"It"s over," Charlotte said quietly. "Punishment is neither here nor there. It"s just a matter of counting the cost." She looked at Michael Lowenthal as she spoke, even though the people he represented were experts on prices rather than costs.
"It was still murder," was all that Lowenthal could find to say.
"Of course it was," said Oscar Wilde. "It was a perfect murder-perhaps the only perfect murder the world has seen, as yet."
Epilogue: Happily Ever After
In Hal Watson"s crowded workroom in the bowels of the UN building in New York-whose upper stories were already decaying to ash and dust-Sergeant Charlotte Holmes faced her superior officer with all the calm and confidence she could muster.
"Walter Czastka died of natural causes," Hal told her. "The death certificate makes conventional reference to general neuronal failure, which usually means that the nanotech patchwork holding the hindbrain together couldn"t maintain the feedback loops necessary to sustain motor function." "Usually?" Charlotte queried.
"Regina says that the wastage in Czastka"s brain was more extensive than usual, and more evident in the cerebrum." "What does that imply?" "In Regina"s words: "If you set aside all the jargon, he just gave up on himself and faded out." There"s no hard evidence in his own files to prove that in 2322 he carried out a series of illegal genetic manipulations on egg cells which had been taken from Maria Inacio"s unexpectedly active womb and fertilized by his own spermatozoa, but I"ve dipped into the private files of those officers of Wollongong University who could have been involved in hushing it up. There"s more than enough buried there to support Wilde"s conjectures. I"m still excavating it, but all bureaucrats tend to be careful in the maintenance of their private records, however fast and loose they play with official doc.u.ments.
Given that Czastka"s death wasn"t suspicious, there"s no need for us to publish our findings, but I"ve found sufficient confirmation of the factual allegations contained in Moreau"s scroll to be sure that they"re true." "Information which, being good bureaucrats, we"ll naturally commit to our own records, for the edification of future excavators," Charlotte said.
Hal didn"t rise to that. "I have hard evidence of the peripheral involvement of at least twelve others in Czastka"s experiment. All of them, including the murder victims, are commemorated in the faces of the monkeys on Moreau"s island; none are still alive. That"s not to say that it was an organized conspiracy; Czastka appears to have recruited them as and when he needed them, and it"s probable that none of them knew exactly how many others were involved, or how.
The scroll left behind by Gustave Moreau is based on hearsay, of course, but it confirms that Maria Inacio knew more than anyone else-except Walter himself-about the progress of the experiment and the subsequent cover-up.
Moreau"s account of what she told him confirms the private notes made by the dean of Walter"s faculty and the a.s.sistant registrar who arranged the transfer of the embryo from her womb to the artificial one.
"There"s no detailed map of the transformations that Walter carried out on the embryo formed from the ovum he took from Inacio"s womb and combined with his own sperm, but he was definitely trying to engineer it for longevity. It"s explicitly stated that he worked at several of the key loci to which Zaman later applied his own transformations. We"ll never know how close he came to succeeding, but he would have been extremely lucky to hit on the right subst.i.tutions first time out, without the benefit of the preparatory animal work that Zaman and his peers were able to do." "If he"d succeeded," Charlotte observed, "we might now be attributing the New Human Race to the Czastka transformation." "But he didn"t." "The photographs of Jafri Biasiolo in different phases of his career as Rappaccini that you showed Wilde when I first brought him in suggest that what Czastka did must have had some effect," Charlotte reminded him. "If he"d carried on-if he"d kept track of Biasiolo and tried again-it would have been hard going; but he might have given us the New Human Race fifty or sixty years earlier than Ali Zaman." "If he"d carried on in the 2320s," Hal opined, "he"d have ended up like Michi Urashima: a sacrifice to the forces of convention. He"d have ended up in the freezer, while the masters of the MegaMall divided the work up into manageable packets and made sure the transformations were properly tested on animals before they started work on dismantling the legal restraints. They"d have been right to do it. These things have to be properly managed. We"re not living in the twentieth century." "The spin-off from Michi Urashima"s pioneering efforts wasn"t properly managed, though," Charlotte pointed out. "Not the bits that Rappaccini took it upon himself to carry forward, at any rate." "From now on," Hal judged, "they will be." "Does the scroll explain why Moreau did it?" Charlotte asked curiously. She was still harboring the faint hope that Oscar Wilde might have got it completely wrong and that Moreau"s madness had not been quite as divine as Wilde insisted.
"It does include some teasing comments about the ethics of scientific research, and a slighting reference to the quality of Walter Czastka"s artistry, but there"s no detailed explanation of Moreau"s motives. He seems to have decided to carry the final solution to the mystery to his grave-unless, of course, he had such perfect trust in Wilde"s skills as a detective that he was content to leave that side of the matter to him. Fortunately, I"m not required to include speculations as to motive in my own report." "The news tapes won"t be content with that," Charlotte observed wryly. "The vidveg always want to know Why? "The news-tape mongers won"t give a d.a.m.n what we say or don"t say, so long as they have the charismatic Dr. Wilde to supply all the lurid fantasies they need, and a few more besides." "What about the court?" Charlotte asked.
"It won"t get to court," Hal told her. "Once the psychologists and neurophysiologists have completed their reports, all charges against the woman will be dropped. There"s no doubt that she wasn"t in control of her own actions; she doesn"t even have any memory of what happened. She"s the Robot a.s.sa.s.sins" worst nightmare-but however reckless Moreau may have been in other respects, he certainly did his best to make sure that his chief p.a.w.n came through it all. It seems that she"ll make a full recovery." "She"ll simply walk free, then?" "Not exactly. She"ll be quietly given into the custody of the Secret Masters of the MegaMall. Not as a prisoner, of course, but as a valued employee. They"ll pay her whatever salary she requires in exchange for her full cooperation.
There"s a great deal they can learn from her, or so they hope. It"s dangerous knowledge-but it"ll be even more dangerous if others decide to follow in Moreau"s footsteps and we don"t have the means to prevent them." Charlotte thought about that for a few moments. In the long run, the entire Moreau affair might come to be seen as mere window dressing for the proof that it was possible to make brainfeed equipment that would turn humans into mere robots. That knowledge would now be entrusted to the Hardinist Cabal-but were they safe custodians? And if not them, then who? She realized that the repercussions of this remarkable series of incidents would extend over centuries-and that she, Charlotte Holmes, had been privileged to see the whole drama unfold from the best seat in the house.
If only she had been able to play a more active part... "Walter Czastka could have offered his talent and his enterprise to the Ahasuerus Foundation," Charlotte pointed out when she had decided that she needed more time to mull over the other matter. "If he didn"t want to set himself so far outside the mainstream of scientific research, he could at least have given them what he had and pointed their people in the right direction.
Instead, he decided to cultivate his and everyone else"s gardens: not merely to make flowers, but to make flowers to make money. Not only did he refuse to become an Ali Zaman, he even refused to become an Oscar Wilde. Not, apparently, the kind of role model that young Jafri was looking for when Maria Inacio turned up on his doorstep claiming to be his mother and volunteering to tell him everything." "We don"t have to speculate," Hal reminded her.
"No," she admitted, "but it"s difficult to avoid it, isn"t it? The fact that his mother went and drowned herself-deliberately or not-can"t have helped young Jafri to come to terms with his inheritance. It did make him unique, though.
From that moment on, he must have been very conscious of the fact that there was n.o.body else in the world quite like him. I can imagine how it might have preyed on his mind. Whom the G.o.ds destroy, they first make mad, according to Euripides." "That"s a terrible habit you"ve picked up from Wilde," Hal complained, referring to her use of the cla.s.sical quotation.
"If, by the G.o.ds, one means the vicissitudes of chance and circ.u.mstance," Charlotte went on unrepentantly, "then we all stand on the brink of destruction: every one of us who is not a Natural. Some of us are two hundred years old, others merely twenty, but we"re all doomed. Oscar Wilde thinks I ought to be even more fiercely resentful of that fact than he is, because my foster parents actually had the choice of going for the more expensive option and paying for my admission to the New Human Race. Wilde"s parents didn"t-and whatever Jafri Biasiolo chose to think, neither did his. Perhaps it"s just youth that prevents me from plumbing the depths of disappointment that claimed both Wilde and his good friend Rappaccini. Perhaps, in due course, the news of my destruction will actually come home to me. Tell me, Hal-how mad are you? And how long will your sanity last, while we two grow old in a world where the gradually increasing majority of our contemporaries stay young?" "We"re policemen," Hal reminded her. "We"re the ones who are supposed to help keep the mad ones in check. Rappaccini and Wilde haven"t done us any favors there." "We"re policemen," Charlotte agreed. "We"re the ones who are supposed to make sure that the Gustave Moreaus and Michi Urashimas of this world keep their follies at home and their sins in virtual reality. But are we doing the world any favors?" "I think so," Hal answered without hesitation.
"It"s a living, I suppose," she conceded. "It"ll keep us occupied until we die, if we want it to. But Oscar Wilde was right about something else too. I won"t want to be a policeman all my life. Life"s too short, you see, for the likes of us." "You can"t win them all," said Hal philosophically, "no matter how closely you rub shoulders with the biggest winners there are. You have to play the hand you"re dealt by fate, as cleverly as you can." "That"s exactly what Jafri Biasiolo must have thought," said Charlotte, determined to have the last word, "and I suppose that"s exactly what he did, in his own peculiar fashion." Having completed his report, Michael Lowenthal looked anxiously around the virtual conference room, trying to measure the response. There were thirteen men and women whose representative sims were arranged about the illusory table, seven of whom he did not yet know by name. Their images were as obsessively minimalist as the "room" in which they were gathered; they looked perfectly human and perfectly ordinary, except for a slight gloss that might have been a reflection of the light that bounced up at them from the polished tabletop.
According to those elements of the Hidden Archive which had so far been opened to Michael"s inquiries, there had been a time when the Secret Masters had donned all manner of gaudy raiment in order to conduct their board meetings. They had delighted in appearing to one another as G.o.ds and demons, monsters and mirror-men, and they had met at the summits of virtual peaks higher by far than the meager mountains of Earth"s crumpled crust-but that had been in the early days of their power. Now they dressed more fittingly, not out of humility but to emphasize that their a.s.semblies were straightforwardly utilitarian, merely a matter of business.
Virtual environments were now the arena of all the most cherished dreams of humankind-every impossible adventure, every bizarre fetish, every body of knowledge, every shameful desire-but the Dominant Shareholders liked to remember that virtual s.p.a.ce was first and foremost the repository of the world"s wealth.
It was where money was, and it was where stewardship of the earth was exercised with scrupulous care. Michael knew that this imagistic room was more securely cloaked than any other in all the world, whether bedded in the hardware of the UN police or the so-called World Government. Whatever was said here remained here, consigned to the abyssal core of the Hidden Archive-but those who met here did not think of it as the conference chamber of the Secret Masters, the G.o.ds of Olympus, or the Hardinist Cabal. It was merely a place where businessmen could meet and consider matters of mutual concern. It was just a room with bare walls and a rectangular table, devoid of all unnecessary ostentation, except a little extra polish.
"Thank you, Michael," said the chairman. "All things considered, you did a good job. If you hadn"t taken the decision to follow Wilde, the police would certainly have tried-and might have contrived-to keep a little more from us than they actually did. It would have been annoying, to say the least, if we hadn"t been able to secure the equipment in that ingenious theater for our exclusive use. There are tricks we can actually use in that setup. They"re trivial tricks by comparison with what we"ll eventually learn from the girl and her lovely hair, but trivial tricks are often the most rewarding, in purely commercial terms." "I wish the distractions had worked a little better," Michael said, feeling that it was safe, in view of the chairman"s generosity, to indulge in a little judicious self-criticism. "I can"t help feeling that if only I"d framed my reckless hypotheses a little more cleverly, I might have persuaded Wilde to fall for one or other of them. He is a sucker for a good story, and it might have been better if he hadn"t been quite so accurate in his subsequent guesses." "Wilde"s a fool," opined a white-haired man who must have been two hundred and twenty if he were a day. "It doesn"t matter how accurate he is-no one will ever take his opinions seriously." "Rightly so, Mr. Hart," observed a female of equal apparent antiquity. "People know full well that it"s men like him who invent disparaging terms like vidveg, and they"re absolutely right to feel insulted. They"re correct in their estimation of him as a vain, patronizing poseur. n.o.body watching the final act of that farce live identified with him-they all identified with the policewoman.
We don"t have to put any substantial amount of spin on the commercial resumes; she"s already the star, and her act only needs a little cleaning up. Wilde will come across as a spokesman for a lunatic and a lunatic himself; the only people who"ll listen to what he says are people who are out on a limb anyway-irrelevant people. The show can"t work against us, in the short run or the long. There"ll be no substantial comeback about the extirpation. The vast majority will thank us, as they always do." How was it possible, Michael wondered, to be so old and yet so calm? Why were these people immune to the kinds of resentments which Jafri Biasiolo and Oscar Wilde had stored up against the undying inheritors of Earth? It was, he realized, people like Oscar Wilde who made up such disparaging epithets as "MegaMall" It was people like Oscar Wilde who charged the people whose duty and vocation it was to run the world with being hidebound monsters of greed, incapable of any but quant.i.tative reckoning. In fact, only people like those gathered around this conference table could properly understand the quality of life. By virtue of that understanding, they were neither afraid to die nor resentful of their appointed heirs.
"We were right to let it go all the way," another dutiful soul put in. "It would have been a pity to put a stop to it fifty years ago. The obsessive secrecy of true madmen is a great a.s.set to the sane; it allows us to be discreet and eclectic in releasing the products of their creativity. It would be a terribly dull world if we always had to take the oddb.a.l.l.s out before they did their most interesting work, just because the ripples might spread too fast and too far." "But we"ll have to keep a closer eye on Wilde, from now on," another and more ominous voice put in.
"It"s hardly worth it, surely," said Michael, so relaxed by now that he did not even feel that he was taking a risk in issuing the mild contradiction. "He"ll be dead soon enough, won"t he?" In the Green Carnation Suite of the New York Majestic, Oscar Wilde stood before a 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. The sound of his voice, lower in pitch and more musical than he remembered it, gave him an exquisite thrill.
He repeated the phrase reverently, as though it were a magical incantation: "Ivory and rose leaves." Oscar had never been afraid of vanity. He was a man ready and willing to address his own reflection in the most admiring terms, provided only that it remained full of youth and perfect in its symmetry. Whenever it grew old, as it had three times over, it lost its capacity to inspire admiration and became a mocking reminder of the hazards which he and all men of his obsolescent kind still faced: decay, senescence, decomposition.
"One hundred and thirty-three years old," he said softly. "One hundred and thirty-three years old, and young again. Age cannot wither, nor custom stale..." He reached out to pluck a green carnation from the wall beside the mirror. It was one of only half a dozen in full bloom, and he twirled it between his delicate fingers, admiring it with as much satisfaction as he admired his own image.
The flower was a trivial creation, only a little more elegant than the variety which the horticulturalists of old had wrought without the aid of genetic engineering, but it had been a necessary endeavor. It was a joke, of course, but a very serious joke. The never-ending games which Oscar played in consequence of his name were no mere matter of public relations. His identification with the ideas and ideals of his alter ego had long ago become a deep-seated obsession as well as a mischievous fetish. He was not afraid to acknowledge that fact, nor to take pride in it. He had always felt that 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; a cause. Perhaps, as Charlotte Holmes and Michael Lowenthal clearly believed, his own cause was hardly less mad than poor Rappaccini"s-but then again, perhaps all causes that had the power to change the world were bound to be reckoned mad until they bore sweet fruit.
He placed the flower in the mock b.u.t.tonhole of his neatly tailored SAP black suitskin. Black was, he thought, the perfect background for a green carnation-and a room full of green carnations was the perfect background for a man in black.
Oscar was fully aware of the debt of grat.i.tude which he owed to his wallflowers.
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 could always be slightly 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 and should always be available for his exclusive use.
His clients did not mind in the least his making such demands; they were, after all, paying for his fashionability rather than his technical dexterity, and he could not have been nearly so fashionable were it not for his extravagantly extrovert eccentricity. There were now hotels in thirty-six cities which could provide him with a distinctive pied-a-terre, and he felt entirely justified in thinking of the green carnation suites as his homes away from home.
His real home, of course, was the island which he had leased for his experiments in Creation.
Oscar half turned one way and then the other, shrugging his shoulders to make sure that the false jacket extruded by his suitskin hung perfectly upon his remodeled body. He had renewed his entire wardrobe since his rejuvenation; it had been absolutely necessary that he should-how could a man feel a tangible pulse of joy at finding himself full of youth unless he acted the part with total conviction? "Clothes maketh the man," he murmured, "or, if the man is clever enough to be self-made, must at least refrain from unmaking him." He did not have to make a note to remember the remark; even in his inner sanctum the bubblebugs were active around the clock. They would stay that way until the first signs of aging began to show again upon his face and in the timbre of his voice.
Oscar felt that he, unlike most men of his age, had conscientiously adapted his ideas to the reality of twenty-fifth-century life. He had discarded outdated notions of privacy in favor of making a perfect record of his beautiful life.
For this reason, if for no other, he was determined to be content with nothing less than sartorial perfection. This evening was, after all, to be the auspicious occasion of his reemergence into the social world. His involvement in the Rappaccini affair, and the quarantine which he had been forced to endure thereafter, had delayed his new debut but had also made certain that it would be even more dazzling than he had ever dared to hope. He was famous now, and would be for at least a quarter of an hour as the clock of history made revolution after revolution. He was profoundly glad that fame had descended upon him at exactly the right moment, while he looked his best for what would almost certainly be the last time.
"It is only shallow people," he informed his reflection, confident in the knowledge that it would be an appreciative audience, "who do not judge by appearances. Adonis, perfection is thine." He bathed in the luxury of his own narcissism, admiring his gray eyes, his soft lips, his pearly white teeth. He savored the complexity of his emotions as he contemplated his beauty and his ambitions. There was a warm glow of grat.i.tude and relief-tinged with admiration-for the artistry of the somatic engineers who had restored his body to its excellent state.
"You"re a fool, Oscar," a friend had said to him when he had confessed his intention to chance a third rejuvenation. "You had twenty years of wear still left in your last body when you turned it in, and you"ve at least twenty left in this one. Only a fool would take the risk." Oscar had often been called a fool. Most of the people he knew probably thought that his entire lifestyle was nothing but foolishness. He was immune to such criticism. He knew full well that when he was called a fool the people who used the word meant it in its common or garden sense, but he always heard it as a more dignified reference.
"Certainly I am a Fool," he had replied more than once. "I am an unfettering Feste, court jester to the Bio-technic Aristocracy, the Touchstone which tests the metal of the Golden Age. I am one of those who is privileged to whisper in the ears of the modern mult.i.tude the fateful words: "Remember that thou art the last of mortal men!" I am the harbinger of Eternal Youth. I am proud to be a Fool." Beneath the grat.i.tude and the relief which he felt upon finding himself young again, however, were sterner feelings. He knew well enough that the tissue replenishments had only made a beginning for him. He had been provided with the raw material of youth, but it still remained for him to complete the work of art by dressing his new body, animating it, and providing the soul and the intelligence which would put its youth to work. The genius of medicine had painted a portrait of Adonis, but it would be his own task to be Adonis: to live extravagantly, perfectly, and beautifully. There were deeper regrets too; had he not been so anxious to make the most of his celebrity, he would have been in mourning, not so much for Rappaccini but for Rappaccini"s Creation, condemned by the UN as poisonous and erased from the face of the Pacific.
Oscar did not doubt for a moment, as his greedy eyes devoured the glory of his reflection, that he would be equal to the immediate task before him. He had never been the kind of habit-dominated man who renewed his appearance only to remain confined by a straitjacket which his earlier way of life had made for him. He was no cra.s.s 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 as though there were nothing to do with the gift of youth except recycle the same stereotyped errors. He was a man properly equipped, in heart and in mind, for serial rejuvenation. There would be time, later, for him to prove himself equal to the less immediate task of making sure that the example of Rappaccini"s reckless inventiveness did not go entirely to waste. There would even be time for him to become a murderer, if he decided that the cause of Art demanded it.
He closed his eyes for one last lingering moment while he savored the pleasures of antic.i.p.ation. He pretended that the moment was an infinite one, in which a man might lose himself in the ecstasy of a chosen dream.
Such was the power of his imagination that he did indeed win a moment"s suspension of the oppressive curse of Time: a moment of true and total freedom which promised to last... certainly not forever, and certainly not long enough, but at least for a little while.
He knew that it was up to him to use that little while as fully as he could, not merely here in the great wide world whose eyes were yet upon him and whose ears were eager for his every epigram and aphorism, but also in his private island covert: his garden; his folly; his Creation. Would the world ever see his like again, once he was gone? He was, of course, an imitation, but he was an imitation which had outshone its original. The first Oscar Wilde would have approved of that, just as he would have approved of the fact that in the company of Charlotte Holmes, he had reduced her to the role of a mere Watson, while he himself had played the master of deduction.
If only there were time enough, Oscar thought, to be a thousand men instead of one or two. What a wonder I might have made of myself, had my youth been truly eternal!
End of Book