“You seem to have slept well, Oscar,” Charlotte said.
“I usually do, my dear,” he said. “You’ll probably find, as you get older—especially at those times when you replenish your youth without losing the wisdom of maturity—that deep sleep will come more easily.” “We’ve all had the biofeedback training,” Lowenthal said dismissively. “We all know the drill.” Charlotte felt a sudden surge of anxiety about the appearance of her own face.
She altered the lateral viewport to full reflection and studied her lax features and bleary eyes with considerable alarm. The face she wore was not entirely the gift of nature; she had had all the conventional manipulations in infancy, but she had always refused to be excessively pernickety about matters of beauty, preferring to retain a hint of naturalness on the grounds that it gave her character and individuality. Oscar Wilde had all of that and phenomenal beauty, and he was a hundred and thirty-three years old. Somehow, it didn’t seem quite fair. She worked her facial muscles feverishly, recalling the elementary exercises that everyone learned at school and almost everyone neglected thereafter. Then she straightened her hair.
Oscar Wilde looked politely away as she did so, tutting over the condition of the fading green carnation which still protruded from the false collar of his suitskin.
As Charlotte took stock of the reward of her efforts she noticed the faint wrinkles which were just becoming apparent in the corners of her eyes. She knew that they could be removed easily enough by the most elementary tissue manipulation, and she would not have given them a second thought two days before, but now they served as a reminder of the biological clock that was ticking away inside her: the clock that would need to be reset when she was eighty or ninety years old, and again when she turned a hundred and fifty… and then would wind down forever, because her brain would be unable to renew itself a third time without wiping clean the mind within.
For Michael Lowenthal, she knew, it would be different. No one, least of all Lowenthal himself, knew as yet exactly how different it would be, but there was reason to believe that he might live for three or four hundred years without needing any kind of nanotech restructuring, and reason to hope that he might go on for a further half-millennium, and on and on… Barring accidents, suicide, and murder.
But who would be the suicides and murderers, in a world of beautiful ancients? Who would kill or choose to die, if they could live forever? “The mind is its own place,” Charlotte quoted silently, “and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” She passed a hand across her face, as if to wipe away the tried laxity of the muscles and the embryonic wrinkles. Fifty or sixty years to rejuve number one, she told herself, and no point yet in counting.
By the time she switched the viewport back to transparency, the island toward which they had been headed was below them, and their plane was descending toward the trees, preparing to alter the orientation of its engines so that it could complete its descent in helicopter fashion.
Like all the Hawaiian islands, Kauai had been blighted by the ecocatastrophes of the twenty-first century and the fallout from the plague wars. Most of its ecosystems had been stripped down almost to the prokaryot level, but it was small enough to have been comprehensively rehabilitated. The biodiversity loss had been enormous, and the current genetic variety of the island was probably only a few percent of what it had been in pre-Crash days, but the painstaking work done by natural selection in the cause of diversification was beginning to bear fruit on a prolific scale. The trees over which the aircraft passed while making for the landing field almost qualified as authentic wilderness.
Charlotte checked the equipment in her belt, making dutiful preparations for the dash from one vehicle to another. She had already invited Oscar Wilde to accompany her rather than taking the helicopter chartered by the late Gustave Moreau, but he had declined the offer. She was not displeased by the thought of putting a little distance between herself and one of her annoying companions—although, had she been given a choice, she would have kept Wilde and banished Lowenthal.
As soon as they had set down at the heliport, Charlotte opened the cockpit door and leapt down to the blue plastic apron. Michael Lowenthal made haste to follow her, but Wilde had perforce to take his time. Uniformed officers hurried toward her, directing her to a police helicopter that was waiting less than a hundred meters away. Its official markings were a delight to Charlotte’s eyes, holding as they did the impression of authority. From now on, she told herself, she would no longer be a passenger but a determined pursuer: an active instrument of justice.
One of the local men tried to tell her that there was no need for her to join the dragnet, and that she could watch it all on screens, but there was no way she was going to be turned aside now. She strode toward the police helicopter very purposefully, brushing off the attentions of the Kauai men as if they were buzzing flies, and Michael Lowenthal trotted along in her wake, barely keeping pace with her in spite of the fact that his stride was longer.
“You can strand him here if you want to,” Lowenthal said, jerking his head in the direction of Oscar Wilde, who was walking to another, somewhat smaller, machine. “He needs clearance for takeoff. You could ground him for the duration.” “Hal could,” Charlotte corrected him as she climbed into the helicopter, taking note of the numerous flitter-bugs clinging to the hull. “I’m just a sergeant. In any case, he might come in useful. Why don’t you take the opportunity to drop out? Your employers surely can’t think that they have any particular cause for concern—and they can watch the whole thing through the flying eyes.” “I talked to them last night,” Lowenthal told her. “They want me to stay with it. They’re still anxious—and that’s as much your fault as anyone’s. All that stuff about advertising for a new generation of Eliminators. They’ve probably had their own PR teams working through the night, figuring out the best way to spin the story once the final shot’s been fired.” The helicopter lifted as soon as they were both strapped in. The automatic pilot had been programmed to take them to Czastka’s island without delay. Charlotte reached into the equipment locker under the seat and brought forth a handgun.
She loaded it and checked the mechanism before clipping it to her belt.
“Do you think you’ll have a chance to use that?” Lowenthal asked. Charlotte noticed that the interpolation of the words a chance put a distinct spin on the question.
“It would be within the regulations,” Charlotte answered tautly. “I couldn’t even be rude to her when I spoke to her at McCandless’s house, but now the proofs in place I’m entitled to employ any practical measure which may be necessary to apprehend her. Don’t worry—the bullets are certified nonlethal.
They’re loaded with knock-out drops. We’re the police, remember.” “Have you ever fired one before?” he asked curiously. “Outside a VE, I mean.” She chose to ignore the question rather than answer it—as honesty would have forced her to do—in the negative.
The copter was traveling at a speed which was only a little greater than that attained by their previous conveyance, but they remained so low that their progress seemed far more rapid. The sea was the deep sapphire blue color renowned in ancient tradition, modestly reflecting the clarity of the cloudless morning sky. The waves, aided by the onrushing downdraft of their blades, carved the roiling water into all manner of curious shapes.
High in the sky above them a silver airship was making its stately progress from Honolulu to Yokohama, but the other police helicopters, dispatched before their arrival on Kauai, were out of sight beyond the horizon. Oscar Wilde’s charter craft was half a kilometer behind them, but it was keeping pace.
Like their previous craft, the helicopter had only one comcon. Charlotte tuned in to a broadcast news report. There were pictures of Gabriel King’s skeleton, neatly entwined with winding stems bearing black flowers in horrid profusion.
They had not come from Rex Carnevon—they were obviously taken from Regina Chai’s footage. Given that Hal would not
have released them, they must have been forwarded by somebody he had been obliged to copy in on the investigation: Michael Lowenthal’s employers. The tape had been reedited so that the camera lingered lasciviously over its appreciation of the horrid spectacle.
The King tape was swiftly followed by footage of Michi Urashima’s similarly embellished skeleton. The AI voice-over was already speculating, in that irritatingly insinuating fashion that AI voice-overs always had, that the UN police had been caught napping by the murderous tourist. The word negligence was not actually mentioned, but the tone of the coverage suggested that it would not be long delayed in the wings. Charlotte was tempted to purge the skin of the craft of the news-tape eyes that had hitched a ride thereon, but there was no point. There would be hundreds more flying under their own power.
Charlotte knew that although the information which had passed back and forth between Hal and herself would have been routinely cloaked, it could be uncloaked easily enough if anyone cared to take the trouble. Although the conversation she, Wilde, and Lowenthal had conducted in the restaurant at the UN complex was probably safe from retrospective eavesdroppers, very little they had said to one another since boarding the maglev would be irrecoverable. Their conversational exchanges after they had quit the car in the hills near the Mexican border would all be contained on the bubblebug tapes she had relayed back to Hal Watson—and, of course, to Michael Lowenthal’s employers.
It was anyone’s guess, now, what the casters might think, worth broadcasting if the climax of the chase proved to be sufficiently melodramatic to pull in a big audience. By now, even skyballs might be turning their inquisitive downward gaze in the direction of Walter Czastka’s proto-Eden; the privacy which the genetic engineer so passionately desired to conserve was about to be rudely shattered.
But then what? How would the tentative attention of the vidveg be captured—and how would it be secured? She wondered whether it would be necessary to use the gun—and what effect it would have on her career, her image, and her self-regard if the entire world were to watch her shoot down an uncommonly beautiful unarmed woman, albeit with a certified nonlethal dart.
The newscast flickered as the comcon signaled that a call was incoming from the helicopter trailing in their wake.
“What is it, Oscar?” Charlotte said.
“I tried to call Walter,” said Wilde. “This is what I got.” His own face was immediately replaced by that of Walter Czastka’s silver-animated sim.
“Damn you, Oscar Wilde,” the sim said, apparently without having bothered with any conventional identification or polite preliminary. “Damn you and Rappaccini to the darkest oblivion imaginable.” “That’s not very nice, Walter,” Wilde’s voice countered, although the image on screen was still the sim’s. “We have a responsibility to our AI slaves not to use them in this tawdry way. They can be pleasant on our behalf, but we shouldn’t require them to be insulting. It isn’t worthy of us.” “Damn you, Oscar Wilde,” the sim repeated. “Damn you and Rappaccini to the darkest oblivion imaginable.” “Nor should we lock the poor things into tight loops,” the Wildean voice-over added. “It’s a particularly cruel form of imprisonment.” “Damn you, Oscar Wilde,” said the sim yet again. “Damn you and Rappaccini to the darkest oblivion imaginable.” It was obviously programmed to make that response to anything and everything that Wilde might say. Charlotte cut off the tape and punched out Czastka’s phone code herself.
“Dr. Czastka,” she said when the sim appeared, “this is Sergeant Charlotte Holmes of the UN police. I need to speak to you urgently.” “Damn you, Oscar Wilde,” replied the sim stubbornly. “Damn you and Rappaccini to the darkest oblivion imaginable.” Charlotte restored the link to Wilde’s helicopter. His face had creased into an anxious frown. “I have a horrible suspicion,” Wilde said, “that we might already be too late.” Charlotte looked at the comcon’s timer. They were still thirteen minutes away from their estimated time of arrival at the island. She punched in another code, connecting herself to the commander of the task force whose hovering copters had surrounded the island.
“What’s happening?” she demanded.
“No sign of her yet,” the answer came back. “She can’t possibly have landed without being seen. If anything happens, Sergeant, you’ll be the first to know, as per New York’s orders.” The local man did not seem particularly pleased by the fact that he had orders to check all his moves with a mere sergeant. The fact that she was from New York probably added an extra hint of insult to the tacit injury.
“What do you mean, too late?” she said to Wilde, having cut back to him yet again. “If he were dead, it could only be suicide. His phone sim may be the stupidest obsolete sloth still in use, but there must be silver-level smarts somewhere in his systems. If he were actually dead, they’d override the sloth.
We’ve put the whole island on full alert!” “Even if he is not dead,” Wilde said stubbornly, “we may still be too late. That is what Rappaccini intends.” There was nothing to do but wait and see, so Charlotte sat back in her seat and stared down at the agitated waves, letting the minutes tick by. Michael Lowenthal did not attempt to engage her in conversation.
They were still two minutes short of their ETA when the voice of the local commander came back on-line. “We have visual contact with the woman,” he said.
“Relaying now.” When the picture on the copter’s screen cleared, it showed a female figure in a humpbacked suitskin walking out of the sea, looking for all the world as if she were enjoying a leisurely stroll after a few minutes in the water.
“We’re going in,” said the commander.
“Not yet!” said Charlotte. “We’re coming in now! Don’t set down until I do.
Leave her to me.” She was not entirely sure why she had told him to wait, but she was acutely aware of the responsibility of enacting Hal Watson’s authority—and it was, after all, her investigation too.
Charlotte watched raptly as the woman who looked like Julia Herold paused at the high-tide line and began detaching the hump on her suitskin, which presumably contained a built-in paralung. The camera eye zoomed in, not because it was refocusing but because the helicopter carrying it was moving closer. Obedient to Charlotte’s order, however, the machine did not complete its touchdown, hovering a meter or so above the sand. Over the voice link, Charlotte could hear the sound of loudhailer-magnified voices instructing the woman to stand still.
The woman did not seem to see the slowly settling helicopters or hear the loudhailers. She pushed back the hood of her suitskin and shook loose her long tresses. Her hair had changed color again; it was now a gloriously full red-gold, which seemed luminously alive as it caught the rays of the rising sun.
The assassin knelt beside the discarded augmentation of her suitskin, removing something from a pocket. She made no attempt to move from the spot where she had been instructed to remain, but she swiftly unwrapped whatever it was that had been bound up with the paralung in the bi-molecular membrane.
“What’s she doing?” Charlotte murmured as her own copter nudged its way into a gap in the surrounding ring.
“I don’t know,” Michael Lowenthal answered.
Over the voice link they could still hear the officer who had spoken to them. He was instructing her to desist from whatever she was doing and raise her hands above her head.
Charlotte’s copter settled on the sand, thirty meters closer to the woman’s position than any of the others, and Charlotte threw open the door. She stepped down onto the beach, conscious of the fact that hundreds of flying eyes would now be focused on her.
Suddenly the air around the red-haired woman was filled by a haze of what looked like smoke. As she came back to an erect position, the haze dispersed.
“Artificial spores,” Michael Lowenthal guessed. He was still in the copter, but he had moved to Charlotte’s seat in order to get a better view. “Millions of them—she knew she’d never get to kiss Czastka, so she’s casting them adrift on the wind.�
�� “Where’s Czastka?” Charlotte shouted, turning up the mike on her beltphone in the hope that the task-force commander might still be able to hear her—but the thrum of the slowing helicopter blades was still too loud to allow her to be heard. She hoped that the Creationist was still inside, his walls sealed tight against any form of biological invasion.
Charlotte took three steps toward the young woman, then raised her gun, holding it in both hands, and pointed it. The noise of the copters was fading fast, and she was certain that she would be heard if she shouted.
“Raise your hands!” she yelled.
The woman was standing perfectly still now, but she had to turn through ninety degrees to face Charlotte. The expression on her face was unreadable, and Charlotte was not at all sure that the woman could see her, let alone hear her—but as she turned she meekly raised her hands high above her head. By the time her bright green eyes met Charlotte’s, she was still, impassive, and seemingly harmless.
Charlotte felt a wave of thankfulness sweep through her tense frame. She took her left hand off the stock of the gun and beckoned to the woman.
“Come to me!” she instructed. “Slowly, now.” From the corners of her eyes Charlotte could see uniformed men dismounting from the other helicopters, but they simply stepped down to the ground, watching and waiting. The sound of the copter blades was a mere hum by now, but Charlotte’s ears had been numbed by the cacophony, and she was not sure how loud the sound was. She could hear the distant whine of Oscar Wilde’s copter, though. It had turned to circle the beach rather than coming in to land.
Architects of Emortality Page 28
