained on the bubblebug tapes she had relayed back to Hal Watson-and, of course, to Michael Lowenthal's employers.

It was anyone's guess, now, what the casters might think, worth broadcasting if the climax of the chase proved to be sufficiently melodramatic to pull in a big audience. By now, even skyb.a.l.l.s might be turning their inquisitive downward gaze in the direction of Walter Czastka's proto-Eden; the privacy which the genetic engineer so pa.s.sionately desired to conserve was about to be rudely shattered.

But then what? How would the tentative attention of the vidveg be captured-and how would it be secured? She wondered whether it would be necessary to use the gun-and what effect it would have on her career, her image, and her self-regard if the entire world were to watch her shoot down an uncommonly beautiful unarmed woman, albeit with a certified nonlethal dart.

The newscast flickered as the comcon signaled that a call was incoming from the helicopter trailing in their wake.

"What is it, Oscar?" Charlotte said.

"I tried to call Walter," said Wilde. "This is what I got." His own face was immediately replaced by that of Walter Czastka's silver-animated sim.

"d.a.m.n you, Oscar Wilde," the sim said, apparently without having bothered with any conventional identification or polite preliminary. "d.a.m.n you and Rappaccini to the darkest oblivion imaginable." "That's not very nice, Walter," Wilde's voice countered, although the image on screen was still the sim's. "We have a responsibility to our AI slaves not to use them in this tawdry way. They can be pleasant on our behalf, but we shouldn't require them to be insulting. It isn't worthy of us." "d.a.m.n you, Oscar Wilde," the sim repeated. "d.a.m.n you and Rappaccini to the darkest oblivion imaginable." "Nor should we lock the poor things into tight loops," the Wildean voice-over added. "It's a particularly cruel form of imprisonment." "d.a.m.n you, Oscar Wilde," said the sim yet again. "d.a.m.n you and Rappaccini to the darkest oblivion imaginable." It was obviously programmed to make that response to anything and everything that Wilde might say. Charlotte cut off the tape and punched out Czastka's phone code herself.

"Dr. Czastka," she said when the sim appeared, "this is Sergeant Charlotte Holmes of the UN police. I need to speak to you urgently." "d.a.m.n you, Oscar Wilde," replied the sim stubbornly. "d.a.m.n you and Rappaccini to the darkest oblivion imaginable." Charlotte restored the link to Wilde's helicopter. His face had creased into an anxious frown. "I have a horrible suspicion," Wilde said, "that we might already be too late." Charlotte looked at the comcon's timer. They were still thirteen minutes away from their estimated time of arrival at the island. She punched in another code, connecting herself to the commander of the task force whose hovering copters had surrounded the island.

"What's happening?" she demanded.

"No sign of her yet," the answer came back. "She can't possibly have landed without being seen. If anything happens, Sergeant, you'll be the first to know, as per New York's orders." The local man did not seem particularly pleased by the fact that he had orders to check all his moves with a mere sergeant. The fact that she was from New York probably added an extra hint of insult to the tacit injury.

"What do you mean, too late?" she said to Wilde, having cut back to him yet again. "If he were dead, it could only be suicide. His phone sim may be the stupidest obsolete sloth still in use, but there must be silver-level smarts somewhere in his systems. If he were actually dead, they'd override the sloth.

We've put the whole island on full alert!" "Even if he is not dead," Wilde said stubbornly, "we may still be too late. That is what Rappaccini intends." There was nothing to do but wait and see, so Charlotte sat back in her seat and stared down at the agitated waves, letting the minutes tick by. Michael Lowenthal did not attempt to engage her in conversation.

They were still two minutes short of their ETA when the voice of the local commander came back on-line. "We have visual contact with the woman," he said.

"Relaying now." When the picture on the copter's screen cleared, it showed a female figure in a humpbacked suitskin walking out of the sea, looking for all the world as if she were enjoying a leisurely stroll after a few minutes in the water.

"We're going in," said the commander.

"Not yet!" said Charlotte. "We're coming in now! Don't set down until I do.

Leave her to me." She was not entirely sure why she had told him to wait, but she was acutely aware of the responsibility of enacting Hal Watson's authority-and it was, after all, her investigation too.

Charlotte watched raptly as the woman who looked like Julia Herold paused at the high-tide line and began detaching the hump on her suitskin, which presumably contained a built-in paralung. The camera eye zoomed in, not because it was refocusing but because the helicopter carrying it was moving closer. Obedient to Charlotte's order, however, the machine did not complete its touchdown, hovering a meter or so above the sand. Over the voice link, Charlotte could hear the sound of loudhailer-magnified voices instructing the woman to stand still.

The woman did not seem to see the slowly settling helicopters or hear the loudhailers. She pushed back the hood of her suitskin and shook loose her long tresses. Her hair had changed color again; it was now a gloriously full red-gold, which seemed luminously alive as it caught the rays of the rising sun.

The a.s.sa.s.sin knelt beside the discarded augmentation of her suitskin, removing something from a pocket. She made no attempt to move from the spot where she had been instructed to remain, but she swiftly unwrapped whatever it was that had been bound up with the paralung in the bi-molecular membrane.

"What's she doing?" Charlotte murmured as her own copter nudged its way into a gap in the surrounding ring.

"I don't know," Michael Lowenthal answered.

Over the voice link they could still hear the officer who had spoken to them. He was instructing her to desist from whatever she was doing and raise her hands above her head.

Charlotte's copter settled on the sand, thirty meters closer to the woman's position than any of the others, and Charlotte threw open the door. She stepped down onto the beach, conscious of the fact that hundreds of flying eyes would now be focused on her.

Suddenly the air around the red-haired woman was filled by a haze of what looked like smoke. As she came back to an erect position, the haze dispersed.

"Artificial spores," Michael Lowenthal guessed. He was still in the copter, but he had moved to Charlotte's seat in order to get a better view. "Millions of them-she knew she'd never get to kiss Czastka, so she's casting them adrift on the wind." "Where's Czastka?" Charlotte shouted, turning up the mike on her beltphone in the hope that the task-force commander might still be able to hear her-but the thrum of the slowing helicopter blades was still too loud to allow her to be heard. She hoped that the Creationist was still inside, his walls sealed tight against any form of biological invasion.

Charlotte took three steps toward the young woman, then raised her gun, holding it in both hands, and pointed it. The noise of the copters was fading fast, and she was certain that she would be heard if she shouted.

"Raise your hands!" she yelled.

The woman was standing perfectly still now, but she had to turn through ninety degrees to face Charlotte. The expression on her face was unreadable, and Charlotte was not at all sure that the woman could see her, let alone hear her-but as she turned she meekly raised her hands high above her head. By the time her bright green eyes met Charlotte's, she was still, impa.s.sive, and seemingly harmless.

Charlotte felt a wave of thankfulness sweep through her tense frame. She took her left hand off the stock of the gun and beckoned to the woman.

"Come to me!" she instructed. "Slowly, now." From the corners of her eyes Charlotte could see uniformed men dismounting from the other helicopters, but they simply stepped down to the ground, watching and waiting. The sound of the copter blades was a mere hum by now, but Charlotte's ears had been numbed by the cacophony, and she was not sure how loud the sound was. She could hear the distant whine of Oscar Wilde's copter, though. It had turned to circle the beach rather than coming in to land.

The woman showed not the slightest sign of obeying Charlotte's last order. She stood where she was, un-moving. Her arms were still upraised in a gesture of surrender, but the gesture suddenly seemed to Charlotte to be slightly mocking.

The murderess had apparently done what she came to do, and had accepted that it was all over-but she did not seem to be in any hurry to place herself in custody and climb aboard the helicopter that would ferry her to judgment.

"Come this way!" Charlotte repeated, shouting in case the woman had not been able to hear the first command. "Walk toward the helicopter, slowly." She lifted the handset from her beltphone and spoke into it. "Better get your men back into the copters," she said to the task-force commander. "The stuff she's released is probably harmless to anyone but Czastka, but there's no point in taking risks.

When we get back to Kauai, everyone goes through decontamination." "As you wish, Sergeant," said the officer sourly.

The woman still had not moved. She stood statue-still, looking up into the brilliant blue sky. It seemed that Charlotte had no alternative but to go to her.

Charlotte replaced the handset of her beltphone and took two steps forward, saying: "My name is Detective Sergeant Charlotte Holmes of the UN police. I'm arresting you on suspicion-" She was interrupted by a cry of alarm from the helicopter that had settled on the far side of the woman's position. The uniformed men had been obediently climbing back aboard, but the last one had paused and turned-and now he was pointing, apparently at the two women.

"Look out!" he cried.

Charlotte's right hand tensed about the handle of the gun, and her left moved back to support it. Her forefinger curled around the trigger-but the red-haired woman hadn't moved a muscle, and there was no evident threat. Charlotte heard a strange squawking sound emanating from the region of her hip and realized that someone was trying to attract her attention by shouting over the voice link to her handset. She lowered her left hand again, rather uncertainly, and plucked the handset from its holster. "It's okay," she said impatiently. "She has no weapon. It's all under control." "Look behind you!" screeched the unrecognizable voice, still trying to shout at her although the volume control on the beltphone was automatically compensating.

"Corruption and corrosion, woman, look behind you!" Uncomprehendingly, Charlotte looked behind her.

Gliding toward her from the vivid brightness of the climbing sun was a broad black shadow. At first she could judge neither its breadth nor its exact shape, but as it swooped down upon her the truth became abundantly and monstrously clear.

She could not believe the evidence of her eyes. She knew full well that what she was seeing was impossible, and her mind stubbornly refused to accept the truth of what she saw. She understood, as her unbelief stupefied and froze her, why the voice had been trying so hard to achieve an appropriate level of amplification. In addition to the need to warn her that she was in danger, there had been a need to express shock, horror, and sheer terror.

It was a bird-but it was a bird like none which had ever taken to the skies of Earth in the entire evolutionary history of flight. Its wingspan was larger than the reach of the helicopter blades that were already spinning again as the automatic pilots prepared for flight. Its vast wings were black, but they glinted like the wings of starlings; their pinion feathers somehow reminded Charlotte of scimitars and samurai swords. Its enormous and horrible head was naked, like a vulture's, and its eyes were the size of basketb.a.l.l.s; they were crimson in color, but as they caught the sunlight it seemed that they were all aglow with a sulphurous inner light.

The creature's raptorial beak was fully agape, and it cried out as it swept over her head. Its call was a terrible inhuman shriek, which put Charlotte in mind of the wailing of the d.a.m.ned in some ancient mythical h.e.l.l. She felt as if she had been frozen in place, like a pillar of salt, to await her doom as that terrible beak closed upon her tender flesh-but the beak pa.s.sed her by, and the huge claws too. Their talons were aimed at the other woman: Rappaccini's unnatural daughter.

Charlotte's momentary petrifaction came to an end. Even as she perceived that she was not the target of the monster's dive, panic took hold of her and threw her aside like a rag doll. She had no time to realign and fire her gun, nor even to think about realigning and firing it. Her reflexes rudely cast her down, tumbling her ignominiously onto the silvery sand.

Rappaccini's daughter, if that were indeed what she deemed herself to be, did not change her position in the slightest. Her hands were still lifted high into the air. Her eyes were unconcerned, apparently entranced.

Charlotte understood now-how obvious it was, now!- that the meek raising of those arms had not been a gesture of surrender at all; the woman had merely been making preparations for the arrival of her appalling rescuer. Charlotte twisted her body so that she could watch, but her limbs still hugged the ground, as if they were trying to bury into the warm and welcoming sand.

And this is going out live to half the population of the world! Charlotte thought. What a way to win a ratings war! As though with an ease induced by long and patient practice, the woman who had been Rappaccini's murderous instrument interlaced the fingers of both her hands with the reaching talons of the huge bird and was lifted instantly from her feet.