Architects of Emortality (17 page)

The couchette had a screen of its own, but it was situated at the foot of the bed, and Charlotte found it more comfortable by far to plug her beltphone into the bed’s head and set the bookplate on the pillow while lying prone on the mattress.

At first she was content to scan data which had already been collated by Hal’s silvers, but she soon grew bored with that. Now that she had elected to play the detective, she knew that she ought to be doing research of her own. She could hardly compete with Hal’s private army in matters of detail, but even Hal had confessed to her once that the principal defect of his methodology was the danger of losing sight of the wood among the trees. Given that she was a legman, operating in the human world rather than the abstract realm of digitized data, she needed to think holistically, making every effort to grasp the big picture.

To have any chance of doing that, however, she needed more information on the game’s players. Hal had already shown her the near vacuum of data that was supposedly the man behind Rappaccini, but if her suspicions could be trusted, the real key to the mystery must be Oscar Wilde.

She had, of course, to hope that her suspicions could be trusted; if they could not, she was going to look very foolish indeed. Modern police work was conventionally confined to the kind of data sifting at which Hal Watson was a past master. Legmen were at the bottom of the hierarchy, normally confined to the quasi-janitorial labor of looking after crime scenes and making arrests. She was mildly surprised that Hal had actually consented to let her accompany Wilde, because he obviously felt that this trip to San Francisco was a wild-goose chase, and that it was of no relevance whatsoever to the investigation. She wondered whether he would have given her permission if it had not been for Lowenthal. Although he would never be able to say so out loud, Hal would be much happier if the man from MegaMall were chasing distant wild geese instead of looking over his shoulder while he did the real detective work. At any rate, Charlotte knew that she could expect no backup and no encouragement, and that her one chance of avoiding a nasty blot on her record was to prove that her instincts were correct. If she could do that, the outlandishness of her action would be forgiven—and if she were spectacularly successful, her efforts might actually make the UN hierarchy think again about the methodology of modern police work.

It was the work of a few moments to discover that Oscar Wilde was anything but a data vacuum. That did not surprise her—although she was slightly startled by the revelation that there was almost as much data in the Web relating to the nineteenth-century writer after whom the contemporary Oscar had been named as there was to the man himself. It took her a further fifteen minutes fully to absorb the lesson that mere mass was a highly undesirable thing when it came to translating information into understanding. By the time that quarter hour had elapsed, she had cultivated a proper appreciation for the synoptic efforts of compilers of commentaries and encyclopedists.

She tried out half a dozen points of entry into the hypertextual maze, eventually settling for the Condensed Micropaedia of the Modern World. From there she was able to retrieve a reasonably compacted description of the life and works of Oscar Wilde (2362- ) and Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854-1900). When she had inwardly digested that information, she looked up Charles Baudelaire. Then she looked up Walter Czastka, then Gabriel King, and then Michi Urashima. She had been hoping for inspiration, but none came; she felt even more exhausted but even less capable of sleep.

On a whim, she looked up Michael Lowenthal. She found references to a dozen of them, none of whom could possibly be the man in the next-but-one couchette. She keyed in MegaMall, but had to go to the Universal Dictionary to find an entry, which merely recorded that the word was “A colloquial term for the industrial/entertainment complex.” There were no entries even in the Universal Dictionary for the Secret Masters, the Nine Unknown, or the Dominant Shareholders, and the entries on the Gods of Olympus and the Knights of the Round Table were carefully disingenuous. There were, however, entries in both the dictionary and the Condensed Micropaedia on Hardinism, each of which deigned to include a footnote on the Hardinist Cabal.

According to the micropaedia, Hardinism was the name adopted by a loose association of early twenty-first-century businessmen to dignify their assertive defense of the principle of private property against steadily increasing demand that a central planning agency administered by the United Nations should be appointed to supervise the management of the ecosphere. The name had been appropriated from an obscure twentieth-century text called The Tragedy of the Commons, by an agricultural economist named Garrett Hardin. There, Hardin had pointed out that in the days when English grazing land had been available for common use, it had been in the interests of every individual user to maximize his exploitation of the resource by increasing the size of his herds. The inevitable result of this rational pursuit of individual advantage had been the overgrazing and ultimate destruction of the commons. Those former English commons which had been transformed into private property by the Enclosures Act had, by contrast, been carefully protected by their owners from dereliction, because they had been calculated as valuable items of inheritance whose bounty must be guarded.

According to the footnote, the members of the consortium of multinational corporations who had masterminded the so-called Zimmerman coup, which had taken advantage of a financial crisis in the world’s stock markets to obtain a stranglehold on certain key “trading derivatives” relating to staple crops, had justified their actions by citing Hardinist doctrine. Although they had left Adam Zimmerman to acquire the primary notoriety of being “the man who cornered the future” or “the man who stole the world,” they had nevertheless been stuck with the nickname of the Hardinist Cabal.

Neither the dictionary nor the micropaedia had anything to say about the contemporary use of the nickname, but it did not require much imagination to see the implication of its continued currency. Whatever the truth behind the myth of the Zimmerman coup might be, its effects were still in force. If a cartel of big corporations really had acquired effective ownership of the world in the early twenty-first century, they still had it. Even the Crash could not have served to loosen their grip; indeed, the establishment of the New Reproductive System must have helped to insulate it from the main kind of disintegration to which private property had previously been subject: dissipation by distribution among multiple inheritors.

In a sense, this was not news. Everybody “knew” that the United Nations didn’t really run the world, and that the MegaMall did—but the ease with which that ironically cynical doctrine was accepted and bandied about kept the awareness at a superficial level. The idea of the MegaMall was so numinous, so difficult to pin down, that it was easy to forget that in the final analysis, it really was under the control of a relatively small number of Dominant Shareholders, whose names were not generally known. Like the ingenious Rappaccini, they had slipped away into the chaotic sea of Web-held data, forging new apparent identities and abandoning old ones, hiding among the electronic multitudes.

According to Hardinist doctrine, of course, such men were the saviors of the world, who had prevented the ecosphere from falling prey to the tragedy of the commons. Presumably, they were Hardinists still, utterly convinced of the virtue as well as the necessity of their economic power—and the next generation, to whom the reins of that power would be quietly handed over, would have the opportunity to hold it in perpetuity.

Michael Lowenthal had said that he was only a humble employee, like Charlotte, but while she only worked for the World Government, he was a servant of the Secret Masters of the world. Those Secret Masters had thought it necessary to take an interest in the murder of Gabriel King, in case it might be the beginning of a process that might threaten them. Now Michi Urashima was dead too—and to judge by Michael Lowenthal’s reaction, that had been both unexpected and unwelcome. If it had suggested that their initial anxieties had been unfounded, it must also have suggested a few new anxieties to take the place of the originals. With luck, Lowenthal and his associates would be as confused and frustrated at this moment in time as she was.

If Oscar Wilde really was the killer, Charlotte realized, then this whole affair was nothing more than a madman’s fantasy. How grateful the Hardinist Cabal would be if that were indeed the case—or if, indeed, it turned out to be some other madman’s fantasy! The question that still remained, however—the question which was presumably responsible for Michael Lowenthal’s continued presence on the maglev—was whether there was any kind of method within the seeming madness.

If so, she wondered, what kind of method could it possibly be? What could anyone possibly achieve, or even seek to achieve, by the murders of Gabriel King and Michi Urashima? Charlotte rose somewhat earlier than was her habit—the couchette was not the kind of bed which encouraged one to lie in, no matter how little sleep one had had.

She immediately patched through a link to Hal Watson in order to get an update on the state of his investigations, but he wasn’t at his station yet.

She decanted all the messages that he had left in store for her, and took careful note of those which seemed most significant before walking to the dining car in order to obtain a couple of manna croissants and a cup of strong coffee.

She did not doubt that Michael Lowenthal would do the same as soon as he awoke, if he had not done so already; she could only hope that her estimations of significance might prove better than his.

By the time Charlotte had finished her breakfast, the train was only three hours out of San Francisco. Oscar Wilde joined her while she was sipping coffee. He was looking very neat and trim save for the fact that the unrenewed green carnation in his buttonhole was now rather bedraggled. When he saw her looking at it, he assured her that he would be able to obtain a new one soon after arrival, because one of his very first commissions, had been to plan the interior decor of the San Francisco Majestic.

“Such has been the mercy of our timetable,” he observed, peering through the tinted window, “that we have slept through Missouri and Kansas.” She knew what he meant. Missouri and Kansas were distinctly lacking in interesting scenery since the restabilization 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 matte black, which could easily cause offense to eyes that had been trained to love color. The SAP fields of Kansas always gave Charlotte the impression of looking at a gigantic piece of frilly and filthy corrugated cardboard. Houses and factories alike had retreated beneath the Stygian canopy, and the parts of the landscape which extended toward the horizon were so blurred as to be 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 carefully reforested; apart from the city of Denver—another of the Decivilizers’ favorite targets, but one they had not yet claimed—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 black, presumably because millions of years of adaptive natural selection had ensured that it would be, and the Colorado landscape seemed extraordinarily soothing.

Had the hard-core Green Zealots not been so fixated on the grandiose glories of rain forest, they might have nominated this as a corner of Green Heaven. Had it been authentic wilderness, of course, it would have been mostly desert, but no one in the USNA would go so far in the cause of authenticity as to insist upon land remaining desolate; the republics of Gobi and Kalahari had a monopoly on that kind of nostalgia.

While Oscar ordered eggs duchesse for breakfast, Charlotte activated the wallscreen beside their table and summoned up the latest news. The fact of Gabriel King’s death was recorded, as was the fact of Michi Urashima’s, but there was nothing about the exotic circumstances. She was momentarily puzzled by the fact that no one had yet connected the two murders or latched onto the possible biohazard, but she realized that the MegaMall’s interest in the affair had advantages as well as disadvantages. The MegaMall owned the casters, and until the MegaMall decided that discretion was unnecessary, the casters would keep their hoverflies on a tight rein.

“Where’s Lowenthal?” she asked. “Still sleeping the sleep of the just, I suppose.” She wondered briefly whether she ought perhaps to wait for the man from the MegaMall before talking to Wilde about the investigation, but figured that it was up to her, as the early bird, to go after any available worms as quickly and as cleverly as she could. Unfortunately, she wasn’t at all sure how to start.

“My dear Charlotte,” said Oscar, while she dithered, “you have the unmistakable manner of one who woke up far too early after working far too hard the night before.” “I couldn’t sleep,” she told him. “I took a couple of boosters before breakfast—once the croissants get my digestive system in gear they’ll clear my head.” Wilde shook his head. “I am not normally a supporter of nature,” he said. “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—but in my experience, maintaining one’s sense of equilibrium with the aid of drugs is a false economy.