Architects of Emortality Part 4

"Michi Urashima's just been found dead in San Francisco," she reported. She knew that it wasn't necessary to tell either of them who Michi Urashima was. For the sake of completeness she added: "He was murdered. Same method as King." "Michi Urashima!" Lowenthal repeated incredulously.

"I'm very sorry to hear that," said Wilde. "Michi was a better man by far than Gabriel King." Lowenthal had s.n.a.t.c.hed up his own handset by the time Wilde had finished his sentence, and had turned away to speak into it. Charlotte had no difficulty at all in deducing that Michi Urashima's was not one of the names Lowenthal's employers had feared or expected to hear in this context-although there was one item of their discussion downstairs which had pointed to a pattern into which Urashima fit as snugly as a hand into a glove.

Before his trial and imprisonment, Michi Urashima had been one of the world's foremost pioneers of "encephalic augmentation": brainfeed research. Gabriel King must have known him well. So must Jafri Biasiolo, alias Rappaccini.

On the other hand, it was difficult to imagine anyone less in tune with the MegaMall's economic and social philosophy than Urashima. Even in the earliest phase of his career, when he had been an expert in computer graphics and image simulation, widely celebrated for his contributions to synthetic cinema, he had been a political radical. If the Hardinist Cabal feared that King's a.s.sa.s.sination had been the first move in a conspiracy directed against their ownership of the world, Michi Urashima was the last person they would expect to find on the hit list.

"Not everyone would agree with you about his being a better man," Charlotte said to Wilde speculatively, "but he must, I suppose, have been of the same generation. In any case, there's no need for you to take the midnight maglev now." "On the contrary," said Oscar. "Even if this revelation is, by Rappaccini's reckoning, premature, I feel that he would still want me to visit the scene.

This affair is still in its early stages, and if we want to witness the further phases of its unfolding we really ought to follow the script laid down for us." "You think there will be more murders?" Charlotte asked.

"I always thought so," said Wilde. "Now, I am certain of it."

Intermission Two: A Pioneer on the Furthest Sh.o.r.e

As if it were caught by the surge of a fast-flowing black river, the soul of Paul Kwiatek was hurled upon its wayward course through the warp of infinity. It was outside the universe of atoms, beneath the wayward play of nuclear interaction forces, having been reabsorbed into the implicate order itself. Paul knew that his fleshy envelope must be dead and that his body must already be in its coffin, borne through the streets of Bologna on a black-draped bier-but his soul was free, miraculously inviolate.

Tossed as he was by the whim of the reckless current, Paul could see nothing of the river's sh.o.r.e, the Land of the Dead. Perhaps it was only his imagination which a.s.sured him that he could hear the whispering voices of the spirit legions, welcoming him with gossip as they marveled over the achievements of his life.

The guardian at the entrance to an older heaven might have stopped him at the gate, for his life had not been entirely without sin, but he had always worked in the cause of Mind and the further evolution of the human intellect. In the reckoning of cowards, he had committed crimes-crimes from whose legal consequences the agents of the MegaMall had fortunately condescended to shield him-but everything he had done he had done for the sake of increased understanding of the last and greatest of the ancient mysteries: the nature of consciousness, the fundamental phenomenon of the human mind. In any case, the heaven of tradition was now a virtual theme park owned and operated by the MegaMall, through which silver saints offered guided tours to the living; this was the world beyond death, the ultimate upload, the exit to eternity.

Paul knew that the flow of the river was not the flow of time, because he was now beyond the reach of time, although his consciousness had no alternative but to arrange its thoughts and feelings consecutively, preserving the illusion of duration even in a realm without any such dimension. Nor was his soul confined in any way; free of his body, it had neither width nor breadth nor depth-but consciousness had no alternative but to define itself in terms of "position" and "magnitude," and so he perceived himself as an inconsiderable atom in the flotsam of a river which fed the Sea of Souls-an atom as yet alone, but fit nevertheless to join the company of all humankind at the omega point of creation.

Paul did not fear dissolution in the ocean of the implicate order, nor did he fear annihilation at the Climacticon; he knew that he could not be lost, even in infinity. Nothing, ultimately, could be lost, no matter how many inflationary domains bubbled up from the wellspring of creation, making worlds within worlds within worlds and selecting those best fitted to be cradles of further worlds, further minds, further candidates for the ultimate upload. The surge of creativity was illimitable, possessed of no vestige of a beginning and no prospect of an end, and the surge of mind within it was irresistible in its insistence on being heard and felt. Every sensation that was ever felt, every thought that was ever framed, was gathered here into the river of intelligence, neatly bound into ident.i.ties and personal histories, stories made from memory, racing upon the tide toward omega, the summation of all.

Souls bound for lesser heavens were supposed to be joyous, worshipful, and above all grateful, but Paul was prey to no such petty treasons. He was an explorer, whose mind was questioning, and he had no s.p.a.ce within his virtual self for gladness or triumph, ecstasy or awe. He had come to see all that there was to be seen, to feel all that there was to be felt, and above all else to know all that there was to be known. His purpose was discovery: to go to the undiscovered country where mult.i.tudes had been before, but from whose bourn no traveler had yet returned; to be what mult.i.tudes would one day be, although they could not know it.

It was, of course, a virtual experience-Paul had always despised the phrase "virtual reality" as a vile oxymoron, and thought "virtual environment" misleading because it implied that a person within one had merely altered his existential wallpaper without altering himself-but that did not make it any less valuable, in Paul's reckoning. As he was fond of reminding the few friends he had left, all experience was virtual, because that was the very essence of Mind.

The cogitative brain was a machine for generating virtual experiences of a kind that would allow the body to function in the world of things-in-themselves, but to describe the phenomenal world of things-as-perceived as the real world was a conceptual step too far.

Few would have agreed with him, but Paul felt perfectly ent.i.tled to put the experience of the black river on a par with his experience of the Tiber or the Po, and to deem the implicate order of the Sea of Souls as sensible as the streets of Rome and the sh.o.r.es of the Adriatic.

Paul had no doubt of his own effective immortality, but still he could not shake the last vestiges of his fear of death. Perhaps, if he had been able to do that, he would have been able to ride the black current to its terminus, without the necessity of a return to vulgar quiddity. As things were, however, he felt compelled to call an end to his odyssey when his IT began to send unmistakable distress calls from his not-quite-abandoned flesh.

Paul lifted the VE hood from his head and set about unsealing the special suitskin in which he had been enwrapped for thirty-six hours. He fumbled every seam, his quivering fingers seeming huge and repulsive.

When he was finally free he made no immediate attempt to raise himself into a sitting position, let alone to swing his legs from the cradle to the floor. He simply lay there, becoming reaccustomed to his lumpen body and his mere humanity. He felt utterly deflated as well as severely disoriented; it was an effort even to blink his rheumy eyes.

He could no longer remember a time when this kind of return had seemed like returning home. He felt as if he had been washed up on an alien sh.o.r.e, stranded there as a castaway in a state of utter exhaustion. There was nothing he could do, until he recovered far better possession of himself, but lie still and wait.

His IT was no longer transmitting distress calls, but it was laboring under duress. Although he had not consulted a physician in some time, his personal nanotech was neither obsolete nor broken down, but while the law forbade "explicit neural cyborgization," IT could only do so much to help the brain to maintain its efficient grip on the motor nerves. Given that the whole point of a VE hood-and-suitskin was to distract the brain from its involvement with a body, it was hardly surprising that the efficiency of that grip could be compromised while a person was lost in virtual experience.

Suitskins designed for everyday use were purely organic-even supposedly state-of-the-art s.e.xsuits and commercially augmented VE trippers were only lightly cyborgized-but the suitskin Paul had been wearing was nearly 40 percent inorganic. Fortunately, there was no law specifying the limits of explicit neural cyborgization in artificial constructions. The suitskin was as awkwardly bulky as a twenty-second-century deptank, but it carried ten times as much fibertech and fifty times as much nanotech-and every single nanosuite was a great deal sleeker than its ancient ancestors. The suitskin's power was so much greater than a deptank's, and the virtual realities to which it took its user were so much more complicated, that the difference had to be reckoned as a qualitative one rather than a merely quant.i.tative exaggeration.

Paul thought of the suitskin as his own invention, refusing to admit that the contribution of the giants on whose shoulders he had stood while drawing up its blueprint had been significant. He also thought of it as his own personal property, although he could never have financed its construction. All the money he had ever extracted from the MegaMall in the days when he had been a pioneer, oblivious of the cautionary elements of the emerging brainfeed laws, would not have served to buy an eye and a glove, let alone a whole suit-but if ever it became an item of controversy, he would have to take sole responsibility for its possession and its use. The Secret Masters of the world were hardly likely to come forward in his defense and say: the guilt is ours, and the penalty too. He had ceased to be an officially acknowledged employee of the MegaMall on the day that Michi Urashima had been thrown to the wolves. Others had thought of it as expulsion, but Paul had thought of it as freedom. In his eyes, the augmented suitskin was his creation, his property, and his gateway to eternity, no matter who had fed the cash into his bank account or what elaborate chain of transfers had culminated in the final delivery.

Paul's friends occasionally took leave to inform him-as if he had asked, or cared, or needed to know-that his apparatus was simply a souped-up version of the VE kits that ordinary folk used for remote work and virtual tourism. He always denied it, pointing out that suitskins intended for the use of VE tourists and others like them were content to pretend merely to alter the worlds in which their users moved, while ostensibly leaving their sense of self unmolested. Relatively few VE suitskins were actually designed to alter their users' subjective experiences of their own persons as profoundly as they altered the environments through which their bodies appeared to be moving. Most of the ones which could and did were geared to produce the illusion of being some other kind of animal: "a leopard stalking its prey; a dolphin in the deep; an ant in the hive. Paul's pride and joy was far more ambitious than that, and the virtual worlds in which he routinely immersed himself were stranger by far. He was an explorer of artificial universes whose physical laws were markedly different from those pertaining to our own inflationary domain, and of alien states of being as remote from the human as the digital imagination could produce.

He was always prepared to explain this, not merely to his friends but to anyone who would listen, but no one really understood who had not done what he had done and been where he had been. Had he tried much harder, he might eventually have persuaded one or more of his friends to do that, but he never tried too hard. To evangelize was one thing; to share the embrace of his most intimate possession was another.

* * * When he had finally managed to sit up, Paul reached for the plastic bottle waiting on the shelf beside the cradle, uncapped it with hands that were almost steady, and sucked at the tube. He held the glucose-rich liquid in his mouth for six or seven seconds before easing it into his esophagus. The last of the time-release capsules that he had carefully committed to his stomach before donning the suitskin had exhausted its cargo of nutrients five hours before; he and his loyal IT were both in need of the energy fix.

Another ten minutes pa.s.sed while he flexed the muscles in his limbs, preparing for the arduous journey to the bathroom. An everyday sleepskin would have absorbed the secretions of his skin as easily as it absorbed all other excreta, then turned him out perfectly fresh, but the suit he had been using had only the most elementary provision of that kind. He needed a shower and a generous dusting of talcmech before he was fit to receive company.

Sometimes he wondered whether it might be better to become a total recluse, but he did not like to be called a VE addict and he knew that.if he were to withdraw from all human contact it would be taken as proof that the label had not been unjustly attached to him. The idea of a permanent retreat into the suitskin's inner worlds was not altogether attractive, even though it was now practicable.

Thanks to the sudden flood of wealth produced by their stake in Zaman transformation technology, the Ahasuerus Foundation had been able to put a whole fleet of new susan technologies on the market, including a DreamOn facility which promised year-round support. He had enough money to pay for his upkeep for far longer than his body and mind were likely to hold out, and his doctors had advised him that a third core-system rejuvenation was out of the question unless he wanted to start over with a tabula rasa personality. The whole point of his odysseys in exotica was, however, to undertake voyages of discovery. How could he be reckoned a true explorer unless he brought the fruits of his labor back to Earth? Whatever people might say, he was not a VE addict; he was a pioneer.

Even susan-becalmed dreamers were, of course, only a phone call away from their real-world neighbors, but those voluntary Endymions to whom Paul had talked on various virtual grounds had always given abundant evidence of the fact that they were entranced. When they posed as scrupulous scientific observers reporting on their findings, they never gave the impression of reliability. Paul did not want to be seen as an unreliable witness, let alone a figure of fun; his journeys into the remotest regions of virtual s.p.a.ce were attempts to expand reality, not attempts to escape it, and in order to make that plain he had to retain the capability of wakefulness.

He set the temperature control on the shower ten degrees too low, so that the first jet of water would startle his flesh, but he held on to the k.n.o.b so that he could twist it to a more comfortable setting as soon as the benign shock had worked its way through his system. After that first reminder of what manner of being he was, it became far easier to relax into what he still considered-even after all his amazing adventures-to be his true self.

By the time he had slipped into a conventional day-suit Paul was beginning to wonder if he had left himself enough time to check his mail and get something to eat, but he still had thirty minutes to spare before the appointed time for his rendezvous, and he had already taken note of the fact that his visitor's sense of timing was extraordinarily exact. Although he had known her for less than a fortnight, he felt that he knew the young woman as well as he knew anyone else in the world, and he trusted her to appear at the appointed time, neither a minute early nor a minute late.

He did not, of course, have time to reply to any of his mail, but no one who knew him even slightly would be expecting a rapid response. His meal was whole diet manna, as uncomplicated as possible, but he followed it with hot black coffee, as authentic in taste and texture as his dispensary could contrive.

While he drank the coffee he reflected that although his lifestyle might have appeared frugal to anyone who had cause to consult the record stored by the mechanical eyes which had him under observation, they would have been wrong.

"Only those with extensive experience of the unreal," he murmured, "can properly appreciate the real." It was one of his favorite aphorisms; he could no longer remember from whom he had stolen it.

"That's not what most people say," the beautiful woman had observed when he had quoted the saw on the occasion of their first meeting. "Some reckon that the near perfection of virtual reality can only devalue actual experience, by proving that it is-at least in principle, and nowadays very nearly in practice-reducible to a mere string of ones and zeroes." "That's absurd," Paul had told her. "Even if one were to ignore the hardware whose structures are animated by the digital programs, it's as grossly misleading to think of the programs merely as a string of ones and zeroes as it is to think of living organisms merely as a string of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts threaded on a DNA strand. In any case, how can it be a devaluation to know that everything, in the ultimate a.n.a.lysis, can be reduced to the pure and absolute beauty of abstract information?" The beautiful woman had been as deeply impressed by his eloquence as she was by his originality. There had been a spark between them from the very first moment: a spark that was emotional as well as intellectual. The fact that he was a hundred and ninety-four years old while she could hardly be more than twenty-twenty-five at the most-was no barrier to empathy. On the contrary: the difference between them actually increased the quality of their relationship by marking out complementary roles. She had so much to learn, and he so much to teach. She had such bright eyes, such fabulous hair... and he had such a wealth of experience, such a wonderful elasticity of mind.

"The professions of information technology have generated many derisory nicknames over the centuries," Paul had explained to his new lover when she wondered aloud whether she ought to follow a career trajectory in Webwork, "but those of us who have a true vocation learn to bear them all with pride. I've never been ashamed to be a chipmonk, or a bytebinder, or a cyberspider. I've devoted my life to the expansion of the Web and its capabilities. It is, after all, the mind of the race. In my youth I found it tattered and torn, ripped apart by the Crash, and in my middle years I had to fight with all my might to preserve its scaffolding from the vandalistic activities of the new barbarians-but in the end, I saw the triumph of the New Order and felt free to move on to further fields, searching for the road that would lead to the ultimate upload. That's the way to true immortality, after all. No matter what the so-called New Human Race is capable of, it can only be emortal; if we're to look beyond the very possibility of death, it's to the Web that we must look in the first instance, because it's the Web that will ultimately be fused with the Universal Machine, the architect of the omega point. It's a pity that so many of the people whose souls are inextricably caught in the embrace of the Web feel compelled to belittle it with their talk, even while they enjoy the wonderful privileges of its caresses, but it seems to be human nature to take the best things in life for granted." "Rumor has it," she had told him while inspecting his cradle and his collection of uncommon suitskins, "that the most realistic VEs of all don't require a suitskin. The illusion is produced entirely by internal nanotech while the dreamer lies unconscious in a kind of susan. It's said that the suite was never put on the market because the illusions were too convincing for some of its users." "Actually, the system in question was made commercially available for a while," Paul had been able to tell her, "but it was withdrawn after the first half-dozen shock-induced fatalities. An overreaction, in my opinion, but typical of the way the World Government works, always turning panic into legislation. All that was required was a slight tightening of the IT safety net, but the vidveg never see that, and democracy gives the vidveg the right of campaign. I've used the relevant IT myself, but work on the software stopped when the scandal forced the product off the market, and the existing VEs aren't nearly as sophisticated as the best of those designed to run on equipment like mine. If the MegaMall ever puts it back on the market I'd certainly consider adapting my own work to that kind of system, but it would involve some heavy and exceedingly laborious work.

I'm probably too old for that kind of project." "I doubt that," she had said, with a brilliant smile. "You've worn better than any other two-hundred-year-old man I know." He hadn't even bothered to point out that he was still six years short of his second century.

By the time the door chime sounded, Paul was entirely ready to receive his visitor. He felt perfectly at home in his flesh, and perfectly at home in his apartment "Why thank you," he said as she offered him a bouquet of golden flowers. "I think I have a vase, somewhere. Are they Wildes or Czastkas?" "Wildes," she told him. "His latest release." "Of course-I should have known. The style's unmistakable. Czastkas always look so lackl.u.s.ter, so very natural- although I suppose we'll have to give up calling things natural, now that the adjective's been turned into a noun by the new emortals." Paul did have a vase, although it wasn't easy to find. He was not a man who liked clutter, and he kept the great majority of his possessions neatly and efficiently stored away. "My memory isn't what it used to be," he explained while he searched for it.

"It doesn't matter," she said. "You can set them in the wall if you have the right kind of plumbing." "I don't," he replied, still searching. "In my day, picture windows and virtual murals were all the rage. n.o.body wanted creepers and daisy chains covering their interior walls-even daisy chains designed by Oscar Wilde or Walter Czastka. I was at university with Czastka, you know. He was so intense in those days-so full of plans and schemes. A little bit crazy, but only in a good way. He was an explorer uienj like me. Sometimes I wonder where all his daring went. I haven't spoken to him for decades, but he'd become exceedingly dull even then." "It really doesn't matter about the vase," the woman told him anxiously.

"It's here somewhere," he said. "I really ought to remember where I keep it. I might have thirty or forty years in me yet, if only I can keep my mind alive and alert. My brain might be a thing of thread and patches, but as long as I can keep the forces of fossilization at bay I can keep the neural pathways intact.

As long as I can look after my mind..." Paul realized that he was rambling. He shut up, wondering whether he could find an opportunity to ask her whether or not she was a Natural, engineered for such longevity that she might not ever need "rejuvenation." If so, her mind might have a thousand years to grow and learn, to refine itself by the selection of forgetfulness. He wondered whether it would really be indelicate simply to ask her-but he decided against it, for the moment. She was authentically young; that was what mattered. What would become of her in two or five hundred years was surely none of his concern.

"The apartment sloth will know where it is," he told her while he continued to move hither and yon uncertainly, "but if I ask it, I'll be giving in to erosion.

Sloths never forget, but that shouldn't tempt us to rely on them too much, lest we lose the ability to remember. A good memory is one that's as adept in the art of forgetfulness as it is in the art of remembrance." He realized, somewhat belatedly, that he was losing the thread of his own argument-and that he still had not found the vase.

"I'll put them down here," the woman said, laying the flowers down on the table beside the food dispensary. "They'll be fine for an hour or two-longer, if necessary. You can look for the vase later, if you really want to." "Yes, of course," Paul said, trying not to sound annoyed with himself lest she take the inference that he was also annoyed with her. He resolved to start the encounter again, and went back to greet her for a second time, in a better way.

The young woman was extraordinarily beautiful, in an age where ordinary beauty was commonplace. Her eyes sparkled, and her hair was a delight to eye and hand alike. The touch of her lips seemed to Paul's old-fashioned consciousness to be a sensation which not even the most elaborate and sensitive virtual experiences could yet contain.

"Sometimes, when I emerge into the daylit world," he told her, "I feel as if I had pa.s.sed through a looking gla.s.s into a mirror world which is subtly distorted. It seems very like the one I left behind, but not quite the same. I always need the touch of a human hand or a kiss from human lips in order to be sure that I'm really home." "You can be sure of that," she told him. "This is the world, and you're certainly in it." And so he was, for a while.

By the time death came to claim him, Paul Kwiatek was deep in yet another waking dream, and it seemed to him that he was in a very different body, in a very different world. Even before the seeds began to germinate within his flesh, he was a ghost among ghosts, in a world without light, adrift on a black torrent pouring over the edge of a great cataract, falling into an infinite and empty abyss.

The memory of the kisses he had so recently shared had already been stored neatly away, ready to be forgotten. Now, like the elusive vase, they would be forever lost.

So far as most people were concerned-even others like himself-Paul Kwiatek had been a mere phantom of the information world for years. His extinction pa.s.sed unnoticed by any kind of intelligence, human or artificial, and the fact of it might have remained undiscovered for months had no one found a particular reason to search for him. It was not until a dutiful silver linked his name to those of Gabriel King, Michi Urashima, and Walter Czastka that anyone thought to wonder where he actually was, or what he had actually become.

Investigation: Act Three: Across America

By the time she had installed herself in the maglev couchette, Charlotte was exhausted. It had been a long, eventful, and mentally taxing day. Unfortunately, her head was still seething with crowded thoughts in Brownian motion, and she knew that sleep would be out of the question without serious chemical a.s.sistance. She knew that her disinclination to avail herself of such a.s.sistance would undoubtedly punish her the next day, when she would doubtless need chemical a.s.sistance of a different kind to maintain her alertness, but that seemed to her to be the dutiful way to play it. There was plenty of work she could do while she stayed awake, even if her powers of concentration were not at their peak.

The couchette had a screen of its own, but it was situated at the foot of the bed, and Charlotte found it more comfortable by far to plug her beltphone into the bed's head and set the bookplate on the pillow while lying p.r.o.ne on the mattress.

At first she was content to scan data which had already been collated by Hal's silvers, but she soon grew bored with that. Now that she had elected to play the detective, she knew that she ought to be doing research of her own. She could hardly compete with Hal's private army in matters of detail, but even Hal had confessed to her once that the princ.i.p.al defect of his methodology was the danger of losing sight of the wood among the trees. Given that she was a legman, operating in the human world rather than the abstract realm of digitized data, she needed to think holistically, making every effort to grasp the big picture.

To have any chance of doing that, however, she needed more information on the game's players. Hal had already shown her the near vacuum of data that was supposedly the man behind Rappaccini, but if her suspicions could be trusted, the real key to the mystery must be Oscar Wilde.

She had, of course, to hope that her suspicions could be trusted; if they could not, she was going to look very foolish indeed. Modern police work was conventionally confined to the kind of data sifting at which Hal Watson was a past master. Legmen were at the bottom of the hierarchy, normally confined to the quasi-janitorial labor of looking after crime scenes and making arrests. She was mildly surprised that Hal had actually consented to let her accompany Wilde, because he obviously felt that this trip to San Francisco was a wild-goose chase, and that it was of no relevance whatsoever to the investigation. She wondered whether he would have given her permission if it had not been for Lowenthal. Although he would never be able to say so out loud, Hal would be much happier if the man from MegaMall were chasing distant wild geese instead of looking over his shoulder while he did the real detective work. At any rate, Charlotte knew that she could expect no backup and no encouragement, and that her one chance of avoiding a nasty blot on her record was to prove that her instincts were correct. If she could do that, the outlandishness of her action would be forgiven-and if she were spectacularly successful, her efforts might actually make the UN hierarchy think again about the methodology of modern police work.

It was the work of a few moments to discover that Oscar Wilde was anything but a data vacuum. That did not surprise her-although she was slightly startled by the revelation that there was almost as much data in the Web relating to the nineteenth-century writer after whom the contemporary Oscar had been named as there was to the man himself. It took her a further fifteen minutes fully to absorb the lesson that mere ma.s.s was a highly undesirable thing when it came to translating information into understanding. By the time that quarter hour had elapsed, she had cultivated a proper appreciation for the synoptic efforts of compilers of commentaries and encyclopedists.

She tried out half a dozen points of entry into the hypertextual maze, eventually settling for the Condensed Micropaedia of the Modern World. From there she was able to retrieve a reasonably compacted description of the life and works of Oscar Wilde (2362- ) and Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854-1900). When she had inwardly digested that information, she looked up Charles Baudelaire. Then she looked up Walter Czastka, then Gabriel King, and then Michi Urashima. She had been hoping for inspiration, but none came; she felt even more exhausted but even less capable of sleep.

On a whim, she looked up Michael Lowenthal. She found references to a dozen of them, none of whom could possibly be the man in the next-but-one couchette. She keyed in MegaMall, but had to go to the Universal Dictionary to find an entry, which merely recorded that the word was "A colloquial term for the industrial/entertainment complex." There were no entries even in the Universal Dictionary for the Secret Masters, the Nine Unknown, or the Dominant Shareholders, and the entries on the G.o.ds of Olympus and the Knights of the Round Table were carefully disingenuous. There were, however, entries in both the dictionary and the Condensed Micropaedia on Hardinism, each of which deigned to include a footnote on the Hardinist Cabal.

According to the micropaedia, Hardinism was the name adopted by a loose a.s.sociation of early twenty-first-century businessmen to dignify their a.s.sertive defense of the principle of private property against steadily increasing demand that a central planning agency administered by the United Nations should be appointed to supervise the management of the ecosphere. The name had been appropriated from an obscure twentieth-century text called The Tragedy of the Commons, by an agricultural economist named Garrett Hardin. There, Hardin had pointed out that in the days when English grazing land had been available for common use, it had been in the interests of every individual user to maximize his exploitation of the resource by increasing the size of his herds. The inevitable result of this rational pursuit of individual advantage had been the overgrazing and ultimate destruction of the commons. Those former English commons which had been transformed into private property by the Enclosures Act had, by contrast, been carefully protected by their owners from dereliction, because they had been calculated as valuable items of inheritance whose bounty must be guarded.

According to the footnote, the members of the consortium of multinational corporations who had masterminded the so-called Zimmerman coup, which had taken advantage of a financial crisis in the world's stock markets to obtain a stranglehold on certain key "trading derivatives" relating to staple crops, had justified their actions by citing Hardinist doctrine. Although they had left Adam Zimmerman to acquire the primary notoriety of being "the man who cornered the future" or "the man who stole the world," they had nevertheless been stuck with the nickname of the Hardinist Cabal.

Neither the dictionary nor the micropaedia had anything to say about the contemporary use of the nickname, but it did not require much imagination to see the implication of its continued currency. Whatever the truth behind the myth of the Zimmerman coup might be, its effects were still in force. If a cartel of big corporations really had acquired effective ownership of the world in the early twenty-first century, they still had it. Even the Crash could not have served to loosen their grip; indeed, the establishment of the New Reproductive System must have helped to insulate it from the main kind of disintegration to which private property had previously been subject: dissipation by distribution among multiple inheritors.

In a sense, this was not news. Everybody "knew" that the United Nations didn't really run the world, and that the MegaMall did-but the ease with which that ironically cynical doctrine was accepted and bandied about kept the awareness at a superficial level. The idea of the MegaMall was so numinous, so difficult to pin down, that it was easy to forget that in the final a.n.a.lysis, it really was under the control of a relatively small number of Dominant Shareholders, whose names were not generally known. Like the ingenious Rappaccini, they had slipped away into the chaotic sea of Web-held data, forging new apparent ident.i.ties and abandoning old ones, hiding among the electronic mult.i.tudes.

According to Hardinist doctrine, of course, such men were the saviors of the world, who had prevented the ecosphere from falling prey to the tragedy of the commons. Presumably, they were Hardinists still, utterly convinced of the virtue as well as the necessity of their economic power-and the next generation, to whom the reins of that power would be quietly handed over, would have the opportunity to hold it in perpetuity.

Michael Lowenthal had said that he was only a humble employee, like Charlotte, but while she only worked for the World Government, he was a servant of the Secret Masters of the world. Those Secret Masters had thought it necessary to take an interest in the murder of Gabriel King, in case it might be the beginning of a process that might threaten them. Now Michi Urashima was dead too-and to judge by Michael Lowenthal's reaction, that had been both unexpected and unwelcome. If it had suggested that their initial anxieties had been unfounded, it must also have suggested a few new anxieties to take the place of the originals. With luck, Lowenthal and his a.s.sociates would be as confused and frustrated at this moment in time as she was.

If Oscar Wilde really was the killer, Charlotte realized, then this whole affair was nothing more than a madman's fantasy. How grateful the Hardinist Cabal would be if that were indeed the case-or if, indeed, it turned out to be some other madman's fantasy! The question that still remained, however-the question which was presumably responsible for Michael Lowenthal's continued presence on the maglev-was whether there was any kind of method within the seeming madness.

If so, she wondered, what kind of method could it possibly be? What could anyone possibly achieve, or even seek to achieve, by the murders of Gabriel King and Michi Urashima? Charlotte rose somewhat earlier than was her habit-the couchette was not the kind of bed which encouraged one to lie in, no matter how little sleep one had had.

She immediately patched through a link to Hal Watson in order to get an update on the state of his investigations, but he wasn't at his station yet.

She decanted all the messages that he had left in store for her, and took careful note of those which seemed most significant before walking to the dining car in order to obtain a couple of manna croissants and a cup of strong coffee.

She did not doubt that Michael Lowenthal would do the same as soon as he awoke, if he had not done so already; she could only hope that her estimations of significance might prove better than his.

By the time Charlotte had finished her breakfast, the train was only three hours out of San Francisco. Oscar Wilde joined her while she was sipping coffee. He was looking very neat and trim save for the fact that the unrenewed green carnation in his b.u.t.tonhole was now rather bedraggled. When he saw her looking at it, he a.s.sured her that he would be able to obtain a new one soon after arrival, because one of his very first commissions, had been to plan the interior decor of the San Francisco Majestic.

"Such has been the mercy of our timetable," he observed, peering through the tinted window, "that we have slept through Missouri and Kansas." She knew what he meant. Missouri and Kansas were distinctly lacking in interesting scenery since the restabilization of the climate had made their great plains prime sites for the establishment of vast tracts of artificial photosynthetics. Nowadays, the greater part of the Midwest looked rather like sections of an infinite undulating sheet of matte black, which could easily cause offense to eyes that had been trained to love color. The SAP fields of Kansas always gave Charlotte the impression of looking at a gigantic piece of frilly and filthy corrugated cardboard. Houses and factories alike had retreated beneath the Stygian canopy, and the parts of the landscape which extended toward the horizon were so blurred as to be almost featureless.

By now, though, the maglev pa.s.sengers had the more elevating scenery of Colorado to look out upon. Most of the state had been carefully reforested; apart from the city of Denver-another of the Decivilizers' favorite targets, but one they had not yet claimed-its centers of population had taken advantage of the versatility of modern building techniques to blend in with their surroundings.

Chlorophyll green was infinitely easier on the human eye than SAP black, presumably because millions of years of adaptive natural selection had ensured that it would be, and the Colorado landscape seemed extraordinarily soothing.

Had the hard-core Green Zealots not been so fixated on the grandiose glories of rain forest, they might have nominated this as a corner of Green Heaven. Had it been authentic wilderness, of course, it would have been mostly desert, but no one in the USNA would go so far in the cause of authenticity as to insist upon land remaining desolate; the republics of Gobi and Kalahari had a monopoly on that kind of nostalgia.

While Oscar ordered eggs d.u.c.h.esse for breakfast, Charlotte activated the wallscreen beside their table and summoned up the latest news. The fact of Gabriel King's death was recorded, as was the fact of Michi Urashima's, but there was nothing about the exotic circ.u.mstances. She was momentarily puzzled by the fact that no one had yet connected the two murders or latched onto the possible biohazard, but she realized that the MegaMall's interest in the affair had advantages as well as disadvantages. The MegaMall owned the casters, and until the MegaMall decided that discretion was unnecessary, the casters would keep their hoverflies on a tight rein.

"Where's Lowenthal?" she asked. "Still sleeping the sleep of the just, I suppose." She wondered briefly whether she ought perhaps to wait for the man from the MegaMall before talking to Wilde about the investigation, but figured that it was up to her, as the early bird, to go after any available worms as quickly and as cleverly as she could. Unfortunately, she wasn't at all sure how to start.

"My dear Charlotte," said Oscar, while she dithered, "you have the unmistakable manner of one who woke up far too early after working far too hard the night before." "I couldn't sleep," she told him. "I took a couple of boosters before breakfast-once the croissants get my digestive system in gear they'll clear my head." Wilde shook his head. "I am not normally a supporter of nature," he said. "No one who looks twenty when he is really a hundred and thirty-three can possibly be less than worshipful of the wonders of medical science-but in my experience, maintaining one's sense of equilibrium with the aid of drugs is a false economy.

We must have sleep in order to dream, and we must dream in order to discharge the chaos from our thoughts, so that we may reason effectively while we are awake. Your namesake, I know, was in the habit of taking cocaine, but I always thought it implausible of Conan Doyle to suggest that it enhanced his powers of ratiocination." Charlotte had already taken note of Oscar Wilde's date of birth while researching his background, and the fact that he had mentioned his age offered her an opportunity to ask what seemed to be a natural-if not conspicuously relevant-question. "If you're only a hundred and thirty-three," she said, "what on earth possessed you to risk a third rejuvenation? Most people that age are still planning their second." "The risks of core-tissue rejuvenation mostly derive from the so-called Miller effect," Wilde observed equably. "In that respect, the number of rejuvenations is less significant than the absolute age of the brain. Given the limitations of cosmetic enhancement, I felt that an increased risk of losing my mind was amply compensated by the certainty of replenishing my apparent youth. I shall certainly attempt a fourth rejuvenation before I turn one hundred and eighty, and if I live to be two hundred and ten I shall probably try for the record. I could not live like Gabriel King, so miserly in mind that I allowed my body to shrivel like the legendary t.i.thonus." "He didn't look so bad, until the flowers got him," Charlotte observed.

"He looked old," Wilde insisted. "Worse than that, he looked contentedly old. He had ceased to fight against the ravages of fate. He had accepted the world as it is-perhaps even, if such a horror could be imagined, had actually become grateful for the condition of the world." Charlotte remembered that Wilde had not yet arrived at the Trebizond Tower when Hal had forwarded King's last words, which had carried a different implication.

She did not attempt to correct him; he had turned his attention to his eggs d.u.c.h.esse.

It was a pity, Charlotte thought as Colorado flew past, that there was no longer a quicker way to travel between New York and San Francisco. She had an uncomfortable feeling that she might end up chasing a daisy chain of murders all around the globe, always twenty-four hours behind the breaking news-but the maglev was the fastest form of transportation within the bounds of United America, and had been since the last supersonic jet had flown four centuries before. The energy crises of the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries were ancient history now, but the inland airways were so cluttered with private flitterbugs and helicopters, and the zealots of Decivilization so enthusiastic to crusade against large areas of concrete, that the scope of commercial aviation was now reduced to intercontinental flights. Even intercontinental travelers tended to prefer the plush comfort of airships to the hectic pace of supersonics; electronic communication had so completely taken over the lifestyles and folkways of modern society that almost all business was conducted via com-con.

When the silence proved too oppressive, Charlotte began to talk again, although Wilde was still engrossed in his breakfast. "The detail is still piling up by the bucketload," she said, "but we've had no major breakthrough. We still haven't pinned down the current name and location of the woman who visited the victims or the man who used to be Rappaccini, although Hal thinks that we're getting close on both counts. Most of the new information concerns the second murder, and possible links between Urashima and King. You knew Urashima at least as well as you knew King, I suppose?" "We met on more than one occasion," Wilde admitted, laying down his fork for a moment or two, "but it was a long time ago. We were not close friends. He was an artist, and I had the greatest respect for his work. I would have been glad to count him as a friend, had that ridiculous business of house arrest not made it virtually impossible for him to sustain and develop his social relationships." "He was released from the terms of his house arrest and communications supervision thirteen years ago," Charlotte observed, watching for any reaction, "but he seems to have been inst.i.tutionalized by the experience. Although he began to receive visitors, he never went out, and he continued to use a sim to field all his calls. The general opinion was, I believe, that he was lucky to get away with house arrest. If he hadn't been so famous, he'd have been packed off to the freezer." "If he hadn't deserved his fame," Wilde countered, "he wouldn't have been able to do the work he did. His imprisonment was an absurd sentence for a nonsensical crime. He and his coworkers placed no one in danger but themselves." "He was playing about with brainfeed equipment," Charlotte observed patiently.

"Not just memory boxes or neural stimulators-full-scale mental cyborgization.

And he didn't just endanger himself and a few close friends-he was pooling information with other illegal experimenters. Some of their experimental results made the worst effects of a screwed-up rejuve look like a slight case of aphasia." "Of course he was pooling information," Wilde said, pausing yet again between mouthfuls. "What on earth is the point of hazardous exploration unless one makes every effort to pa.s.s on the legacy of one's discoveries? He was trying to minimize the risks by ensuring that others had no need to repeat failures." "Have you ever experimented with that kind of equipment, Dr. Wilde?" Charlotte asked. She had to be vague in asking the question because she wasn't entirely sure what mult.i.tude of sins the phrase "that kind of equipment" had to cover.

Like everyone else, she bandied about phrases like "psychedelic synthesizer" and "memory box," but she had little or no idea of the supposed modes of functioning of such legendary devices. Ever since the first development of artificial synapses capable of linking up human nervous systems to silicon-based electronic systems, numerous schemes had been devised for hooking up the brain to computers or adding smart nanotech to its cytoarchitecture, but almost all the experiments had gone disastrously wrong. The brain was the most complex and sensitive of all organs, and serious disruption of brain function was the one kind of disorder that twenty-fifth-century medical science was impotent to correct. The UN, presumably with the backing of the MegaMall, had forced on its member states a worldwide ban on devices for connecting brains directly to electronic apparatuses, for whatever purpose-but the main effect of the ban had been to drive a good deal of ongoing research underground. Even an expert Webwalker like Hal Watson would not have found it easy to figure out what sort of work might still be in progress and who might be involved. In a way, Charlotte thought, Michi Urashima was a much more interesting-and perhaps much more likely-murder victim than Gabriel King.

"There is nothing I value more than my genius," Wilde replied, having finished the eggs d.u.c.h.esse and inserted the plate into the recycling slot, "and I would never knowingly risk my clarity and agility of mind. That doesn't mean, of course, that I disapprove of anything that Michi Urashima and his a.s.sociates did. They were not infants, in need of protection from themselves. Michi could not rest content with his early fascination with the simulation of experience.

For him, the building of better virtual environments was only a beginning; he wanted to bring about a genuine expansion of the human sensorium, and authentic augmentations of the human intellect and imagination. If we are ever to make a proper interface between natural and artificial intelligence, we will need the genius of men like Michi. I am sorry that he was forced to abandon his quest, and very sorry that he is dead-but that is not what concerns us now. The question is, who killed him-and why?" While completing this speech he refilled his coffee cup, then ordered two rounds of lightly b.u.t.tered white wholemeal bread, slightly salted Danish b.u.t.ter, and coa.r.s.e-cut English marmalade.

"So it is," said Charlotte. "Did you know that Michi Urashima was at university with Gabriel King-and, for that matter, with Walter Czastka?" "Not until Michael communicated the fact to me," he replied calmly. "I had already suggested, if you recall, that the roots of this crime must be deeply buried in the fabric of history. I immediately asked him where this remarkable inst.i.tution was, and whether Rappaccini was also at the same inst.i.tution of learning. He told me that it was in Wollongong, Australia, and that there is no record of Jafri Biasiolo ever having been there. If it were Oxford, or the Sorbonne, even Sapporo, it would be far easier to believe that the alma mater might be the crucial connection, of course, but it is difficult to believe that anything of any real significance can ever have occurred in Wollongong. I could believe that Walter, who is an impressively dull man, learned everything he knew in such a place, but I would not have suspected it of Michi-or even of Gabriel King. Even so, it is a very interesting coincidence." He collected his toast and began to spread the b.u.t.ter, evening it out so carefully that the knife in his hand might have been a sculptor's.

"When did Lowenthal tell you about the Wollongong connection?" Charlotte asked, although the answer was obvious. She remembered belatedly that one thing she had forgotten to check up on was the contents of Wilde's earlier conversation with Lowenthal. Now, it seemed, she had missed a second and even more significant one.

"We exchanged a few notes last night, after you had retired," Wilde explained airily.

"You exchanged a few notes" Charlotte echoed ominously. "It did occur to you, I suppose, that I'm the police officer in charge of this investigation, not Lowenthal." "Yes, it did," he admitted, "but you seemed so very intent on following up your hypothesis that I am the man responsible for these murders. Because I know full well that I am not, I felt free to ignore your efforts in order to tease a little more information out of Michael. Unfortunately, he seems to have no interest at all in the most promising line of inquiry, which derives from the interesting coincidence that both King and Rappaccini had invested heavily in Michi's specialism. Indeed, he was so uninterested in it that I suspected him of deliberately trying to steer me away from it. I presume that one of the reasons the MegaMall decided to monitor this investigation is that they did not like the idea of Hal Watson digging too deeply into the murkier aspects of Gabriel King's past-which suggests to me that in putting money into brainfeed research Gabriel was a mere delivery boy. Alas, Michael seems intent on trying to build the Wollongong connection into grounds for establishing Walter Czastka as a key suspect. He will be of little help to the investigation, I fear-but I daresay that you will not be too disheartened to hear that." Charlotte regarded her companion speculatively, wondering how carefully his flippancy was contrived. "What other little nuggets of information did he throw your way?" she asked, keeping her voice scrupulously level, as if in imitation of his own levity.

"He showed me a copy of the second scene-of-crime tape," Wilde admitted. He was as scrupulous in distributing his marmalade as he had been with the b.u.t.ter.

"We're still trying to figure out where the woman went after she left Urashima," Charlotte said, to demonstrate that she had not been idle in this particular matter. "Hal's set up silvers to monitor every security camera in San Francisco.

If she's still there, we'll find her in a matter of hours. If she's already gone, we ought to be able to pick up her trail by noon. She's presumably altered her appearance again in order to confuse the standard picture-search programs, but we'll check every possible match, however tentative. If she moved on quickly enough, though, she might have had time to deliver more packages." "We must a.s.sume that she did move on," Wilde said, licking a crumb from the corner of his mouth. "You noted, of course, that my name came up in the conversation, as her presentation of the bouquet of amaranths was doubtless intended to ensure. The poem inscribed on the condolence card caused it to be repeated. I do hope that you will not read too much into that." Charlotte blushed slightly. If he had not caused the card to be placed at the scene of the crime, could he possibly have reacted so calmly? And if he had placed the card there, would he have dared to react so calmly? Reflectively, Wilde quoted in a reverent but rather theatrical whisper: The vilest deeds like poison weeds, Bloom well in prison-air; It is only what is good in Man That wastes and withers there: Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate, And the Warder is Despair.