Architects of Emortality Part 8

There was no seventh face. Salome slowed in her paces, faced the sofa where Oscar and Charlotte sat watching, and took her bow.

Then the lights came on.

Charlotte had a.s.sumed that the performance was over, and its object attained, but she was wrong. What she had so far witnessed was merely a prelude.

The lights which sprang into dazzling life brought a new illusion, infinitely more spectacular than the last Charlotte had attended numerous theatrical displays employing clever holographic techniques, and knew well enough how a black-walled s.p.a.ce which comprised in reality no more than a few hundred cubic meters could be made to seem far greater, but she had never seen a virtual s.p.a.ce as vast and as ornate as this.

Here was the palace in which Salome had danced, transfigured by the phantasmagoric imagination of some later artist: a crazily vaulted ceiling higher than that in any reconstructed medieval cathedral, with elaborate stained-gla.s.s windows in mad profusion, offering all manner of fantastic scenes.

Here was a polished floor three times the size of a sports field, with a crowd of onlookers that must have numbered tens of thousands. There was no sense at all of this being an actual place: it was an edifice born of nightmarish dreams, whose awesome and impossible dimensions weighed down upon a mere observer, reducing Charlotte in her own mind's eye to horrific insignificance.

Men like Gabriel King called their quasi-organic nanotech constructors shamirs, after the magical ent.i.ty which had helped Solomon build his temple when his laborers had been forbidden the use of conventional tools, but this was the first time Charlotte had seen an edifice worthy of the labor of fabulous mythical creatures.

Salome, having bowed to the three visitors from the future who had watched her dance at far closer range than any of the fict.i.tious mult.i.tude, turned around to bow to another watcher: to the biblical king of Judea, Herod, seated on his throne.

Charlotte could not remember whether Herod had been Salome's father or merely her stepfather, but she was certain that he had been one or the other. She was certain too that there had never been a throne like this one in the entire history of empires and kingdoms. None but the most vainglorious of emperors could even have imagined it; and none of them could have ordered it built. It was huge and golden, hideously overburdened with silks and jewels: an appalling monstrosity of avaricious self-indulgence. It was, Charlotte knew, intended to appall, to const.i.tute an offense to any taste or sense of proportion.

All of this was a calculated insult to the delicacy of effective illusion. It was a parody of grandiosity, an exercise in profusion for profusion's sake. And yet, she understood the kind of technological sophistication that must have been required to produce this. She knew how much more difficult it was to produce such a fabulous extravaganza than it would have been to produce something which would have seemed possible and likely, on any scale.

"Do you like it?" asked the man on the throne: the king on the throne, who had even drawn himself three times life-size, as a bloated, overdressed grotesque.

Herod's body, even had it been reduced to a natural scale, was like nothing any longer to be seen in a world which had banished obesity four hundred years before-but the face, had it only been leaner, would have been the face which Jafri Biasiolo, alias Rappaccini, had worn in the three photographs which Hal Watson had shown to Oscar, Lowenthal, and herself the day before.

But we know that she's not his daughter, Charlotte thought. She's supposed to be his mother now! Charlotte felt Oscar Wilde's hand take up her wrist and squeeze it. He was still invisible to her, as she was to herself, although the glorious light of the illusory palace surrounded them. "Tread carefully," Wilde whispered, his lips no more than a centimeter from her ear. "This simulation may be programmed to tell us everything, if only we can question it cunningly enough." Herod/Rappaccini burst into mocking laughter. The sim's tumultuous flesh heaved and seethed with it: "Do you think that I have merely human ears, my dear Oscar? You can hardly see yourselves, I know, but you are not hidden from me. Your friends are charming, Oscar, but neither the woman nor the man is one of us.

They are of an age which has forgotten and erased its past. They are neither revenants nor artists." AI or not, thought Charlotte, it's still mad. As absolutely and irredeemably insane as the man whose simulacrum it is. She wondered whether she might be in mortal danger, if the man beside her really was the secret designer of all of this: Rappaccini's creator and puppet master.

"Gustave Moreau might have approved," Wilde said offhandedly, "but he always tended to become dispirited and leave his work half-done. His vision always outpaced his capacity for detail. Michi Uras.h.i.+ma would not have been satisfied so easily even when he was a VE technician, although I detect his early handiwork in some of the effects. Did Gabriel King supply the artificial organisms which hollowed out this Aladdin's cave, perchance?" "He did," answered the gargantuan Rappaccini, squirming in his uncomfortable seat like a huge painted slug. "I have made art with his sadly utilitarian instruments. I have taken some trouble, as you have seen, to weave the work of all my victims into the tapestry of their destruction." The sim was obviously a high-grade silver rather than a sluggish sloth, but it was making preprogrammed speeches rather than responding with any real intelligence to Wilde's provocations.

"It's overdone," said Oscar Wilde with insultingly mild contempt. "Grotesquely overdone and more than a little chaotic. As a show of apparent madness, it's too excessive to be anything but pretense. Can we not talk as one civilized man to another, Jafri, since that is what we are?" Rappaccini smiled. "That is why I wanted you here, my dear Oscar," he said.

"Only you could suspect me of cold rationality in the midst of all this. But you understand civilization far too well to wear its gifts unthinkingly. You may be the only man in the world who understands the world's decadence, but you cannot hide that understanding from me, or deny it to my face. Have the patient bureaucrats of the United Nations police force discovered my true name yet?" "Jafri Biasiolo?" Wilde queried. "Is that what you mean by your true name? I doubt it. Even Rappaccini is truer than that. Half a dozen other pseudonyms have come to light-but I doubt that we have found the true one yet. Would you care to tell us what it is?" "Not Herod," said the sim. "Be sure of that, at least." "It's only a matter of time, as you must know," Charlotte put in, unable to resist the temptation. "By the time we get back to the car, it might be all over." The sim turned its bloodshot eyes upon her, and she could not help but shrink before the baleful stare.

"The final act has yet to be played," Rappaccini told her. "Even the penultimate phase of the drama has not yet reached its fatal climax. You may already know all of my true names, but you might still have difficulty in identifying the one which I presently use as my own, for reasons which dear Oscar will readily understand." The sardonic gaze moved again, to meet Wilde's invisible stare.

"You will thank me for this evasiveness, Oscar-an element of surprise is indispensable to the enjoyment of any unfolding drama. You would never have forgiven me had I not been just that little bit too clever for you." "The car chase was entirely gratuitous," said Oscar. "A jarring note of modernism in a performance which might otherwise have had the benefit of consistency, if not of coherency. I cannot concede that manifestation of cleverness." "Consistency is the hallmark of a narrow mind," replied the sim, seemingly unworried by the criticism.

"If you wanted to kill six men," said Oscar Wilde, in a pensive tone which rather suggested that he was talking to himself rather than the AI, "why did you wait until they were almost dead? I cannot understand the timing of your performance. At any time in the last seventy years fate might have cheated you.

Had you waited another month, you might well have been too late to find Walter Czastka alive." "You underestimate the tenacity of men like these," Biasiolo-as-Herod replied.

"You think they are ready for death because they have ceased to live, but longevity has ingrained its habits deeply in the flesh. Without me to help them, they might have protracted their misery for many years yet-even dear, sad Walter. But I am nothing if not loyal, nothing if not affectionate to those most deserving of my tenderness. I bring them not merely death but glorious transfiguration-'Mortality, Behold and Fear! What a change of flesh is here!' But even you, Oscar, can never have read Beaumont... the point is, dear Oscar, that the mere fact of death is not the central motif here. Did you think me capable of pursuing mere revenge? It is the manner of a man's death which is all-important in our day and age, is it not? Have we not rediscovered all the ancient joys of mourning, and all the awesome propriety of solemn ceremony and dark symbolism? "Wreaths are not enough for the likes of us, Oscar-not even wreaths which are spiders in disguise. The death of death itself is upon us, and how shall we celebrate that, save by making a new and better compact with the grim reaper? Murder is almost extinct-but it should not be, and cannot be, and must not be.

Murder must be rehabilitated, Oscar, made romantic and flamboyant, made gorgeous and excessive, made glamorous and hideous and larger than life. What have my six victims left to do but set an example to their younger brethren? Who is more fitted than I to appoint himself their deliverer, their enn.o.bler, the proclaimer of their fame-and who more fitted than my beloved daughter to serve as my instrument?" "But she's not-," Michael Lowenthal began-and Charlotte suddenly realized what should have been plain even as they sat in the car, distractedly arguing possibilities.

"She's a clone!" whispered Charlotte fiercely.

"I fear, my friend," said Wilde, loudly overriding their brief exchange, "that this performance might not make the impact that you intend. If you hope for sympathy from me, and find none, what can you expect from the world at large? Perhaps you pretend too hard to madness. If the world thinks you merely mad, they will see neither motive nor artistry in anything you may have done. For myself, I do not deny that you have intrigued me, but I have always been an unnaturally generous man. My attention is easy to capture-my approval is less so. So far, Dr. Rappaccini, I have yet to see the merit in your murders or your absurd distractions, not because they seem too clever but because they seem so stupid." The hologrammatic sim of Rappaccini smiled again. "You will repent that cruelty, Oscar," he said. "You must, for you are already committed, already exposed, already known to me. Your hands are bound; the privilege of disapproval was surrendered when you chose the truth of your name. You must judge me as a true liar, Oscar Wilde, and no trick of the mind or the pen can reduce what I have done to mere deception. No matter how hard you resist, I will convince you. You know in your heart that what surrounds you now is no mere rock, rough-hewn and polished for delusion's sake. You know in your heart that this marvelous appearance is real, and the hidden reality a mere nothing. This is no coc.o.o.n of hollowed stone; it is my palace. Hear me, Oscar: you will see the finest rock of all before the end." Wilde did not reply to that immediately; Charlotte could imagine the frown of vexation which must lie upon his forehead.

"Your representations are deceptive, King Herod," she said. "Your dancing stepdaughter showed us Gabriel King's head first and foremost, but Kwiatek died before him, and I suspect that Magnus Teidemann was probably dead even before Kwiatek. It was optimistic too-we have already warned your fifth and sixth intended victims, and we intend to save them both." Herod turned back to face her. She had not been able to deduce, so far, exactly how high a grade of artificial intelligence its animating silver had, but she hoped that it might be less clever than it seemed. It was responsive, to be sure, but much of what it said consisted of scripted speeches fairly loosely connected to the reactive remarks which prefaced them. She was not optimistic about the prospect of provoking it to reveal anything authentically useful, nor did she expect any explicit confirmation of her guess that Magnus Teidemann was indeed a victim, but she felt obliged to try.

"All six will go to their appointed doom whatever you do," the sim told her.

"You do not understand what is happening here. You and your companion must look to Oscar to provide what explanations he can. If he does not understand yet, he will understand soon enough." Charlotte noted that the sim did not use her name, even though Wilde had addressed her by her first name as they had entered; that made her feel slightly better, because it was a welcome reminder to her that the abilities of the mercurial Rappaccini were not, after all, supernatural. All this was mere artifice, albeit of Byzantine complexity. She wanted to get out now, to transmit a tape of this encounter to Hal Watson so that he could identify the fifth face-but she hesitated.

"What can these men possibly have done to you?" she asked, trying to sound contemptuous although there was no earthly point in it. "What unites them in your hatred?" "I do not hate them at all," replied the sim, "and the link that unites them in my affections is not recorded in that silly Web built by cyberspiders to trap the essence of human experience." The image was no longer looking at her, but at Oscar Wilde. She suspected that it had somehow received the cue for another programmed speech, which it was determined to direct to the intended recipient.

"I have done what I have done," the AI continued, steadfastly following its programming, "because it was absurd and unthinkable and comical, lies have been banished from the world for far too long, and the time has come for us not merely to tell them, but to live them also. It is by no means easy to work against the grain of synthetic wood, but we must try. All this is for you, dear Oscar-the last and best gift you will ever receive." "I think I could have done without it," said Oscar, not quite as coldly as before. "In any-case, this is not my birthday. I repeat-I cannot fathom your timing." "Oh, but it is your birthday," countered the fatuous creature on the ridiculous throne. "And you look simply fabulous." And with that, darkness fell.

The gloom would have been absolute and impenetrable were it not for a single tiny pinp.r.i.c.k of light which shone behind them, marking the door through which they had entered the underworld.

Intermission Four: A Teacher and His Pupil

Stuart McCandless walked along the beach on the southern sh.o.r.e of Kauai east of Puolo Point, patiently awaiting the restoration of his subjective equilibrium.

His IT had already taken charge of his heart, and his pituitary monitors would ensure that his endocrine system would soon be finely tuned and perfectly balanced, but within the gap that separated state of being from state of mind there was still a considerable margin of unease.

Stuart adjusted the brim of his hat to take better account of the angle of the afternoon sun and stared out over the quiet Pacific, fixing his eyes on the distant horizon. Although he knew that there were countless smaller islands out there, hidden by the subtle curvature of the earth, it was easy enough to imagine that the ocean went on forever, unsullied by the dabblings of the so-called continental engineers and their Creationist clients. One day, he supposed, the Hawaiian archipelago would be so extensively augmented that there would be islet eyesores by the score visible in every direction, but he counted himself fortunate to have lived in an era of relative stability, when the most ingenious efforts of the world's environmental revisionists had been directed to the repair of the damage done to the natural islands by the Greenhouse Crisis and the eco-catastrophic Crash.

The sight of the seemingly infinite sea calmed him, as it always had done, and helped him to feel that his true self had been restored to him. Ever since childhood, Stuart had been claustrophobic. He had consulted therapists of half a dozen different kinds, but their a.n.a.lyses and practical advice had never had the least impact on the problem. Before his second rejuve, while it still seemed that brainfeed research might yield results, he had taken as keen an interest as any nonspecialist could in the painful advance of neurophysiological science and technology, but he had waited in vain for a product that might cure him of his unwanted delicacy.

There were, of course, worse afflictions that a man might be condemned to live with for a hundred and ninety-four years, but Stuart had never been able to take comfort from that fact. His situation would not have been so bad if he had only been required to avoid such close confinement as that a.s.sociated with elevators and whole-body VE apparatuses; that would have been a definite inconvenience, but not a crippling handicap. The real problem was the slow unease which crept upon him by day whenever he was confined to his house. It was not something that caused him any acute pain, and it never threw him into a panic attack no matter how long the pressure was sustained, but its very slightness was annoying. It was like an insidious internal tickling, whose effect grew by degrees until its psychological effect was out of all proportion to its sensational marginality.

In order to maintain his sense of equilibrium, he had to get out into the open for an hour or more at least once a day. That was one of the reasons why he lived on Kauai, where the air was always warm enough and rarely too hot for comfort, and where the stars were clearly visible at night in order that they might emphasize the limitlessness of the universe. That was also why he lived close to the beach, where the land met the huge and seemingly infinite sea. He had always loved beaches. All the most significant encounters in his life had taken place on beaches.

Ever since his second full rejuve, his claustrophobia seemed to be more easily aggravated than it had been before. The repair work, which the nanotech shock-troops had carried out within his brain seemed to him to have increased the magnitude of the innate flaw in his makeup, if only slightly. Nowadays, it required only the merest disturbance of his routines to set him on edge and to cause the inexorable closing-in of his walls to proceed just a little bit faster.' When Inspector Watson of the UN police had called to tell him that he might be on the hit list of a mad murderer, it had not mattered in the least that the a.s.sertion was patently absurd; it had unsettled him nevertheless.

He had been angry, of course-especially when he discovered what had led Watson to contact him. "Are you calling everyone who was at Wollongong in 2322?" he demanded.

"Yes," Watson had replied, as if there were nothing even slightly unreasonable about the policy. "Everyone who's still alive." "You can't possibly think that this lunatic intends to murder everybody who happened to be at university with him!" "That's not the point," the policeman had told him, as if he were the one who was being obtuse. "Until we know more about his motive, we have no idea how he's selecting out his victims. All we know for sure is that the people killed so far were all at Wollongong in that year. Until we know exactly what links Gabriel King, Michi Uras.h.i.+ma, Magnus Teidemann, and Paul Kwiatek, we can't figure out which of their contemporaries might have to be added to the list. One of the reasons we're contacting everybody is the hope that somebody who was there at the time might be able to identify the connection for us. Can you think of any such connection, Professor McCandless?" "Don't be ridiculous," Stuart had said. "It was more than a hundred and seventy years ago. n.o.body can remember that far back-and it's preposterous to think that anyone might start killing people in 2495 because of something that happened in 2322." "The person actually delivering the fatal blow seems to be a much younger person," Watson had admitted. "We're having trouble tracking her movements because she keeps changing her appearance. I'm posting three images now-please look at them very carefully, Professor McCandless, and tell me if you recognize this person. Please bear in mind that if she is known to you, she will have confronted you with an appearance as subtly different from these as they are from one another." "That's even more ridiculous," Stuart had told him, becoming even angrier.

"Every woman nowadays aspires to one or other of the conventional ideals of beauty, Inspector, and every one has access to the technologies which allow her to secure it. As a university administrator, I've been in contact with young people all my life, and I must have known thousands of young women who sculpted their faces along those general lines. This is a small island, and there can only be a few hundred authentically young women residents here, but at least half of them could pa.s.s for one of these three if she put her mind and cosmetic skills to work on the problem. The same is true of any woman who's just undergone a first rejuve." Watson had tried to a.s.sure him that it wasn't true, and that if he would only look carefully enough he would be able to discern certain distinguis.h.i.+ng features, but Stuart hadn't had the time to waste. As a university administrator, he'd long grown used to seeing young people in quant.i.ty, as a kind of undifferentiated ma.s.s. Their academic records varied, but in person they were merely segments of an infinite crowd. Things were different now, of course; since retiring from administrative work to concentrate on research he no longer saw young people at all, except for Julia-but that only proved the point. Julia could have made herself look like the woman in Watson's pictures with no difficulty at all, and there was nothing unusual about Julia.

Even so, he had looked up the four victims named by the policeman, to jog his memory as to who they were and what their accomplishments had been. He had also taken a second look at the pictures, just in case he could discern something meaningful therein.

There wasn't anything meaningful. They could have been anyone. They could even have been Julia.

Stuart knew that he had to put the whole matter out of his mind now and concentrate his mind on the sea, and on infinity-but it wasn't easy. The puzzle was too intriguing. What could possibly link Gabriel King the demolition man, Michi Uras.h.i.+ma the brainfeed buccaneer, Magnus Teidemann the econut, and Paul Kwiatek the software engineer turned VE veg? Stuart had known them all by reputation, although he hadn't previously realized that they had all been at Wollongong at the same time, and he'd needed the encyclopedia to remind him of exactly what they were famous for. He must, presumably, have been aware of their simultaneous presence at the university way back in the 2320s, but the memory of the coincidence had faded long ago. Their subsequent careers had diverged as widely as those of any four individuals picked at random, and it was difficult to imagine why anyone might want all four of them dead-especially when one considered that Uras.h.i.+ma and Kwiatek were half-dead already. There was, it seemed, a young woman involved-perhaps more than one, if Inspector Watson was incorrect in his estimation that the three pictures were all representations of the same woman-but that didn't offer any clue as to the connection. It was difficult to imagine a crime of pa.s.sion involving Uras.h.i.+ma or Kwiatek, and it seemed that the only thing about which Teidemann was capable of being pa.s.sionate was his hypothetical Mother G.o.ddess.

King was surely the only one who had it in him to attract the wrath of a jealous lover, if one could believe in a lover jealous enough to kill.

Stuart could believe in a lover jealous enough to kill, because he knew that jealousy-like claustrophobia-was one of those soul afflictions with which nanotechnology had never quite come to grips. He could not, however, believe in a lover jealous enough to kill four times over, picking out victims who were all approaching two hundred years old. Who in the world could possibly be jealous of a man whose brain had exploded in a chaotic mess of superfluous neural connections? Or a man who had almost lost contact even with simulations of the real world, preferring expeditions into the remoter reaches of perverted perception? "I knew I'd find you here." The voice cut through Stuart's ruminations like a knife, and he felt his heart lurch as he started-but by the time he turned, he was in control of himself.

"Julia!" he said. "You shouldn't creep up on a man when he's just been told that he might be about to be murdered. Not a man of my age, at any rate. I'm fragile." Her vivid green eyes seemed to be laughing, although her beautiful mouth was only slightly curved into a quizzical smile. The sultry breeze drifting from the sea was barely sufficient to stir her red-gold hair, but the hairs were so fine that her tresses s.h.i.+fted like the surface of the patient sea. Her hair had always seemed to Stuart to have a life of its own. "Murdered?" she echoed. "Why would anyone want to murder you?" "They wouldn't," he answered. "They couldn't possibly. But someone, it seems, has a grudge against selected Wollongong alumni of my particular vintage. The UN police are actually calling everyone who was there at that time, fis.h.i.+ng for a motive. And you needn't feel complacent about it-they're circulating a description of a murder suspect who's almost as beautiful as you. If you were to change the color of your hair and eyes, and apply a little synthetic flesh to the contours of your cheeks... you should be grateful that I know you so well and that I'm not in the least paranoid. A lesser man might have given your name to the police, and you'd be under arrest by now." "I doubt that," Julia said, coming forward to take him by the arm and turning him so that he could walk back to the house with her. "They'd have to find me first, then catch me." "It's a small island," he pointed out, "and there's nowhere to run or hide." "It's big enough," she a.s.sured him. "I brought you some flowers, by the way. I put them in your living room. It's a new design, by Oscar Wilde." "I can't quite understand your fondness for that man's work," Stuart confessed.

"He's a nineteenth-century man, insofar as he's a historian at all. Not one of us." By us he meant specialists in the twenty-second century: the most eventful era in human history, when history itself had trembled on the brink of extinction; the era of the great plague, the Crash, the New Reproductive System, and the nanotech revolution.

"He designs beautiful flowers," Julia said. "He's an artist. There are very few true artists in the world." "But he's not original," Stuart said. "It's all recapitulation and recomplication." "All human life is recapitulation and recomplication," she said, with the casual confidence of unfalsified youth.

"No, it's not," he a.s.sured her. "There are genuine ends and authentic beginnings. Conrad Helier was a true artist. He put an end to the old world and forged a new one. He designed the womb which ultimately gave birth to the New Human Race. He, not Eveline Hywood, was the original designer of the fundamental fabric of the alternative ecosphere-the stuff she tried to pa.s.s off as alien life after his death. You can't compare a mere flower designer to a man like that." "According to the best evidence available," Julia said gently, "Conrad Helier only designed one of the chiasmatic transformers, and his was only the first artificial womb to be ma.s.s-produced-at best, a tiny recomplication of designs that were being produced in some profusion. The time had come to put an end to so-called natural childbirth, and it would have ended anyhow. When historians put the b.l.o.o.d.y knife in Helier's hand, it's as much a matter of scapegoating as anything else. He's the heroic villain appointed to the role, but he was just an instrument of causal process. As for Hywood's fake alien life, it was her foster son who actually worked out most of the key applications: LSP, SAP systems, shamirs, and so on. In any case, you can't call that kind of utilitarian endeavor Art. Art is essentially superfluous, and that's why it's so necessary to human existence." "Nothing is historically superfluous," Stuart told her sternly. "Nothing is outside the causal process by which the world is made and remade. Art is merely an expression of that process, no matter what individual artists may think." It was a serious argument, but not in the sense that their disagreement might come between them as a hurdle or a moat. He and Julia had an understanding which allowed them to debate points of intellectual nicety without being divided.

That, in Stuart's view, was what friends.h.i.+p amounted to-and in spite of the difference in their ages, he and Julia were the firmest of friends. The rapport between them went far beyond their common interest in the study of history.

"Even the art of murder?" Julia asked lightly.

"If murder were not an expression of historical causality," Stuart insisted, "it would have to be considered devoid of artistry, even by the most daring interpreter." Stuart had always considered himself a daring interpreter. His ambition had always been to understand the whole of human history and the whole of the human world: to hold it entirely in his mind's eye, as if it were a vast panorama in which every element stood in its proper relation to every other element, a huge seamless whole whose horizons held the promise of infinity. In a way, he had to reckon himself a failure, because he knew well enough that there was a great deal which he did not understand, and never would understand, but he could forgive himself that inadequacy-which was, of course, an inadequacy which he shared with all other living men-because he had at least made the effort. He had never allowed himself to be intellectually confined in the way that men like Uras.h.i.+ma and Teidemann had. "You must understand that you too will fail to grasp the whole," he had told Julia when she had first come to him as his pupil.

"Everyone fails, but there is no shame in failure, provided that you have set your sights widely enough. The human condition has its limitations, and always will have. Even if the genetic engineers are right in claiming that they have at last brought the human race to the very threshold of emortality, and even if the prophets of man/machine symbiosis are right in saying that the fallibility of human memory can be compensated by appropriate augmentation of the brain, there will still be limitations of understanding. A man may live forever, and remember everything, and still understand hardly anything. It is as easy-perhaps easier-to breed a race of immortal fools as a race of mental giants. The majority of men have always made fools of themselves, and the vidveg will undoubtedly continue to do so, however long they live and whatever ingenious devices may one day be connected by artificial synapses to the substance of their souls." Julia had listened to such speeches very dutifully, in the beginning, and that had pleased him immensely-but their friends.h.i.+p was not based in anything as shallow as adulation. He was not in love with her; erotic orthodoxy had long ago begun to bore him, and he had never felt the least impulse to reinvest in it when the many and various unorthodoxies with which he had briefly experimented had similarly begun to pall. In fact, since becoming young for the third time Stuart had experienced a dramatic loss of libido which he had not the slightest interest in repairing. He felt-he understood- that there might be advantages in being old, to one who was as cerebrally inclined as he. Nor was he particularly flattered by Julia's attentiveness; he had been an educator for so very many years that he drank up the respect of pupils by sheer force of habit, not tasting it at all. If she had been more to him than a mere sounding board, which reflected his thoughts in a pleasing manner, he could not have felt as close to her as he did. He valued her disagreement as much as her agreement now; he loved to exchange ideas with her. He needed someone like her, who would not merely listen to his ideas but challenge them, playing white to his black in an endless game of intellectual chess.

Ideas were healthier when they were challenged; kept inside, in the dark and secret theater of the mind, protected from exposure, they did not nourish half so well. If ideas were to grow-and thus give birth to understanding-they must be let out, and tested.

"Will you stay for dinner?" he asked his companion. "We can eat on the veranda, if you wish. It's going to be a beautiful evening." "Of course," she said. "But I don't know how long I can stay afterward. There's something I have to do-I have to go to one of the other islands." "Which one?" he asked reflexively.

"One of the new ones. I have to visit a Creationist." "Why? I didn't think they encouraged visitors." When it became clear that she did not intend to answer the question, he carried on. "You'll have to be careful-you must have heard the rumors about dinosaurs and giant spiders, and the jokes about the Island of Dr. Moreau. How long will you be away?" "I don't know," she said. "It depends." It occurred to Stuart that Walter Czastka was a Creationist, and that Walter Czastka had been at the University of Wollongong in 2322-and that he had once walked on a beach with him, much as he was walking with Julia now, discussing some project that Walter had dreamed up. Walter had wanted his help... but Stuart could no longer remember exactly what it was that Walter had wanted from him, or whether or not he had obliged.

It was on the tip of his tongue to ask Julia whether it was Walter Czastka that she intended to visit, and what she could possibly want with a man like him, but he suppressed the impulse. It would probably seem like prying motivated by jealousy.

"I'm glad that I retired here," he said, glancing briefly upward in the direction of the blazing sun, then more languorously downward at the glints that its light imparted to the crests of the lazy waves. "The heat suits me, now that I'm growing old for the final time, and I can't see the twenty-sixth century creeping up on me. There was never any but the most rudimentary agriculture here, you know, not even in the Colonial Era. The volcanoes are tame now, of course, and the bigger islands in the group were badly affected by the population movements following the plague wars, but Kauai's seen less change than almost any other place on the earth's surface since the beginning of the twenty-second century." "But it's not the same, even so," Julia pointed out. "Every time you step, indoors, it must be obvious that you're living in the present-and you're entirely a product of the present. There were no men of your antiquity in the twenty-second century." "Granted," he said. "But still, I'd far rather live beside the blue sea than the green, and I could never be content in a valley between SAP black hills. I can still remember the days before the green seas and black hills, you know; I think my memory has held up better than most, in spite of the unease of illusory deja vu. Sometimes I'm half-convinced that I've known you before, in the long-gone days of my first youth... but I understand how these tricks of the mind work. In these days of cosmetic engineering, when everyone is beautiful, it's easy to recognize in the woman one sees today some or all of the women one knew many years before, who are simply phantoms imprinted on the vanis.h.i.+ng horizon of remembrance..." He trailed off because they had reached the threshold of his home: a place at which he always hesitated.

Although he could not bring himself to entertain the thought, let alone believe it, Stuart McCandless was fated to die very soon.

It was likely that nothing could have saved him-certainly not a better memory.

What he took for an illusion of similarity was indeed an illusion, because he had recently been shown a better likeness of his darling Julia than ancient memory could possibly have preserved, and had not recognized it.

Sometimes victims collaborate in their own murders, even when they have been warned of danger-and why should they not, if they believe that murder and art are mere expressions of historical process, deft feints, and thrusts of causality? If idiosyncrasy, madness, and genius are no more than tiny waves on a great sullen tide of irresistible causality, even a man forewarned can hardly be expected to defy their force. Stuart McCandless certainly did nothing to avoid his fate, even when the second and far more explicit warning arrived. He simply could not imagine that his pupil could be anything but what she seemed or anyone but who she pretended to be. He was old, and he was complacent. He knew that he was fated to die, but he carried in his consciousness that remarkable will to survive that refuses to recognize death even while it stares death in the face.

Nor was he a fool; he was probably as knowledgeable a historian as there was in the world, and as wise a lover.

If those who tried to warn him had been able to explain to him exactly why he was being murdered, he would have laughed aloud in flagrant disbelief. Like the vidveg he affected to despise, and in spite of his claustrophobia, he was a man whose imaginative horizons were narrower than he knew or could ever have admitted to himself.

Investigation: Act Five: From Land to Sea

The sun was setting by the time Charlotte and her companions emerged into the open; it remained visible solely because its decline had taken it into the cleft of a gap between two spiry crags.

The car had gone.

Charlotte felt her hand tighten around the bubblebugs which she had carefully removed from their stations above her eyebrows. She had been holding them at the ready, anxious to plug them into the car's systems so that their data could be decanted and relayed back to Hal Watson.

She murmured a curse. Michael Lowenthal's exclamation of distress was even louder-and the man from the MegaMall immediately reached for his handset, moving to one side to call for a.s.sistance.

Charlotte took out her beltphone and tried to send a signal, although the charge indicator suggested that the battery no longer had enough muscle to reach a relay station or a convenient comsat. Nothing happened. She muttered another curse beneath her breath, and then she turned back to Oscar Wilde.

"I should have..." she began-but she trailed off when she realized that she didn't know exactly what she should have done, or even what she might have done.

"Don't worry," said Wilde. "I doubt that Rappaccini brought us up here simply to abandon us. I suspect that a vehicle of some kind will be along very shortly to carry us on our way." "Where to?" she asked, unable to keep the asperity out of her voice.

"I don't know for certain," he said, "but I would hazard a guess that our route will be westward. We might have one more port of call en route, but our final destination will surely be the island where Walter Czastka is playing G.o.d. He is to be the final victim, and his death is presumably intended to form the climactic scene of this perfervid drama." "We have to warn him," said Charlotte. "And we have to identify the fifth man too. If the car were here..." "Walter has already had a warning of sorts," said Oscar ruminatively. "If Hal has been able to contact him with the news that he may be Rappaccini's father..." He left the sentence dangling.

"Let's hope it's not too late to tell him that we now have clear evidence of Rappaccini's intention to kill him," said Charlotte, "and let's hope the fifth man is still alive when we get a chance to find out who he is. He may be dead already, of course, like Kwiatek and Teidemann. Your ghoulish friend displayed his victims in the order in which their bodies were discovered, not the order in which they were killed." "He was never my friend," Oscar objected, seemingly more than a little disturbed by what he had just witnessed, "and I am not at all sure that I can approve of his determination to involve me in all this." "You should have challenged him about Czastka." Michael Lowenthal put in, having despaired of making his own call heard. "You should have told him that we've discovered that Czastka's his father." "It was only a sim," Wilde reminded him. "It could not have been startled or tricked into telling us anything it was not primed to tell us. In any case, if the DNA evidence can be trusted, Rappaccini must already know that Walter is his father, even if Walter has not the slightest idea that Rappaccini is his son. As Charlotte pointed out, Rappaccini knew enough to create a modified clone of his mother-a very special stepdaughter-and he must have done so with his present purpose in mind. We must concentrate our attention on the questions I did ask, especially the one to which I received two different but equally enigmatic answers." "Timing," said Charlotte, to show that she was now able to keep up. "The sim said that it is your birthday-by which it must mean your third rejuvenation. Is that what triggered this bizarre charade?" "That was the second response," Wilde pointed out. "It required a repet.i.tion of the cue to elicit it, it was markedly different in tone from the other speeches delivered by the sim, and it was the last thing it said before shutting down.

The comment had all the hallmarks of an afterthought-a belated addition to the program. Rappaccini must have known for years approximately when I would attempt my third rejuve, but he can only have known the exact date of my release from the hospital for eight or ten weeks-three months at the most. The real answer to the question must somehow be contained in the earlier and much more circuitous speech." "How much of that did you actually understand?" she asked him. "I recognized the characters, but a lot of what the Herod effigy said went over my head." "I understood most of the references," Oscar said, "if only because so many of them were to works by my ancient namesake-but the meaning hidden between the lines was by no means obvious even to me. There was meaning in it, though-meaning that I am intended to divine, given time. The setting was, of course, an elaboration of one of Gustave Moreau's paintings of Salome's dance, and Rappaccini's Herod made several oblique references to Wilde's essays, including 'The Decay of Lying' and 'Pen, Pencil and Poison.' " Charlotte knew that she had heard the second t.i.tle before, and was very eager to show that she was still at least one step ahead of Michael Lowenthal. "That's the one which refers to the Wainewright character Hal listed among Rappaccini's other pseudonyms," she said.

"That's right. My namesake argued there, not without a certain macabre levity, that the fact that Wainewright had been a forger and a murderer should not blind critics to the virtues of his work as a literary scholar. Indeed, the essay suggests that Wainewright's fondness for subtle murder-he was apparently a poisoner of some dexterity and skill-might be regarded as evidence of his wholeness as a person, and might provide better grounds for critical praise than his admittedly second-rate writings. The argument is not as original as it may seem-as I mentioned when the name first came up, De Quincey had earlier written an essay called 'Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.' The relevance of the argument to the present case is abundantly clear, I think; Rappaccini obviously regards his murders as phases in the construction of a work of art and considers them at least as estimable as his ingenious funeral wreaths. He is asking me-although I doubt that he can seriously expect me to comply-to look at them admiringly, in the same light." Charlotte was tempted to observe that Wilde had seemed hitherto to be complying with some enthusiasm, but she could see that there was more to come and felt obliged to give explanation priority over sarcasm. "What else?" she asked, instead.

"In 'The Decay of Lying,' my namesake laments the dominance of realism in the artwork of his own day. He argues-again, rather flippantly-that there is no virtue at all in fidelity of representation, and that the glory of art lies in its unfettered inventiveness. Art, he argues, should not endeavor to be truthful or useful, nor should it limit itself to the kinds of petty deception which are committed by vulgar everyday liars-salesmen and politicians. He proposes that art should lie with all the extravagance and grandiosity of which the human imagination is capable. That is why Rappaccini asked me to judge him as a true liar. But the word decay is also very significant, and you will doubtless recall that the simulation said that I, of all people, should understand the world's decadence. That, I think, is a subtler-" He broke off as Charlotte suddenly turned away, looking up into the sky. While Oscar had been speaking, his words had gradually been overlaid by another sound, whose clamor was by now too insistent to be ignored. Its monotonous drone threatened to drown him out entirely.

"There!" she said, pointing at a dark blur only half-emerged from the dazzling face of the sun. It was descending rapidly toward them, growing hugely as it did so.

The approaching craft was a light aircraft, whose engines were even now switching to the vertical mode so that it could land helicopter-fas.h.i.+on.

Charlotte followed Wilde and Lowenthal as they hurried into the shelter of the building from which they had come, in order to give the machine s.p.a.ce to land.

The plane was, of course, pilotless-and the first thing Charlotte saw as she hurried to the pa.s.senger cabin was a message displayed on its one and only screen which said: ANY ATTEMPT TO INTERROGATE THE PROGRAMMING OF THIS VEHICLE WILL ACTIVATE A VIRUS THAT WILL DESTROY THE DATA IN QUESTION.

She had expected that and was sufficiently glad to have access to an adequately powerful comcon. For the moment she did not care exactly where the machine might be headed. While Oscar Wilde and Michael Lowenthal climbed in behind her she plugged her beltphone into the comcon and deposited her bubblebugs in the decoder.

As soon as the doors were closed, the plane began to rise into the air.

"Hal," said Charlotte as soon as the connection was made. "Sorry to be out of touch. Vital data coming in-crazy message from Biasiolo, alias Rappaccini, delivered by sim. It's conclusive proof of Rappaccini's involvement. Pick out the face of the fifth victim and identify it for me. Send an urgent warning to Walter Czastka. And tell us what course this d.a.m.n plane is following, if you can track it from orbit." Hal Watson acknowledged the incoming information, but paused only briefly before saying: "I'm sure all this is very interesting, but I've closed the file on Jafri Biasiolo, alias Rappaccini, alias Gustave Moreau. We're now concentrating all our efforts on the woman. We a.s.sume that she's a modified clone of Maria Inacio, illegally and secretly created by Biasiolo before his death." "Death!" Charlotte echoed, dumbfounded by the news. "When? How?" Unfortunately, Hal was busy decanting the data from her bubblebug and didn't reply immediately. There was a long, frustrating pause. Wilde and Lowenthal were waiting just as raptly as she was.

Charlotte filled in time by looking around the cabin. The airplane was a small one, built to carry a maximum of four pa.s.sengers. Again, Lowenthal had been left to play odd man out. Behind the second row of seats there was a curtained section, but the curtains were drawn back, allowing her to see the four bunks it contained. That implied that they were in for a long flight-and the plane's engine seemed distinctly fainthearted. They were traveling no faster than they had on the maglev or the transcontinental superhighway.

"Hal!" she said as soon as her colleague's image appeared on the inset screen.

"What do you mean, you've closed the file? The tape is proof of Rappaccini's involvement." "He's dead, Charlotte," Hal repeated, calmly emphasizing the crucial word. "He's been dead all along. I found the new ident.i.ty he took up after his rejuvenation, with the aid of a much-changed appearance, as soon as I'd cut through the obfuscations in the leases pertaining to the artificial islands in the vicinity of Kauai. Actually, he'd established half a dozen fake ident.i.ties under various pseudonyms, but the one he appears to have used for everyday purposes is the late Gustave Moreau. As Moreau, Biasiolo leased an islet west of Kauai; he's been Walter Czastka's nearest neighbor for the last forty years. He's spent most of the last quarter century on the islet, never leaving it for more than three or four weeks at a time. According to the official records, he was alone there, but we now presume that he was taking advantage of the quarantine gifted to all Creationists in order to bring up his mother's clone. All of this was carefully obscured, of course, but it was just a matter of digging down. We've touched bottom now-everything's in place except the location and arrest of the woman." "The late Gustave Moreau," Charlotte repeated, glancing sideways at Oscar Wilde.

It had been Wilde, she remembered, who had said that the Moreau name was just part of a series of jokes, not worth taking seriously-but that was before they had seen the "play" whose stage set was based on a painting by the original Gustave Moreau. Was it possible, she wondered, that Biasiolo/Rappaccini/Moreau had gone out of his way to involve Wilde in this comedy simply because he, like Wilde, had taken the name of a nineteenth-century artist fascinated by the legend of Salome? "That's right," Hal replied patiently. "Gustave Moreau, alias Rappaccini, alias Jafri Biasiolo, died six weeks ago in Honolulu. The precise details of his conception might be lost in the mists of obscurity, but every detail of his death was scrupulously recorded before the body was released. According to the boatmaster who handled Moreau's supplies, the corpse was s.h.i.+pped back to the islet-where the mysterious foster daughter presumably took delivery of it.

There's no doubt that the dead man was Biasiolo; I'd have found the DNA match if I'd only thought to check Biasiolo's record against the register of the dead as well as the living. It was the same error of omission I initially made with the woman's DNA, delaying her identification as an Inacio clone." "The comcon links to Moreau's island haven't been closed down, but there's no one answering at present. The boatmaster says that he's been s.h.i.+pping equipment and bales of collapsed LSP from the islet to Kauai for over a year, every time he's made a supply drop. According to him, there's virtually nothing left on the islet except for the ecosystem which Moreau built-and, presumably, his grave.

The UN will send a team in to examine and record the ecosystem. Under normal circ.u.mstances it would probably take three months or so to put the people together and another three before they finished the job, but in view of the biohazard aspect of the case I've put Regina Chai in charge and I've asked her to make all possible speed. She and her team will be there before the end of the week." "But Biasiolo's still responsible for all this, isn't he?" Charlotte protested, again glancing sideways at Oscar Wilde. Wilde was staring upward with an expression of annoyance on his face which strongly implied that he was mentally kicking himself for failing to deduce that it was Rappaccini's death which had determined the timing of this remarkable posthumous crime. "He must have set it all up before he died. The woman is obviously implicated, but what we just saw in that cellar must have been put in place years ago-and it must have taken years to build up, if what you say about Biasiolo never leaving the islet for more than a month at a time is true." "Agreed," said Hal. "But we can't charge a dead man. She's the one we want-the one we need. The evening news broke the full story of the sequence of murders-the story so far, at any rate. I don't know how much the MegaMall will hold back, but now that they know for sure that this isn't aimed at them, however obliquely, I suspect they'll just sit back and enjoy the show along with everybody else. The news tapes haven't identified the killer, of course, but they know what's going on. By now there'll be a whole swarm of hoverflies heading for Kauai and Biasiolo's island." Charlotte turned to look at Michael Lowenthal, who did indeed have the air of a man who had decided to sit back, even if the remainder of the show afforded him little enjoyment. His face was a picture of misery-presumably because even he had now been forced to accept that Walter Czastka was not the guilty party.

Given that the a.s.sa.s.sination of Gabriel King had not been aimed at the MegaMall he must now be regretting that he had ever become involved in the investigation at all.

"You haven't picked her up yet," Charlotte said, slowly realizing that it wasn't over yet. "You don't even know where she is." "We think we know where she's going," Hal replied. "She's headed for Walter Czastka's island." "Not directly!" Charlotte said, her voice suddenly insistent. "Look at the tape, Hal! There's a fifth intended victim-one she's set out to hit before she gets to Czastka. His face is on the tape!" "If the tape has any significance," Hal replied with reflexive skepticism. "It looks to me like a shoddy version of the dance of the seven veils!" He obviously had it set up on one of his screens, and he was playing it through.

Charlotte didn't bother to congratulate him on his perspicacity. "Fast-forward to the severed head!" she said urgently. "Track the changes!" "I don't think he'll be able to reach her before we do," Oscar Wilde said softly. "As slow as this glorified giant hoverfly is, I suspect that we've been given the fastest available track to the climax of the psychodrama. That's the way it's been planned, at any rate. Whoever the fifth man is, he's probably already dead-perhaps for some time. I understand now why the simulacrum said that we might have difficulty identifying the true name among the false, for reasons which I would understand. He must have thought of Moreau as his true name, by then-but he knew that the coincidence would make me a.s.sume that it was a mere pseudonym. There must be more hints hidden in the tape. I must talk to Walter again, if I can only get through." "The fifth face is Stuart McCandless," said Hal suddenly. "We already had him in the frame as a possible victim. We've spoken to him once and shown him pictures of the woman, so he's been warned already. I'm trying to get through to him again now-his house AI says that he's out walking. It's sent out a summoner. Oh, and your plane's heading is a few degrees south of due west-dead on course for Kauai." This, at least, was one datum of which Charlotte was already aware; the blood red sun was slipping inexorably toward the horizon almost dead ahead of them, and its last rays would soon be teasing the surface of the ocean.

"I'll try to get through to McCandless again," Hal said. "I'll alert the local police as well-and I'll picture-search everyone who's arrived on the island since our busy murderess left San Francisco." Charlotte's fingers were still resting on the rim of the keyboard, claiming it for her own, but Oscar Wilde put his hand on top of hers, gently insistent "I have to call Walter," he said. "Hal will take care of McCandless." Charlotte let Wilde take control of the comcon, although she felt, uncomfortably, that she should not be allowing her authority to slip away so easily. She, after all, was still the investigating officer. Oscar Wilde was only a witness. She no longer thought he was a murderer, but that didn't affect the fact that he was the one who should only be along for the ride, if he had any ent.i.tlement to be here at all.