The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  7

  Charlotte winced as the car lurched slightly, throwing her sideways. They had left the superhighway and were climbing into the hills along roads which did not seem to have been properly maintained. This had been a densely populated region in the distant past, but California had suffered several plague attacks in the Second Biotech War, and rural areas like this one had been so badly hit as to cause a mass exodus of refugees. Most of those who had survived had never returned, preferring to relocate to more promising land. Three quarters of the original ghost towns of the Sierra Nevada were ghost towns still, even after three hundred years. The car had not been designed for climbing mountains and it had slowed considerably when it first began to follow the winding road up into the foothills of the mountain range. It was picking up speed again now. Charlotte called up a map of the region on to the car’s wallscreen, but it was stubbornly unhelpful in the matter of providing clues as to where they might be going or why.

  “The region up ahead is real wasteland,” she told Oscar. “Nobody lives there. Nothing grows except lichens and the odd stalk of grass. The names on the map are just distant memories.”

  “Something must be up there,” Oscar said, shifting uncomfortably as the car took another corner. “Rappaccini wouldn’t bring us up here if there were nothing to see.”

  Charlotte wiped the map from the screen, and replaced it with a list which Hal had beamed through to her. There were twenty-seven names on it: the names of all the surviving men and women who had attended the University of Wollongong while Gabriel King, Michi Urashima, and Walter Czastka had been students there. The names, that is, of all the supposed survivors; Hal’s patient AIs had so far only managed to obtain positive confirmation of the continued existence of twenty-three. The business of trying to contact them all was proving uncommonly difficult; they all had high-grade sims to answer their phones, and most of the sims had been programmed for maximum unhelpfulness. IBI priority codes were empowered to demand maximum co-operation from every AI in the world, but no AI could do more than its programming permitted.

  “These people are crazy!” she complained.

  “They’re all old,” Oscar pointed out. “Every single one of them is a double rejuvenate. They were born during the Aftermath, when the climate was still disturbed, the detritus of the plague wars hadn’t yet finished claiming casualties, the Net was still highly vulnerable to software sabotage, and cool fusion and artificial photosynthesis were brand new. All of them were conceived by living mothers, and I doubt if one in five was carried to term in an artificial womb. They’re strangers in today’s world, and many of them don’t have any sense of belonging any more. Half of them have nothing left to desire except to die in peace, and more than half—as your associates must have found out in trying to cross-examine them—have no memory at all of the long-gone years they spent at the University of Wollongong.”

  She looked at him curiously. “But you’re not much younger than they are,” she said, “and you’re a triple rejuvenate. You obviously don’t feel like that.”

  “The fact that I do not,” he said, drily, “is the greatest proof of my genius. I am a very unusual individual—as unusual, in my way, as Rappaccini.”

  Charlotte’s waistphone buzzed, and she lifted it from its holster reflexively.

  “You can take Paul Kwiatek off your list,” Hal’s voice said, dully. “They just found him dead. Same method, same visitor.”

  Oscar leaned over to speak into the mouthpiece. “Who’s dead?” he asked Hal.

  “Paul Kwiatek. Another Wollongong graduate, born 2401.”

  Charlotte snatched up the phone again. Determined to be businesslike, she said: “Where?”

  “Bologna, Italy.”

  “Bologna! But … when?”

  “Some time last week. It looks as though he was killed before King. The woman probably flew to New York on an intercontinental flight from Rome. I’ll try to figure out where she was before that—there might be other bodies we haven’t found yet. We’re stepping up our attempts to contact and question the others on the list, but I don’t know how to work out which of them are potential victims, let alone potential murderers.”

  “Czastka knows something,” said Charlotte. “He might be the key.”

  “We’ve just talked to him,” Hal said, in his infuriating fashion. “He denies knowing anything at all that would connect him with King, Urashima and Kwiatek, and he denies having received the equipment and supplies paid for by the Rappaccini accounts. So far, there’s no proof that he’s lying. We’re worried about another name on the Wollongong list—Magnus Teidemann. He’s supposed to be out in the wilderness somewhere in mid-Africa, but he’s been ominously silent for some time. If he’s dead, it could take us a week to find the body. I’ve ordered a search. That’s all for now.” He broke the connection, without waiting for Charlotte to respond.

  Charlotte had already recalled the list, and had begun tracing a path through the back-up information. “Paul Kwiatek,” she said to Oscar. “Software engineer. Should I call up a more detailed biog, or do you know him?”

  “No,” said Oscar, “but I know Teidemann by repute. He was a major force in the UN a hundred years ago, one of the inner circle of worldplanners. Gabriel King probably knew him personally. The unfolding network of cross-connections is going to deluge your friend’s AIs with data. There’s too much of it to sort out and unravel, unless we can somehow cut the Gordian knot at a stroke.”

  “It doesn’t work like that,” she told him, although she wasn’t entirely convinced. “The machines are so fast that a profusion of data doesn’t trouble them. The real problem is the age of the data. If the motive for the murders really does go back a hundred and fifty years … but if it does, why wait until now to carry them out? Why murder men who are already on the threshold of extinction?”

  “Why indeed?” echoed Oscar Wilde.

  “It’s insane,” Charlotte opined, being unable to see any other explanation. “It’s some weird obsession.” Such things were not unheard of, even in these days of chemical retuning and biofeedback training. The brain was no longer the great mystery it once had been, but it kept stubborn and jealous guard over many of its secrets.

  “Obsession might sustain memories which would otherwise fade away,” Oscar admitted. “If there were no obsession involved, no murderer could nurse a plan as elaborate as this for as long as Rappaccini must have nursed it.”

  Charlotte returned to her contemplation of the list displayed on the screen. Apart from Teidemann’s, none of the names meant anything at all to her. Only a handful were listed as genetic engineers of any kind, and none seemed to have the right kind of background to be Rappaccini—except, of course, for Walter Czastka. As she scanned the subsidiary list of addresses, her eye was caught by the word “Kauai.” She stopped scrolling. One Stuart McCandless, ex-Chancellor of the University of Oceania, had retired to Kauai. She was tempted to call Hal and trumpet her discovery, but she knew what his response would be. His AIs would have turned up the coincidence; investigation of the data-trail would be in hand. She wished, briefly, that she were back in New York. There, at least, she would be involved in the routine pursuit of inquiries, making calls. What was she accomplishing out here, in the middle of nowhere?

  She glanced out of the side-window as the car swung slowly and carefully around a bend into one of the ghost-towns whose names were still recorded on the map in spite of the fact that no one had lived in them for centuries. The ancient stone buildings had been weathered by dust-storms, but they still retained the sharp angles which proudly proclaimed their status as human artifacts. The land around them was quite dead, incapable of growing so much as a blade of grass, and every bit as desolate as an unspoiled lunar landscape, but the shadowy scars of human habitation still lay upon it.

  In the long-gone days when the earth had lain temporarily unprotected by an ozone layer, this would have been a naked place. Even then, it would probably have been almost empty
; this part of the state, within a couple of hundred kilometers of Los Angeles, had been very hard hit even by the first and least of the three plague wars—whose victims, not knowing that there was far worse to come, had innocently called it the Great Plague War.

  8

  The wallscreen blanked out. While Charlotte was still wondering what the interruption signified, the car’s AI relayed a message in large, flamboyant letters: WELCOME, OSCAR: THE PLAY WILL COMMENCE IN TEN MINUTES. THE PLAYHOUSE IS BENEATH THE BUILDING TO YOUR RIGHT.

  “Play?” said Charlotte, bitterly. “Have we come all this way just to watch a play?”

  “It appears so,” said Oscar, as he opened the door and climbed out into the sultry heat of the deepening evening. “Do you carry transmitter-eyes and bubblebugs in that belt you’re wearing?”

  “Of course,” she said.

  “I suggest that you place a few about your person,” said Oscar. “I have only the one bubblebug of my own, which I shall mount on my forehead.”

  Charlotte turned to stare at the building to their right. It did not look in the least like a theater. It might once have been a general store. It was roofless now, nothing more than a gutted shell.

  “Why bring us out here to the middle of nowhere?” she demanded, angrily. “Why didn’t he just record it on tape for transmission in a theater in San Francisco or New York?” As she spoke, she planted two electronic eyes above her own eyebrows.

  Oscar quickly located a downward-leading flight of stone steps inside the derelict building. Charlotte planted head-high nanolights every six or seven steps to illuminate their passage, which had been hollowed out using bacterial deconstructors far more modern than the building itself. By the time they reached the bottom of the stair, there were several meters of solid rock separating her from the car; she knew that her transmitter-eye would only function as a recording-device. At the bottom, there was a door made from some kind of synthetic organic material; it had no handle, but when Oscar touched it with his fingertips, it swung inward. “All doors in the world of theater are open to Oscar Wilde,” he muttered sarcastically.

  Beyond the doorway was a well of impenetrable shadow. Charlotte automatically reached up to the wall inside the doorway, placing another nanolight there, but the darkness seemed to soak up its luminance effortlessly, and it showed her nothing but a few square centimeters of matte-black wall. The moment Oscar took a tentative step forward, however, a small spotlight winked on, picking out a two-seater sofa upholstered in black.

  “Very considerate,” said Oscar, drily. He invited her to move ahead of him, and she did. Five seconds after they were seated, the spotlight winked out. Charlotte could not suppress a small gasp of alarm. The nanolight she had set beside the door shone like a single distant star in an infinite void.

  When light returned, it was cleverly directed away from them; Charlotte could not see Oscar, nor her own body. It was as if she had become a disembodied viewpoint, like a bubblebug, looking out upon a world from which her physical presence had been erased. She seemed to be ten or twelve meters away from the event which unfolded before her eyes, but the distance was illusory. Cinematic holograms of the kind to which Michi Urashima had devoted his skills before turning to more dangerous toys were adept in the seductive art of sensory deception.

  The “event” was a solo dance. The performer was a young woman, whose face was made up to duplicate the appearance that the image’s living model had presented to Michi Urashima’s spy-eyes. Only her hair and costume were different; the hair was now long, straight and jet-black, and she was dressed in sleek, translucent chiffons which were gathered in multicolored profusion about her lissome form, secured at strategic points by gem-faced catches. The music to which she danced, lithely and lasciviously, was raw and primitive. Charlotte knew by now that the original Oscar Wilde had written a play called Salomé. Forearmed by that knowledge, she quickly guessed what she was to watch.

  As the virtual Salomé began the dance of the seven veils, the first impression Charlotte formed was that the dance was utterly artless. Modern dance, with all the artifice of contemporary biotechnology as a resource, was infinitely smoother and more complicated than this—but she judged that its primitive quality was deliberate. In the nineteenth century, Charlotte knew, there had been something called “pornography.” Nowadays, in a world where most sexual intercourse took place in virtual reality, with the aid of clever machinery, the idea of pornography was redundant; everyone now accepted that in the realm of mechanized fantasy, nothing was perverse and nothing was taboo. Charlotte thought she understood, dimly, the historical implications of Salomé’s silly prancing, but she found it neither stimulating nor instructive. The gradual removal of the veils was simply a laborious way of counting down to a climax she was already expecting. She waited for Salomé to acquire a mute partner for her mesmerized capering.

  The dancer did look as if she were mesmerized. She looked as if she were lost in some kind of dream, not really aware of who she was or what she was doing. Charlotte remembered that the young woman had given a similar impression during the brief glimpse of her that Gabriel King’s cameras had caught. The dance slowed, and finally stopped. Salomé stood with bowed head for a few moments, and then reached out into the shadows that crowded around her, and brought out of the darkness a silver platter, on which sat the decapitated head of a man. Charlotte was not surprised, but she still flinched. The virtual head looked more startlingly real than a real head would probably have done, by virtue of the artistry which had gone into the design of its horror-stricken expression and the bloodiness of the crudely severed neck. She recognized the face which the virtual head wore: it was Gabriel King’s.

  The dancer plucked the head from its resting-place, entwining her delicate fingers in its hair. The salver disappeared, dissolved into the shadow. The dance began again.

  How differently, Charlotte wondered, was Oscar Wilde seeing this ridiculous scene? Could he see it as something daring, monstrous and clever? Would he be able to sigh with satisfaction, in that irritating way of his, when the performance was over, and claim that Rappaccini was indeed a genius?

  The macabre dance now seemed mechanical. The woman appeared to be unaware of the fact that she was supposedly brandishing a severed head. She moved its face close to her own, and then extended her arms again, maintaining the same distant and dreamy expression. Then the features of the severed head changed. It acquired an Oriental cast. Charlotte recognized Michi Urashima, and suddenly became interested again, eager for any hint of further change. She fixed her gaze steadfastly upon the horrid head. She had seen no picture of Paul Kwiatek, so she could only infer that the third appearance presented by the severed head was his, and she became even more intent when the third set of features blurred and shifted. The number and nature of the metamorphoses might well be crucial to the development of the investigation. She felt a surge of triumph as she realized that this revelation might vindicate her determination to stay with Oscar Wilde. She did not recognize the fourth face, but she was confident that the bubblebug set above her right eye would record it well enough for computer-aided recognition. How many more would there be?

  The fifth face was darker than the fourth—naturally dark, she thought, not cosmetically melanized. She did not recognize this face, either, but she knew the sixth. She had seen it within the last few hours, looking considerably older and more ragged than its manifestation here, but unmistakably the same. It was Walter Czastka.

  There was no seventh face. Salomé slowed in her paces, faced the sofa where Oscar and Charlotte sat watching, and took her bow. Then the lights came on. Charlotte had assumed that the performance was over, and its object attained, but she was wrong. What she had so far witnessed was merely a prelude. The lights that came on brought a new illusion, infinitely more spectacular than the last.

  Charlotte had attended numerous theatrical displays employing clever holographic techniques, and knew well enough how a black-walled space which com
prised no more than a few hundred cubic meters could be made to seem far greater, but she had never seen a virtual space as vast and as ornate as this. Here was the palace in which Salomé had danced, painted by a phantasmagoric imagination: a crazily vaulted ceiling higher than that in any reconstructed medieval cathedral, with elaborate stained-glass windows in mad profusion, offering all manner of fantastic scenes. Here was a polished floor three times the size of a sports-field, with a crowd of onlookers that must have numbered tens of thousands. But there was no sense of this being an actual place: it was an edifice born of nightmarish dreams, whose awesome and impossible dimensions weighed down upon a mere observer, reducing Charlotte in her own mind’s eye to horrific insignificance.

  Salomé, having bowed to the two watchers who had watched her dance at closer range than any of the fictitious multitude, turned to bow to another watcher: Herod, seated upon his throne. There had never been a throne like it in the entire history of empires and kingdoms; none but the most vainglorious of emperors could even have imagined it. It was huge and golden, hideously overburdened with silks and jewels, an appalling monstrosity of avaricious self-indulgence. It was, Charlotte knew, intended to appall. All of this was a calculated insult to the delicacy of effective illusion: a parody of grandiosity; an exercise in profusion for profusion’s sake.

  The king on the throne had drawn himself three times life-size, as a bloated, overdressed grotesque. The body was like nothing any longer to be seen in a world which had banished obesity four hundred years before, but the face, had it only been leaner, would have been the face which Rappaccini wore in the photographs that Hal Watson had shown her the day before. Oscar took her wrist in his hand and squeezed it. “Tread carefully,” he whispered, his invisible lips no more than a centimeter from her ear. “This simulation may be programmed to tell us everything, if only we can question it cunningly enough.”