The Best of Both Worlds and Other Ambiguous Tales

by Brian Stableford

  “I find that difficult to believe,” Victory observed, sarcastically.

  “The reason he makes so much work for other idle hands,” Monsignor Torricelli said sadly, “is that his own are afflicted with too many obsolete habits. It was his part in the scheme that went wrong, remember, not yours. It’s as dangerous to overestimate him as it is to underestimate him. Don’t do his work for him. Dr. Victory. Don’t give him what he wants. You know that he doesn’t play fair. You know who and what he is, if you’ll only admit it to yourself. You still have a choice in this matter. Use it wisely, I beg of you.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to do,” Victory assured him. “It’s just that my wisdom and your faith don’t see eye to eye.”

  “We’re prepared to give you more than money,” Torricelli said, with the air of one who obliged to play his last card, even though the game had been lost for some considerable time. “You’re an art collector, I believe.”

  “I’m not prepared to be bribed, even with works of art,” Victory said. “I’m an artist myself, and my own creativity comes first.”

  “Human creativity is always secondary to God’s,” Monsignor Torricelli riposted. “I hope you’ll remember that, when the time comes.”

  * * * *

  In the wake of Torricelli’s visit Victory returned to his computer model with renewed zest. There was so much obvious nonsense in what the priest had told him that there was no real reason to believe the assurance that he was only one step short of being able to reproduce—at least on paper—the face of Adam, but Victory had no need of faith to season his curiosity. He felt that he was, indeed, close to that particular goal, and the feeling was enough to lend urgency to his endeavors.

  Part of his problem lay in the fact that the transformative software had to begin with the image of a child only a few weeks old. When Victory used computer imaging to inform a forty-year-old woman what she would look like when he had worked his magic, the new image was constructed on the same finished bone-structure, modifying muscles that were already in their final form, removing superfluous fat and remodeling skin whose flexibility was limited. A baby’s face, by contrast, was as yet unmade. The bones were still soft, the muscles were vulnerable to all manner of influence by use and habit, the minutely-layered fat still had vital metabolic functions to perform, and the overlying skin had a great deal of growing and stretching yet to do.

  Even the best conventional software could only offer the vaguest impression of the adult face that would eventually emerge from infantile innocence, because that emergence was no mere matter of predestined revelation. Integrating the effects of early surgery into conventional software usually made the results even more uncertain—and no matter how ingeniously Victory had labored to overcome these difficulties, he had not been able to set them entirely aside. He had to suppose that, if and when he could produce a perfect duplicate of the comprachicos’ instructions, the surgical modifications specified therein would somehow obliterate the potential variability that infant faces usually had—but every hypothetical alteration he made by way of experiment had the opposite effect, increasing the margin of causation left to chance and circumstance.

  Whatever the missing piece of the puzzle was, if there was indeed only one, it was obviously a piece of magical—perhaps miraculous—subtlety and power.

  There were, in the meantime, other aspects of the comprachicos’ field of expertise that continued to reveal interesting results and applications, but Victory had lost his ability to content himself with petty triumphs. No matter how much nonsense Torricelli had spouted, he had been right to call the project “tantalizing”.

  The five weeks that elapsed between Torricelli’s attempt to bribe him and Gwynplaine’s reappearance were the most tortuous of Victory’s life, and the fact that the torture in question was entirely self-inflicted did not make it any easier to bear.

  This time, Gwynplaine did not bother to telephone for an appointment. He simply turned up one evening, long after Meg had gone home, when Victory was still working at his computer. He was not carrying his briefcase.

  “You’re a very difficult man to find, Mr. Gwynplaine,” Victory observed, as his visitor settled himself into the chair on the far side of his desk.

  “Not according to my detractors,” Gwynplaine observed, as un-smilingly as ever. “According to them, I’m impossible to avoid— urgently present in every malicious impulse and every self-indulgent whim.”

  “Are you telling me that you really are the Devil?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Dr. Victory. There is no Devil. He’s an invention of the Church—an instrument of moral terrorism. Priests have always embraced the defeatist belief that the only way to persuade people to be good is to threaten them with eternal torment. You and I know better than that. We understand that the only worthwhile way to persuade people to be good is to show them the rewards that will flow from virtuous endeavor. There has to be more to hope for than vague promises of bliss beyond death. If anyone’s living proof of that, it’s you.”

  “So who are you, really?” Victory tried, as he said it, to meet Gwynplaine’s disconcerting stare with the kind of detachment that befitted a man who could repair every horror and enhance every beauty, but it wasn’t easy.

  “I was sold as a child,” Gwynplaine said, his eerie voice becoming peculiarly musical again. “Adam’s isn’t the only face the comprachicos tried to reproduce. The society is not yet extinct, no matter what the pope may think—but its members are mere butchers nowadays, while men like you follow other paths.”

  “That was done to you deliberately?”

  “It wasn’t quite the effect they intended to produce.”

  “And before? Were you...like the boy you brought me nine years ago.”

  “No. I was healthy, and fair of face. Angelic, even. I might have become....well, that’s water under the bridge. Even you couldn’t help me now, Dr. Victory. I hope to see the face of Adam before I die, but not in a mirror.”

  In spite of his impatience, Victory could not help asking one more question. “Was Torricelli lying,” he asked, “or did he really believe what he told me?”

  “He believed it,” Gwynplaine told him, his gaze never wavering within his frightful mask. “He still believes it—but he won’t interfere again, because he also believes that the Devil operates on Earth with the permission of God.”

  Victory decided that it was time to get down to business. “Where’s the book?” he demanded.

  “Safe in the custody of its rightful owners,” Gwynplaine told him. “You don’t need it. Nine years of nurturing the seeds I lent you has prepared you for what needs to be done. All you need now is the master key—and a child.”

  Victory shook his head. “No,” he said. “That’s not the way it’s going to be done. Not this time. This time, I get all the information first. This time, I get to see the face on my computer before I make a single cut. No arguments—it’s my way, or not at all. You cheated me once; I won’t trust you again.”

  “If I broke my promise,” Gwynplaine said, “it was for your own good. If I’d succeeded in my part of the project....but that’s more water under the bridge. You’re not the only one who’s been doing things the hard way these last nine years. We’re almost there—but I’d be doing you a grave disservice if I didn’t warn you that you’re in danger. If you’ll condescend to take my advice you’ll leave the program incomplete until you have to use it to guide the robot arm. Don’t attempt to preview the result. No harm can come to you if you work in the flesh of a child and allow me to take him away when you’ve finished—but I can’t protect you if you refuse to take my advice.”

  “And what, exactly, will become of me if I look at the face of Adam on my computer before I attempt to reproduce it in the flesh?”

  “I don’t know. Nobody knows—certainly not Monsignor Torricelli. In contrast to the fanciful claims of legend, the Church has never had the slightest contact with the world of the angels.”r />
  “So your warning is just so much bluster?” Victory said.

  “No. I’m trying to protect my own interests. I don’t want anything unfortunate to happen to you before you repeat the experiment—or afterwards, for that matter.”

  “But you said before that the face of Adam would bring about a religious renaissance—that it would inspire everyone who saw it to forsake sin and seek salvation.”

  “I said nothing of the kind,” Gwynplaine said, equably. “I only said that the comprachicos believed that. You already know that the Church believes otherwise. So do I. I may be privy to the comprachicos’ secrets, but I’m not one of them. I’m their victim and their emissary, but I’m also my own person. For myself, I haven’t the slightest interest in the salvation or damnation of humankind.”

  “So what do you want out of this?”

  “That’s my business. The question is, doctor—what do you want out of it, and what are you prepared to risk in order to get it? I’ve given you the warning that I was duty bound to offer. If you’re prepared to take the risk, having had fair warning, so am I. I can’t give you the book, but I can give you the last piece that’s missing from your painstaking reconstruction of its final secret. If you insist on seeing an image before you attempt to produce the real thing I won’t try again to prevent it. If, after seeing the image, you’re unable to conduct the operation, I’ll simply take the results of all your hard work to California. My advice to you is that you should find a suitable child, and conduct the operation as before, without a preview of the likely result. Take it or leave it—in either case, I intend to proceed.”

  “I’ll leave the advice,” Victory said. “But I’ll take the missing piece of the puzzle.”

  Gwynplaine reached into the inside pocket of his ridiculously unfashionable jacket and produced a folded piece of paper. If he really had been in hell, the inferno was obviously equipped with photocopiers. Victory unfolded the piece of paper and looked at the diagram thus revealed.

  He stared at it for a minute and a half, and then he let out his breath.

  “Of course,” he said. “So simple, so neat—and yet I’d never have found it without the cue. Diabolically ingenious.”

  Gwynplaine didn’t take the trouble to contradict him.

  Gwynplaine sat languidly in the chair, a perfect exhibition of patience, while Victory’s busy fingers flew over the keyboard and clicked the mouse again and again, weaving the final ingredient into the model that would reproduce the face of Adam when the program was run.

  It wasn’t a simple matter of addition, because the code had to be modified in a dozen different places to accommodate the formulas describing the final incision-and-connection.

  Victory had half-expected the code itself to be mysteriously beautified, but it remained mere code, symbolizing a string of ones and zeroes as impenetrable to the naked eye and innocent mind as any other. Until the machine converted it into pictures it was inherently lifeless and vague—but when the job was done....

  In the end, Victory looked up. He didn’t bother to look at his wristwatch, but it was pitch dark outside and Harley Street was in the grip of the kind of silence that only fell for a brief interval in the small hours. “It’s ready,” he said. “You’d better join me if you want to watch.”

  “If you don’t mind,” Gwynplaine said, “I’ll stay on this side of the desk and watch you. I have patience enough to wait for the real thing.”

  “If Torricelli were here,” Victory said, “he’d probably remind me of the second commandment.” He was looking at the screen as he said it, where he had set up the face of a three-week-old child. He had chosen the child at random; any one, he supposed, would do as well as another.

  “If Torricelli were here,” Gwynplaine said, “neither of us would give a fig for anything he said.”

  Victory drew the mouse across the pad, and launched the program.

  He had watched its predecessors run a thousand times before, without seeing anything unusual in the adult face that formed in consequence. He had run them so many times, in fact, that he had ceased to believe that there was any conceivable human face that could have any unusual effect on his inquiring eye and mind. When he tried to imagine what the face of Adam might look like, all he could summon to mind was the image painted by Michelangelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

  But Adam didn’t look like that at all.

  Adam’s face was unimaginable by any ordinary mortal—even an artist of genius.

  While learning the basics of medicine forty-two years before, Hugo Victory had been informed that each of his eyes had a blind spot where the neurons of the optic nerve spread out to connect to the rods and cones in the retina. Because he had always been slightly myopic, his blind spots had been slightly larger than those of people with perfect vision, but they still did not show up in the image of the world formulated by his brain. Even if he placed a hand over one eye, to eliminate the exchange of visual information between the hemispheres of his cerebral cortex, he still saw the world entire and unblemished, free of any void. That, he had been told, was an illusion. It was not that the brain “filled in” the missing data to complete the image, but rather that the brain ignored the part of the image that was not present, so efficiently that its absence was imperceptible. And yet, the blind spot was there. Anything eclipsed by it was not merely invisible, but left no clue as to its absence.

  It was a blind spot of sorts—albeit a trivial one—that had prevented Victory from being able to see or deduce the missing element in his model of the comprachicos’ final secret. It was likewise a blind spot of sorts—but by no means a trivial one—that had prevented him and every other man in the world from extrapolating the face of Adam and the angels from his knowledge of the vast spectrum of ordinary human faces.

  Now, the blind spot was removed. His mind was no longer able to ignore that which had previously been hidden even from the power of imagination. Hugo Victory saw an image of the proto-human face that had been made in God’s image.

  Quietly, he began to weep—but his tears dried up much sooner than he could have wished.

  His right hand—acting, apparently, without the benefit of any conscious command—moved the mouse, very carefully, across its mat, and clicked it again in order to exit from the program.

  He watched without the slightest reservation or complaint as Gwynplaine, who had waited until then to move around the desk, carefully burned the program on to a CD that he had appropriated from the storage cabinet.

  “I told you so,” the man with the hideous face murmured, not unkindly, as he carefully set the computer to reformat the hard disk. “I played as fair as I dared. That wasn’t the real thing, of course. It was just a photograph, lacking even the resolution it might have had. You should have done as I asked and worked directly on a child. Dr. Victory. It might require a dozen more attempts, or a hundred more, but in time, one of them will survive to adulthood. That will be the real thing. At least, I hope so. The comprachicos might not have got it absolutely right, of course. Even now, I still have to bear that possibility in mind. But I remain hopeful—and now I have something that’s worth taking to California, I’m one step nearer to my goal.”

  “It’s strange,” Victory said, wondering why he had utterly ceased to care. “When you first came into my office, nine years ago, I thought you were the most awfully disfigured man I’d ever seen. I couldn’t imagine why the doctors who’d treated you after your accident hadn’t done more to ameliorate the effect of the burns. But now I’ve grown used to you, you seem perfectly ordinary. Hideous, but perfectly ordinary. I thought nine years ago—and still thought, ninety minutes ago—that I could do something for you, if you’d only permit me to try, but now I see that I couldn’t....that there’s simply nothing to be done.”

  “It’s not strange to me,” Gwynplaine assured him. “I’ve lived among the comprachicos. I understand these things better than any man alive...with one possible exception, now. I hope
you can find it in your heart to forgive me for that enlightenment.”

  “I don’t feel capable of forgiveness any more,” Victory said. “Or hatred either. Or....”

  “Much as I’d like to hear the rest of the list,” Gwynplaine said, apologetically, “I really must be going. If you see Monsignor Torricelli again, please give him my fondest regards. Unlike him, you see, I really have learned to love my enemies.”

  * * * *

  It wasn’t until Meg arrived at half past eight that Victory had the opportunity to assess the full extent of the change that had come over him, but once the evidence was before him he understood its consequences easily enough.

  Meg, like Janice before her, was an unusually beautiful young woman. A plastic surgeon had to surround himself with beautiful people, in order to advertise and emphasize his powers as a healer. But Meg now seemed, to Victory’s unprejudiced and fully awakened sight, not one iota more or less beautiful than Gwynplaine. She looked, in fact, absolutely ordinary: aesthetically indistinguishable from every other member of the human race. Nor could Victory imagine any practicable transformation that would bring about the slightest improvement.