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 assure 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 passage of a prose poem by Baudelaire entitled—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 title.” Charlotte scrolled down a little way. “It says here,” she remarked, “that the title 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 assured 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 circumstances 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 assure 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 Gods 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 repetition 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 assumes 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 analogy 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 reassert 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 surpass 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 wh
en 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 lust 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 asserted, the ruling classes 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.
Architects of Emortality Page 25
