The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “This crime,” said Charlotte, as soon as she felt the time was ripe for talk of business, “is the work of a very remarkable mind.”

  “Very,” Oscar agreed. “I have, of course, a very remarkable mind myself, but genius is always unique. I wear my genius openly, and can barely understand the temperament that would hide away an entire life behind a series of electronic masks, but the man who has invented Rappaccini is clearly a dissimulator. I suspect that this crime has been planned for a very long time. The fictitious Rappaccini might have been invented with this murder in mind, and every detail of him has been tailored to its requirements. Absurd as it may seem, I cannot help but wonder whether my involvement as a witness was planned along with the crime.”

  Charlotte studied his face soberly. She wondered whether he had designed his own features. It was rare to see such flamboyant femininity in the lines of a male’s face, but she had to admit that it suited him.

  “What was your impression of the man who posed as Rappaccini?” she asked.

  “I liked him. He had an admirable hauteur—as if he considered himself a more profound person by far than the other exhibitors at the Great Exhibition. He was a man of civilized taste and conversation. He appeared to like me, and we shared a taste for all things antiquarian—particularly relics of the nineteenth century, to which we were both linked by our names.”

  “Do you remember anything useful?” asked Chasrlotte, with some slight impatience. “Anything which might help us to identify the man behind the name.”

  “I fear not. We never became friends. We were both solitary workers, deeply interested in the purely aesthetic aspects of our work. One could not say that of all the exhibitors at Sydney, or even of the majority. Walter Czastka is more typical—he has always worked with an army of apprentices, far more interested in industry than art.”

  “You don’t seem to like Walter Czastka,” she observed.

  Oscar hesitated briefly before replying. “I don’t dislike Walter,” he said, “although I find him rather dull. He’s an able man, in his way, but a hack. Whereas I aspire to perfection in my work, he aims to be prolific. He certainly has Creationist ambitions—he has taken out a lease on a small island in the Pacific, just as I have—but I can’t imagine what he is doing with it.”

  “Walter Czastka knew Gabriel King very well,” Charlotte observed, having scanned several pages of data copied to her by Hal Watson while they ate. “They were both born in 2401, and they attended the same university. Czastka has done a great deal of work for King’s companies—far more than you. Most murders, you know, involve people who know one another well.”

  “Walter has not sufficient imagination to have committed this crime,” said Oscar, firmly, “even if he had a motive. I doubt that he did; he and Gabriel are—or were—cats of a similar stripe.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean that they were both hacks. A modern architect, working with thousands of subspecies of gantzing bacteria, can raise buildings out of almost any materials, shaped to almost any design. The integration of pseudo-living systems to provide water and other amenities adds a further dimension of creative opportunity. A true artist could make buildings that would stand forever as monuments to contemporary creativity, but Gabriel King’s main interest was always in productivity—razing whole towns to the ground and re-erecting them with the least possible effort. His business was the mass-production of third-rate homes for second-rate people.”

  “I thought the whole point of bacterial cementation processes is that they facilitate the provision of decent homes for the very poor,” said Charlotte.

  “That is the utilitarian view,” agreed Oscar. “But it is two hundred years out of date. Future generations will look back at ours with pity for the recklessness with which we have wasted our aesthetic opportunities. One day, the building of a home will be part of a person’s cultivation of his own personality. Making a home will be one of the things every man is expected to do for himself, and there will be no more Gabriel King houses with Walter Czastka sub-systems.”

  “We can’t all be Creationists,” objected Charlotte.

  “Oh, but we can,” retorted Oscar. “We can all be everything we want to be, or we should at least make every effort to do so. Even men like me, who were born when rejuvenation technology was still in its infancy, should do their utmost to believe that the specter of death is impotent to set a limit upon our achievements. The children of tomorrow will surely live for centuries if only they have the will to do so. You and I, Charlotte, must be prepared to set them a good example. The men of the past had an excuse for all their failures—that man born of woman had but a short time to live, and full of misery—but only cowardice inhibits us now. There is no excuse for any man who fails to be a true artist, and declines to take full responsibility for both his mind and his environment. Too many of us still aim for mediocrity, and are content with its achievement. You don’t intend to be a policewoman all your life, I hope?”

  Charlotte was slightly discomfited by this question. “I’m continuing my education,” she said. “My options are still open.” Her waistphone began to buzz. She plucked it from its holster and accepted the call. She held it close to her ear so that Oscar would not be able to eavesdrop, assuming that Hal had ferreted out some further morsel of information about Rappaccini. What he actually had to say was rather more disturbing. When she had replaced the phone, she looked at her companion, trying to control the bleakness of her expression.

  “Do you know a man named Michi Urashima?” she asked, as blandly as she could.

  “Of course I do,” said Oscar. “I hope you aren’t going to tell me that he’s dead. He was a better man by far than Gabriel King.”

  “Not everyone would agree with you,” she said, shortly. Urashima was an expert in computer graphics and image-simulation, famed for the contributions to synthetic cinema he had made before becoming involved in outlawed brainfeed research—which had led to a much-publicized fall from grace.

  “How was he killed?” Oscar asked, sadly. “The same method?”

  “Yes,” she said, tersely. “In San Francisco. There’s no need for you to take the maglev now.”

  “On the contrary,” he said. “There is every reason. This affair is still in its early stages, and if we want to witness the further stages of its unfolding, we must follow the script laid down for us. You will come with me, I hope?”

  “Scene-of-crime officers don’t operate nationwide,” she said. “Police work isn’t done that way in this day and age.” She knew even as she said it, though, that she still wanted—and still intended—to cling to her suspect.

  “Police work may not be,” he replied, with an infuriating wave of his hand, “but psychodrama is. The mystery in this, my dear Charlotte, is not who has done it, but why. I am the man appointed by the murderer himself to the task of following the thread of explanation to the heart of the maze. If you want to understand the crime as well as solving it, you must come with me.”

  “All right,” she said, hypocritically. “You’ve convinced me. I’ll stick with you till the bitter end.”

  5

  Charlotte rose earlier than was her habit; the maglev couchette was not the kind of bed which encouraged one to sleep in. She called Hal to get an update on the investigation, then wandered along to the dining car to dial up some croissants, coffee, and pills. It was a pity, she thought, that there was no quicker way than the maglev to travel between New York and San Francisco. She had an uncomfortable feeling that she might end up chasing a daisy-chain of murders all around the globe, always twenty-four hours behind the breaking news. But the maglev was the fastest form of transportation within the bounds of United America since the last supersonic jet had flown four centuries before. The power-crises of the Aftermath were ancient history now, but the inland airways were so cluttered with private flitterbugs and helicopters, and the green zealots so avid in their crusades against large areas of concrete, tha
t commercial aviation had never really gotten going again. Even intercontinental travelers tended to prefer the plush comfort of airships to the hectic pace of supersonics. Electronic communication had so completely taken over the lifestyles and folkways of modern man that most business was conducted via comcon.

  By the time Charlotte had finished her breakfast, the train was only four hours out of San Francisco. Oscar joined her then, looking neat and trim although the green carnation in his buttonhole was now rather bedraggled. “Such has been the mercy of our timetable,” he observed, “that we have slept through Missouri and Kansas.”

  She knew what he meant. Missouri and Kansas were distinctly lacking in interesting scenery since the re-stabilization of the climate had made their great plains prime sites for the establishment of vast tracts of artificial photosynthetics. Nowadays, the greater part of the Midwest looked rather like sections of an infinite undulating sheet of a dull near-black violet which offended unpracticed eyes. The SAP-fields of Kansas always gave Charlotte the impression of looking at a gigantic piece of frilly corrugated cardboard. Houses and factories alike had retreated beneath the dark canopy, and parts of the landscape were almost featureless. By now, though, the maglev passengers had the more elevating scenery of Colorado to look out upon. Most of the state had been returned to wilderness, and its centers of population had taken advantage of the versatility of modern building techniques to blend in with their surroundings. Chlorophyll green was infinitely easier on the human eye than SAP-violet, presumably because millions of years of adaptive natural selection had helped to make it so.

  While Oscar ordered eggs duchesse for breakfast, Charlotte activated the wallscreen beside their table and called up the latest news. The fact of Gabriel King’s death was recorded, but there was nothing as yet about the exotic circumstances. The IBI never liked to advertise crimes until they were solved, but the exotic circumstances of King’s death would make it a hot topic of gossip, and she knew that it was only a matter of time before bootleg copies of the security tapes leaked out.

  “My dear Charlotte,” said Oscar, “you have the unmistakable look of one who woke too early and has been working too hard.”

  “I couldn’t sleep,” she told him. “I took a couple of boosters with breakfast. They’ll clear my head soon enough.”

  Oscar shook his head. “No one who looks twenty when he is really a hundred and thirty-three can possibly be less than worshipful of the wonders of medical science,” he said, “but, in my experience, the use of it to maintain one’s sense of equilibrium is a false economy. We must have sleep in order to dream, and we must dream in order to discharge the chaos from our thoughts, so that we may reason effectively while we are awake. Now, what about the second murder? Any progress?”

  She frowned. She was supposed to be the one asking the questions. “Did you know Urashima personally, or just by reputation?” she countered, determined not to let him get the upper hand.

  “We met on several occasions,” said Oscar, equably. “He was an artist, like myself. I respected his work. Although I didn’t know him well, I would have been glad to count him a friend.”

  “He’d been inactive of late,” she said, watching her suspect closely. “He hadn’t worked commercially since his conviction for illegal experimentation thirteen years ago. He served four years house arrest and control of communication. He was probably still experimenting, though, and he may well have been engaged in illegal activities.”

  “His imprisonment was an absurd sentence for an absurd crime,” Oscar opined. “He placed no one in danger but himself.”

  “He was playing about with brainfeed equipment,” she said. “Not just memory boxes or neural stimulators, but mental cyborgization. And he didn’t just endanger himself; he was pooling information with others.”

  “Of course he was,” said Oscar. “What on earth is the point of hazardous exploration unless one makes every effort to pass on the legacy of one’s discoveries?”

  “Have you ever experimented with that sort of stuff?” Charlotte asked, vaguely. Like everyone else, she bandied about phrases like “psychedelic synthesizer” and “memory box,” but she had little or no idea of the way such legendary devices were supposed to work. Ever since the first development of artificial synapses capable of linking up human nervous systems to silicon-based electronic systems, numerous schemes for hooking up the brain to computers had been devised, but almost all the experiments had gone disastrously wrong, often ending up with badly brain-damaged subjects. The brain was the most complex and sensitive of all organs, and disruption of brain-function was the one kind of disorder that twenty-sixth century medical science was impotent to correct. The UN had forced a world-wide ban on devices for connecting brains directly to electronic apparatus, for whatever purpose, but the main effect of the ban had been to drive research underground. Even an expert fisherman like Hal Watson would not have found it easy to figure out what sort of work might be going on, where, and why.

  “You’ve just heard me express my dislike of everyday chemical boosters,” Oscar pointed out. “There is nothing I value more than my genius, and I would never knowingly risk my clarity and agility of mind. That does not mean that I disapprove of what Michi Urashima did. He was not an infant, in need of protection from himself. His perennial fascination was the simulation of experience, and for him, the building of better visual images was only a beginning. He wanted to allow his audience to live in his illusions, not merely to stand outside and watch. If we are ever to make a proper interface between natural and artificial intelligence, we will need the genius of men like Michi. Now, have you anything to tell me about his death which may help to unravel the puzzle which confronts us?”

  “Perhaps,” she said, grudgingly. “Did you know that Michi Urashima was at college with Gabriel King—and, for that matter, with Walter Czastka?” She permitted herself a slight smile of satisfaction when Oscar raised an interested eyebrow.

  “I did not,” he said. “Was Rappaccini, perhaps, also at this particular institution of learning? Has he been harboring some secret grudge for a hundred and thirty years? Where was this remarkable college, where so many of our great men first met?”

  “Wollongong, in Australia.”

  “Wollongong!” he exclaimed, in mock horror. “If only it were Oxford, or the Sorbonne, or even Sapporo … but it is an interesting coincidence.”

  Charlotte regarded him speculatively. “Hal transmitted a copy of the scene-of-crime tape,” she said. “Urashima’s last visitor was a woman. She’d changed her appearance quite considerably, but we’re pretty sure that she’s the same one who visited Gabriel King.”

  Oscar nodded. “Rappaccini’s daughter,” he said. “I expected it.”

  “The main thrust of Hal’s investigation is to identify and track the woman,” Charlotte went on. “He’s set up programs to monitor every security camera in San Francisco. If she’s already gone, we might still be able to pick up her trail. The problem is that she left Urashima’s house more than three days ago; if she moved fast, she may have delivered more packages in the interim.”

  “We must certainly assume that she did,” Oscar agreed. “Did she leave another calling card, by any chance?”

  “Not this time. But she kissed Michi Urashima, exactly as she kissed Gabriel King.” She had decanted the tape on to a disc, so she only had to slot it in. Like the tape she had displayed for Oscar outside Gabriel King’s apartment, it had been carefully edited from the various spy-eyes and bubblebugs that had been witness to Michi Urashima’s murder.

  The similarity between the two records was almost eerie. The woman’s hair was silvery blonde now, but still abundant. It was arranged in a precipitate cataract of curls. The eyes were the same electric blue but the cast of the features had been altered subtly, making her face thinner and apparently deeper. The changes were sufficient to deceive a standard picture-search program, but because Charlotte knew that it was the same woman, she could see that it was
the same woman. There was something in the way her eyes looked steadily forward, something in her calm poise that made her seem remote, not quite in contact with the world through which she moved. She was wearing a dark blue costume now, which hung loose about her seemingly fragile frame. It was the kind of outfit which would not attract much attention in the street. As before, the woman said nothing, but moved naturally into a friendly kiss of greeting before preceding her victim into an inner room beyond the reach of conventional security cameras. Her departure was similarly recorded by the spy-eye. She seemed perfectly composed and serene.

  There were more pictures to follow, showing the state of Urashima’s corpse as it had eventually been discovered. There were long, lingering close-ups of the fatal flowers. The camera’s eye moved into a black corolla as if it was venturing into the interior of a great greedy mouth, hovering around the crux ansata tip of the blood-red style like a moth fascinated by a flame. There was, of course, a sterile film covering the organism, but it was quite transparent; its presence merely served to give the black petals a weird sheen, adding to their supernatural quality.

  Charlotte let the tape run through without comment, then flipped the switch. “The flowers aren’t genetically identical to the ones used to kill King. Our lab people think that the germination of the seeds may have been keyed to some trigger unique to the victim’s genotype—that each species was designed to kill a specific victim, while being harmless to everyone else. That would explain how the girl can carry the seeds around. She traveled to San Francisco on a scheduled maglev. The card she used to buy the ticket connects to a credit account held in the name of Jeanne Duval. It’s a dummy account, of course. She didn’t use the Duval account to reach New York, and she’ll presumably use another to leave San Francisco.”

  “You might set the search programs you’re using to find her to pick up the names Daubrun and Sabatier,” Oscar advised. “Jeanne Duval was one of Baudelaire’s mistresses, and it’s possible she has the others on her list of noms de guerre.”