Architects of Emortality Part 9

Wilde's call was fielded by a sim, which looked considerably healthier than the real Walter Czastka.

"This is Oscar Wilde," said the geneticist. "I need to talk to Walter. It's extremely urgent." "I'm not taking any calls at present," said the simulacrum flatly.

"Don't be ridiculous, Walter," said Wilde impatiently. "I know you're listening in. I know that the police have told you exactly what's going on, even if you haven't had the courtesy to acknowledge it. This is no time to go into a sulk.

We have to talk." The sim flickered, and its image was replaced by Czastka's actual face. "What do you want, Oscar?" he said, his voice taut with aggravation. "This is nothing to do with you." "I'm afraid that you're a player in this game whether you like it or not, Walter," Wilde said soothingly. "I know it's a nuisance, but we really do have to try to figure out why your natural son and next-door neighbor intends to kill you." "I'm not in any danger and I don't need protection," said Walter in a monotone that was as replete with stubbornness as it was with weariness. "There's no one else on the island, and no one has been here. No one can land here without the house systems knowing about it. I can seal all the doors and windows if I need to. I'm perfectly safe and I don't need any a.s.sistance. I never heard of anyone called Jafri Biasiolo and I never had the slightest suspicion that I had fathered a child, let alone the lunatic on the next island over. I can't think of any reason why he or anyone else should want to murder me." It sounded to Charlotte like a rehea.r.s.ed speech-one that he had probably recited more than once to the UN police. It also sounded to Charlotte like a pack of lies: a refusal to cooperate, or even to acknowledge the problem, whose pigheadedness would not have been out of place in the fake personality of a low-grade sloth.

"I don't think Rappaccini's motive is conventional, Walter," said Wilde, "but the six intended victims of his murderous sequence certainly weren't chosen at random. There must be some kind of connection linking you to King, Urashima, Kwiatek, Teidemann, and McCandless, and it must be something that happened when you were all at Wollongong. It must have to do with the circ.u.mstances in which you fathered a child with Maria Inacio." Charlotte noted that Walter Czastka looked astonishingly pale. His eyes were unblinking, his features set firm.

"As I told your friends, Oscar," Czastka said in a voice devoid of all emotion, "I don't remember. n.o.body remembers what they were doing a hundred and seventy years ago. n.o.body. I have no memory of ever having met Maria Inacio. None." Lies, thought Charlotte. He knows everything-but he's determined not to let us in on the secret. It won't work. Everything will come out, and everyone will know. Now that Rappaccini has recruited the vidveg as well as Wilde, everyone will be interested. That's what Rappaccini intended.

"I'm not sure that I can believe that, Walter," said Wilde, treading very softly indeed. "We forget almost everything, but we can always remember the things which matter most, if we try hard enough. This is something which matters, Walter. It matters now, and it mattered then. Are you certain that you don't know the woman whose picture they showed you-the Inacio clone? The others all seemed to know her-perhaps you've met her too? She seems to have been born and raised on the island next to yours-perhaps you met her in Kauai." "I can't." The word was delivered with such sudden bitterness and flaring anguish that Charlotte flinched.

Wilde didn't react to the unexpected outburst. "What about you and Gustave Moreau, Walter?" he asked soothingly. "You obviously didn't know that Moreau was Rappaccini, let alone that he was your son, but how did you get on with him as a neighbor? Was there some special hostility between you? Why did you describe him as a lunatic just now?" "I've hardly ever seen Moreau," said Czastka, his annoyance almost incandescent.

"His island may be nearer to mine than any other, but it's still way over the horizon. I may have b.u.mped into him on Kauai a couple of times, but I never said more than half a dozen words to him. He has a reputation for eccentricity among the islanders, but so does every Creationist. I shouldn't have echoed the opinion of the ignorant by calling him a lunatic just because I've got sick of hearing the jokes-you'd probably appreciate the humor in them, but I never have.

The Island of Dr. Moreau-get it? You've probably even read the d.a.m.n thing. We all keep ourselves to ourselves out here-surely you understand that. All I want to do is to keep myself to myself. Do you get the message, Oscar? I don't want protection from the UN police and I certainly don't want you interfering in my business. I just want to be left alone." There was a brief silence while Oscar Wilde paused for thought.

"Do you want to die, Walter?" he asked finally. It was not an aggressive question, and the inflection suggested that it was not rhetorical.

"No," said Czastka sourly. "I want to live forever, like you. I want to be young again, like you. But if I do die, I don't want flowers by Rappaccini at my funeral, and I don't want anything of yours. If I do die, I want all the flowers to be mine. Is that clear?" "Given that he must have known for a long time what you never did-that he was your biological son-why should Rappaccini have hated you?" Wilde asked, trying as hard as he could to make the question seem innocuous, although it was obviously anything but.

"I don't know," Walter Czastka said resentfully. "I don't hate anyone. It's not in my nature to hate. It's not supposed to be in anyone's nature anymore, is it? Didn't we leave the era of hatred behind after the Crash, when Conrad Helier and PicoCon saved the world with the New Reproductive System and dirt-cheap longevity? We don't hate one another anymore because we don't expect other people to love us, and we don't feel slighted when they don't. This is the Era of Courtesy, the Era of Common Sense, when all emotion is mere histrionic display. I was born a little too early to adapt myself fully to its requirements, but you and Rappaccini always seemed to me to have mastered the art completely. I don't even hate you, Oscar. I don't hate you, I don't hate Rappaccini, I don't hate Gustave Moreau, and I certainly don't expect any of you to hate me. You don't hate me, do you, Oscar? You might despise me, but you don't hate me. You wouldn't want to kill me-why should you take the trouble, when you think I'm hardly alive to begin with? Why should anyone take the trouble?" The heat of Czastka's bitterness had faded while he spoke, its near incandescence cooling into ashen SAP black, but Charlotte couldn't begin to figure out why the Creationist had felt the need to say all that.

"I think we're on our way to see you, Walter," said Oscar Wilde placidly. "I don't know how long it will take us to get there-quite some time, I expect, given the stately progress we're making at present. I hope everything will be all right when we get there. We can talk then." "d.a.m.n you, Oscar Wilde," said the old man. "I don't want you on my island. You stay away, do you hear? I don't want to talk to you. I've said everything I have to say. You stay away from me. Stay away!" He broke the connection without waiting for any response.

Oscar turned sideways to look at Charlotte. His face looked slightly sinister in the dim light of the helicopter's cabin.

"He knows," he said. "He may not understand exactly why Rappaccini wants to kill him, but he knows what's behind it. The strange thing is that although he doesn't care at all about the possibility of being murdered, there's still something he does care about. I think I understand, now, what Rappaccini has done, and maybe even why he's done it-but only in broad terms. There's still a devil somewhere in the detail. Maybe if I can talk to McCandless. He lives on Kauai; he must know Walter and Rappaccini, alias Moreau. He may even have made up some of the jokes that Walter found so strangely objectionable-after all, there can't be many people on Kauai familiar with the work of H. G. Wells." "Why don't you let me do this one?" Charlotte asked as politely as she could. "I am supposed to be the detective, after all." Wilde's answering smile was very faint. The cabin lights had come up automatically as darkness had fallen, but they seemed somewhat lacking in power, like the plane itself.

"Please do," he said as infuriatingly as ever. Despite what Walter Czastka had said about the Era of Courtesy and the obsolescence of hatred, it wasn't too difficult for Charlotte to imagine that a man like Oscar Wilde might be hated-or that a man like Oscar Wilde might be capable of hate.

It didn't take as long as Charlotte had expected to get through to the ex-vice-chancellor. Hal had obviously been at his most brisk and businesslike.

As she had also expected, Stuart McCandless was not answering his phone in person, but this time there was no need for begging or bl.u.s.tering. She simply fed his sim her authority codes and it summoned him to the comcon without delay.

"Yes?" he said, his dark face peering at her with slightly peevish surprise. He would be able to see that she was in a vehicle of some kind, but he wouldn't necessarily be able to identify it as a plane. "I'm still going through the data you people dumped into my system, although I'm sure that it's quite unnecessary.

It's going to take some time to look at it all. I promised that I'd get back to you as soon as I could-this isn't helping." "I'm Sergeant Charlotte Holmes, UN police, Professor McCandless," she said. "I'm in an airplane which has apparently been programmed by Gustave Moreau, alias Rappaccini. He seems intent on providing my companion, Oscar Wilde, with a good seat from which to observe this unfolding melodrama. We're heading out into the ocean from the American coast. We don't know what destination has been filed, but we may well be heading your way, and I'm afraid that the killer might get there ahead of us. Have you ever met Moreau?" "Once or twice. I know very little about him, except for the jokes that people tell. To the best of my knowledge, I've never seen his alleged foster daughter on Kauai, and I certainly can't imagine that he or she could have anything against me." McCandless's voice was by no means as bitter as Walter Czastka's, but he did seem petulantly resentful. He plainly did not believe that anyone might be trying to kill him, in spite of the fact that the only thing the four known victims had in common was an item of biography that he shared.

"Have you remembered anything about your time at Wollongong that might link you to the four dead men and Walter Czastka?" Charlotte demanded, desperate to get something from the interview to justify the fact that she had placed the call in Wilde's stead. "Anything at all?" McCandless shook his head reflexively but vigorously. "I've already answered these questions," he said irritably. "I've tried-" "But you've looked at the tapes of the girl who visited Gabriel King and Michi Urashima, haven't you? Are you certain that you'd be able to recognize her if she altered her disguise yet again?" "I'd be able to study your tapes more closely if you'd allow me time to do it, Sergeant Holmes," McCandless snapped back. "I'm looking at them now, but quite frankly, in these days of ever-changing appearances it's almost impossible to recognize anyone except people one knows intimately. I don't know whether the person in those pictures is twenty years old or a hundred. I've had dozens of students who were similar enough to be able to duplicate her appearance with a little effort-perhaps hundreds. I've a guest here with me now who would only need a little elementary remodeling to resemble any one of a hundred people I see on TV every day-and your suspect could do exactly the same." For the second time within a quarter of an hour Charlotte felt Oscar Wilde's hand fall upon hers, exercising significant pressure. This time it was quite unnecessary. The moment the meaning of McCandless's words had become clear she had felt a veritable chill in her blood. She was already trying to work out how best to phrase the next statement in such a way as not to seem crazy.

"How well do you know this visitor, Professor McCandless?" she asked, astonished by the evenness of her tone.

"Oh, there's not the slightest need to worry," McCandless replied airily. "I've known her for years. Her name is Julia Herold. I've just told your colleague in New York all about her-I'm sure he's checking her out, and equally sure that he'll find everything in perfect order." "Could you ask her to come to the phone?" asked Charlotte. She looked sideways at Oscar Wilde, certain that he would share the agony of her helplessness. Even Michael Lowenthal was paying attention again, leaning avidly between the seats so that he could see the image on the screen.

"Yes, of course-she's here now," McCandless replied. He turned away, saying, "Julia?" Moments later he moved aside, surrendering his place in front of the camera to a young woman, apparently in her early twenties. The young woman stared into the camera with beguiling frankness. As McCandless had said, she could have altered her face, with the aid of subtle cosmetic resculpturing, to duplicate the features of any of a hundred female newscasters and show hosts.

She could also be the woman Charlotte had seen in the tapes-but there was no single point of absolute similarity, and nothing that would have tipped off a superficial scan search. Her abundant hair was golden red and very carefully sculptured; it could easily have been a wig. Her eyes were a vivid green, but the color could easily have been a bimolecular overlay. Charlotte knew that Hal must be moving heaven and earth in the hope of finding one point of absolute proof that he could take back to the smug idiot who could not comprehend what danger he was in-but she knew too that Hal must know that he was already too late to save McCandless. The local police must be on their way to the house, but Charlotte had no idea how long it would take them to arrive, and there was no way to protect McCandless from infection.

"I'm sorry to disturb you, Miss Herold," said Charlotte slowly. "As you presumably know, we're investigating a series of rather bizarre murders, and it's very difficult to determine what information may be relevant." "I understand," said the woman calmly. She seemed utterly unperturbed by the situation, and Charlotte couldn't help remembering Wilde's suggestion that she might not have the slightest idea of the effect that her kisses were having on her victims.

Charlotte felt a strange p.r.i.c.king sensation at the back of her neck. It's her, she thought. I'm actually talking to the killer-so what on earth do I say? She remembered, uncomfortably, how she had felt very nearly the same about Oscar Wilde, in eerily similar circ.u.mstances.

"Have you seen the news this evening?" Charlotte asked.

"Yes, I have," Julia Herold replied. "But as I told your colleague, I never met Gabriel King or Michi Urashima, and I've never been to New York or San Francisco, let alone Italy or central Africa." She's playing with us, Charlotte thought. She's deliberately tantalizing us. She has McCandless in the palm of her hand and there's no way we can save him-but she'll never get away with it. Not this time. She can't make another move without our knowing about it.

"May I talk to Dr. McCandless again?" she asked dully.

They switched places again. Charlotte wanted to say, "Whatever you do, don't kiss her!" but she knew how very stupid it would sound.

"Professor McCandless," she said uncomfortably, "we think that something might have happened when you were a student yourself. Something that links you, however tenuously, with Gabriel King, Michi Urashima, Paul Kwiatek, Magnus Teidemann, and Walter Czastka. We need to know what it was. We understand how difficult it is to remember, but..." "I didn't know them all," McCandless said, controlling his irritation. "I've set a silver to check back through my own records, trying to turn something up. I've always kept good records-if there's anything at all, it will be there. I hardly know Walter, even though he lives less than a couple of hundred kilometers away across the water. He keeps himself to himself, as Moreau does. The others I know only by repute. I didn't even remember that I was contemporary with Urashima or Teidemann until your people jogged my memory. There were thousands of students at the university, even then. We didn't even graduate in the same year-I've established that much. We were never, together, unless..." "Unless what, Dr. McCandless?" said Charlotte quickly.

The dark brow was furrowed and the eyes were glazed as the man reached for some fleeting, fugitive memory. "There was a time with Walter... at the beach..." Then, instantly, the face became hard and stern again. "No," he said firmly. "I really can't remember anything solid. If you want my help, you must let me go back to the doc.u.ments-but I'm certain that it's just a coincidence that I was at Wollongong at the same time as the men who've been murdered." Charlotte saw a slender hand descend rea.s.suringly upon Stuart McCandless's shoulder, and she saw him take it in his own, thankfully. She knew that there was no point in asking what it was that he had half remembered. He couldn't believe that it was important, and he couldn't remember exactly what had taken place. He was shutting her out.

It's happening now, she thought, before our very eyes. She's going to kill him within the next few minutes, if she hasn't already. And we can't do a thing to stop her-but we can surely stop her before she gets to Walter Czastka. This is the last.

"Professor McCandless," she said. "I have reason to believe that you're in mortal danger. I have to advise you to isolate yourself completely-and I mean completely. Please send Miss Herold away-and do it now. Whatever you believe or don't believe, I beg you not to have any further physical contact with her. I have no doubt at all that your life is at stake." "Oh, don't be so stupid," McCandless retorted testily. "I know how the mind of a policeman works, but I have a far better understanding of my present situation than you do, Sergeant Holmes. I can give you my absolute a.s.surance that I'm in no danger whatsoever. Now, please may I get on with the work which your colleague asked me to do?" "Yes," she said numbly. "I'm sorry." She let him break the connection; she didn't feel that she could do it herself She found the futility of her attempted intervention appalling.

When the screen went blank, Charlotte turned to Oscar Wilde and said: "He's already dead, isn't he? He doesn't know it yet, but he's infected. Nothing we could have done would have stopped it." "The seeds may well be taking root in his flesh as we speak," Wilde agreed. "If Julia Herold is the Inacio clone-and I say if, because it is still conceivable that she is not, although neither of us dares to believe it-then Professor McCandless had secured his own doom before you or Hal Watson had any reason to contact him." "What was it that he started to say, I wonder?" she whispered. "Why did he stop and blank it out?" "Something that came to mind in spite of his resistance," Wilde said. "Something he didn't really want to remember. Something, perhaps, that Walter remembers too, if only he dared admit it..." " 'There was a time with Walter at the beach,' " Michael Lowenthal quoted speculatively. "a.s.suming that he didn't mean a tree, he must have been referring to something that happened at a beach. Maybe that's where Czastka met Maria Inacio-maybe it's where they all met Maria Inacio. A party, do you think? Six drunken students, who hardly knew one another...?" "That might make sense," Oscar Wilde conceded thoughtfully. "If Rappaccini had reason to think that any one of them might have been his biological father, and that Walter was merely the unlucky one..." Charlotte felt that duty required more urgent action from her than joining in with speculative games. She called Hal. "Julia Herold," she said shortly. "Have you tied her in with Moreau yet? She has to be the killer." "I've no proof yet," Hal replied impatiently. "The records say that she's a student at the University of Hawaii. She lives on Kauai. Although McCandless is retired from administration, he still does research-he's a historian, specializing in the twenty-second century. That's Herold's main area of interest too. According to the official record, Herold's been on Kauai all along-but I'm double-checking everything, and there's a distinct possibility that the woman is a masquerader, not really Herold at all. If there's disinformation in there, the seams will come apart in a matter of minutes, but it'll be too late to save McCandless." "She's the one," said Charlotte. "Whatever the superficial data flow says, she's been halfway around the world in the last few days, killing people all the way.

It's all in place, Hal-everything except the reason. You've got to stop her from leaving the island. Whatever else happens, you mustn't let her get to Czastka." "I've already taken care of that," said Hal. "Even if she's exactly who she says she is, she's going nowhere tonight. Every exit is blocked, right down to the last rowboat-I can a.s.sure you of that." "Who's Julia Herold's father?" Oscar Wilde put in. "Whose child is she supposed to be?" "Both egg and sperm were taken from the banks, according to the records," said Hal. "Both donors are long dead. I can give you a list of the coparents who filed the application to foster, if you like-there are six names on the form. I haven't had time to talk to any of them, but I'm still checking to make sure that their Julia Herold and the woman with McCandless are the same. It might all be irrelevant." "Who are the biological parents supposed to have been?" "The sperm was logged in the name of Lothar Kjeldsen, born 2225, died 2317. The ovum is annotated 'Deposited c.2100, Mother Unregistered.' That's not surprising-when the sterility plague hit hard, scientists were stripping healthy ova from every uninfected womb they could locate, including embryos. No duplicate pairing registered, no other posthumous offspring registered to either parent. Nothing significant." "You're right," Wilde conceded readily. "If the killer is merely masquerading as Julia Herold for the sake of temporary convenience, we should return our attention to her origins. If my memory serves me right, Dr. Chai's original report concerning the DNA traces recovered from Gabriel King's apartment implied that the evidence of somatic engineering was unusual-idiosyncratic was the word she used, I think." "Regina was being typically cautious," Hal said. "DNA traces recovered from crime scenes always show some effects of somatic engineering, but it's usually straightforwardly cosmetic. The Inacio clone has had orthodox cosmetic treatment, but that's by no means all. After due consideration, Regina now thinks that the engineering was more fundamental than somatic tinkering. She also says that no matter how unlikely it sounds, the differences obscuring the Biasiolo/Czastka consanguinity almost certainly resulted from embryonic engineering, not from subsequent somatic modification." "That was something that bothered me before," Wilde said. "I couldn't believe that there'd been any considerable somatic modification to a child born in 2323-but the alternative is even more astonishing. How did Maria Inacio die?" "She drowned, in Honolulu. The records say that it was presumed accidental, which means that whoever conducted the inquest thought there was a possibility that it was suicide. I'm not sure where this is taking us, Dr. Wilde, and I have whole panels lighting up on me here-I'll have to cut you off." The screen immediately went blank yet again.

"In the story, Rappaccini's daughter was raised among poisons," Wilde murmured.

"She acquired her immunities-but we do things differently nowadays. Rappaccini worked on her embryo to provide her immunities, whatever they are. If he'd duplicated a Zaman transformation, Regina Chai would have spotted the rip-off, but if it was his own variation on the theme, inspired by a different basal template if not actually developed from it..." "It won't help her when we catch her," Charlotte put in ominously. "And we will catch her-she can't get away from Kauai. With Biasiolo dead, she'll have to stand alone in court. Even if she pleads insanity, she's likely to go into the freezer for a very long time. Even the most rabid antisusanists are unlikely to rally to her defense. At the end of the day, there are some people who simply can't be allowed to pollute the world the rest of us live in. If Biasiolo did build the corruption into her genes, that makes her all the more dangerous." "That's the weakest point of the whole argument," Wilde said. "Rappaccini would never have let this happen if he thought that his mother-daughter would have to bear the full weight of the law's vengeance. And you're wrong about her not being able to get away from Kauai. She will get to Walter. I don't know how, but she will-even if she has to swim." The "condolence card" among the flowers that had been found in Paul Kwiatek's apartment read: Cette vie est un h'opital ou chaque malade est poss'ede du desir de changer de lit. Cette d'voudrait souffir en face du poek, et celm-la croit qu'il querirait a cote de la fenetre.

"This life is a hospital," Oscar Wilde translated, squinting slightly at the words displayed on the screen, "where each sick man is possessed by the desire to change his bed. This one yearns to suffer by the stove, that one believes that he would get better by the window." "What's that supposed to mean?" Charlotte demanded. Hal Watson's computers had already identified the text as the opening pa.s.sage of a prose poem by Baudelaire ent.i.tled-in English-"Anywhere out of the World." "It means," said Wilde, "that everyone in the world is ill at ease, or believes himself to be misfortunate. It means that no man can help thinking that if only he were in someone else's situation, he would feel much better. If I remember correctly, the piece extends as a hypothetical dialogue between the poet and his uncommunicative soul, in which the poet interrogates his inner being as to where, exactly, he might find his own fulfillment. The soul replies, at long last, with the words which supply the poem with its t.i.tle." Charlotte scrolled down a little way. "It says here," she remarked, "that the t.i.tle was taken from the works of Edgar Allan Poe, which Charles Baudelaire had translated into French." "What exceedingly dutiful programs your colleague has!" said Wilde sarcastically. "Does it, perhaps, also observe that 'Anywhere out of the World' was Jean Des Esseintes's favorite among Baudelaire's prose poems?" "No," she said. "But I can get a readout on this Jean Des Esseintes if it would help." "It wouldn't," Oscar a.s.sured her.

"Look," said Charlotte, carefully letting her annoyance show. "Does all of this stuff mean something, or not? Because if it doesn't, I think I'd like to get some sleep. We're still a long way from Hawaii, but it's midsummer and dawn will probably break before we get to Czastka's island-and I really don't see the point in waiting up for news of Stuart McCandless. The fool wouldn't listen..." "So fate will doubtless take its course," Wilde finished for her. "And yes, all of this means something, if only to Rappaccini. Whether it will help us to discover what it means is a different matter. If your interest is confined to the possibility of interrupting the unfolding tragedy before it reaches its end, and the probability of making an arrest, I fear that any tentative explanation I can offer will seem irrelevant." Charlotte felt that she was being subtly insulted, or at least cunningly challenged. Despite the fact that she had done little for the last thirty-six hours but sit in vehicles, she felt physically exhausted and direly in need of rest. On the other hand, she hated to think that Wilde might be treating her with thinly veiled contempt.

"If you have any kind of explanation," she said, "I really would be glad to hear it." "So would I," said Michael Lowenthal. "The other one seems even weirder than that one, even though it's in English." He meant the legend on the condolence card found in Magnus Teidemann's tent-which they had inspected first, because it had been in English.

Oscar Wilde nodded, with a faint smile which somehow contrived to suggest that he had intended both of them to reply in exactly that fashion.

"As the UN's dutiful silver observed," Wilde said, "the card left with Teidemann's body carried lines abstracted from a poem called 'Adianasia,' which is one of my namesake's finest. The poem as a whole speaks-symbolically, of course-of the discovery of a seed closed 'in the wasted hollow' of the hand of a mummy exhumed from an Egyptian pyramid. The seed, when sown, produces 'a wondrous snow of starry blossoms' which outshines all other flowers in the eyes of the insects and the birds. Unlike ourselves, who 'live beneath Time's wasting sovereignty' the miraculous plant is 'a child of eternity.' "I think we must look for that text's significance in terms of a series of inversions. Rappaccini's flowers are, of course, more often black than white, and their function is to emphasize that the wasting sovereignty of time still extends over those who once hoped to find themselves ranked among the first fragile children of eternity. When the victims of this crime were born, you see, the great majority of people were only just awakening to the fact that the nanotech escalator had stalled: that serial rejuvenation could not and would not preserve human life forever, and that the extra years bought by any future suite were extremely unlikely to carry its users into an era when further extensions would be routinely available. By the time that Rappaccini was born, it was virtually taken for granted that the quest for human emortality would have to make a new beginning. It was necessary to go back to the drawing board, in more ways than one." "We don't know for sure, as yet, that the Zaman transformation will be any more effective in beating the Miller effect than core-tissue rejuve," Michael Lowenthal modestly pointed out. "We hope-" "That's precisely my point," said Oscar Wilde. "You hope. The generations of the twenty-second and twenty-third centuries hoped. Even men born at the very dawn of the twenty-fourth, in 2301, still hoped, although they became aware eventually that their hopes had been ill-founded because their nanotech idols couldn't beat the Miller effect. Rappaccini and I, on the other hand, belonged to generations whose members knew from the beginning-as the men of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had known-that eventual extinction of the personality was inevitable. We grew up knowing that our own makers, and their makers before them, had made a mistake. They had contentedly put all their eggs into the basket of nanotechnology, trusting that even if the escalator effect did not carry them all the way to true emortality it would surely carry their children. That unwarranted trust, Michael, could easily be seen as a kind of betrayal. I have forgiven my own foster parents, although I think that Charlotte may one day find it a great deal more difficult to forgive hers-and however paradoxical it may sound, it may be that Jafri Biasiolo might have found it even more difficult to forgive the still-mysterious circ.u.mstances of his own conception." "That's nonsense," said Lowenthal sharply. "Even if Maria Inacio was raped by Walter Czastka and five others-" "Actually," Wilde interrupted him, "I prefer your earlier hypothesis to the gang-rape scenario-the one you formed when you still presumed that Biasiolo had been conceived in the orthodox manner, and were thinking in terms of dares, challenges, and initiations to student secret societies. Until we have better reason to do so, however, I think we should resist the temptation to jump to conclusions which are nasty or silly. I can a.s.sure you that what I have said is not nonsense. There was a point in history when it was abruptly realized that our whole approach to the problem of emortality had been seriously misled, and that the commercial monopoly established by the men who had begun to think of themselves as the G.o.ds of Olympus had cost us dear. Professor McCandless, if he is still alive, would doubtless be able to tell you that the Ahasuerus Foundation continued to plough a lone furrow throughout the era of PicoCon's economic dominance, refusing to admit that nanotechnological techniques of rejuvenation were ever anything more than superficial. If others had followed the example of their funding policies, the Zaman transformation-or something very like it-might have been available at least a century before your conception." "A hundred and thirty-four years ago," Charlotte murmured. Oscar Wilde ignored her.

"What is incontrovertible," the geneticist said in a more level tone, "is that Jafri Biasiolo, alias Rappaccini, alias Gustave Moreau, devoted his life to the design and manufacture of funeral wreaths-and whatever else this series of murders may be, it is Rappaccini's own funeral wreath. All its gaudy display, including the invitation sent to me, is explicable in those terms, and only in those terms. Rappaccini has supplied materials to so many funerals that he must have decided a long time ago that he could never be satisfied by any mere parade through the streets of a city, however grandiose. He wanted a funeral to outdo every other funeral in the history of humankind-and we are part and parcel of its ceremony. These condolence cards are not addressed to his victims-they are leaves from his own Book of Lamentations, and must be understood in that light." "I can't believe it," said Michael Lowenthal, shaking his head. "It's too ridiculous." Wilde's remark about refraining from jumping to silly conclusions had obviously needled him.

"Maybe it is ridiculous," said Charlotte, "but it's no more so than the crimes themselves. Go on, Dr. Wilde-Oscar." Wilde beamed, welcoming her belated concession. Then he relaxed back into his seat and half closed his eyes, as if preparing himself to deliver a long speech-which, Charlotte realized, was exactly what he intended to do.

"It may seem unduly narcissistic," Oscar Wilde began, "but I wonder whether the most fruitful approach to the puzzle might be to unpack the question of why Rappaccini chose me to be its expert witness. The Herod sim informed us that it was because I was better placed than anyone else to understand the world's decadence. The quotations reproduced on the condolence cards are taken from works identified in their own day as 'decadent,' but it is not ancient history per se that is the focus of attention here. It's the repet.i.tion of history: the resonance implied by Jafri Biasiolo's performances as Rappaccini and Gustave Moreau, and my own performance as my ancient namesake.

"According to the tape which you kindly showed me, Gabriel King described me as a 'posturing ape,' and you probably took some slight pleasure in the implied insult. The description is, however, perfectly accurate, provided one a.s.sumes that ape is a derivative of a verb meaning to imitate rather than a reference to an extinct animal. I am, indeed, an imitation; my whole existence is a pose-but the original Oscar Wilde was a poseur himself, and ironic echoes of my performance extend through my own work and through his. Once, when someone complained that my namesake had criticized a fellow artist for stealing an idea when he was an inveterate thief himself, he observed that he could never look upon a gorgeous flower with four petals without wanting to produce a counterpart with five, but could not see the point of a lesser artist laboring to produce one with only three. You will understand why that a.n.a.logy has always been particularly dear to me-but there are other echoes more vital still.

"In the first Oscar Wilde's excellent novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, the eponymous antihero makes a diabolical bargain, exchanging fates with a portrait of himself, with the consequence that the image in the picture is marred by all the afflictions of age and dissolution while the real Dorian remains perpetually young. In the nineteenth century, of course, the story of Dorian Gray was the stuff of which dreams were made: the purest of fantasies. We live in a different era now, but you and I, dear Charlotte, have been caught on the cusp between two ages. We can indeed renew our youth-once, twice, or thrice-but in the end, the sin of aging will catch up with us. It still remains to be proven whether Michael's New Human Race is really capable of enduring forever, but the glorious vision is in place again: the ultimate hope is there to be treasured.

"Like me, Charlotte, you will doubdess do what you may to make the best of the life you have. I am living proof of the fact that even our kind may set aside much of the burden with which ugliness, disease, and the aging process afflicted us in days of old. We are corruptible, but we also have the means to set aside corruption, to rea.s.sert in spite of all the ravages of time and malady the image which we would like to have of ourselves. I daresay that you will play your part bravely and make the best of what is, after all, a golden opportunity for achievement and satisfaction. Perhaps, even as you watch the progress of such contemporaries as Michael, you will never experience a single moment's anguish at the thought that you are a mere betwixt-and-between, becalmed halfway between mortality and authentic emortality. Perhaps, though, you will not find it impossible to find a grain of sympathy for Rappaccini's obsession with death and its commemoration. In designing a funeral for himself that would surpa.s.s all the funerals of the past in its ludicrous self-indulgence and mawkish extravagance, he must also have had it in mind that there would soon come a time when funerals would lose their aura of inevitability, occurring only in the wake of rare and unexpected accidents." "But I still don't see-," Charlotte began.

Oscar Wilde silenced her with an imperious wave of his delicate hand. "Please don't interrupt," he said. "I realize that you may well find this boring as well as incomprehensible, but I am trying hard to arrange my own thoughts in order, and I hope you might allow me to bore and confuse you a little while longer.

Even if you fail, in the end, to make sense of what I have to say, you will be no worse off than you are now." "I wasn't-," Charlotte protested, but stopped as he pursed his perfect lips. She felt a perverse pulse of l.u.s.t as his gleaming eyes bade her be silent.

"The nineteenth-century writers who were called decadent," Wilde continued, "saw themselves as products of a culture in terminal decay. They likened their own era to the days of the declining Roman Empire, when the great city's grandeur gradually ebbed away, and its possessions were overrun by barbarians. According to this way of thinking, the aristocracy of all-conquering Rome had grown effete and self-indulgent, so utterly enervated by luxury that its members could find stimulation only in orgiastic excess. By the same token, the decadents a.s.serted, the ruling cla.s.ses of nineteenth-century Europe had been corrupted by comfort, to the extent that anyone cursed with the abnormal sensitivity of an artistic temperament must bear the yoke of a terrible ennui, which could only be opposed by sensual and imaginative excess.

"An entire way of life, according to the decadents, was d.a.m.ned and doomed to collapse; all that remained for men of genius to do was mock the meaninglessness of conformity and enjoy the self-destructive exultation of moral and artistic defiance. Many of them died of excess, poisoned by absinthe and ether, rotted in body and in mind by syphilis-but they were, of course, absolutely right. Theirs was a decadent culture, absurdly distracted by its luxuries and vanities, unwittingly lurching toward its historical terminus. The next two hundred years saw wars, famines, and catastrophes on an unprecedented scale, in which billions of people died, although the hectic increase in human population was not halted until the descent of the final plague: the plague of sterility. The comforts of the nineteenth century-hygiene, medicine, international trade-were the direct progenitors of the feverish ecocatastrophe whose crisis was the Crash.

Throughout the twentieth century the petty deceivers of politics maintained their ruthless grip upon the fettered imagination of the vast majority of humankind, ensuring that few men had the vision to understand what was happening, and even fewer had the capacity to care. Addicted to their luxuries as they were, even terror could not give them adequate foresight. Blindly, stupidly, madly, they laid the world to waste and used all the good intentions of their marvelous technology to pave themselves a road to h.e.l.l.

"What a waste it all was!" Wilde paused again, but only for effect. This time, it wasn't Charlotte who made haste to interrupt him. "You can't compare the present era to the one that preceded the Crash, Dr. Wilde," said Michael Lowenthal, the agent of the MegaMall. "There's no prospect whatsoever of another ecocatastrophe. Everything is under control now." "Exactly so," said Wilde. "The old world ended with a bang and a whimper. Ours will not. Ours is far more likely to end in Hardinist stasis, in perfect order, with everything under control." "That's not what I meant, and you know it!" Lowenthal protested. "The masters of the MegaMall like change. They need change. Change is what keeps the marketplace healthy. There has to be demand. There has to be innovation. There has to be growth. There has to be progress. But..." "But it all has to be managed" Oscar Wilde finished for him. "It has to be measured and orderly. Change is good but chaos is evil. Growth is good but excess must be stifled. There are still those among us who cannot agree. Few of them are authentic revolutionaries-even the most extreme Green Zealots and Decivilizers, like the Eliminators and Robot a.s.sa.s.sins before them, probably ought to be reckoned clowns and jesters rather than serious anarchists-but they still desire to make their dissenting voices heard. I think you will agree that whatever the outcome of this comedy may be, Rappaccini will certainly succeed in being heard. When dawn breaks, five men will be dead and a sixth will be under sentence of execution. A vast swarm of helicopters and hoverflies will be headed for Walter Czastka's island, avid to watch the denouement of the drama at close quarters. Can Walter be saved? Can the woman be apprehended? What has been done, and how, and why? Above all else: why? "Perhaps, when all is said and done, the question is the answer; perhaps the sole purpose of every move in this remarkable play is to force us to recognize that it is, indeed, play. At any rate, my friends, we are no longer an audience of three: tomorrow, we will merely be the avant-garde of an audience of billions. Tomorrow, everyone will listen, even if hardly anyone will actually understand, while Rappaccini informs us, in the most grandiosely bizarre way he can contrive, that our culture too has reached its terminus, and that it is on the brink of being interred forever, mourned for a while, and then forgotten." "It's nonsense!" Michael Lowenthal protested. "Everything worthwhile will be preserved. Everything!" "But you and those like you, Michael, will be the ones who decide what is worthwhile," Wilde pointed out. "Even if men like Rappaccini and I were to agree with you, we should still feel the need to mourn the loss of the superfluous.

What Rappaccini is trying to make us understand, I suppose, is the horror of a Hardinist world of carefully stewarded property, inhabited entirely by the old.

That might, after all, be the ultimate consequence of the Zaman transformation.

Children have already become rare on the surface of the earth; they will eventually become as nearly extinct as those obscure species which are never decanted from the ark banks except to supply the demands of zoos.

"Whatever might happen on Mars, or in the circ.u.m-lunar colonies, Earth will presumably remain what it has already become: the MegaMall-dominated Empire of the Old. In time, maturation will ensure that it becomes the Empire of the Eternal. Some form of that empire is the heart's desire of every thinking man and the ambition of every practical scientist-even those, like me, who stand condemned as the last generation of the envious-but its emergence is bound to cause us anxiety and fear. The death of death is a prospect we ought to celebrate, but it is also a prospect we ought to approach with solemn concern.

Who better to remind us of that than Rappaccini, the master of commemoration, the monopolist of wreaths?" Charlotte suddenly realized that Wilde was deliberately understating the case.

He was waiting for someone else to take the next step in the sequence, lest it be thought that he understood a little too well what the man he called Rappaccini wanted to achieve.

"He's murdering people," she said, taking it upon herself to fill the gap. "He's murdering old men. He's not just making an aesthetic statement; he's writing an ad for the philosophy of Elimination. That's how some of the vidveg are going to read this crazy business, at any rate-and I, for one, think that he always intended them to read it that way. His sim said as much, when it said that murder mustn't be allowed to become extinct." Oscar Wilde smiled wryly. "He did indeed," he admitted.

"And is that the way you were supposed to read it?" Charlotte followed up. "Is that part of the interpretation that you were supposed to put to the world on his behalf?" "I don't know," he answered frankly. "But I am, as you have cleverly observed, reluctant to go so far in my approval." "So you don't agree with him, then?" Michael Lowenthal put in. "When all the fancy rhetoric is set aside, you agree with us." Charlotte knew that the implied collective was the masters of the MegaMall, not Lowenthal and herself.

"I do share Rappaccini's anxieties," Wilde replied, "but I don't think the threat is as overwhelming as he seems to think. I don't believe that the old men will ever take over the world completely, no matter how few they are or how long they live, or how clever they are in sustaining their claim to own the earth. I can't believe that a world in which death has been virtually abolished will be a world full of Walter Czastkas. I may, of course, be prejudiced by vanity, but I think that such a world could and should be a world full of Oscar Wildes. I'm even prepared to concede that the world will probably get by perfectly adequately even if I'm half wrong, and men like me are forced by circ.u.mstance to live alongside men like Walter.

"The spark of authentic youth can be maintained, if it's properly nurtured. The victory of ennui isn't inevitable. When we really can transform every human egg cell so as to equip it for eternal physical youth, at least some of those children-hopefully the greater number-will discover ways to adapt themselves to that condition by cultivating eternal mental youth. My way of trying to antic.i.p.ate that is, I will admit, primitive and rough-hewn, but I am here to help prepare the way for those who come after me: the true children of our race; the eternal children; the first authentically human beings." "That's all very well," Charlotte said, "but it's Rappaccini, not you, who's going to be world-famous tomorrow, at least for a while. Others may be more sympathetic to the violent aspects of his message than you are." "Undoubtedly," said Wilde.

"On the other hand," said Michael Lowenthal, "the great majority will be horrified and sickened by the whole thing." "I'm a police officer," said Charlotte sourly. "I'll be dealing with the troublesome minority." "That was another thing the decadents helped to demonstrate, or at least to reemphasize," Oscar Wilde observed, stifling a yawn. "Human beings are strangely attracted to the horrific and the sick. We have been careful in this guilt-ridden age of dogged reparation to invent a mult.i.tude of virtual realities which serve and pander to that darker side of our nature, but we have no guarantee that it can be safely and permanently confined in that way. With or without Rappaccini's bold example, we might well be overdue for a new wave of Eliminator activity or a new cult of hashishins. We have done sterling work in displacing our baser selves, but the impulse to sin is not something that can be entirely satisfied by vicarious fulfillment. As our indefatigable murderess has demonstrated, actual s.e.xual intercourse is coming back into fashion. Can violence be far behind?" Charlotte turned to look out of the viewport beside her, lifting her head to stare at the patient stars. I'm a police officer, she repeated in the privacy of her own thoughts. If he's right, it's me, not him or Michael Lowenthal, who'll bear the brunt of it. It might have been a symptom of her own exhaustion, but she couldn't bring herself to believe that Wilde might be wrong, even about the likelihood of Julia Herold evading all Hal's traps. She no longer had any faith at all in the ability of the UN and the MegaMall to prevent the late Jafri Biasiolo, alias Rappaccini, alias Gustave Moreau, from bringing this affair to the conclusion which he had predetermined, or from making as deep an impression upon memory and history as he had always intended.

Intermission Five: A Failed G.o.d and His Creation

Whenever Walter Czastka attempted to focus his attention on the practical questions which still required settlement, they slipped away. He could not confront them without first confronting the sheer enormity of the fact, unkindly revealed to him by the UN's hapless investigators, that Jafri Biasiolo was his son.

He had, of course, always known that he had a son, but he had never made any attempt to find out what name the boy had been given following his perfectly orthodox birth. It would have been very foolish of him to make any such inquiry, given that it would have been compounding a criminal act, whose commission had been carefully covered up by calculatedly bad record keeping-but that had not been the real reason for his refusal to investigate.

The truth was, Walter admitted to himself at long last, that he simply had not cared enough. Once the experiment had been rudely taken out of his hands, he had forsaken all interest in it. The authorities had taken over, and the young Walter had reacted in a way that had been typical of the young Walter; he had resentfully washed his hands of the whole affair. The fact that he had escaped punishment for his alleged misdeed had made things worse rather than better; it had been the local authorities which had stepped in, undertaking in their wisdom to keep the "problem" confined, to enter the child into the records in a calculatedly and deceptively economical fashion: to pretend, in essence, that the whole thing had never happened, and to demand-on pain of punishment-that he should do likewise.

Presumably they had done that for the child's sake, but all that the young Walter had seen was a brutal minimization of his heroic effort, a casual refusal to see it as anything important, anything meaningful, anything worth recording.

And his own direly youthful reaction had been: So be it; if that's what you think, you're welcome to it. You want pretense, I'll pretend-and I'll never try to change the world again. From now on, the world can rot.

He saw, now that he was forced to see, that it had been a petty and childish reaction-but he had been no more than a child.

Perhaps, he thought, pettiness was something he had not entirely grown out of, even now. What had become of his once-grand ambitions, his once-fervent l.u.s.t to be a pioneer? He had followed through with his threat, and had let the world's corruption alone, leaving it to fester. He had pretended, as the supposedly generous authorities pretended, that he had done nothing, and that nothing had been the right thing to do.

Now, at the age of a hundred and ninety-four, he had nothing to look back on but that determined pretense. Apart from the single experiment that had produced Jafri Biasiolo-which had to be recognized, in retrospect, as a failure-had he ever even tried to pioneer anything worth pioneering? He had tried... but what had he tried, and how hard? He had abandoned all thought of human engineering and had turned instead to the engineering of pretty flowers. He had thought himself accomplished in that safe and lucrative field, and he had been successful. Had he really been outdone by those who came after him: Oscar Wilde and his unacknowledged son? Had he somehow consented to be upstaged by a clown and a designer of funeral wreaths? Surely not. And yet... Had he been allowed to follow his experiment through, Walter thought, his career path would have been very different, and his life too-but it had been taken from him in too brutal a fashion. The unborn child had been transferred to a Helier womb, and its transference undoc.u.mented, so that no one referring to the bare record of the child's birth would see at once that he was anything but an ordinary product of the New Reproductive System.

The "local authorities" who had discovered what he had done had died off one by one, but the young men who had helped him out, in their various mostly trivial ways, had not. Like him, they had gone unpunished; like him, they had probably pushed the memory of their involvement to the very backs of their minds and might even have contrived to forget it entirely. Only three of them had known the whole story, and not one of them knew the names of all the others who had helped him. Maria Inacio was the only one who could have listed all five names and coupled them to his. Clearly, she had-but the only person to whom she had revealed the names was her son.

Her presumably beloved son.

Her presumably uniquely beloved son. Or was that presuming too much, given that the world of 2323 had changed so drastically since the days when all women had been born like Maria Inacio, capable of conception and parturition? There was no reason, of course, why Maria Inacio or any of his accomplices should ever have spoken publicly of what they knew. None of them could have won any credit by revealing that they had been part of such a wild endeavor. It was in no one's interest belatedly to add into the record that which had been carefully excluded therefrom-not even Jafri Biasiolo's. Now, Biasiolo had gone to his grave and had taken King, Urashima, Kwiatek, and Teidemann with him. That only left McCandless, and McCandless did not even know that the other four had been involved. Even if McCandless were spared, or had been spared long enough to tell the police what he knew, he would be unable to connect himself to Urashima or Kwiatek. The most he might remember-and even that would require a prodigious feat of memory-was that Walter might have mentioned King's interest, and Teidemann's, while the two of them had walked along that lonely beach discussing a little favor which McCandless might do in order to help Walter keep a secret.

The secret was safe now. Or was it? There was one other person who might-perhaps must-have heard from Biasiolo's lips the names of those involved and the nature of his scheme: the woman who was carrying out Rappaccini's scheme.

And that too was a mystery.

"What, exactly, is my murder intended to achieve?" Walter murmured aloud. "What, if anything, is it intended to demonstrate?" Saying it aloud did not help. There was no answer waiting in the wings for an audible prompt.

All of it, Walter thought, is beyond understanding. If I were to wrestle with the puzzle for a hundred years, I would not get close to a solution.

He sat on his bed and stared into the depths of an empty suitcase. He had opened it with the intention of filling it with everything he needed and fleeing the island, but the plan had spontaneously aborted within ten. seconds of its launch. It had taken him no longer than that to realize that he had nothing whatsoever to put in the case. The world had changed while he had lived in it.

When he had been a young man, people really had packed luggage when they needed to travel; suitskins and household dispensers had not been as clever in the early twenty-third century as they were in the late twenty-fourth, and utilitarian possessions had not been so easily interchangeable. Information technology had been almost as clever, but people's att.i.tudes to its instrumentality had been far more cautious; even people with nothing to hide had routinely kept data bubbled up, and had carried self-contained machines wherever they went in order to access and process the bubbles. In those days, the notion of "personal property" had meant far more than it seemed to mean now.

Walter realized belatedly that there would have been no point in filling the case even if there had been anything to put into it. No matter what the UN police said, he was not going to leave. There was no need, because there was nothing left to be afraid of-not even the threat of murder.

"After all," he murmured, "I am guilty of something. No matter how long I have lived, and no matter how much time I have wasted, I am still the man who found Maria Inacio, still the man who tried to grasp that single slender reed of opportunity... and failed." He wondered whether there might be grounds for perverse grat.i.tude in the fact that his unnatural son had somehow found in that unique circ.u.mstance a motive for murder. He could not fathom that motive, and it was too late now to repair the omission of a lifetime and make the attempt to communicate with his son, but at least he knew now that his son had not been as neglectful of their relationship as he. The fact that his son, having discovered the circ.u.mstances of his birth, had decided to murder his father and all of his father's accomplices was surely proof that the matter of paternity was not irrelevant to him, and could therefore be construed as a compliment of sorts.

That, at any rate, was surely what Oscar Wilde would have said.

"d.a.m.n him to h.e.l.l," Walter murmured-meaning Oscar Wilde, not Jafri Biasiolo, alias Rappaccini.

The profoundest mystery of all, of course, was why Jafri Biasiolo, having learned from Maria Inacio the ident.i.ty of his father and the circ.u.mstances of his birth, had done nothing for so long. Had he postponed his "revenge"-if "revenge" it was-until he himself was dead merely in order to avoid punishment? If so, he was worse than a coward, because his agent undoubtedly would be caught and would suffer his punishment in his stead.

It made no sense.

Walter left the bedroom and ordered a bowl of tomato soup from the dispenser in the living room. He ordered it sharp and strong, and he began to sip it while it was still too hot, blistering his upper palate. He carried on regardless, forcing the liquid down without any supplementation by bread or manna. He contemplated chasing the soup with a couple of double vodkas, but there was a difference between the stubborn recognition that he ought to eat and mere folly.

In any case, the benign machines which had colonized his stomach would not let him get drunk unless he first sent messengers to rewrite their code-and that would take hours.

He tried yet again to drag his mind back to the matter in hand. Why should his son want to kill him? Because he-the son-felt abandoned? Because the experiment had failed? Because his mother had asked him to? But why should Maria Inacio want him dead, when she had been a willing partner in the escapade? Why should she want all those who had helped to set it up to be killed along with him, when not one of them had hurt her in any way? And if Maria or her son had wanted to take revenge, why had they waited so long? Why now, when there was so little life left in any of their intended victims? If Moreau had lived thirty or forty years longer-as he certainly would have, had the experiment not failed so ignominiously-there would probably have been no one left for him to murder. Only luck had preserved all five of the people who had given Walter the resources with which to work, a place to hide his experimental subject, and the alibis he had needed to keep his endeavors secret. Only luck had preserved him long enough to outlive his son-if his current state of body and mind could be thought of as "preservation." Perhaps that was what Moreau resented: the fact that Walter and his five accomplices had all outlived him, when the whole point of his creation was that he was supposed to outlive them. Perhaps, if he had been a better artist, a better Creationist, he would not have failed. Perhaps that was what his forsaken son had been unable to forgive him. Perhaps that was why his forsaken son had said to himself: when I die, you must come with me, for it was your failure that determined the necessity of my death. That almost made sense. Could it also begin to make sense of the fact that the instrument of the son's murderous intent was a replicate of his mother? The game of G.o.d, Walter reflected, must have been the only one he had wanted to play when he was young and devoid of pretense. Perhaps, when he had been forced to put that game aside he had put aside playfulness itself. Perhaps, thereafter, he had presented to the world at large the perfect image of a man who was down-to-earth and matter-of-fact. Everyone thought of him as a realist: a man of method, a hardheaded person without any illusions about himself or anything else. He had lived that pretense for nearly two hundred years-unless, of course, it was no pretense at all, and he really was down-to-earth and matter-of-fact, hard of head and hard of heart, incapable of play.

Walter remembered the Great Exhibition held in Sydney in 2405, when he had seen the work exhibited by Oscar Wilde and Rappaccini and said to himself: These idle egotists can only play; they have not the capacity for real work. They are vulgar showmen whose only real talent is for attracting attention. Even their names are jokes. They are the froth on the great tide of biotechnics, whose gleam and glitter will adorn the moment while the real power of the surge will come from honest, clear-sighted laborers like myself. I am the one who has the intelligence and the foresight to play the game of G.o.d as it was meant to be played.

In the ninety years that had pa.s.sed since the days of the Great Exhibition, Walter had gradually come to understand the frailty of that hope. Here, on his Pacific atoll, he was the unchallenged lord of all he surveyed, with none to stay his hand or resist his edict, and yet... He had set out to build a Garden of Eden, but the Tree of Knowledge was not here, nor even the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. When he was dead-which would presumably be fairly soon, whether or not Gustave Moreau's murderous scheme could be interrupted-people would be able to visit his island, and say: "Yes, this is Walter's work." If they were generous of spirit, they might say: "Look at the sense of order, the cleanness of line, the careful simplicity. No wild extravagance for Walter, no illusions. Method, neatness, economy-those were always Walter's watchwords." And if they were not so generous? "Dull, dull, dull." In the quiet arena of his mind, Walter could almost hear the voices which would deliver that deadly verdict. Oscar Wilde would state it much more elaborately, of course, while waving his pale left hand in a dismissive arc. Few people would pay any attention to Oscar-people never did pay attention to mere caricatures-and no one would ever believe for a second that he, dear Walter, would care a fig what Oscar Wilde might think of his work, but the majority opinion was not the important one.

"What do I think?" Walter asked himself, knowing that that was the real heart of the matter. "Now that it's all coming out, now that it can't be kept inside anymore, what do I think? What have I made of my life and my work, and how does it compare with what I might have made? That's the thing that has to be decided." It sounded so simple, but it wasn't. There were far too many awkward questions, and far too little time to hunt for the answers he should