Architects of Emortality Part 2

Magnus Teidemann was exhausted by the time he got back to the tent, but it was a good kind of exhaustion: the kind that resulted from a long walk through resentful undergrowth, carrying a heavy pack loaded with specimen jars.

The specimen jars had been carefully dug out of the humus-littered forest floor, where they had served as pitfall traps to capture wandering insects and arachnids. As the director of the Seventh Biodiversity Survey, Magnus had a legion of a.s.sistarits to carry out such work, but he insisted on taking s.h.i.+fts himself. There was no tokenism about the gesture; the reason he had involved himself with the Natural Biodiversity Movement in the first place was to have the opportunity to work at ground level.

Old though he was, Magnus was not ready to be confined to a laboratory, let alone a desk. A man of his age had to be reckoned to be taking a serious risk if he insisted in isolating himself out here, where help might take ten or twelve hours to reach him if he contrived to send an alarm call and ten or twelve days if he did not, but it was a risk he was prepared to take. Indeed, his dearest and most secret wish was to die in some such place as this, in the humid maternal shadow of the forest giants, where his body would decay in a matter of days into the placental humus so that its atoms could be redistributed within the organisms that collaborated in the const.i.tution of one of the world's new lungs.

Magnus had always worked in the cause of life-the greatest cause there was-and he knew that a man condemned to die, as all men of his misfortunate generation were, ought to make a gift of his body to Mother Earth. He did not want a gaudy funeral in which his coffin would be dragged around the streets of some sterile city, followed by cartloads of Rappaccini flowers purchased from the MegaMall.

He would rather die in the sisterly company of sylphs and dryads, surrounded by the flowers of the forest, donating his flesh to the seething cauldron of benign witchery.

The "tent" in which Magnus was temporarily resident was not, of course, an actual tent. It was a bubble dome made out of Life-Simulating Plastic, of a kind originally designed for use on Mars. It was second cousin to those which currently dotted the airless plains of the moon and those which were anch.o.r.ed to the bedrock beneath the snows and glutinous muds of t.i.tan. It was a high-tech product of the MegaMall, and its presence here confirmed that no matter what Magnus's dreams and wishes might be, he was a stranger in an alien environment.

Man was an alien invader here, as he was everywhere else in the solar system.

Man was a product of the savanna, a creator of fields and deserts. The forest was its own world, but the entire ecosphere was part of the human empire now.

The forest could not survive without the protection and support of such benevolent invaders as himself, and the LSP dome was the price of his own comfortable survival within it.

The purpose of Magnus's dome, as of its extraterrestrial cousins, was to secure a miniature alien environment and to keep a natural ecosphere at bay. The only difference was that the primary purpose of his dome was to protect the environment without, rather than the environment within. The biospheric fragment in which the dome was set had to be guarded from contamination because it was, in spite of its relative geographical isolation, too near a neighbor that was the most dangerous and malign of all alien environments: the fin de siecle cities of the twenty-fifth century. The humming hives of the MegaMall's customers and sales force were far beyond the horizon, but while they shared the same spherical surface and the same atmosphere they had to be reckoned close neighbors. From the forest's viewpoint, the MegaMall's minions were the neighbors from h.e.l.l.

Ultimately, of course, it was the MegaMall that paid Magnus his living wage, just as it paid the wage of every other man and woman living on and beyond Earth, but Magnus always thought of his particular portion of the great capitalist pie as conscience money, or as a tribute to the oldest G.o.ddess of them all: the ultimate mother, Gaea the Great.

Tired as he was, Magnus had neither the inclination nor the energy to make an elaborate investigation of his new captives. The most interesting specimens, in any case, would be too small to see without the aid of a magnifying gla.s.s, and his eyes, long overdue for replacement, were too weak to take the strain. He took his time decanting the contents of his specimen jars into more economical storage units, and then put the empty jars into the sterilizer, ready to be taken out into the field again tomorrow. They would be alternated with their duplicates for the sixty-third time, with thirty-seven still to go.

When his duty had been adequately done, Magnus used the microwave oven-which had been dutifully storing solar power all day long-to heat up a plastic-wrapped meal. The sole meuniere tasted excellent, as was to be expected of one of the finest products of modern food science, but Magnus hardly noticed. In the wilderness, eating was a utilitarian business, a mere matter of fueling the body.

The tropical night arrived with characteristic swiftness, but Magnus did not reach for the wall panel whose virtual control keys were displayed in patterns of red light. He could have instructed the Life-Simulating Plastic to become opaque, but he did not want to do that. Privacy was not an issue hereabouts, and the fact that the discreetly muted lights inside the bubble dome would attract every moth for miles around did not concern him-except, of course, insofar as the moths themselves might be inconvenienced.

Magnus loved wilderness better than anything else in the world. That is to say, he loved green wilderness: wilderness the color of the world that men had all but lost What he hated most in all the world was wasteland: gray wasteland, the color of the glutinous organic dust which had consumed the first-generation cities left derelict by the Crash, and the color of the second-generation cities that had been gantzed out of that dust to supply the alleged needs of the mult.i.tudinous produce of Conrad Helier's New Reproductive System. Today's third-generation cities were multicolored, and Magnus knew that the fourth-generation complexes which were no longer to be called cities-out of respect for the current fas.h.i.+onability of the absurd philosophy of Decivilization-would take care to mimic the green which had been banished from the ever-extending jet-black SAP fields; to Magnus, however, the underlying color of the human hive and all its honeycombs would always be gray.

Magnus loved to sleep beneath the stars, as if in the open air. Even though the LSP prevented his breathing in the myriad scents of the renewed rain forest while he lay upon his bunk, he felt that he was sharing communion with the benign soul of the world. Thanks to the protective power of the tent, he could lie naked on his bed without the least fear of cold or persecution by predators and parasites.

It was still early when he finished his strictly utilitarian meal, but he was too tired for serious work, and the last thing he wanted was to watch TV. He discarded his beltphone along with his clothes, knowing full well that it would not emit the slightest sound. His answering machine was a low-grade silver, and he had trained it very carefully to be as stubborn as it was clever. It would not break into his communion even to give him news of the end of the world.

He turned the light down to a mere glow. Then he laid himself down on his bed, displaying himself with all due reverence, feeling deliciously humble in the presence of Gaea. In public, he always denied that he was a Gaean Mystic, because two centuries of mockery had contrived to attach a comical significance to the term, but in private he was prepared to admit that Gaea had been the one true love of his life, the core of his spirituality. Her cause was his cause, and would be for as long as he lived.

Sleep did not come to Magnus immediately, but he was unworried by its lack of hurry. He was content to look serenely up at the handful of stars that were visible through the forest canopy.

Darkness had leached all color from the outside world, but it was still green to him. Green was more than mere appearance, after all; it was essence and symbol, belonging at least as much to inner vision as to the deceptive wisdom of the eye.

In the days of his youth, which Magnus could no longer remember with any clarity, there had been such an abundance of gray in the world that he must surely have been filled with anguish by its contemplation. Even then, he had been avid-recklessly avid, on occasion-to work in the cause of life, although he had not had such a clear idea of what the cause of life required of a man. In those days, he had a.s.sociated freely with the engineers whose cause was to subdue and manipulate life and reduce it to the status of one more MegaMall product; nowadays, he knew better. He had not seen or spoken to Walter Czastka for more than a century.

Now that he was old, Magnus was exceedingly glad that the empire of the gray had been so much reduced. The one good thing to be said for the vast black landscapes of modern agri-industry was that they had liberated s.p.a.ce for the limited restoration of the greenery of Ancient Nature. Magnus was now old for the third time, and he knew that this time would be the last. He was glad enough and wise enough to accept that truth; he was not one of those vainglorious individuals who would dare anything and everything in the usually futile pursuit of a fourth youth.

The lessons of the twenty-third and twenty-fourth centuries had been hard, but the limits of inorganic nanotechnology had finally been recognized and admitted by his own generation. Had they been admitted two hundred years earlier, he knew, far more research might have been redirected into pure bioscience, and members of the new generation of Naturals might now be welcoming their second century of hopefully eternal youth instead of climbing out of slightly protracted adolescence. Magnus was not unduly resentful of the fact that he had been born too soon to benefit from Zaman engineering, however; nor did he begrudge the fact that he had lived to see the advent of the New Human Race while still confined to the tattered flesh of the Old, doomed to become a thing of nanotech thread and patches.

Magnus knew that there were many people in the world-most of them younger by far than he-who considered the reborn wilderness to be an artifact of nostalgia, a brief folly of the MegaMall's Dominant Shareholders, but he was convinced that the work he was doing would provide a legacy for which the new inheritors of the earth would be deeply grateful. He would die, and soon, but the work to which he had dedicated his life would go on. The forest would survive. Alien to man it might be, but man would protect it nevertheless. The members of the New Human Race had even elected to call themselves Naturals. Gaean Mystics they were not, but at heart-or so Magnus believed-every true human was a Gaean in essence. The inheritors of Earth would guard their heritage far better than his own kind ever had.

As these thoughts wandered across his mind, Magnus had to blink a tear from the corner of his left eye. He immediately suffered a sudden stab of doubt, which was not so easily blinked away. He could not help but recall the fact that many people considered him to be an obsessive fool, not merely a lunatic but-and this was surely the final insult-a harmless lunatic.

"In the empire of the ecosphere, Magnus," a once-valued colleague had said to him, only a few weeks before, "everything is controlled. It has to be. What you call 'wilderness' was born from the gene banks which conserved DNA from the world which existed before the ecocatastrophes of the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries. It flourishes by our permission, entirely subject to our guidance. Its freedom is merely the result of our refusal fully to exercise our ecological hegemony. You're fooling yourself if you think that it's Ancient Nature reborn, in any meaningful sense. Ancient Nature began to die with the first discovery of agriculture and ended its long torment in the years before the Crash. Your so-called wilderness is at best a ghost and at worst a mere echo." "I know and understand all that," Magnus now took leave to reply, exercising his inalienable right to l'esprit de I'escaller. "I am not a fool-I merely recognize both the necessity and the propriety of returning these tracts of land to the dominion of natural selection. It is a wholly desirable act of expiation, whose efficacy is clearly displayed by the results of the biodiversity surveys." "It's a shallow gesture," the colleague had told him, in response to a less carefully formulated reply. "It's a temporary indulgence-a brief guilt trip whose futility will be recognized by the New Human Race as soon as its first generation reaches true adulthood. The time has already arrived when forest green is just as much an artifact as SAP black. You can't halt progress, Magnus.

You can't turn back the clock. Your forest is a sham, and a temporary folly." "I'm trying to turn the clock, forward," Magnus had not thought to say at the time. "What I'm doing is progress. The forest is forever, and its flesh is as real as its soul." And yet, he could not deny that all the forest trees whose company he preferred to that of his fellow men had been planted within his own lifetime. The seeds from which they were grown had come from gene banks: the static arks that had been hastily stocked in the twenty-first century, before the Greenhouse Crisis had sent a second Deluge to devastate the lowlands of civilization. The young trees had required careful protection and a.s.siduous nurture for decades before they could be left to fend for themselves. The re-creation of wilderness had been, in its fas.h.i.+on, as delicate a task as any exercise in Creation of the kind which hundreds of hubristic engineers were now carrying out in the real and artificial islands of the vast Pacific.

In spite of all this, Magnus knew that he must somehow have faith in the a.s.sertion that what surrounded him, as he slept beneath the stars, really was a part of the authentic soul of the world. He had to believe that the gene banks had merely been a phase in an evolutionary story that stretched back from the present to the magical day when life had first ventured forth from the littoral zones of the primordial ocean to embrace the land.

Like all good Gaeans, Magnus preferred to think of that adventure as an "embrace"; he had always hated to hear it described as a "conquest." Had he not been a.s.sailed by such troublesome doubts, Magnus would not have been delighted to receive an unexpected visitor-but it happened that he was a.s.sailed by doubts on that particular night, and that his visitor brought welcome relief.

When Magnus first heard the noise of the newcomer's approach, he could not help the reflexive twitch of his hand which impelled it toward the place where his dart gun lay hidden, but he suppressed the impulse readily enough. Within the dome, he was invulnerable to attack by any creature which had only teeth and claws to use as weapons. When he saw that the approaching figure was a human woman, however, a different set of reflexes was immediately invoked, and he tumbled from his bed with indecent haste.

By the time the woman had come through the protective undergrowth, Magnus had framed his protests, but they were halfhearted, motivated by shame that she should have come upon him naked in a transparent tent rather than by annoyance at the violation of his privacy.

"You shouldn't have come," he said when he had let her in-having partly clothed himself, although he still felt more than a little exposed. "It's dangerous to walk through the forest by night." "I was lonely," she said. "My dome's only a couple of kilometers from yours, and it seemed foolish to endure the loneliness when company was so close to hand. By day, the nature of our work confines us to our own tracts, but that's no reason why we can't get together in our own time. There is a track, after all-it's not as if I had to hack my way through th.o.r.n.y bushes and sticky creepers with a machete. I would have called to tell you I was coming, but that d.a.m.ned silver of yours wouldn't let me through. You really should instruct it to allow a few exceptions." Magnus didn't have the heart to tell her that if he had been disposed to file a list of people exempted from the silver's stalling strategy, her name would not have been among them. She was undeniably lovely-her eyes were perfectly delightful, her flowing hair absolutely magnificent-but he hardly knew her. He had never seen her at the base, nor had he even noticed her name in any of the doc.u.ments that flitted across his busy screens. Had she not taken it into her head to begin making these mercifully infrequent journeys from her LSP tent to his, he would probably never have become aware of her existence, let alone made love to her. But even in the depths of his beloved forest he could take comfort from genuine human warmth, and she did seem genuine, in that naive fas.h.i.+on that only the authentically young could manifest.

They talked for a while, as they always did. She liked him to talk and never thought him pompous or foolish.

She was not a Natural, but she was one of the committed ones, one of those who understood-or was, at least, capable of understanding, given the guidance of a man as wise as himself.

"If you are to understand what you are," he told her, when they had got to the strong meat of the conversation, "you must understand the true history of your own genes. Like everyone else, you were born from an artificial womb, the child of a sperm and an ovum which might well have been stored in the banks for centuries. I'm sure that the resultant egg was carefully screened, before cell division was even allowed to begin, for immunity to those hereditary diseases for which even the best IT cannot compensate-but that doesn't mean that you're a creature of human artifice. No matter how extensively the designers of the New Human Race may tamper with the blueprint which is written in the DNA carried by our kind, the DNA retains a history which extends in an unbroken double helix all the way back to the cradle of life itself. Like the forest, you and I are part of the soul of the world-and so is the legion of Naturals whose privilege it will be to inherit that world." The woman had always replied to such proud and portentous statements with a welcoming smile, and she did so now. "That's right," she said. "I was born from a Helier womb, like my mother before me, but the essence of my being didn't begin its development in an artificial environment. As it happens, the sperm and egg whose combination formed my own gentemplate hadn't been stored in the banks for centuries, and in spite of everything that was done to the embryo, and everything else which separates me from the moment of my first genesis, I feel that I'm less a creature of artifice than many. It's a pity that the Naturals have been allowed to hijack that label. I was educated to believe that I too am a Natural of sorts." Magnus heard the entire speech as an echo of his own voice. The young woman had never tried to contradict him and always seemed to be genuinely inspired by his vision. Although she would presumably be one of the last-born members of the Old Human Race, her youth allowed her to feel completely at ease with herself and completely at ease with the world. That easefulness was far more precious than her silken hair, her luminous flesh, or her lithe limbs.

Although he was not ungrateful to be old, and not afraid to die, Magnus was still capable of loving youth. He was still capable of loving her, even though she really should not have left her own bubble dome to visit him in his. He had to forgive her the breach of protocol. He had forgiven her before, and he did so now.

It was a fine irony, Magnus thought, that the cycle of fas.h.i.+on had come full circle yet again, so that the young people of her generation were once again inclined to favor s.e.xual intercourse with actual human beings over the infinitely more various seductions of intimate technology. The truly young had, of course, always been inclined to such experiments, but the newest generation seemed more fervent than its predecessors in challenging the inherited opinion of their elders that only virtual reality could offer ideal partners.

Magnus was old enough and wise enough to have known all along that real partners were better than virtual ones. He had always had faith in the sanct.i.ty of true flesh. His love of wilderness and his love of authentic youth were, he supposed, merely different aspects of his faith in the sanct.i.ty of flesh. Flesh itself might be seen as a kind of wilderness, and wilderness as a kind of youth.

When the soul of the world was young, Magnus thought as he prepared to lie down upon his bed for a second time, naked and unashamed, and man's ancestors were hairy apes on the point of venturing forth from the forests to the great African plain, everything was wilderness. There was wasteland even then-the slopes of active volcanoes; the polar ice fields; the true deserts-but the latter-day wastelands which men have made by deforestation and civilization and biotech wars had not yet offended the all-embracing empire of flesh and youth. Nothing then had been made by ignorance and stupidity and greed, and we still have the opportunity to recall and recreate that lovely innocence. This too is a sacrament offered to Gaea. This too is wors.h.i.+p, and labor in the cause of life.

No man or woman has been born from a human womb for nearly two centuries-longer than that if the official records are believable-but the womb is still a temple of life, and its rites of approach are Gaea's rites. This is not merely love but wors.h.i.+pful love, the ant.i.thesis of ignorance, stupidity, and greed.

Magnus hated ignorance, stupidity, and greed. All wise men, he supposed, must hate ignorance, stupidity, and greed. Wisdom was love of knowledge, intelligence, and moderation. Wisdom was thinking in terms of embraces, and not in terms of conquests. He did not think of the wondrous woman as a conquest, and he was certain that she did not think of herself as having been conquered.

When he kissed her before lowering her onto the narrow bed, Magnus thought for a fleeting instant that he might have known the young woman before-that somewhen in the mists of time which had clouded his memory over the years, he had caught a glimpse of a supremely beautiful face almost exactly like hers-but he dismissed the thought. She was far too young, and her face had clearly been somatically modified to bring the features into line with one of the so-called seven archetypes of female beauty. He had long grown used to the silly tricks which memory sometimes played, and was too wise to let them bother him unduly.

The kiss was delicious, the taste of it far from merely utilitarian.

Before the sun rose again, Magnus Teidemann was dead.

He had died peacefully, and happily, in the forest which he loved. Because it was wilderness, to which human access was, by necessity, very strictly controlled, no one found his body for a long time. No alarm had been raised, and no one thought it in the least odd that they could not get access to him via his answering machine.

By the time his body was discovered, the cunning flowers which had trans.m.u.ted his flesh into their own had withered and died. The humus had reclaimed them, and in reclaiming them had reclaimed him. He was no longer alien to the forest; he had been a.s.similated. It was the end for which he had yearned.

Of all the kindly murders which the innocent flowers and their innocent host were to commit, this was both the first and the most generous.

Investigation: Act Two: Across Manhattan

As soon as the elevator door slid shut, Oscar Wilde seemed to take it for granted that Charlotte's interrogation had been temporarily suspended. Had she been quick enough to seize the initiative, Charlotte might have established that no such suspension had been granted, but she was not. While she paused to collect her thoughts, Wilde turned his attention to Michael Lowenthal.

"I hope you won't think me impolite, Michael," said Wilde, "but I believe you are what common parlance calls a Natural, or a member of the New Human Race." "Yes, I am," Lowenthal agreed in a slightly surprised tone. "I congratulate you on your perspicacity. Most people can't identify a Zaman transformation by means of superficial appearances." "I'm something of a connoisseur of authentic youth," Wilde admitted. "Charlotte is, of course, a fine specimen of the Old Race, but I could never doubt that she and I are of the same sad kind. Perhaps you think that I am too old to share her inevitable regret that her foster parents did not seize the opportunity of subjecting her embryo to the Zaman transformation, but I am not. I have been a genetic engineer all my life, you see, born in the days of prejudice. Like others of my kind, I have always known the perversity and tragedy of the folly which long withheld the generosity of the Finest Art from the most precious flower of all: the flower of human youth." "You are not so very old, Dr. Wilde," said Lowenthal politely.

"Call me Oscar," said Wilde reflexively. "Indeed I am not-but my youth has been hard-won. I have had to renew it three times over. Having been immunized against the ravages of age from the moment of conception, you have every right to expect-or at least to hope-that you will look hardly a day older than you look now when you have lived as many years as I." A triple rejuvenate! Charlotte thought, knowing that her astonishment must be visible. I never saw a triple rejuvenate who looked like that! Even Gabriel King, who was far better preserved than most, had skin like weathered wood, until he was rudely transformed into flesh of a very different kind.

"The error which our forebears made in concentrating their efforts on the development of cleverer nano-technologies was understandable," Lowenthal said, his tone relentlessly neutral. "They believed, not unreasonably, in the escalator effect-that true emortality would eventually be bestowed upon them if only they could keep on reaping the rewards of new and better instruments of repair. With the aid of hindsight, we can see that the hope was illusory-but as a triple rejuvenate, you must have believed in your own youth that presently imperfect technologies would nevertheless be adequate to deliver you into a world in which improved nanotechnologies really would give you the means to preserve your body and mind indefinitely." "I never believed it," Wilde said bluntly. "Even as a child, I could see that the logical end point of excessive reliance on inorganic nanotechnologies would be a dehumanizing robotization-that the only ent.i.ties which could emerge from an endless process of repair would be creatures less human than the cleverest silvers: caricaturish automata. The only respect in which I have been forced to alter my opinion is that I feared such travesties would actually be able to think of themselves as human and even to believe themselves to be the same individuals who had been born into an earlier era. Mercifully, the workings of the Miller effect have spared us that. And now, at last, the old folly is over and done with. Now, we have a New Human Race, as artfully created as the best products of my own industry." "I wish that you could be one of them," said Michael Lowenthal politely as the elevator car came to a halt and the door slid open again to reveal the modified gloom of the Trebizond Tower's subterranean garage, "since you wish it so fervently." "Thank you," said Oscar Wilde. "I hope that I shall never grow used to the cruelties of fate-and I hope that you, dear Charlotte, will preserve your own resentments as jealously. It will help you to be a better policeman." Charlotte nearly fell into the trap of declaring that she had no such resentments and that she was perfectly content with the decision her eight parents had made to produce and foster a child of their own kind, but she strangled the impulse. Time was pa.s.sing, and there was work to be done.

"My car's over there," she said, extending a finger to indicate to Wilde the direction he should take. "Will you follow us, Mr. Lowenthal?" "I'd rather travel with you, if you don't mind," Lowenthal said. "My superiors sent me out in person so that I could keep my finger on the pulse of the investigation, so to speak. There's no purpose in my actually being here if I have to keep in touch with you by phone." "Suit yourself," said Charlotte shortly. "But I'd be obliged if you could both keep it in mind that this is an investigation, not a dinner party. We're not here to talk about the relative merits of internal technology and Zaman engineering. We're here to figure out who killed Gabriel King-preferably before the news tapes get hold of the grisly details of his demise." "Of course," said Lowenthal. "With luck, the DNA samples collected by Lieutenant Chai will lead us to the murderer-and then we shall only be required to figure out why." He said it in a vaguely admonitory manner-as if he were suggesting that the relative merits of internal nanotech and engineered emortality might perhaps be the crux of the matter.

For the moment, Charlotte could only wonder whether, perhaps, they might.

Charlotte opened the doors of her car and climbed into the seat which offered primary access to the driver, leaving Wilde and Lowenthal to decide for themselves which seats they would take. As if to emphasize their newly cemented alliance, they both got into the rear of the vehicle, leaving the other front seat vacant.

Having keyed in their destination, Charlotte left the silver to plan and navigate a route. She turned to face her pa.s.sengers, but she was too late to take control. Oscar Wilde had already begun talking again.

"I fear," he said, addressing himself to Lowenthal, "that it might not be possible to get to the bottom of this affair before the newsmen unleash their electronic bloodhounds. If what I have so far seen is a reliable guide, the puzzle must have been carefully designed so as not to unravel in a hurry." Lowenthal nodded his head sagely. "It does seem-" "That's all the more reason to concentrate our efforts on the facts we have," Charlotte cut in rudely. "So will you please tell me what you meant, Dr. Wilde, about the supposedly obvious suggestion that the woman in the tape might be Rappaccini's daughter." "Ah," said Wilde. "The thickening of the plot. May I tell you a story?" "If you must," Charlotte said as evenly as she could contrive. It did not help her mood to observe that Michael Lowenthal seemed to be suppressing a smile.

"In an age that was long past even in the nineteenth century," Wilde began, relaxing into the delicate embrace of the car's LSP upholstery, "a young man comes to study at the University of Padua. He takes a small room beneath the eaves of an old house, which looks out upon a walled garden filled with exotic flowers. This garden, he soon learns, is tended by the aged Dr. Rappaccini and his lovely daughter, Beatrice.

"Over a period of weeks, the student watches the delightful Beatrice while she is at work in the garden. Having some knowledge of botany, he soon notices that she can handle with impunity certain plants which he knows to be poisonous to other living things. He is fascinated by this revelation-and, of course, by the lovely girl herself. Eventually, his landlady shows him a secret way into the garden so that he can meet her.

"Beatrice, who has led an extraordinarily secluded life, is as fascinated by the handsome student as he is by her. Innocence and beauty are a fine and deadly combination in a young woman-a combination which ensures that he soon falls in love with her-and she mirrors his infatuation. The student is, however, a very respectable young man, and he is careful to maintain an appropriate distance from his chaste beloved.

"One of Rappaccini's colleagues at the university discovers that the young man has managed to obtain access to the secret garden. He warns the student that he is in great danger, because the plants in the garden-many of which are Rappaccini's own creations-are all poisonous. Beatrice, because she has grown up there, is immune to the poisons; but she has in consequence become poisonous herself. This rival professor, who despises Rappaccini as a 'vile empiric' defiant of tradition, gives the student a vial which, he claims, contains an antidote to the poisons. This, he says, can redeem the unfortunate Beatrice and make her as harmless as other women.

"The student gradually realizes that he too is being polluted by the deadly plants. By virtue of having entered the garden so frequently, he has been infected with the power to blight and kill. He accuses Beatrice of visiting a curse upon him but then proposes that they should both drink the antidote and be cured.

"Rappaccini has by now discovered the intrigue between his daughter and her suitor. He tries to intervene, warning Beatrice not to take the antidote because it will destroy her. He insists that what he has bestowed upon her is a marvelous gift, which makes her powerful while all other women remain weak.

"Beatrice will not listen to her father; she prefers the advice of her young lover. He, being deluded as to the true situation, recklessly urges her to drink the potion, which is to her peculiar nature a poison rather than an antidote.

She dies, and in dying, breaks the hearts of her father and lover alike." Charlotte had struggled hard to follow the implications of this curious tale while it was being told, trying to figure out how it could possibly have anything to do with the murder of Gabriel King-or why Oscar Wilde might think that it did. In the end, she could only say: "You think that the man you know as Rappaccini might be acting the part of his namesake-much as you make a show of acting the part of yours?" Wilde shrugged his shoulders. "In the story, it was Rappaccini's jealous colleague who committed murder, if anyone did. But Rappaccini did collect the fatal flowers: les fleurs du mal. In today's world, of course, it would be very difficult indeed to raise a child in such perfect seclusion as Beatrice. If the man I knew as Rappaccini had a daughter raised to be immune to poisons, but poisonous herself, we must a.s.sume that she would be wiser by far than her predecessor. She would surely know, would she not, that her glamor and her kiss would be poisonous?" "Her kiss?" Charlotte echoed.

"We saw her kiss poor Gabriel, did we not? Did you not think that it was a very deliberate kiss?" "This is too bizarre," Charlotte complained.

"I quite agree," said Wilde equably. "As lushly extravagant as a poem in prose by Baudelaire himself. But then, we have been instructed to expect a Baudelairean dimension to this affair, have we not? I can hardly wait for the next installment of the story." "What's that supposed to mean?" asked Charlotte.

"I doubt that the affair is concluded," Wilde replied.

"You think this is going to happen again?" "I'm almost sure of it," said the beautiful but exceedingly infuriating man, with appalling calmness. "If the author of this mystery intends to present us with a real psychodrama, he will not stop when he has only just begun. The next murder, as your aptly named colleague must by now have deduced, might well be committed in San Francisco." Charlotte could only look at Oscar Wilde as if he were mad-but she could not quite believe that he was. For a moment, she thought that his reference to her "aptly named colleague" was to Lowenthal, but then she remembered the stale jokes about Holmes and Watson, which had had to be explained to her when she had first been teamed with Hal. She recalled that Wilde considered himself an expert on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature-or some of it, at least.

"Why San Francisco?" she asked, wis.h.i.+ng that she did not have to hold herself in such an awkward position while her car threaded its way through the dense traffic. The funeral was long gone, but its congestive aftereffects still lingered.

"The item which was faxed through to me along with the peremptory summons that took me to the Trebizond Tower here was not a copy of the text which appeared on my screen," Wilde belatedly informed her. "It's a reservation for the midnight maglev to San Francisco. Inspector Watson discovered that when he traced the call." The flower designer took a sheet of paper from a pocket in his suitskin and held it out for Charlotte's inspection. She took it from him and stared at it dumbly.

"Why, didn't you show me this before?" she said.

"I'm sorry," Wilde said, "but my mind was occupied with other things. I do hope that you won't try to prevent me from using the ticket. I realize that Hal took great care to recruit me as an expert witness in order to make sure that I might be kept under close surveillance, but I a.s.sure you that I will be of more use to the investigation if I am allowed to follow the trail which the murderer seems to be carefully laying down for me." "Why should we?" she replied, bitterly aware of the fact that it was entirely Hal's decision. "We're the UN police, after all-and this isn't a game. Whether or not those flowers that killed Gabriel King were capable of producing fertile seeds, they const.i.tute a serious biohazard. If something like that ever got loose... why do you think Lowenthal's here?" "I thought he was with you," said Wilde mildly.

"Well, he's not," Charlotte snapped back. "He's from some mysterious upper stratum of the World Government, intent on making sure that we aren't trembling on the brink of a new plague war." "I hope you'll forgive the contradiction, Sergeant, but I never said any such thing," said Michael Lowenthal, speaking just as mildly as the man beside him.

"You seem to have taken the wrong inference from my declaration that I'm just a humble employee." This was too much. "Well who the h.e.l.l are you, then?" she retorted.

"I'm not required to divulge that information," Lowenthal countered, apparently having taken it upon himself to see if he could match Oscar Wilde's skill in the art of infuriation. "But I'd rather you weren't laboring under any delusions about my working for the UN. I don't." Charlotte knew that every word of this conversation would eventually be replayed by Hal Watson, even if he were content for the time being to rely on her summary of its results while he was busy chasing silvers through the dusty backwaters of the Web. She was painfully aware of the fact that the replay wasn't going to make her look good-or even halfway competent.

"What do you think is going to happen in San Francisco, Dr. Wilde?" she asked, taking a firm grip of her temper.

"Call me Oscar," he pleaded. "I fear, dear Charlotte, that it may already have happened. The question is: what am I being sent to San Francisco to discover? I daresay that Hal is doing what he can to make the relevant discovery before I get there, and we shall doubtless find out whether he has succeeded in a few minutes' time, but the pieces of the puzzle have so far been placed with the utmost care. There is so much in the unfolding picture that I am able to recognize without having to delve in esoteric databases that I am forced to the conclusion that the whole affair was planned with my role as expert witness very much in mind. I don't know why this ingenious murderer should have taken the trouble to invite me to play detective, but it seems that I may be better equipped to draw inferences from whatever discoveries you may make than anyone else. I hope that you will trust my judgment, allowing me to help you in the way that seems most appropriate to me." "And if we did that," Charlotte said, "we'd look even more idiotic than the meanest sloth if it eventually turned out that you were the one who had planted all these crazy clues, wouldn't we? If it turned out that you were the architect of the whole affair, and we'd let you lead us halfway around the world while posing as an expert witness, we'd look like the stupidest idiots that ever enlisted in the UN police." "I suppose you would," said Oscar Wilde. "I fear that I can't offer you any incontrovertible proof that I'm innocent-but you'll seem just as foolish, I fear, if you refuse to avail yourself of my expertise, and it later turns out that I am innocent and could have given you significant help in solving the mystery." Charlotte had to admit, if only silently, that it was true. If Wilde really did have the temerity to have himself summoned to the scene of a crime which he had committed, so that he could savor the frustration of the UN's investigators, the ticket to San Francisco might be a means of escape that he was flaunting in front of her, but if not... "If you're going to San Francisco," she said, hoping that she could get Hal to back her up, "then I'm going too." On the theory that a reckless gamble shared was an uncomfortable responsibility halved, she added: "How about you, Mr.

Lowenthal?" "I wouldn't miss it for the world," Lowenthal said. "I'll book our tickets now." He unhooked his beltphone and set about doing exactly that.

"We have several hours in hand before midnight," Charlotte said to Oscar Wilde, feeling a little better now that she had actually made an executive decision.

"Even if Hal hasn't cracked the case by then, he's sure to have turned up a wealth of useful information. If you really have been invited to the party in order to give us the benefit of your expertise, you'll doubtless be able to give us a better idea of what it might all mean than any impression we can form on our own behalf." "I certainly hope so," he replied warmly. "You can count on my complete cooperation-and, of course, on my absolute discretion." And you, Charlotte said silently, can count on being instantly arrested, the moment Hal digs up anything that will stand up in court as evidence of your involvement in this unholy mess. If you're trying to run rings around us, you'd better not count on our getting dizzy.

The "new" UN complex built in 2431 was now under sentence of death, along with every other edifice on Manhattan Island, but it was intended to remain functional for at least another year while its mult.i.tudinous departments were relocated on a piecemeal basis. Charlotte thought that its loss would be a pity, given that it had so much history attached to it-the complex embraced the site of the original building, which had been demolished in 2039-but the MegaMall and the Decivilizers both saw the matter in a different light.

Charlotte had only the vaguest notion of how the Decivilization movement had come to be so influential, but she could see perfectly well that it was a matter of fas.h.i.+on rather than ideological commitment. Perhaps people had been huddled into the old cities for far too long, and perhaps the populations of the New Human Race ought to be more diffusely distributed if they were really to develop new and better ways of life, but that didn't mean that history ought to be forgotten and all its artifacts rendered down into biotech sludge. What would happen when the fas.h.i.+on pa.s.sed, and "Decivilization" ceased to be a buzzword? Would the Naturals then begin to restore everything that Gabriel King had demolished? There had once been talk of the UN taking over the whole of Manhattan, but that had gone the way of most dream schemes during the still-troubled years of the late twenty-second century. Now, an even more grandiose plan to move the core of the UN bureaucracy to Antarctica-the "continent without nations"-was well advanced and seemed likely to proceed to completion. Fortunately, that was unlikely to include the Police Department. Charlotte didn't want to relocate to a penguin-infested wilderness of ice.

Oscar Wilde mentioned to Charlotte as they transferred from her car to the elevator that he had visited the UN complex many times before but had never penetrated into the secret sanctum of the Police Department. He seemed to find the prospect of a visit to Hal's lair rather amusing. Charlotte was confident that he would be disappointed by the clutter; Hal was not a tidy man, and Wilde's manner of dress suggested that he valued neatness.

"How well did you know Gabriel King, Dr. Wilde?" she suddenly asked as they stepped across the threshold of the elevator. Having seen and understood what had happened last time, she was determined to seize the initiative before the ascent commenced.

"We used to meet for business reasons at infrequent intervals," Wilde replied, apparently having given up on his attempt to achieve first-name status, "and we must have been in the same room on numerous social occasions. I think of myself as belonging to a different generation, but the world at large presumably considers us to be of equivalent antiquity. I haven't spoken to Gabriel for more than twenty years, although I would undoubtedly have b.u.mped into him sometime soon had I remained in New York and had he remained alive. I've supplied his company with decorative materials for various building projects, but we were never friends. He was one of the great bores of his era, and not for want of compet.i.tion, but I had nothing else against him. Even a man of my acute aesthetic sensibilities would not stoop so low as to murder a man merely for being a bore." "And how well do you know Rappaccini?" she followed up doggedly.

"I haven't seen him in the flesh for more years than I can count. I know the body of his work far better than I know the man behind it, but there was a period immediately before and after the Great Exhibition when we used to meet quite frequently. We were often bracketed together by critics and reporters who observed a kins.h.i.+p in our ideas, methods, and personalities, and tended to oppose us to a more orthodox school headed by Walter Czastka. The reportage created a sense of common cause, although I was never sure how closely akin we really were, aesthetically speaking. Our conversations were never intimate-we discussed art and genetics, never our personal histories and ambitions." Charlotte would have pursued the line of questioning further, but the elevator had reached its destination.

Oscar Wilde did not seem in the least surprised or reluctant to comply when Charlotte asked her two companions to wait in her office for a few minutes while she consulted her colleague in private, but Michael Lowenthal almost voiced an objection before deciding better of it. She could not tell whether he was being scrupulously polite, or whether he thought that there might be more advantage in remaining with Wilde. As soon as she had shown Wilde and Lowenthal into her room, the two of them fell into earnest conversation again, seemingly losing interest in her before she closed the door on them.

Charlotte made a mental note to review the tape before she went to bed, even if she had to do it in a sleeper on the maglev.

Charlotte saw no point in beating about the bush when she presented herself to her superior officer.

"I brought Wilde with me," she said brusquely. "I think he did it. I think this whole mad scheme is a bizarre game. He may be a victim of mental disruption caused by excessive use of repair nanotech within the brain. He's older than he looks." Even in the dim light of Hal's crowded quarters Charlotte was easily able to see the expression of amus.e.m.e.nt which flitted across the inspector's face, but all he actually said was: "I know how old he is. Less than one-fifty, and already he's risked a third rejuve-but every test they applied at the hospital says that he's still in possession of a mens sana in corpore sano. I've checked his records." "He knows far too much about this business for it to be mere coincidence," Charlotte insisted, wis.h.i.+ng that her argument hadn't collapsed quite as feebly on exposure to the oxygen of publicity. "I know it sounds crazy, but I think he set this whole thing up and then turned up in person to watch us wrestle with it." "So you think his introduction of Rappaccini's name is just a red herring?" "He's been careful not to say that Rappaccini's guilty of the murder," she pointed out. "When he told us that silly story about Rappaccini's daughter, he pointed out that the murderer, if there was one, was a jealous rival. Wilde's a flower designer, like Rappaccini-and he put on a convincing show of being offended when I told him that our first choice of expert witness was Walter Czastka. If this Biasiolo character hasn't been glimpsed for decades, it's possible that Wilde has actually taken over the Rappaccini pseudonym from its original user." "It's an interesting hypothesis," said Hal, with an air of affected tolerance that was almost as excruciating as Oscar Wilde's. "But my surfers haven't found a jot of evidence to support it." Charlotte hesitated but decided that it would be best not to continue. She'd put her suspicions on the record; the best thing to do now was to follow them up herself, as best she could. She figured that it would be sensible to change the subject of the present conversation-and there was a question she had been longing to ask.

"Who the h.e.l.l is this Lowenthal, Hal? When you said that the order to copy him in came from upstairs I a.s.sumed that he came from upstairs too, but he says he didn't. Who's he really working for?" Hal shrugged. "Pick your cliche," he said. "The Secret Masters. The Hardinist Cabal. The Nine Unknown. The Ice-Age Elite. The Knights of the Round Table. The G.o.ds of Olympus. The Heirs Apparent. The Inner Circle. The Dominant Shareholders." "The MegaMall?" Charlotte completed the sequence incredulously. "Why would the MegaMall be interested in this? King's murder can't possibly have any macro-economic implications." "Everything has macroeconomic implications," Hal informed her, although-as his recitation of the list of names by which the world's economic elite were mockingly known suggested-he didn't seem to be entirely serious. "This is a very sensitive time, world-supply-and-demand-wise. We're on the hot upslope of the economic cycle, and the Dominant Shareholders have taken what must seem even to them to be a brave decision in pandering to the prophets of Decivilization.

Clearing out the old cities and changing the lifestyle of the race will certainly generate a lot of lovely economic activity, but the Shareholders must be a little nervous about the possibility that it might all boil over. They don't want anything to get out of hand, and the a.s.sa.s.sination of a man like King-the publicly acknowledged spearhead of the demolition of New York-might be a symptom of something ugly." "Are you saying that King was part of the Inner Circle?" Charlotte asked incredulously.

"No. But he was a committed servant-close enough to make the real Shareholders think that it might be worthwhile to track my investigation move for move.

Lowenthal's just learning the ropes, though. For him, this is schoolwork. Be nice to him-one day, he'll probably be up there on Olympus with the rest of the Heirs Apparent, jockeying for a good seat at the Round Table, at the right hand of the Once and Future Managing Director." Hal was still taking the trouble to sound nonserious, but Charlotte wondered whether he was only doing it to conceal the true seriousness of what he was saying.

"You really think Lowenthal's going to be a big wheel in the MegaMall one day?" she said, uncertain as to whether it was the sort of question that should even be asked, if it might receive an affirmative answer.

"Him or someone very like him," Hal replied. "Once members of the New Human Race get their b.u.ms on the boardroom seats, they're likely to be there forever and a day-unless, of course, Zaman transformations turn out to be a storm in a teacup, just like PicoCon's much-vaunted nanotech escalator. The prophets of Decivilization know that, of course, and they probably understand well enough why the MegaMall is letting them play their games with real cities. If they were to decide not to be content with their concessionary inch, and set out to claim a mile... well, some might say that it's a short enough step from being a hard-line Decivilizer to becoming an Eliminator." "Oh," said Charlotte, recognizing that this line of thought might be the basis of a much more intriguing hypothesis as to the why of Gabriel King's murder than her supposition that Oscar Wilde was an insane criminal genius. After a pause she said: "Have you got the DNA a.n.a.lyses from King's apartment yet?" "Twenty minutes," Hal told her. "Maybe thirty. Better wheel Wilde in anyway, though. My silvers have turned up some other stuff he might be interested to look at-and it really isn't a good idea to appear to be shutting Lowenthal out." "Wilde wants to go to San Francisco on the midnight maglev," Charlotte reported mechanically. "Lowenthal wants to go with him. So do I." "I know," said Hal in the infuriating manner he always reserved for her best revelations. "Wilde's got every right to do so, of course, provided that he gives the gentemplate of the killer plant his full and immediate attention once Regina's finished the a.n.a.lysis. What difference does it make? If he has done something wrong, we can find him easily enough, whether he's in San Francisco or on the moon. You don't have to go with him." "Suppose he were the murderer and went on to murder someone else?" Charlotte asked desperately.