Architects of Emortality Part 7

"I hate to break in on such a fevered discussion," he said, "but I just checked the DNA trace Regina Chai recovered against the record of one Maria Inacio, listed in Jafri Biasiolo's birth record as his biological mother. The same record says, 'Father Unknown'-a statement whose significance has only just become apparent to me. The trace recovered from King's apartment is indeed similar to Inacio's, and might have been identical were it not for the differentiating effect of the younger woman's genetic engineering. As I told you before, though, it doesn't match the record of any living person. According to the register, Maria Inacio was born in 2303 and she died in 2342." "So she can't be our murderer," Charlotte said.

"Nor can she be Jafri Biasiolo's mother," Oscar Wilde was quick to put in. "Not, at least, if Michael's new version of events is correct. If Walter or anyone else had merely subst.i.tuted his own sperm for a donation drawn from the bank, it would have been used to fertilize an ovum which had come from the same bank, which could not-at least under normal circ.u.mstances-have been freshly deposited there by an eighteen-year-old girl." "If Jafri Biasiolo had been conceived in a Helier hatchery," Hal Watson said, completing his own revelatory bombsh.e.l.l with evident satisfaction, "the record would have said, 'Father Unrecorded.' Perhaps my silver should have picked the discrepancy up on first inspection, but it had no reason to attribute any significance to the datum. Jafri Biasiolo was the product of a late abortion; he wasn't introduced to a Helier womb until he was three months short of delivery.

Maria Inacio must have been immune to the endemic chiasmatic transformers-and probably never knew it, until her doctor told her that the strange growth in her abdomen wasn't a tumor. Her own fosterers must have belonged to an antinanotech cult of some kind; there was one active in Australia at the time whose members called themselves Naturals; had they not selected themselves for rapid extinction, we might have needed a different label for the likes of Mr.

Lowenthal." "So all this stuff about subst.i.tute donations is rubbish," Charlotte said, to make sure she had it straight. "You're saying that Walter Czastka impregnated the girl by means of everyday s.e.xual intercourse-intercourse which neither he nor she had the slightest reason to think capable of producing a pregnancy." "Given that the record says, 'Father Unknown,' " Hal said, "we can probably a.s.sume that neither Czastka nor Biasiolo ever knew of the relations.h.i.+p Mr.

Lowenthal's eager investigators have now brought to light. Given that it has been brought to light, I suppose someone ought to tell Walter Czastka-except, of course, that he's not answering his phone just now because Dr. Wilde offended him. I'm not entirely happy about merely reporting it to his sim." "But they must know!" Lowenthal protested. "How else can we begin to make sense of all these connections?" "One of them must know," Oscar Wilde agreed, his voice animated by a sudden fervor. "I owe you an apology, Michael-your hypothesis, although mistaken in detail, has indeed paved the way to the crucial enlightenment. Walter can know nothing of all this-but Rappaccini must know everything. We have had the vital connection set before us for several hours, but have not realized its significance! Walter is... am I mistaken, or is the sloth driving this vehicle becoming extremely reckless in its speed around these bends?" Charlotte had not bothered to look out of the windows for some time, having become accustomed to the swaying of the vehicle. Now that she did, it seemed to her that Oscar Wilde was understating the case.

Because AI drivers were programmed to the highest safety standards, everyone fell into the habit of trusting them absolutely, but the road on which they were traveling was undoubtedly far too rough and curvaceous to warrant progress at their present velocity. There was no guardrail on their right-hand side, and the scree slope fell away precipitously.

Charlotte remembered the message warning them not to interrogate the driver's programming. Like Lowenthal and Wilde, she had automatically a.s.sumed that this was merely a device to protect the secrecy of their destination-but what if it were not? What if such an interrogation would have revealed that the driver's safety programming had been carefully and illegally stripped away? She banished Hal's image from her screen and flicked the switch connecting the comcon to the driver. She typed a rapid instruction to the machine, ordering it to moderate the vehicle's speed.

There was no immediate response.

She slid her swipecard into the comcon's confirmation slot and invoked the full authority of the United Nations to back up her instruction. The only effect was that a printed message appeared on the screen: INCREASED SPEED NECESSITATED BY PROXIMITY OF PURSUING VEHICLE.

Charlotte blinked, then tapped in an instruction to open a viewpoint in the rear of the cabin. She and Oscar Wilde turned together to look through it, their heads almost touching as they converged.

The vehicle behind them was not an ordinary car. It was smaller, squarer, and looked as if it were heavily armored. It appeared, in fact, to be some kind of military vehicle. It was also far closer to their rear end than safety regulations permitted. Charlotte knew that it must have an AI driver, because its windscreen was quite opaque, but the sloth in question had obviously been programmed in frank defiance of the law.

"It's trying to force us off the road!" said Charlotte, hardly able to believe her eyes. In all her years in the police force she had never encountered anything so outrageous.

Her beltphone buzzed, and she lifted it from its holster reflexively, her eyes still fixed on the pursuing vehicle and her cheek less than a centimeter away from Oscar Wilde's uncannily beautiful face.

"Hal!" she cried. "Someone's trying to kill us!" "What?" said Hal, his voice as incredulous as her own.

"There's some kind of jeep trying to smash into us from behind!" The car carrying Charlotte and Wilde swept around a bend, and the resultant lurch bounced their heads together. It was not a bad b.u.mp, but the combination of surprise and pain made Charlotte cry out.

"Charlotte!" said Hal, his incredulity replaced by alarm. "What's happening?" Charlotte had to make an effort to force her train of thought onward through the barrier that pain had erected. She wanted to shout instructions to the people who would by now be monitoring their situation through the car's sensors.

"Scramble a helicopter!" she wanted to scream. "Send a software bomb! Get us the h.e.l.l out of here!" As she straightened up again she looked out of the side window at the drop which awaited them if their driver were to be careless enough to let a wheel slide over the edge.

It was a very long drop.

Michael Lowenthal let loose an inarticulate cry of anguish, as befit a potential emortal who was staring death in the face for the first time.

Charlotte gave voice to a wordless cry of her own as they soared around another bend, even sharper than its predecessors. She turned back to the rear viewport, clutching her throbbing head as she did so. She felt a sudden instinctive pulse of hope that the pursuing vehicle might not make it around the bend.

Alas, the jeep did make it. It fell back eight or ten meters in so doing, and Charlotte felt her heart surge as she wondered whether some preventative signal had got through-but then there was a curious rattling noise at the rear end of their own vehicle.

"Hal!" she cried again. "They're shooting at us, Hal! They've got a gun!" "Charlotte!" came the reply. "I've got visual patched through from a sat! I've got... corruption and corrosion!" Charlotte had never heard Hal use such words before, except in their uninflected and strictly literal forms. Had she been able to find words herself she would have delved even deeper in search of more profound expletives.

They had just taken yet another bend. This time, the pursuing vehicle failed to make the turn-in fact, it seemed to keep going straight ahead: straight over the edge and into empty air.

For almost a second it seemed to hang there, like some absurd toon character in a synthemovie, who would not start to feel the effects of gravity until he became conscious of being unsupported.

Then, with a peculiar gracefulness, the jeep began to fall.

It tumbled over and over as it fell, and when it finally hit the rocky slope two hundred meters below, it exploded like a bomb, sending shards in all directions.

The sloth driving the hire car had applied the brakes the instant that the threat of a damaging collision was removed from the viewport, but it had done so judiciously so as to minimize the risk of skidding.

"Hal," said Charlotte tremulously, "I think you just got another data trail to follow." It was, she felt, a very feeble attempt at humor. By now-a.s.suming that this absurdly tilted patch of crumpled wasteland lay within their jurisdiction-the California Highway Patrol's best silvers would have identified the rogue vehicle, and they would already be tracking down its owner and programmer.

Charlotte shut her eyes and breathed deeply, while the pain in her head ebbed slowly away.

When she opened her eyes again, Oscar Wilde had converted his side window into a mirror, and he was inspecting his own head very carefully. There was a noticeable bluish b.u.mp just above the right eyebrow. She could not find it in her heart to regret the temporary damage done to his outrageous good looks, although he obviously felt differently about it.

"What do you make of that?" she asked him.

"I can only hope that it was simply another vignette in the unfolding psychodrama," he said grimly. "Perhaps Rappaccini feared that the journey might be a trifle boring, and laid on a measured dose of excitement." She stared at him for a few seconds. "You mean," she said slowly, "that the person who hired this car also hired that one-as a practical joke?" Oscar shrugged his shoulders, turning back again to his pained inspection of the damage done to his temple.

"He might be right," said Hal, over the phone link. "The information's coming through now. The jeep was hired at the same time as the car, although the fee came from an account I hadn't yet connected to Rappaccini. The local police have no reason to think that anyone was aboard, although they'll send a crew out to check the debris. It wasn't carrying a gun-that rattling sound you heard was produced by your own car's AI." Charlotte was speechless.

"Are you all okay?" Hal inquired solicitously.

"Physically, we're fine," Michael Lowenthal replied. Given that he had not bruised his own head, his ent.i.tlement to speak on behalf of his companions seemed a trifle dubious to Charlotte.

"That's good," said Hal, his voice reverting instantly to its normal businesslike tone. "I've just got some more data in from Bologna, if you want to look at any of it." "Bologna?" said Charlotte.

"It's where Kwiatek was killed," Lowenthal informed her.

"We've got another picture of the woman," Hal said. "We're fairly certain that she flew to New York on an intercontinental flight from Rome. Do you want to see the tape?" "Not really," said Charlotte, who was still profoundly shaken by the fake attack-although she was quick enough to add: "Not yet, I mean. Where was she before Bologna?" "Darkest Africa, we think-visiting Magnus Teidemann. His death is still to be confirmed, but we're not optimistic. Are you sure you don't want the Kwiatek data?" "Was there a calling card with Kwiatek's body?" Oscar Wilde put in, shutting his own eyes as if to blank out the image of the bruise.

"I'll check the tapes," Hal said. "Give me a couple of minutes." "There's no hurry, Inspector," Lowenthal said, exchanging a sympathetic glance with the shaken Charlotte. "I think we'd all benefit from a moment's pause." "Did you look at the list I put up?" Hal asked, evidently seeing no necessity for any such pause. It wasn't entirely clear whether he was addressing Lowenthal or Charlotte.

"I saw it," Charlotte said wearily. "Was there something significant I should have taken note of?" She knew that she ought not to end sentences with prepositions, but thought that the stress of the situation made the infelicity forgivable.

"Maybe not," Hal replied. "But I thought Mr. Lowenthal's eye might have been caught by one of the addresses." The list reappeared yet again, on all three of the seatscreens. Hal had obviously decided that he would follow his agenda no matter what. This time, Charlotte's eye was immediately drawn to the word Kami. One Stuart McCandless, ex-chancellor of the University of Oceania, had retired to the island. He had graduated from the University of Wollongong in 2322.

"Can you connect him to Czastka or Biasiolo?" Lowenthal said.

"Is he answering his phone?" asked Charlotte. "If so, it might be helpful to find out what he remembers about his student days." "He's alive and well," Hal said. "He says that he still meets up with Czastka occasionally, when Czastka's on Kauai, but not for some months. He never met Biasiolo and he doesn't know anything about Rappaccini. He doesn't remember anything significant about Walter Czastka's university career." While this catalogue of negatives was in transmission, Charlotte glanced out of the side window again as the car swung-slowly and carefully-around a bend.

The road was no longer poised above the sheer slope, and she realized that they were coming into one of the ghost towns whose names were still recorded on the map, in spite of the fact that no one had lived in them for centuries.

The car came to a standstill.

The ancient stone buildings that were all that now remained of the town had been weathered by dust storms, but they still retained the sharp angles which proudly proclaimed their status as human artifacts. The land around them was quite dead, seemingly incapable of growing so much as a blade of gra.s.s. It was every bit as desolate as an unspoiled lunar landscape, but the shadowy scars of human habitation still lay upon it.

The sun was reddening against the peac.o.c.k blue background, and the shadows it cast were lengthening toward the east.

"What now?" Charlotte said to Oscar Wilde. "Do we start looking for another body?" Before they had time to get out of the car, the screens in front of them blanked out. While Charlotte was still wondering what the interruption signified, the car's sloth relayed a message in flamboyant red letters.

It said: WELCOME, OSCAR: THE PLAY WILL COMMENCE IN TEN MINUTES. THE PLAYHOUSE IS BENEATH THE BUILDING TO YOUR RIGHT.

"Play?" said Charlotte bitterly. "Have we come all this way just to see a play? Hal was right-I should never have left New York." "I'm sorry that your decision has caused you some inconvenience," said Wilde as he opened the door and climbed out into the sultry heat of the deepening evening, "but I will confess that I'm glad you both decided to come with me. In spite of the entertainment laid on for us as we climbed the mountainside, the journey would have been infinitely more tedious had I been forced to take it alone. I suspect that whatever experience awaits us will benefit from being shared. Do you carry a supply of transmitter eyes in that belt you're wearing, Charlotte?" "Of course I do," she said as she moved to the rear of the car to inspect the place where bullets had seemed to strike it. Hal was, inevitably, absolutely right. There were no marks at all. The sound of the shots had been manufactured by the hire car's sloth, to intensify the fear its pa.s.sengers felt. The sloth was, of course, far too stupid to be held responsible, but Charlotte cursed it anyway, along with its still-mysterious programmer.

All very amusing for you, she thought, but we could have been killed if we'd gone off the road, and we could have died of fright. When we catch up with you... "I suggest that you place a few transmitters about your person," Wilde said to her, his own equanimity seemingly restored. "You too, Michael. I only have a bubblebug, incapable of live transmission-but I'll mount it on my forehead, so that I may preserve the moment for my own future reference." Charlotte turned to stare at the building to their right. It did not look in the least like a theater. To judge by its display window-empty now of gla.s.s, and shutterless-it must once have been a primitive general store. It was roofless now and seemed to be nothing more than a gutted sh.e.l.l.

"Why bring us out here to the middle of nowhere?" she demanded angrily. "If it's just a tape, why didn't he just run it in a theater in San Francisco-or New York?" As she spoke, she planted two electronic eyes on her own head, one above each eyebrow. One of them had power enough to transmit a signal to the car, provided that nothing substantial got in the way, and the car's power system would hopefully boost the signal sufficiently for it to be picked up by a relay sat and copied all the way to Hal Watson's lair. Whether Hal would bother to watch the transmission as it came in she had no idea, but she took the trouble to give him notice of its imminent arrival.

The notice proved to be premature. Oscar Wilde had already located a downward-leading flight of stone steps inside the derelict building. It was obvious almost as soon as they had begun the descent-with Charlotte planting head-high nanolights every six or seven steps to illuminate their pa.s.sage-that it had been hollowed out using bacterial deconstructors far more modern than the building itself. By the time they reached the foot of the flight, Charlotte knew that there must be several meters of solid rock separating her from the car. Her transmitter eye was useless, except as a recording device; no signal could reach the car's sloth.

At the bottom of the stairway there was a very solid door made from some kind of synthetic organic material. It had neither handle nor visible lock, but as soon as Wilde touched it with his fingertips it swung inward.

"All doors in the world of theater open to Oscar Wilde," Michael Lowenthal muttered sarcastically.

Beyond the doorway was a well of impenetrable shadow. Charlotte automatically reached up to the wall inside the doorway, placing another nanolight there, but the darkness seemed to soak up its luminance quite effortlessly, and it showed her nothing but a few square centimeters of matte black wall. The moment Wilde took a tentative step forward, however, a small spotlight winked on, picking out a two-seater sofa upholstered in black, set a few feet away from them.

"Very considerate," said Oscar dryly. "Had you not been here, dear Charlotte, I would have been obliged to distribute myself in a conspicuously languid fas.h.i.+on.

As things are, one of us will be obliged to stand." "I'll stand," said Lowenthal. "I've been sitting down too long." Charlotte had to imagine the expression that must have been on his face as he looked at the sofa. There was no dust on it, but it was conspicuously cheap as well as very old. No modern MegaMall outlet would have stocked anything so tawdry.

"Shall we?" said Wilde. He invited Charlotte to move ahead of him, and she did, although she moved a little hesitantly through the darkness, unable to see the floor beneath her feet. There was an interval of five or six seconds after they were seated, and then the spotlight winked out.

Charlotte could not suppress a small gasp of alarm as they were plunged into a darkness which would have been absolute had it not been for the single nanolight she had set beside the door, which now shone like a single distant star in an infinite void.

When light returned, it was very cleverly directed away from them; Charlotte quickly realized that she could not make out Oscar Wilde's form, nor the contours of her own body. It was as if she had become a disembodied viewpoint, like a tiny bubblebug, looking out upon a world from which her physical presence had been erased.

She seemed to be ten or twelve meters away from the event which unfolded before her eyes, but she knew well enough that the distance-like the event itself-was an illusion. Cinematic holograms of the kind to which Michi Uras.h.i.+ma had devoted his skills before turning to more dangerous toys were adepts in the seductive art of sensory deception.

The illusory event did not seem to be a "play" at all, according to Charlotte's reckoning, but merely a dance, performed solo. The hologrammatic dancer was a young woman. Charlotte had no difficulty at all in recognizing her, because her bronzed features were made up to duplicate the appearance that the image's living model had presented to Michi Uras.h.i.+ma's spy eyes. Her hair was different, though; it was now long, straight, and jet-black. Her costume was different too and did not seem to be the conventional artifice of a suitskin. The dancer's bare flesh was ungenerously draped with soft, sleek, and translucent chiffons of many colors, secured at various strategic points of her lissome form by glittering gem-faced catches.

The music to which she danced-lithely and lasciviously-was raw and primitive, generated by virtual drums and reedy pipes.

"Salome," whispered Oscar Wilde.

"What?" said Lowenthal uncomprehendingly. "I don't-" "Later!" was Wilde's swift response to that. "Hush now-watch!" Two days ago the name would have meant absolutely nothing to Charlotte, but thanks to the background reading she had done in the maglev couchette, she now knew that Oscar Wilde-the original Oscar Wilde-had written a play called Salome.

She had taken sufficient note of it to recall that he had written it in French, because it had been too calculatedly lewd to be licensed for the nineteenth-century English stage. She had also pressed the support key which had informed her that Salome was the name attached by legend to the daughter of Herodias, wife of King Herod of Judea, who was mentioned in two of the gospels of the New Testament, the holy book of the Christian religion.

Forearmed by this knowledge, Charlotte thought that she understood what it was that she was to watch-and now a.s.sumed that the dance would indeed turn into a play of sorts.

Her ready understanding made her feel rather smug, even though she still had no idea what the purpose of this display could possibly be. For the first time since leaving New York, Charlotte did not feel that she was trailing hopelessly in the wake of the better-informed counterpart dispatched by the Secret Masters to keep track of her investigation. She a.s.sumed that she was at least as well prepared as Michael Lowenthal for whatever coups de theatre were to follow.

As the nonexistent woman, isolated in an apparently infinite cage of darkness, swayed and gyrated to the beat of ancient drums, the first impression Charlotte received was one of utter artlessness and a pitiful lack of sophistication.

Modern dance, which had all the artifice of contemporary biotechnology as a key resource, was infinitely smoother and more complicated. But this performance, she knew, was three times an artifact. The image of the dancer was produced by the technology of the twenty-fifth century, but what was being offered to her eyes was a nineteenth-century vision of the first century before the conventional calendrical century count began. This was a half-primitive representation of the genuinely primitive: an ancient fantasy recapitulated as a fantasy of a different kind, contained by a medium which was no less fantastic, in its own marvelous fas.h.i.+on.

In the nineteenth century, Charlotte knew-and thought that she had at least begun to grasp-there had been something called p.o.r.nography, which had to be distinguished from art, although there had been some people who considered that much art was merely p.o.r.nography with pretensions and others who felt that at least some p.o.r.nography was art which dared not speak its name. Nowadays, in a world where most s.e.xual intercourse took place between individuals and clever machinery, while most of the remainder was consciencelessly promiscuous, the idea of p.o.r.nography had become quaint and antique. To nineteenth-century eyes, the programming of any modern person's intimate technology would have been bound to seem p.o.r.nographic, but everyone-in spite of what Oscar Wilde had said about a sense of sin being somehow necessary to s.e.xual pleasure-now accepted that in the realm of private fantasy nothing was perverse and nothing was taboo.

Charlotte understood, therefore-and was proud of herself for being able to understand-that part of the point of this performance was that one had to try to see it from several different viewpoints: from the viewpoint of some legendary petty ruler of the early Iron Age; from the viewpoint of would-be aesthetes and their rival moralists of the late Iron Age; and from the viewpoint of a double rejuvenate of the middle period of the Genetic Revolution.

After a moment's hesitation, she added two more hypothetical viewpoints: the viewpoint of an authentically young citizen of the late-twenty-fifth-century United States of North America; and the viewpoint of a nano-tech recording device whose function was to preserve for future reference the sensory experiences of lives which were continually outstripping the resources of inbuilt memory.

With all this to take into account, she thought, the sight of Salome dancing should have been far more interesting that it actually was. In spite of all that she knew, Charlotte simply could not place herself, imaginatively, in the shoes of one of Herod's courtiers, nor the shoes of one of the original Oscar Wilde's gentleman friends, nor even the shoes of whatever strange individual had manufactured the mercurially virtual Rappaccini. She doubted that anyone of her era could have done better-not even the flesh-and-blood Oscar Wilde who sat invisibly but not quite intangibly beside her.

Charlotte found the steps of the dance trite and inexpressive; to her it seemed neither stimulating nor instructive, nor even quaintly amusing. The gradual removal of the dancer's seven veils was merely a laborious way of counting down to a climax that was already expected. And still there was nothing to suggest a purpose for the charade-unless, as she had earlier suspected, all of this was mere distraction, intended to divert attention away from the true substance of the crime and to confuse the investigations being carried out by Hal's silvers.

If this is mere mockery, she thought, Wilde might soon change his mind about being glad that Lowenthal and I chose to accompany him. If all this is just another joke intended to tease him, he might prefer to have kept it to himself.

As soon as Lowenthal and I decant our bubblebugs, this will be public property-and when the MegaMall gives the go-ahead to the casters, it will be all over the news.

No sooner had she formulated the thought, however, than she realized that she might have got it backward. Perhaps the whole point of the summons to Gabriel King's appointment, the wreath at the San Francisco Majestic, and the car chase through the mountains had been to make Wilde's involvement in this matter newsworthy. Perhaps the mystery and melodrama were intended solely to create audience interest in a rough-and-ready artwork which had little enough interest of its own. Perhaps the real intended audience of this play was the vidveg, who would need Wilde as an interpreter. Under ordinary circ.u.mstances, the vidveg would not have found it at all interesting, but if it were aired on the news, as an appendix to the tale of three-perhaps four-lurid murders, it would command an eager audience of billions.

Was that what its author craved? Was it conceivable that all of this, including the murders, was a publicity stunt? Salome was almost naked now, and the few encrustations she preserved upon her body were intended to heighten rather than to conceal, but Charlotte could summon up neither any vestige of emotional response nor any twinge of moral panic. All she could sense within herself was a precautionary tension, because she knew that at any moment Salome was likely to acquire a mute partner for her mesmerized capering.

The dancer did look as if she were mesmerized, Charlotte noted. She looked as if she were lost in some kind of dream, not really aware of who she was or what she was doing. Charlotte remembered that the young woman had given a similar impression during the brief glimpse of her which Gabriel King's cameras had caught. Was that significant-and if so, of what? The dance slowed and finally stopped.

Without speaking, Salome stood with bowed head for a few moments-and then she reached out into the shadows which crowded around her, and brought out of the darkness a silver platter, on which there rested the decapitated head of a man.

She plucked the head from its resting place, entwining her delicate fingers in its hair.

The salver disappeared, dissolved into the shadow.

Charlotte was not in the least surprised. She was quite ready for the move.

Nevertheless, she flinched. The virtual head-which she knew to be a synthesized illusion-looked more startlingly horrid than a real head would have done, by virtue of the artistry which had gone into the design of its agonized expression and the bloodiness of the crudely severed neck.

She recognized the face which the virtual head wore: it was Gabriel King's.

The dance began again.

How differently, Charlotte wondered, was Oscar Wilde seeing this ridiculous scene? Could he see it as something daring, something monstrous, something clever? Would he be able to sigh with satisfaction, in that irritating way of his, when the performance was over, and claim that Rappaccini was a genius of many disparate talents? If he could, she thought, it would surely be pure affectation: an a.s.sertion of the virtual reality which he wore as a costume, by courtesy of the genius of cosmetic engineers. She felt certain that Michael Lowenthal would have as low an opinion of this vulgar theatricality as she had, even though he would not have antic.i.p.ated the arrival of the severed head and probably would not know even now that it was supposed to be the head of Christ's precursor, John the Baptist.

The macabre dance began to seem even more mechanical. The woman appeared to be unaware-or at least uncaring-of the fact that she was supposedly brandis.h.i.+ng a severed head. She moved its face close to her own and then extended her arms again, all the while maintaining the same distant and dreamy expression.

Charlotte began to grow impatient-but then her attention was caught again.

Subtly, almost imperceptibly, the features of the severed head had changed. Now it was no longer the head of Gabriel King; it had acquired an Oriental cast.

Charlotte recognized Michi Uras.h.i.+ma and suddenly became interested again, eager for any hint of further change. She was fully aware of the necessity of capturing every detail of the sequence-if it were indeed to be a sequence-with her recording devices, so she fixed her own gaze steadfastly upon the horrid head.

She had seen no picture of Paul Kwiatek as yet, so she could only infer that the third appearance presented by the luckless Baptist was his, and she became even more intent when the third set of features began to blur and s.h.i.+ft. This, she thought, was a countdown of a rather different kind, in which the number and nature of the steps might well be crucial to the development of her investigation.

She felt a surge of triumph as she realized that this revelation, if nothing else, might vindicate her determination to accompany Oscar Wilde on his strange expedition.

She did not recognize the fourth face, but she was confident that the bubblebug set above her right eye would record it well enough for computer-aided recognition. If Hal's investigations could be trusted, it was almost certainly the ecologist Magnus Teidemann.

How many more, she wondered, would there be? The fifth face was darker than the fourth-naturally dark, she thought, not cosmetically melanized. Men of King and Uras.h.i.+ma's generation rarely played games with skin color, even when they had recourse to cosmetic engineers to make them handsomer. She did not recognize this man either.

She recognized the sixth face, though. She had seen it on a screen within the last few hours, looking considerably older and more ragged than its manifestation here but unmistakably the same.

It was Walter Czastka.

Charlotte remembered belatedly that Oscar Wilde had been about to say something about Czastka's role in this affair when he had been interrupted by sudden anxiety about the speed of the hire car. Had he been about to confound Michael Lowenthal with the judgment that Czastka, far from being the murderer, must have been marked down as a victim? Could this be taken as proof that Czastka was not, after all, the man behind Rappaccini, but merely one more of Rappaccini's chosen victims? Or might it simply be one more joke, one more bluff? She tried to pull herself together. The real significance of this revelation, surely, was that if Walter Czastka had been marked down as a victim, he might yet be saved-as might the mysterious fifth man. Czastka, at least, had been alive not much more than an hour ago, even though he had stopped answering his phone as soon as Oscar Wilde had talked to him.