“What things?”
“What things? How can you ask me that when you tell me to lie with every one of your followers? You’re like the nobleman, passing me around when you get tired of me.”
“I did nothing. It was you who lusted after Aaron.”
“I didn’t—”
“And others too,” he said, remembering the glances she had given men in the congregation. She had pitied him, and hated him too, just as he had always thought. “Do you think I didn’t notice?”
“I’ve done nothing,” she said. “I—”
“I won’t grant you a divorce, you know.”
“Of course not. If we’re married you still own me, even if I’m not there. That dream you told me about, where you took Jerusalem as your bride—you want to master Jerusalem, make her bow to your will. You want to control the entire world. But have you ever thought about how you will govern once you have the sultan’s crown? You want to be ruler of the earth, but what kind of ruler will you be?”
“What do you know about statecraft, about policy? I have been ordained by God to be king. And you—you have been chosen to be queen.”
“No,” she said. “I have not.”
She turned to leave. “I excommunicate you!” he said, shouting after her. “I call upon God to witness my words—you are excommunicated!”
She continued walking as if she did not hear him.
He watched her go. Perhaps it was just as well that she was leaving. He had known for a long time that she could not grasp the vastness of the task he had been given; she had never studied Kabbalah, or had visions of the light of God. His work in the world was far more important than her private feelings, or his.
He and his followers set sail on December 30, 1665. Word of his departure had gone before him. His boat was intercepted in the Sea of Marmara, and he was brought ashore in chains.
* * *
He sits in his prison in Gallipoli and waits for the light. He has not had a vision in many days; perhaps, he thinks, they have left him. He wonders if they have been consumed by the great fires he has seen in the future.
What had gone wrong? He and his followers had been so certain; he had seen the signs, read all the portents. He was destined to be the ruler of the world.
He puts his head in his hands and laughs harshly. Ruler of the world! And instead he sits in prison, waiting to be killed or released at the whim of the Turkish sultan.
The light of God is broken, dispersed throughout the world. And like the light his own mind is broken, splitting.
There is a knock on the door, and Nathan enters. “How did you find me?” Shabbetai asks.
Nathan appears surprised. “Don’t you know?” he asks.
Shabbetai says nothing.
“I bribed a great many people to get you here,” Nathan says. “Are you comfortable?”
“I—Yes. Quite comfortable.”
“The sultan has returned from Crete,” Nathan says. “There are rumors that he will want to see you.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. Soon, I think. He is alarmed by the support you have among the people of Turkey.” Nathan pauses and then goes on. “Some of your followers are worried. They don’t believe that we can hold out against the combined armies of the sultan.”
“Tell them not to fear,” Shabbetai says. He is surprised at how confident he sounds. But there is no reason to worry Nathan and the others, and perhaps the visions will return. “Tell them that God watches over me.”
Nathan nods, satisfied.
* * *
A few days later Shabbetai is taken by guards from Gallipoli to Adrianople. They pass through the city and come to a strong high wall. Men look down at them from the watchtowers.
Soldiers with plumed helmets stand at the wall’s gate. The soldiers nod to them and motion them through. Beyond the gate is a courtyard filled with fountains and cypress trees and green plots of grass where gazelles feed.
They turn left, and come to a door guarded by soldiers. They enter through this door and are shown before the sultan and his council.
“Do you claim to be the Messiah?” a councilor asks Shabbetai.
“No,” he says.
“What?” the councilor says, astonished.
“No. Perhaps I was the Messiah once. But the light has left me—I see no more and no less than other people.”
The sultan moves his hand. The councilor nods to him and turns toward Shabbetai. “I see,” he says. “You understand that we cannot just take your word for this. We cannot say, Very well, you may go now. Your followers outside are waiting for you—you have become a very dangerous man.”
“We are prepared to offer you a choice,” the sultan says. “Either convert to Islam or be put to death immediately.”
The light returns, filling the room. Shabbetai gasps; he had begun to think it lost forever. The light breaks. Two paths branch off before him.
On one path he accepts death. His followers, stunned, sit in mourning for him for the required seven days. Then Nathan pronounces him a martyr, and others proclaim that he has ascended to heaven.
His following grows. Miracles are seen, and attested to by others. An army forms; they attack the Turks. A long and bloody war follows. The sultan, the man sitting so smugly before him, is killed by one of his own people, a convert to what is starting to be called Sabbatarianism.
After a decade the Turks surrender, worn out by the fighting against the Sabbatarians on one side and the Venetians on the other. Shabbetai’s followers take Constantinople; Hagia Sophia, once a church and then a mosque, is converted a third time by the victorious army.
The Sabbatarians consolidate their power, and spread across Europe and Asia. First hundreds and then thousands of heretics are put to death. Holy wars flare. Men hungry for power come to Constantinople and are given positions in the hierarchy of the new religion.
Finally, using the terrifying tools of the far future, the Sabbatarians set out to kill everyone who is not a believer. The broken light that Shabbetai saw in his vision shines across the sky as city after city is laid waste. Poisons cover the earth. At the end only a few thousand people are left alive.
Shabbetai turns his gaze away from the destruction and looks down the other path. Here he becomes a convert to Islam; he changes his name to Aziz Mehmed Effendi. The sultan, pleased at his decision, grants him a royal pension of 150 piasters a day.
His followers are shocked, but they soon invent reasons for his apostasy. Nathan explains that the conversion was necessary, that the Messiah must lose himself in darkness in order to find all the shards of God hidden in the world.
Over the years his followers begin to lose hope. Sarah dies in 1674. Two years later he himself dies. Several groups of Sabbatarians continue to meet in secret; one group even survives to the mid-twentieth century.
He turns back to the first path. Once again he is drawn to the vision of annihilation. An end to breeding and living and dying, an end to the mad ceaseless activity that covers the earth. Perhaps this is what God requires of him.
He remembers Sarah, her desire to lie with him. She thought him powerless; very well, he will show her something of power. Flame will consume her descendants, all the children he had been unable to give her.
The moon spins before him, fragments into a thousand pieces. He understands that his vision is not an allegory but real, that people will become so strong they can destroy the moon.
His head pounds. He is not powerless at all. He is the most powerful man in the world. All the people he has seen in his travels, the bakers and learned men and farmers and housewives and bandits, all of them depend for their lives on his next word.
He thinks of Sarah again, her tangled hair, her breath warm on his cheek. If he lets the world live all her children will be his, although she will not know it. Every person in the world will be his child. He can choose life, for himself and for everyone; he can do what he was chosen to do and heal the world.
The light blazes and dies. He looks up at the sultan and his men and says, calmly, “I will choose Islam.”
LES FLEURS DU MAL
Brian Stableford
One of the most respected as well as one of the most prolific British SF writers, Brian Stableford is the author of more than thirty books, including Cradle of the Sun, The Blind Worm, Days of Glory, In The Kingdom of the Beasts, Day of Wrath, The Halcyon Drift, The Paradox of the Sets, The Realms of Tartarus, and the critically acclaimed trilogy consisting of The Empire of Fear, The Angel of Pain, and The Carnival of Destruction. His short fiction has been collected in Sexual Chemistry: Sardonic Tales of the Genetic Revolution. His nonfiction books include The Sociology of Science Fiction and, with David Langford, The Third Millennium: A History of the World A D. 2000–3000. Upcoming is a new novel, Serpent’s Blood, which is the start of another projected trilogy. His stories have appeared in our Sixth (two separate stories) and Seventh Annual Collections. A biologist and sociologist by training, Stableford lives in Reading, England.
In the ornate and engrossing novella that follows, Stableford takes us deep into a high-tech future whose decadent, ultrarich inhabitants have almost the power of gods … but even gods occasionally dabble in obsession and revenge, and murder. And when murder most foul (and most peculiar) begins to stalk through this calm and prosperous future Utopia, it’s up to two very unusual detectives to cry “The game’s afoot!” and track the killer down—if they can.
Prologue: 14 April, 2550
Oscar stood before the full-length mirror, carefully inspecting every detail of his face. He caressed the flawless flesh with sensitive fingertips, rejoicing in its gloss. “Ivory and rose-leaves,” he murmured.
Oscar always addressed his own reflection in the most admiring terms while it remained full of youth. When it grew old, as it had three times before, it lost its capacity to inspire admiration, and became a mocking reminder of the hazards that he and all men of his era still faced: decay, senescence, decomposition.
His revitalized hair was a glossy chestnut brown. To describe his complexion in terms of ivory and rose-leaves was a trifle hyperbolic, but the skin was pale and even. Authentically young men never had skin as perfect as that, because they could not help accumulating petty flaws while growing to maturity; only the rejuvenated could attain perfection, thanks to the artistry of their cosmetic engineers.
It was a nice paradox, Oscar thought, that only those who had been old could look truly young. He had flown in the face of professional advice by attempting a third rejuvenation so soon, at the age of 133. Many older men than he had not yet undergone their second rejuvenation, refusing to risk deep somatic engineering while their bodies had not quite descended to the depths of decrepitude. Oscar was far less brave than they; his fear of personal dilapidation was pathological.
“It is only shallow people,” he informed his reflection, confident in the knowledge that he had an appreciative audience, “who do not judge by appearances.” He bathed in the luxury of his own narcissism, admiring his grey eyes, his soft lips, his pearly white teeth.
He reached out to pluck a green carnation from the wall beside the mirror. He twirled it between his delicate fingers, admiring it with as much satisfaction as he admired his own image. The flower was his own creation. It was a joke, of course, but a serious joke. The games which Oscar played in consequence of his name—which had been given to him in all innocence by parents whose knowledge of the earlier Oscar Wilde was limited to a vague awareness that he had been a writer of note—were no mere matter of public relations. His identification with the ideas and ideals of his alter ego had long ago become a kind of fetish. He was not afraid to acknowledge that fact, nor to take pride in it. Life, if it were to be lived to the full in modern conditions, required a definite style and aesthetic shape: a constant flow of delicate ironies, tensions, and innovations.
He placed the flower in the buttonhole of his neatly tailored suit.
Furnishing hotel interiors was vulgar hackwork unbefitting a real artist, but a real artist had to make a living, and the commonplaceness of such commissions was offset by such flourishes of unorthodoxy as having it written into every contract that one suite of rooms should be fitted with green carnations instead of the more fashionable roses and amaranths. His clients did not mind his making such demands; they were, after all, paying for his fashionability as well as his technical dexterity, and he could not have been nearly so fashionable were it not for his extravagantly extrovert eccentricity.
He turned one way and then the other, shrugging his shoulders to make sure that his jacket hung perfectly upon his remodeled body.
Oscar did not doubt for a moment, as his greedy eyes devoured the glory of his reflection, that he would be equal to the challenge of his third youth. He was no crass businessman, apt to fall back into the same old routines at the first opportunity, wearing a new face as if it were merely a mask laid over the old. Nor was he the kind of man who would go to the opposite extreme, reverting to the habits and follies of first youthfulness, playing the sportsman or the rake. He was an artist. Artists had always been the pioneers who led mankind into the psychological unknown, and the current technology of rejuvenation was, after all, little more than a century old. No one knew for sure how many times a man might be successfully restored to youth, although it was tragically obvious that many failed at the second or third attempt. Oscar was firmly resolved that if the only thing required to secure eternal life was the correct attitude of mind, then he would be the first man to live forever.
He closed his eyes for a moment while he savored the pleasures of anticipation, but his delicious reverie was shattered by the comcon bell. He sighed, and crossed the room to the nearest telescreen, pausing only to make sure that his cravat was in order before exposing himself to the unit’s camera-eye. His precautions were unnecessary; no face appeared on the screen. There was only a teletext message, cold and impersonal. It was a request that he should call on a man he knew only slightly, and did not like at all. It seemed an unromantic and unpromising beginning to the new phase of his life. He reached out to send a message refusing the invitation, but paused before his fingers could descend upon the keys. The fax light was blinking. He pressed the RECEIVE button. He expected a copy of the message displayed on the screen, but what emerged from the humming printer was a seat reservation for the midnight maglev to San Francisco. Oscar had no intention of going to San Francisco; no such thought had crossed his mind. He could not imagine why anyone, least of all Gabriel King, should send him such a gift, with or without an explanation.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” he murmured.
He decided to obey the summons after all. He had never been able to resist temptation, and there was nothing in the world quite as tempting as a mystery.
1
While she waited for the forensic experts to conclude their examination of Gabriel King’s apartment, Charlotte Holmes tried to collect her thoughts. This was by far the biggest case of her fledgling career. Routine police work was incredibly dull, at least for site-investigation officers, and there had been nothing in her training or experience to prepare her for anything half as bizarre as this. Murder was nowadays the rarest of crimes, and such murders as did happen usually occurred when rage or spite smashed through the barriers erected by years of biofeedback training. Premeditated murders had fallen out of fashion as soon as it became impossible for the perpetrators to avoid apprehension.
She went to the window at the end of the corridor and looked out over the city. She was on the thirty-ninth floor, and there was quite a view. Central Park looked much as it must have looked in the days before the Devastation, but the rotting skyline was a product of the moment, whose like would probably never be seen again. Charlotte assumed that Gabriel King must have taken up residence in New York so that he might bid for a lion’s share of the work involved in the deconstruction of the city. He had always been bigger in demolition than in construction, because he
controlled a number of key patents in decay biotechnology. The Decivilization Movement had been a great boon to his business, although its prophets detested Gabriel King as much as they detested all old-style entrepreneurs, especially wealthy multiple rejuvenates. King could easily have made enemies among the people whose crusade he was furthering, and among the business rivals who had competed with him for the contracts—but who among them could have thought up the murder weapon she had just been studying through a camera-eye?
Her waistphone buzzed, and she took the handscreen from its holster. No image appeared. Hal Watson rarely allowed his face to be seen; he was a dealer in data, and preferred to remain invisible within the webs of information that he spun. “Two names,” he said. As he spoke, the names appeared on the screen in capital letters: WALTER CZASTKA; OSCAR WILDE. “They’re the top people involved in the engineering of flowering plants,” the voice continued. “We’ll need one of them as a consultant, to double-check the forensic investigation. Czastka’s in Micronesia, on an island he’s leased in order to build an artificial ecosystem. Wilde’s here in New York, but he’s just gone through his third rejuvenation and may be incommunicado. Try Czastka first.”
“I’ll call him,” said Charlotte. “What about the girl?”
“Nothing yet. Camscan’s under way. Might be able to pick her up somewhere, figure out where she came from or where she went. Has the team come out of the apartment yet?”
“No,” said Charlotte, glumly. “I’ll stay until they do.”
“Don’t worry,” Hal said. “It’ll open up once we have the forensics. With luck, we might crack the case before the story leaks out.”
Charlotte sighed, and began punching the buttons on the handset. She tried Czastka first, as instructed. The fact that he was on the other side of the world wasn’t of any real consequence, because he’d have to use a camera to inspect the murder-weapon anyhow, and probably wouldn’t be able to do much more until the lab had turned up a geneprint. The image which came onto the screen was a grade A sim.
The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994 Page 91
