“Charlotte Holmes,” she said. “UN Police. Sending authority.” The privacy-breaking codes cut no ice. The sim told her that Czastka was temporarily unreachable. That probably meant that he was messing about somewhere on his island, without a beeper. It wasn’t worth the hassle of getting Czastka’s house-system to send out a summoner while there was an obvious alternative.
This time, she got a low-grade AI receptionist, which informed her that Oscar Wilde was not in his hotel room at present. She sent her authorization code. The pretty face flickered as the new subroutine was engaged. “Mr. Wilde is in a cab,” said the higher-grade receptionist, her simulated voice still honey-sweet. “Sending contact code; destination Trebizond Tower.”
Charlotte was just about to retransmit the contact code when she realized that Trebizond Tower was the building on whose thirty-ninth floor she was standing.
“What a coincidence,” she murmured, reflectively. Before she had finished wondering what the coincidence might possibly signify, another voice-call came through. This one was from the uniformed officer she had posted at the bottom of the elevator shaft to keep the public at bay.
“There’s an Oscar Wilde here,” said the officer, laconically. “He says he got a message half an hour ago to come up to King’s apartment.”
Charlotte frowned. Gabriel King had been dead for quite some time, and no call could possibly have been made from his apartment. “Send him up,” she said, tersely. She had an uncomfortable feeling of being out of her depth. She was only a legman, after all; Hal was the real investigator. She hesitated over calling Hal to tell him what had happened, but decided against it. Instead, she went to the elevator to meet the new arrival.
When the man emerged, she felt a curious jolt of astonishment. Hal had mentioned that Wilde was a recent rejuvenate, but she hadn’t adapted her expectations to take account of it. Expert witnesses and other consultants usually looked fairly old, but Oscar Wilde looked ten years younger than she did; in fact, he was quite the most beautiful man she had ever seen. He bowed gracefully, and then looked up, briefly, at the discreet plastic eye set in the wall, whose security camera recorded every face which passed by.
Public eyes and private bubblebugs were everywhere in a city like New York, and native New Yorkers were entirely used to living under observation; those who had grown up with the situation took it completely for granted. In some unintegrated nations, it still wasn’t common for all walls to have eyes and ears, but within the borders of the six superpowers, citizens had long since been required to learn to tolerate the ever-presence of the benevolent mechanical observers which guaranteed their safety. Wilde was neither a native New Yorker nor a genuinely young man, but he didn’t give the impression that he resented the presence of the eye at all. If anything, his self-consciousness suggested that he liked to be watched.
“Mr. Wilde?” she said, tentatively. “I’m Charlotte Holmes, UN Police Department.”
“Please call me Oscar,” said the beautiful man. “What exactly has happened to poor Gabriel?”
“He’s dead,” Charlotte replied, shortly. “I understand that you received a call from him, or his simulacrum?”
“The message came as text only, with a supplementary fax. It was an invitation—or perhaps a command. It was sufficiently impolite to warrant disobedience, but sufficiently intriguing to be tempting.”
“That message wasn’t sent from this apartment,” she told him, bluntly.
“Then you must trace it,” he replied, affably, “and discover where it did come from. It would be interesting to know, would it not, who sent it and why?”
They were interrupted by the emergence of the forensic team from the apartment. Charlotte waited patiently while they removed their sterile suits. Oscar looked curiously at all the protective gear, undoubtedly wondering why it had been necessary to use it.
“It’s sealed,” said the team-leader. “We set up a camera on remote control, and we stripped all the bubbled data there was. We connected his personal machines to the Net so that Hal can trawl the data.”
Oscar wore a quizzical expression. Charlotte didn’t want to enlighten him yet as to what had happened; she was anxious to see what his reaction would be when she showed him what was in the apartment. She led the way to the screen mounted in the wall outside the apartment door, and punched in the instruction codes.
The camera was still at the scene, but it had been left pointing tastefully away from the corpus delicti. The room was furnished in an unusually utilitarian manner; there was no decorative plant life integrated into the walls, nor any kind of inert decoration. There were mural screens on the blank walls, but they displayed plain shades of pastel blue. Apart from the food delivery point, the room’s main feature was a particularly elaborate array of special-function telescreens. Charlotte juggled the camera while Oscar peered over her shoulder, raptly. On one of three sofas lay all that remained of the late Gabriel King. The “corpse” was no more than a skeleton, whose white bones were intricately entwined with gorgeous flowers. Charlotte zoomed in, and moved aside to let her companion look closely at the strange garlands and the reclining skeleton.
The stems and leaves of the marvelous plant were green, but the petals of each bloom were black. The waxy stigma at the center of each bell was dark red, and had the form of a crux ansata. Oscar Wilde took over the controls, moving them delicately so that he could inspect the structure and texture of the flowers at the minutest level. He followed the rim of a corolla, then passed along a stem which bore huge thorns, paler in color than the flesh from which they sprouted. Each thorn was tipped with red, as though it had drawn blood. The stems wound around and around the long bones of the corpse, holding the skeleton together even though every vestige of flesh had been consumed. The plant had supportive structures like holdfasts which maintained the shape of the whole organism and the coherence of the skeleton. The skull was very strikingly embellished, with a single stem emerging from each of the empty eye-sockets.
“Can you be certain that it’s Gabriel?” asked Oscar, finally.
“Pretty certain,” Charlotte said. “In the absence of retinas the analysts checked the skull-shape and the dental profile. A DNA scan on the bone-marrow will confirm it. It seems that the flowers are composed of what used to be his flesh. You might say that their seeds devoured him as they grew.”
“Fascinating,” he said, in a tone which had more admiration in it than horror.
“Fascinating!” she echoed, in exasperation. “Can you imagine what an organism like that might do if it ever got loose? We’re looking at something that could wipe out the entire human race!”
“I think not,” said Oscar, calmly. “These are single-sexed flowers from a dioecious species, incapable of producing fertile seed. How long ago did Gabriel die?”
“Between two and three days,” she told him, grimly. “He seems to have felt the first symptoms about seventy hours ago; he was incapacitated soon afterward, and died a few hours later.”
Oscar licked his lips, as though savoring his own astonishment. “Those delightful flowers must have a voracious appetite,” he said.
Charlotte eyed him carefully, wondering exactly what his reaction might signify. “You’re something of a flower-designer yourself, I believe.” Her gaze flickered momentarily to the green carnation in his lapel. “Could you make plants like those?”
Oscar met her eyes frankly. She was as tall as he, and their stares were perfectly level. He frowned as he considered the matter, then said: “Until I saw this marvel, I would have opined that no man could. Clearly, I have underrated one of my peers.” He seemed genuinely perplexed, although the level of his concern for the victim and for the fact that a crime had been committed left something to be desired.
Charlotte stared hard at the beautiful man, wondering whether anyone in the world were capable of committing an act like this and then turning up in person to confront and mock the officers investigating the crime. She decided that if he cou
ld be guilty of the first madness, the second might not be too hard to believe. “I can’t help feeling that your appearance here is a very strange coincidence, Mr. Wilde,” she said.
“It is indeed,” said Oscar, blithely. “Given that it seems to be impossible that I was summoned by the victim, I can only conclude that I was summoned by the murderer.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“It is hard to believe. But when we have eliminated the impossible, are we not committed to believing the improbable? Unless, of course, you think that I did this to poor Gabriel, and have come to gloat over his fate? I disliked the man, but I did not dislike him as much as that—and if I had decided to murder him, I certainly would not have revisited the scene of my crime in this reckless fashion. A showman I might be, a madman never.” He turned back to the screen, and looked again at the deadly flowers, which were still displayed there in intimate close-up.
Charlotte did not want to be put off. “As it happens,” she said, “we would have shown all this material to you anyway. We need an expert report on the nature and potential of the organism, and I was given two possible names. I couldn’t get through to Walter Czastka. I was trying to call you at your hotel while you were on the way over here.”
“I’m offended by the fact that you tried Walter first,” Oscar murmured, “but I forgive you.”
“Mr. Wilde.…” she began, feeling that her patience was being tested too far.
“Yes, of course,” he said. “This is a serious matter—a murder investigation. I think I can hazard a guess as to why the summons was sent. I suspect that I was brought here to identify the murderer.”
“How?” she demanded.
“By his style,” he replied.
“That’s ridiculous!” she said, petulantly. “If the murderer had wanted to identify himself, all he had to do was call us. How would he know that you could recognize his work—and why, if he knew it, would he want you to do it?”
“Those are interesting questions,” admitted Oscar. “Nevertheless, I can only suppose that I was sent an invitation to this mysterious event in order that I might play a part in its unraveling.” He paused, and looked at her reproachfully, radiating injured innocence. “You really do suspect that I’m responsible for this, don’t you?” he said.
“If not you,” she countered, “then who?”
He opened his arms wide in a gesture of exaggerated helplessness. “I cannot claim to be absolutely certain,” he said, “but if appearances and my expert judgment are to be trusted, these flowers are the work of the man who has always been known to me as Rappaccini!”
2
Charlotte called Hal Watson. “Oscar Wilde’s here,” she said, making an effort to be businesslike. “Can you trace the call that was made to his hotel room asking him to come? He says the flowers might have been made by a man named Rappaccini.”
“Of course,” Oscar added, with annoying casualness, “Rappaccini is not his real name. Some long-standing members of the Institute of Genetic Art still prefer to exhibit their work pseudonymously—a hangover from the days of prejudice.”
“Are you one of them?” she asked.
Oscar shook his head. “I am fortunate enough to have a real name that sounds like a pseudonym—my identity thus becomes a kind of double bluff.”
“Perhaps,” she said, “your identification of Rappaccini as the man who made the flowers is also a double bluff.”
Oscar shook his head. “I fear that I have an ironclad alibi. Three days ago I was in the hospital, and the flesh of my outer tissues was unbecomingly fluid. I had been there for some time.”
“That doesn’t prove anything,” Charlotte pointed out. “You might have made the seeds months ago, and made sure that they were delivered—or began to take effect—while you were in the hospital.”
“I suppose I might have,” said Oscar, wearily, “but I assure you that your investigation will proceed more smoothly if you forget about me and concentrate on Rappaccini.”
“Why should a man take the trouble to summon someone capable of identifying him to the scene of the crime?” she asked, with a trace of asperity. “Why didn’t he simply leave his calling card?”
“Why didn’t he simply shoot Gabriel King with a revolver?” countered the geneticist. “Why go to the effort of designing and making this fabulous plant? There is something very strange going on here, dear Charlotte.”
There certainly is, she thought, staring at him, as if by effort she could penetrate the lovely mask to see the secret self within. Oscar, seemingly unalarmed by her scrutiny, began to play with the keys that controlled the camera in the apartment. He zoomed in on something which lay on the glass-topped table: It was a small cardboard rectangle. It had been lacquered over as a safety-measure, but it was still possible to read what was written on it. The words were in French, but Oscar effortlessly read out what Charlotte took to be a translation.
“‘Stupidity, error, sin and poverty of spirit,’” he said, “‘possess our hearts and work within our bodies, and we nourish our fond remorse as beggars suckle their own parasites.’ Perhaps the murderer did leave his calling card, Inspector Holmes. A man like Gabriel King would hardly have a note of such lines as those.”
“Do you recognize them?” asked Charlotte.
“A poem by Baudelaire. Au lecteur—that is, ‘To the Reader.’ From Les Fleurs du Mal. A play on words, I think.”
Charlotte’s audio-link to Hal Watson was still open. “Did you catch that, Hal?” she asked.
“I checked the words already,” Hal replied. “He’s right.”
Charlotte wondered how many men there were in the world who could recognize seven-hundred-year-old poems written in French. Surely, she thought, Oscar Wilde must be the person behind all this. But if so, what monstrous game was he playing?
“What significance do you attach to the card?” she asked him, sharply.
“If my earlier reasoning was correct, it must be a message directed to me,” replied Oscar. “All this is communication—not merely the card, and the message which summoned me, but the flowers, and the crime itself. The whole affair is to be read, and hence understood. I am here because Rappaccini expects me to be able to interpret and comprehend what he is doing.”
Charlotte tried to remain impassive, but she knew that her amazement was showing. She was grateful when the phone in her hand crackled.
“I’m blocked on Rappaccini for the moment,” said Hal. “His real name is recorded as Jafri Biasiolo, but there’s hardly any official data on Biasiolo at all beyond his birth-date, way back in 2420. It’s old data, of course, and may be just a sketchy construction of disinformation.”
Old data tended to be incomplete, often corrupted by all kinds of errors—although she noticed that Hal had said “disinformation,” which meant lies, rather than “misinformation.” In Hal’s view, old data was senile data, too decrepit to be of much use in a slick modern police inquiry. But Gabriel King had been nearly a hundred and fifty years old, and Oscar Wilde—in spite of appearances—must be well over a hundred. If Rappaccini really had been born in 2420, the motive for this affair might go all the way back to the final years of the Aftermath. The Net had been of holes in those days.
“What about the call which summoned Wilde here?” she asked.
“Placed three days ago from a blind unit, time-triggered to arrive when it did. I’ve got nowhere with the woman yet. No picture-match, no route to or from the apartment-house. This is going to take longer than I had hoped.”
Charlotte digested this information. She was not unduly surprised by the news that the real person behind “Rappaccini” might be difficult to identify. It was easy enough nowadays to establish electronic identities whose telescreen appearances could be maintained and controlled by AI simulacra. Virtual individuals could play so full a role in modern society that their real puppet-masters could easily remain hidden—until they came under the scrutiny of a highly skilled investigator. Hal could
get through any conventional information-wall, and work his way through any data-maze, but it would take time. She had a gut feeling that told her that the creator of “Rappaccini” was right in front of her, taunting her with his presence, but she didn’t dare say so to Hal. He was no respecter of gut feelings.
“Can you patch the security tape through to the wallscreen here?” she said. “I’d like Mr. Wilde to see it. He seems to know everything else—perhaps he can tell us who the woman is.”
“Ah,” said Oscar, softly. “Cherchez la femme! Without a woman the crime could not be deemed complete!”
“Hal Watson’s a top cracksman,” Charlotte told him, trying to shake his casual composure. “He can get into all the little electronic backwaters, all the locked-up mines of information. It’s impossible to hide anything from him. It’s only a matter of time before we get to the bottom of this.”
Wilde did not seem in the least intimidated. “I’m delighted to find the two of you working in partnership,” he said. “It demonstrates that even the higher echelons of the International Bureau of Investigation are home to a sense of humor and a sense of tradition.”
He was trying to be clever again, but this time she knew what he meant. Everyone made jokes about it.
On the biggest of the display screens on the far wall there appeared an image of the corridor outside the apartment. The tape had already been edited; no sooner had it started than a young woman came into view, reaching out to activate the doorchime. Her lustrous brown hair was worn unfashionably long. She had clear blue eyes and finely-chiseled features. Even in this day and age, when cosmetic engineers could so easily remold superficial flesh, her beauty was striking. It was not merely the shape of her face, but the undefinable presence which she brought to it. Charlotte could not quite make up her mind whether she was authentically young, or whether she was a successful product of rejuvenative engineering, whose perfection of manner arose from long and careful practice. The woman stepped forward as the door opened, and passed beneath the eye.
The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994 Page 92
