Architects of Emortality Part 6

"I don't remember anything about those days," Czastka said stubbornly. "n.o.body does. It was too long ago. I hardly knew Kwiatek. I never knew any of them, really-not even King. I've had some dealings with his companies, just as I've had some dealings with Rappaccini Inc., but I haven't set eyes on King for fifty years, and I haven't seen Rappaccini since the Great Exhibition. I've seen Urashima's work and I heard about the wireheading scandals, but that's all.

Leave me alone, Oscar, and tell the police to leave me alone too. You know perfectly well that I couldn't kill anyone-and I don't know anything about Rappaccini that you don't already know." "What about his daughter?" said Wilde quickly.

If he intended to catch the other man by surprise it didn't work. Czastka's stare was stony and speculative, with more than a hint of melancholy. "What daughter?" he said. "I never met a daughter. Not that I remember. It was all a long time ago. I can't remember anything at all. Leave me alone, Oscar, please." So saying, the old man cut the connection.

Charlotte could see that Oscar Wilde was both puzzled and disappointed by the other man's reaction.

"That was a mistake, wasn't it?" she said, unable to resist the temptation to take him down a peg. "Did you really think he'd rather talk to you than to us? He doesn't even like you. You should have left him to Hal-you've upset him now, maybe so badly that he won't even take Hal's calls, and you didn't learn anything at all." "Perhaps not," Oscar agreed. "I certainly didn't expect him to freeze up like that. On the other hand..." He trailed off, evidently uncertain as to what kind of balancing factor he ought to add.

"Have you changed your mind about the possibility of Czastka having set up the Biasiolo/Rappaccini ident.i.ty?" Charlotte asked Michael Lowenthal.

"I don't know," said Lowenthal guardedly. "But I do wish you hadn't told him about my suspicions, Dr. Wilde, however absurd you may think them." "I'm sorry," Wilde said, still taken aback by the nature of Czastka's response to his call. "But if he were our stylish murderer, why would he react so churlishly to my inquiries? Surely he'd have made better preparation than that." "Would he?" Lowenthal parried.

Hal's face reappeared on Charlotte's screen. "I just got notification of your little conversation, Dr. Wilde," he said. "What on earth do you think you're playing at? I tried to ring Czastka, and I got that b.l.o.o.d.y sloth again, telling me that he's unavailable, even though I know he's sitting right there at his antique desk!" "I couldn't stop him!" Charlotte complained.

"It wasn't Charlotte's fault," Wilde obligingly added-although she could see that the intervention didn't improve Hal's mood at all.

"Well," Hal said, "you'd better pray that this won't cost us time and effort.

You might care to know that the money trail is getting clearer by the minute.

Some of Rappaccini's pseudonymous bank accounts have been used over the years to purchase ma.s.sive quant.i.ties of materials that were delivered for collection to the island of Kauai-that's in Hawaii." "So the man behind Rappaccini must live on Kauai," Charlotte deduced, trying to remember the context in which she had heard the place name mentioned not ten minutes before. She could tell from the way that Michael Lowenthal had reacted to the name that he remembered-and as soon as she had mentally reviewed that observation, she remembered too. It was too late to say anything; Hal was already speaking again.

"Not necessarily," he was saying. "The supplies were collected by boat. There are fifty or sixty islets west and south of Kauai, some natural but most artificial. Over half of them are leased to Creationists for experiments in the construction of artificial ecosystems. Oscar Wilde's private island is half an ocean away in Micronesia." "But Walter Czastka's isn't," said Michael Lowenthal with evident satisfaction.

"That's right," said Hal. "All the supplies that Czastka purchases in his own name are forwarded from Kauai, by the same boat that forwarded the equipment purchased by the pseudonymous accounts we've just connected to Rappaccini Inc.

Perhaps, Mr. Lowenthal, your wild hypothesis isn't as wild as it first seemed."

Intermission Three: A Mind at the End of Its Tether

Michi Urashima was having trouble with time again. He had lost all sense of it and couldn't remember what day it was, or what year, or how many times he had grown young and then old again. None of that would have been of much significance had he not had the vague impression that there was something he ought to be doing, some important project that needed attention. He could not remember whether or not he was still forbidden to leave his house, or whether or not there was anywhere else he might want to be.

When he asked what year it was, the silken voice of his household sloth dutifully informed him that it was 2495, but Michi could not remember whether 2495 was the present or the past, so he could not tell whether or not he had suffered an existential slippage. There was no point in asking the sloth whether or not he had lost his mind, because the sloth was too stupid to know.

Although he had lost touch with himself, Michi still had command of vast treasures of factual information. He knew, for instance, that sloths were called sloths because the Tupi word for the three-toed sloth was ai, and AI had stood for artificial idiot or artificial imbecile ever since the concept of artificial intelligence had been subdivided. A sloth could not possibly judge whether or not he had lost his mind; for that he would have needed a silver. Silvers were called silver because the chemical symbol for silver was Ag, which stood for artificial genius. There was no popular shorthand for "artificial individual of average intelligence" because the obvious acronym sounded like a strangled scream. Because AP had been claimed by artificial photosynthesis-LAP for liquid, SAP for solid-there was no such thing as a mere artificial person, and an acronymic rendering of artificial mind would have been too confusing by half.

Actually, Michi thought, the attempt to possess an artificial mind of his very own had indeed led him into dire confusion.

"I am," he said, and giggled. "I am an AM, or am not an AM, or am caught like a half-living cat between the two. Perhaps I was an AM, and am no longer, or was not but now am, or would be if only I could think straight, like an AM. Perhaps, on the other hand, I am no longer an AM, and am no longer, but am merely an it, held together by IT." He sat in his armchair and breathed deeply: in, out; in, out; in, out. Slowly but surely, his sense of self came together again, and his sense of temporal location returned. His IT was probably stretched to the limit, but he was not yet an it. Precarious though his grip on reality was, the Miller effect still had not obliterated him from the community of human minds.

Morgan Miller must have been a kindred spirit, he thought. The first man ever to beat the Hayflick limit and discover a viable technology of longevity, and his reward for taking such infinite pains over the project had been two bullets in the back. Unfortunately-as Miller had understood, although his a.s.sa.s.sins had not-the method had worked far too well. It was so utterly irresistible in renewing the body that it wiped out the mind. Even internal nanotech did that eventually, but at least it gave a man time to breathe, time to play, time to work, time to be... and time, in the end, to lose himself.

"I am," he said again. "I am Michi still, at least for a little while. Do I have any appointments today?" "Yes," said the sloth. Before Michi could rephrase the question, he remembered.

Yes, indeed-today, he had an appointment.

"Oh yes," he said aloud. "I am, I am, I definitely am." He reached up his hand to caress his skull, running his fingertips over the numerous sockets which sat above the main sites of his implanted electrodes. He wondered whether he ought to put on a wig, or a hooded suitskin. Did she wear a wig, or a hooded suit-skin? Could that luscious hair really be rooted in her skull? Maybe, maybe not. He would find out. But in the meantime-to obscure or not to obscure? He decided not. She was fascinated by what he was, what he had been; why try to hide it? A martyr should wear his stigmata proudly, unafraid to display them.

They were, alas, mere relics of the past, but they were the remnants of a glorious endeavor.

Michi still wondered, sometimes, whether he ought to make one more attempt to break through to the unknown. If he were to flush out all his IT and douse the sockets so as to flood the underlying electrodes with neurostimulators, the neurons further beneath would resume the business of forging new connections, further extending the synaptic tangles which already bound the contacts to every part of his brain. The removal of his IT would condemn him to death, of course, but he was dying anyway. Suppose he could trade a few months of not knowing what day it was for just one moment of enlightenment, one flash of inspiration, one revelatory proof that everything he had tried to achieve was possible, was within the grasp of contemporary humankind, if only people were willing to try, to take the risk.

Just suppose... It would be his triumph, and his alone. Official sources of finance had bailed out on him a hundred years ago, and he had been forbidden to call for further volunteers. The funds channeled from the Pharaohs of Capitalism by way of Gabriel King and his fellow buccaneers had dried up fifty years ago. The private backers had held out a little longer, but the law had built walls around him to keep their funds out. Like Kwiatek, he had been left high and dry-but Kwiatek had at least avoided the indignity of a show trial and subsequent house arrest.

If Kwiatek eventually ended up in susan, it wouldn't be the law that had put him there; he would go of his own accord, unbranded and uncondemned.

"I was the only one prepared to go all the way," Michi said aloud. "If they hadn't abandoned me, I might even have got to where I wanted to be. Do you hear me?" "Yes," said the sloth, as pedantically terse as ever.

"How long is it before my visitor's due?" Michi demanded, determined to make the stupid machine do a little work to justify its keep.

"Thirty seconds," replied the conscientious machine. Doubtless, in some abstract and ideal sense, it was absolutely right-but even as it spoke, the door chime sounded.

The woman was early.

"Let her in," said Michi, levering himself up from his armchair, hoping as he did so that he would not lose himself again before she left.

"I'm sorry," Michi said to the young woman as they lay in bed together. "I've grown unused to visitors of any kind, let alone lovers. All the old skills..." "I understand," the woman said very gently. "Fifty years of solitary confinement is a very harsh penalty to pay for trying to push back the frontiers of human understanding." "Most people thought of it as getting off lightly," Michi said morosely. "They don't realize. There are millions of people in the world who spend days on end-weeks on end if they're VE addicts-coc.o.o.ned in their apartments, and there are millions who routinely protect their privacy by filtering all their electronic communications through clever sims. They don't know the true value of the power of choice, which allows them to break the pattern anytime they wish.

They don't understand how demeaning it is to be forbidden the use of credit, of the most elementary privacy screening. Everybody nowadays thinks that they're under observation, but they don't really know what it means to have ever attentive eyes trained so intensively on the minutiae of one's everyday life." "I can't pretend to know how it feels to be withdrawn from human society for fifty years, after having lived in it for over a hundred," the young woman told him as she eased herself from his embrace and reached for her suitskin, "but I have spent a good deal of my own brief life in enforced solitude. I've learned very quickly to appreciate the worth of being in the world." "Part of the problem," Michi observed, grateful for the opportunity to mumble on, hoping thereby to cover his embarra.s.sment, "is the ongoing debate about the susan long-termers. They're the ones whose punishments attract all the public attention. Everybody carps about the unreasonableness of the jurists of the past, who just wanted to get supposedly dangerous individuals off the streets during their own lifetimes and didn't care about the ethical problems they were handing down to their descendants. House arrest is seen as a more reasonable alternative-but communication control ensures that the victims don't have a voice. When the sentence ended... I was a hundred and eighty-three years old, and I hadn't talked face-to-face with anyone for fifty years. Most of my former acquaintances were dead, and most of the rest had forgotten me. Even the ones who had stood by me and helped me as best they could, had to impersonalize the communication process. The ones who wanted to carry forward my work-the ones who did carry it forward, insofar as the law allowed them to, had to do so without any input from me-I wasn't even allowed to help. By the time it ended, it was impossible to pick up the fifty-year-old threads, and there was no hope of changing everything back again. The only real relationships I've been able to form in the last thirteen years have been new ones, but so many of the authentically young seem to think of me as some kind of monster or demon... sometimes I feel like the Minotaur made by Daedalus, lost in the labyrinth of Minos." Michi knew that he should not be running on and on in this ridiculous manner, but he couldn't help himself. He had lost the knack of conversation as well as the knack of making love. His social skills had atrophied.

Had he gone to the freezer he'd have emerged into an altered world, but this wasn't the twentieth century; the pace of technological change was much less fierce than it had been at its peak. He could have adapted readily enough-but actually having to live the fifty years of his sentence, aging at a normal rate, had turned him into an old man in every sense of the word: a social and s.e.xual incompetent, hovering on the brink of mental incompetence.

It would probably be best for everyone, he thought, if he were to flush out his IT and stick his head into a bath of neurostimulators-or perhaps to attempt a third rejuve, disregarding the 90 percent probability that the Miller effect would wipe his mental slate clean.

"The time will come," the young woman a.s.sured him as she adjusted her suitskin and ran her fingers lightly through her hair, "when you will be recognized as a great man. When brain-cyborgization technology is finally perfected, you'll be remembered as a bold pioneer, tragically frustrated by the enemies of progress.

You are a great man, and there are people in the world who know it now." "I'm not a great man," he told her uncomfortably. "I never pretended to be. I never did anything for the benefit of future generations. It was all for my own self-gratification. The people whose brains were wrecked were the victims of my ambition. No matter how resentful I may become about my punishment, I have to remember that I was guilty." As he spoke, reflex lifted his wrinkled hand and pa.s.sed it over the hairless dome of his skull, the gnarled fingers dancing on the sockets embedded in the bone as if they were dancing on a keyboard. The continued presence of the sockets was oddly rea.s.suring, despite their uselessness. While they were there, he could never entirely forget who and what he was. Those who had set out to punish him had not dared to remove the apparatus lest they kill him in the process. His neurons had forged too many synapses with the compound electrodes; it was no longer possible to say with any exact.i.tude where he ended and the brainfeed apparatus began.

"You are a great man," the woman insisted, her eyes flashing with uncanny brilliance. Michi lowered his hand. "One day, we will be able to make productive use of encephalic augmentation. Then, no matter how long each of us may live, there will be no limit to what we might become. Evolution will be the prerogative of the individual." If only, Michi thought.

When the cruel sentence had first been pa.s.sed upon him, revoking the prerogative of future individual evolution, Michi had thought that the sockets would be his greatest a.s.set. He knew a thousand combinations whose stimulation created pleasure-and he did think of it as a primal process of creation-and a thousand patterns of varying intensity which made inner music of the ebb and flow of elemental ecstasy. He had been a connoisseur of fundamental self-stimulation, then. The superficial mock experiences available in commercial virtual environments had been of no interest to him at all, and he had taken leave to despise them. What arguments he and Kwiatek had had! He had been arrogant enough to think that nothing that the people of the real world could do to him could hurt him so long as he had power over his own inner being. He had thought himself complete as well as competent.

Fifty years had been more than long enough to reduce pleasure and ecstasy to tedium and mechanism, and to inform him how woefully incomplete he was. Long before the further growth of his new synapses had spoiled the messages with noise, they had lost their intrinsic existential value.

That had been the worst punishment of all.

Once, Michi had thought that the fear of robotization by cyborgization was a mere phantom of the frightened imagination, a grotesque bugbear unworthy of the anxiety of serious men. In those days, he had been convinced that the so-called Robot a.s.sa.s.sins were mere lunatics. Now, he was not so sure... and yet, the flatteries heaped upon him by this remarkable young woman were anything but unwelcome. The knowledge that there were still a precious few among the newest generation who counted him a hero was very precious.

The woman was probably not a Natural; in two hundred years' time she would run into the crucial limitation of nanotechnological repair exactly as his own generation had. There must, however, be Naturals who thought as she did, who would carry his memory into the fourth millennium-perhaps even to the fifth if the limited research in encephalic augmentation that was still permitted eventually solved the problem of forgetfulness without eroding the capacity for empathy... "I don't have much time, Michi," the woman told him. "I'll have to go." "Of course," he said, hauling himself from the bed into an upright position, ignoring her pantomimed protest.

"Don't get up," she said when she realized how determined he was. "Please-stay where you are. I'll let myself out." "Will you come again?" he asked, although he wasn't entirely sure that he wanted to risk another possible humiliation.

"Yes," she said. "I promise." For some reason, he couldn't even begin to believe her-and it was that, rather than the mere instruction, which made him sink back onto the bed and wait, supine, until he was sure that she had left the house.

When he finally managed to rouse himself, Michi went back into the outer room, without bothering to put his own suitskin on. He slumped upon the settee, drained and dejected, staring at the golden flowers that the woman had brought for him and mounted in his wall. They were garden flowers, but they were products of modern genetic art rather than ancient selective breeding. According to the young woman, they were one of Oscar Wilde's designs-but for some reason he could not quite fathom, they reminded Michi of the kind of flowers one might put in a funeral wreath.

He wished that he had not lost his grip on the artistry of actual life. Like the soft caresses of data suits and the visual illusions of virtual reality, the rewards of ordinary "sensation" now seemed to him so remote from authentic intimacy as to be utterly worthless. In his first youth, which had all but disappeared into the oblivion of forgetfulness, he had devoted a great deal of time to the enhancement of the visual illusions deployed by VE technology. Even in his second youth, he had contrived to devote a certain amount of attention to the lucrative businesses of VE education and VE entertainment, but by then he had been determined to become a pioneer of experiential augmentation, and he had succeeded in that mission to the extent of becoming an outlaw. In doing so, he had lost his appet.i.te for the ordinary. Perhaps that was why he seemed to be perpetually on the brink of losing his unfortunately ordinary mind.

The young woman was right, of course-all true pioneers so far outstripped the ambitions of their contemporaries that they were condemned to perdition for their bravery-but she could not know the true cost of his abandonment of the phenomenal world, any more than she could know the real effect of his long imprisonment.

"One day," Michi had actually said to the judge who had p.r.o.nounced sentence upon him from the conventional safety of a virtual courtroom, "the world will despise the kind of cowardice whose representative you are. Michi Urashima, the men of the future will say, was demonized by those too dull to see that he was the seed of the Afterman. Those future men will not be prisoners within their own skulls, rotting in the dungeons of their incompetent wetware. The crude paths which I have hacked out will be built by future generations into the roads of freedom.

Our children's children will live forever, and they will wear the crowns of Emperors of Experience: crowns of silicon which will give them the memories they will need, the calculative capacities they will need, and all the ecstasies that they will not be ashamed to demand. Our children's children will be properly equipped for eternal life." Even now, he was certain that he had been right-but still he was forced to count the cost of his martyrdom.

Michi was wise enough to understand the kinds of fear which his experiments had inspired in those who condemned him. He knew now that there was real cause for anxiety in their nightmarish visions of people made into robotic puppets by external brainfeed equipment, either by operant conditioning or straightforward usurpation of the command links to the nervous system. He had responded to those fears in the same speech, appropriating the defense offered by the pioneers of the Genetic Revolution. "All technologies can be used for evil ends as well as good ones," he had said, "but willful ignorance is no protection. Biotechnology provided the means for hideous wars, but it also provided the defenses which prevented their devastations from becoming permanent and freed humankind from the oppressions of the Old Reproductive System. What we require, as we face a future of limitless opportunity, is not blind fear and denial but a clear-sighted sense of responsibility, and the means to undo all the evils of oppression-including the oppressions of our imperfect evolutionary heritage." That too had been true-but it had not been sufficient then to lay the fears of others to rest, and it was not sufficient now to quell his own anxieties.

The simple fact was that he had not, in the end, succeeded in freeing himself from the oppressions of his imperfect evolutionary heritage. His purpose had been to add to the sum of human freedom by increasing the power which individual consciousness had over its own recalcitrant wetware, and he had indeed added to that sum, but his own freedom had been lost, and not merely by imprisonment. He had never been intimidated by the fears of those who believed that brainfeed equipment would provide new technologies of enslavement and new technologies of punishment, preferring to concentrate his own efforts on the pursuit of empowerment and pleasure-but in the end, he had lost more than he had expected, and gained less than he had hoped.

Whatever the woman said, and whatever she believed, he was what he was, and it was not enough.

In the hope of shaking himself out of his lachrymose mood, Michi stood up and went to the wall fitting in which the young woman had placed the golden flowers.

He noticed for the first time that there was a card nestling within the bouquet-and the observation reminded him yet again of the vague impression he had formed of the bouquet's kinship to a funeral wreath.

Michi reached out to read what was written on the card, and saw with a slight shock that it bore the "signature" of Rappaccini Inc.-but it did not seem to be a condolence card. The legend on the card was a poem, or part of a poem. The corporation was evidently attempting to broaden its commercial scope, albeit somewhat enigmatically.

The words read: Yet each man kills the thing he loves, By each let this be heard, Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word.

The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword!" Why on earth, Michi wondered, had the woman selected such a peculiar message? Was she suggesting that he had killed the things he loved? If so, she was more closely in tune with his morbid mood than any indication she had given in word or gesture. Had it been so obvious, the first time he accepted her kiss, that he was a coward? Had she known all along that she would find him impotent? Had the few flattering words he had contrived to produce, in poor recompense for hers, wounded her with their feebleness? He replaced the card, cursing himself for his folly in searching for hidden meanings. It was, he vaguely recalled, a very old poem; she must have chosen it because it was a time-honored cla.s.sic, more beautiful in its antiquity than in its sentiment.

"Who wrote these words?" he asked his dutiful sloth, reciting them for the benefit of the machine. The sloth had no answer in its own memory, of course, but it had wit enough to consult the reference sources available on the Web.

"Oscar Wilde," it replied, after a few moments' pause.

Michi was astonished until he remembered that there had been more Oscar Wildes in the world than one. The coincidence of names must have been what inspired the young woman to pick this particular card.

A whole bouquet of Oscar Wildes! he thought. Well, better that than a whole bouquet of Walter Czastkas. He remembered that he had known Walter Czastka when the old bore was still in the full flush of youth, although Kwiatek had known him better. They had all been pioneers in those days, but they had all been as stupid as sloths, too young by far to realize that one cannot be a pioneer until one has mastered what has gone before. That had not stopped them hatching all manner of mad schemes, of course. Even Czastka! What was it that he had found which had seemed to him the making of a new era? He had sucked Kwiatek into it, and others too.

Why, Michi thought, with sudden astonishment, that must have been the very first time that I became an outlaw, and I cannot even remember what I did, or why. Who would have thought it? Paul was an outlaw through and through, even then-and that rascal King too, already well on his way to becoming a sly lackey of the MegaMall. But what on earth can stolid Walter Czastka have found that turned him around so completely, if only for a moment? What was it that he tried to do, that seemed so daring and so desperate? For a moment, as he touched the petals of the golden flowers, Michi almost remembered-but it had all taken place too long ago. He was a different man now, or a different half-man.

"I am," he murmured. "I was not what I am, but was not an am, and am not an am even now. I was and am a man, unless I am a man unmanned, an it both done and undone by IT." He spelled out the final acronym, p.r.o.nouncing it "eye tee." Then he laughed. What could it possibly matter now what deliciously illicit a.s.sistance he and Kwiatek had rendered to Walter Czastka at the dawn of all their histories? He could not know, of course, that he had already begun to die because of it.

Investigation: Act Four: The Heights and the Depths

It may be just coincidence, of course," Hal Watson said, referring to the possible connection between Walter Czastka and Rappaccini that had been exposed by his indefatigable silver surfers. "The supplies could have been delivered to a different island-the boatmaster doesn't keep electronically available records-so they may have been intended for a rival exercise in Creationism. Even if we could prove that Czastka is more intimately linked to Rappaccini than other appearances suggest, the only hard evidence linking Rappaccini to the murders is the fact that the woman is drawing money from bank accounts fed by income generated by the corporations which seem to be his. She's the one we have to identify and locate before we can proceed any further." "I disagree," said Oscar Wilde, before Charlotte could reply. "Given that the flowers are victim-specific, their designer must be regarded as the actual murderer. The woman is delivering them, but she may not have been aware that they were lethal until news broke of Gabriel King's death-and even now she may not be certain that she was responsible, unless the news tapes have publicized the manner of his death." "They haven't," Michael Lowenthal put in. "Those dogs won't be let off the leash until the early evening news. After that, it'll be a free-for-all." "I'm sure the UN will be very grateful for your employers' discretion," Charlotte said sourly. She turned away slightly as she said it, embarra.s.sed by her own temerity.

There was nothing visible through the window but a concrete blur speckled with racing vehicles. She had to squint slightly in order to refocus her eyes on the rim of jet-black SAP systems that topped the superhighway's sound-m.u.f.fling walls. It was an inner sensation of deceleration rather than any visual cue which told her that the hire car's driver was responding to an instruction in its secret programming. It was changing lanes, moving to the inside. As the vehicle slowed and Charlotte's eyes adjusted, the blur of uncertainty began to resolve itself into a much clearer image. The road markings appeared out of the sun-blazed chaos of the surface, and the other cars on the road became discrete and distinct.

If only the case could be clarified as easily, she thought, peering into the distance in the hope of seeing a road sign that would tell her which intersection they were approaching. Belatedly, she regretted having left the driver's monitor to Lowenthal. Had he not been turned around, maintaining his position as best he could within the four-way conversation, he would have been able to obtain the car's exact location at the stab of a b.u.t.ton.

"The person we have to identify and locate with all possible expedition," Oscar Wilde went on, overriding the comments which had interrupted his flow, "is the man behind Rappaccini Inc.-and with all due respect to Michael's reasoning and the evidential fruit provided by its pursuit, I still can't believe that Walter Czastka is that man. If Jafri Biasiolo never actually Existed, who was the man who appeared at the Great Exhibition and discussed matters of technique and aesthetics with such evident authority? Whose face appears in the records dutifully a.s.sembled by Hal's inquisitive silvers?" "A well-briefed actor," said Michael Lowenthal. "Hired to secure the illusion that Rappaccini had a real existence-and then removed from the scene, having done his work. You shouldn't have told Czastka that he was a suspect, Dr. Wilde.

Until you did that, he must have thought that his plan was working perfectly. He must have a.s.sumed that he was the only expert witness the police had called upon." "Even though he had summoned me to the Trebizond Tower and simultaneously made himself unavailable for immediate consultation?" Wilde queried. "I think not.

The real Rappaccini may be involving Walter in his affair with the same scrupulous ingenuity that he is applying to my own involvement-but if so, he clearly cannot expect that either of us will actually be arrested and charged.

My part is that of an interested witness. Walter's-" "Czastka has a much stronger link to the victims," Lowenthal insisted stubbornly. "He has to be reckoned the most likely suspect." "Not at all," Wilde insisted. "If this matter of the supplies is not a red herring, the most likely hypothesis is that the elusive Rappaccini is hiding out in exactly the location one would expect of a genetic engineer: in the Creationist archipelago." "It doesn't matter who the most likely suspect is," Hal Watson informed them both sharply. "We have to pursue all the relevant lines of inquiry, and we have to intercept the woman before she does any more damage, even if she's only a dupe. The boatmaster will be questioned as soon as we can get through to him, and I'll be sure to check the leases on all the islands south and west of Kauai.

It's just a matter of time. We still have a better than even chance of putting the whole jigsaw together before the early evening news turns the inquiry into a circus." Charlotte winced as the car suddenly lurched, throwing her sideways to jostle Oscar Wilde. They had left the transcontinental superhighway at the intersection-she still did not know which one-and had already made a second turn, taking it off the subsidiary highway. The car was now climbing steeply into the hills, along a road which did not seem to have been properly maintained.

Having missed the sign at the intersection, Charlotte's first response to this realization was to crane her neck to look back at the valley they were leaving behind, trying to figure out where they might be. The nature of the terrain suggested that they must have pa.s.sed the Los Angeles junction, but she couldn't tell whether they were south of the Salton Sea. She had only the vaguest knowledge of the West Coast, and wasn't even sure what state they were in.

This had been a densely populated region in the distant past, but southern California had suffered worse than any other region of the old USA during the ancient plague wars. The so-called Second Plague War-whose obsolete t.i.tle still lingered, even though modern historians no longer recognized the distinctions made by near-contemporary commentators-had made its grisly debut in Hollywood, which had been widely perceived as the ultimate symbol of twenty-first-century vanity, privilege, and conspicuous consumption. The rumor had been put about that the terrorists who had launched that particular team of viruses had been seeking revenge on the supposed beneficiaries of the "First Plague War," who had allegedly launched it with the aim of wiping out the economic undercla.s.ses of the developed world.

If any of that was true, the "second war" had misfired badly. As in all wars, and plague wars more than any other kind, the poor had sustained far more casualties than the rich. Although the proximity of medical resources and the relative efficiency of emergency measures had helped to keep death rates down in the cities, the response in many rural areas to the emergence of the first cases had been a ma.s.s exodus of refugees. Most of those who had survived had never returned, preferring to relocate to more promising land. Three-quarters of the ghost towns of the Sierra Madre were ghost towns still, even after three hundred years.

Charlotte knew that the car hadn't been on the road long enough to have got to the Sierra Madre, but these lesser hills seemed just as bleak, and the same pattern of response to the plague wars must have been duplicated here. Now that Hal had removed his image from the screen in order to concentrate on his Herculean labors, Charlotte took the opportunity to call up an annotated map of the region onto the screen in front of her. She summoned a blinking light to show her the car's position, but the datum provided no obvious clue as to where it might be headed or why. The names of several small towns-all flagged as uninhabited-were scattered along their present route, but Charlotte wasn't surprised that she was unable to recognize any of them.

"The region up ahead seems to be wasteland," she told Lowenthal and Wilde, vaguely hoping that one of them might be better able to guess where they were being taken.

"She's right," Lowenthal confirmed, addressing himself to Wilde yet again, as if she were merely a hanger-on. "n.o.body lives up here-and I mean n.o.body. The work of repairing the effects of the ecocatastrophe hasn't even begun, even though we're practically in LA's backyard. Nothing grows here except lichens and the odd stalk of gra.s.s. The land's never been officially reclaimed, not even for wilderness. It's just rock and dust. The names on the map are just distant memories." "Something must be up there," Wilde said, shifting uncomfortably as the car took another corner with unreasonable haste. "Rappaccini wouldn't bring us up here if there were nothing to see. If there were no real reason for this expedition he might as well have left us kicking our heels at the Majestic, or your headquarters in New York. Perhaps it's the fact that no one ever comes here which recommended it to him as one of the bases of his secret operations." "But none of these ghost towns is cable-connected to the Web," Charlotte objected, drawing her finger across the screen in an arc.

"Which might be reckoned a considerable advantage by anyone intent on hiding," Wilde pointed out.

It was easy enough for Charlotte to follow the line of thought. Land as derelict as this might be a very good place to hide. A man living up here would not be entirely deaf and blind, provided that he had equipment to receive information broadcast by comsat, but he could be effectively invisible as long as he made no longdistance purchases or person-to-person contacts. If he always kept a roof over his head during daylight hours he would go unnoticed even by surveillance satellites.

The hire car had been designed for highway travel, and its speed had slowed considerably when it first began to follow the winding road up into the foothills of the mountain range, but its AI did not seem to have mastered the art of mountain climbing. Although the road surface was getting worse and the bends were becoming sharper and more frequent, the car still seemed to be making haste. As she was forced to sway yet again Charlotte cursed the AI driver for not being sloth enough, although it could not have had wit enough to qualify as a silver, but she a.s.sumed that she was being oversensitive. A driver's prime directive was to ensure the safety of its pa.s.sengers.

The map disappeared from Charlotte's screen, replaced by a list which Hal Watson had posted there.

"There are twenty-seven names here," Hal said. "So far as we can ascertain, it's a complete list of living men and women who attended the University of Wollongong while King, Urashima, Kwiatek, and Czastka were also in attendance.

We've now contacted all of them but one-Magnus Teidemann-so we're fairly certain that any other bodies that turn up will break the pattern." Michael Lowenthal patched the list through to his own screen, but no sooner had he set it up than his beltphone buzzed. Rather than displace the list, he picked up his handset and put the mike to his ear.

"What!" he said-not very loudly, but with sufficient emphasis to command the attention of his companions.

"What is it?" Charlotte asked-but she had to wait until Lowenthal had lowered the handset again. When he turned in his seat, it was Oscar Wilde that he transfixed with his triumphant gaze.

"I asked my employers to check the record of Jafri Biasiolo's DNA against Walter Czastka's," Michael Lowenthal said proudly, peering back through the gap between the headrests.

"And were they identical?" asked Oscar Wilde, raising a quizzical eyebrow.

"No," said Lowenthal, "they weren't identical." Charlotte wondered why, in that case, he looked so immensely pleased with himself-but he had only paused for effect. "The comparison gave much the same initial estimate of similarity as the comparison between Biasiolo's and the woman's-forty-some percent. Closer a.n.a.lysis of key subsections, however, suggests a consanguinity of fifty percent, blurred by substantial deep-somatic engineering." "I'm not sure that lends any support to your hypothesis," said Wilde. "Indeed, it suggests-" Lowenthal didn't let him finish. "That's not all," he said. "When they uncovered the link between Czastka and Biasiolo, they immediately compared Walter Czastka's DNA profile with the record Regina Chai obtained from Gabriel King's bedroom. The overlap's no better than random. Consanguinity zero!" "But how can that be?" Charlotte complained. "If Czastka and Biasiolo are close relatives, and the woman is Biasiolo's daughter..." "She's not!" Lowenthal was quick to say triumphantly. "The only way that Czastka and the woman could each have fifty percent of Biasiolo's genes without being significantly consanguineous themselves is by being his parents. She's not Rappaccini's daughter at all: she's his mother!-and Walter Czastka's his father!" "Congratulations," said Oscar Wilde dryly. "You seem to have found me guilty of an illegitimate inference-and you doubtless feel that if one of my inferences is defective, the rest might be equally mistaken. But you seem to be overlooking the true significance of the finding-" "Wait a second," Charlotte interrupted. "This doesn't make sense. It's perfectly plausible that Walter Czastka had made a sperm deposit while he was still in his teens, but he certainly couldn't have applied for a withdrawal only two or three years later! We're not talking about the Dark Ages here, or the aftermath of the Crash. People of his generation never exercised their right of reproduction when they were in their twenties-it's only in very special circ.u.mstances that they exercise them even now, while they're still alive." "If Czastka had made any formal application," Lowenthal agreed, not in the least confounded by her argument, "then his name would be included in Biasiolo's record. Obviously, he didn't-but he was training as a geneticist, and he must have had privileged access to a Helier hatchery. He must have subst.i.tuted his own sperm for a donation which had been legitimately drawn from the bank. He wouldn't have been the first hatchery tech to do that, nor the first to have got away with it." "But it doesn't help your hypothesis that Czastka is the designer behind Rappaccini Inc.," Charlotte pointed out. "Your original contention was that Biasiolo was a mere phantom, invented by Czastka for the purpose of establishing a separate ident.i.ty under which he could undertake various clandestine endeavors." "That's true," Lowenthal agreed. "It's now established that Biasiolo is a real person, not a ghost-but he's Walter Czastka's son. Doesn't that put Czastka behind Rappaccini Inc.?" "But if your scenario is accurate," Charlotte objected, constructing the argument as she spoke, "he'd never know it-Biasiolo, I mean. I suppose Czastka might have kept track of a subst.i.tute donation, if he'd made one, but he could hardly tell the foster parents about it, could he? What he did-according to you-was a criminal offense. He could never tell Biasiolo that he was his biological father." "You're still missing-," Oscar Wilde said.

Michael Lowenthal didn't let him finish; for once, he was fully engaged with Charlotte. "He could never tell anyone," the man from the MegaMall said, in answer to her quibble, "but that doesn't mean that n.o.body knew what he'd done.

Maybe it wasn't his own idea.

Maybe it was some kind of challenge, some kind of initiation into a secret society. He was a student, after all-and so were Gabriel King, Michi Urashima, and Paul Kwiatek. Maybe they all knew. Maybe-" "I fear that your flair for melodrama is getting out of hand, Michael," said Wilde impatiently, firmly reclaiming center stage. "As Charlotte says, we're not talking about the Dark Ages-but we are talking about the past. It isn't in the least surprising that an authentically young woman might have undergone sufficient genetic engineering to reduce an actual consanguinity of fifty percent to an apparent overlap of forty-one, but it's not plausible that two closely related old men should be that much less similar, unless something very odd had happened. As for this secret-society initiation, it's the stuff of ancient romance-and it provides no explanation of the timing of the murders. If Walter were Biasiolo's father, how could the revelation hurt Walter now? Even if everyone who knew it then still remembered it nearly a hundred and seventy years later, why should any of them attach any importance to it?" The list of names that Hal had posted on Charlotte's screen disappeared, to be replaced by his face. He didn't look pleased-presumably because he felt that he ought to have been the one to discover the link between Biasiolo and Walter Czastka.