Architects of Emortality (21 page)

“Samuel Cramer, Gustave Moreau, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, and Thomas De Quincey.” Wilde sighed. “Samuel Cramer is the hero of a novella by Baudelaire,” he said.

“Gustave Moreau was a French painter associated with the French decadent movement. Thomas Griffiths Wainewright was a critic and murderer who was the subject of an essay by my namesake called ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’—an exercise partly inspired by Thomas De Quincey’s more celebrated essay ‘Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.’ I fear that these aliases are little more than a series of jokes—decorative embellishments of the unfolding plot.” “The names don’t matter,” said Hal. “What matters is where the money that fed the accounts originated, and where it goes when it makes its exits. I already have surfers going through the books of Rappaccini Inc. with a fine-toothed comb. At present, the money trail seems more likely to deliver the goods than the picture searches. With luck, I’ll eventually be able to find out where the man who used to use the Rappaccini name and our mysterious nonexistent woman have their basic supplies delivered—food, equipment, and so on—and when I know that, I’ll know where they are, and what names they use when they’re not using silly pseudonyms. Then we can pick them both up and charge them.” “What about this brainwave of Lowenthal’s?” Charlotte asked—having reported the conjecture while the maglev was pulling into the San Francisco station. “Have you found any evidence to suggest that Czastka might have set up the Biasiolo identity?” “Not yet,” said Hal noncommittally. Charlotte guessed that Hal wasn’t taking Lowenthal’s hypothesis any more seriously than Wilde was. Although he was reluctant to say so, Hal was presumably still beavering away at the brainfeed link—which could easily extend from King, Urashima, and Rappaccini to Kwiatek, but not to Czastka. Or to Wilde, for that matter, Charlotte admitted to herself.

Despite her aggressive question about whether he had ever used brainfeed equipment, she had found not the slightest shred of evidence that he had ever had a substantial financial or practical interest in the field.

The car which awaited them in the underground garage was roomy and powerful.

Once it was free of the city’s traffic-control computers it would be able to zip along the transcontinental at two hundred kilometers per hour. If they were headed for Alaska, Charlotte thought, they’d be there sometime around midnight They’d need a couple of thermal suits.

Michael Lowenthal opened the door to the seat which faced the driver’s control panel and politely stood aside, offering it to her—but she remembered their journey across Manhattan only too well. She shook her head, leaving him no alternative but to take the front himself while Charlotte got into the rear with Oscar Wilde.

As soon as they were all settled, Wilde activated the car’s program. The car slid smoothly up the ramp and into the street.

Michael Lowenthal, who had skipped breakfast on the maglev in order to lay his beautiful hypothesis before the stern gaze of Oscar Wilde, called up a menu from the car’s synthesizer and looked it over unappreciatively.

“I fear,” said Wilde as he scanned the duplicate which had appeared in the panel on the back of the seat in front of him, “that we are in for a rather Spartan trip.” Most hire cars only stocked manna with a choice of artificial flavorings; this one was a deluxe model, but it didn’t have anything else to offer.

“The time to worry about that,” Charlotte said tersely, “is when we reach Guadalajara.” She had taken note of the fact that the car had turned southeast, heading for intersection nine of the transcontinental instead of eight. Wherever they were headed, it was not Alaska.

Lowenthal was obviously used to better fare than the car had to offer; he decided not to bother with breakfast after all.

Charlotte plugged her beltphone into the screen mounted in the back of the drive compartment and began scrolling through more data that Hal’s silvers had collated while she had been otherwise occupied. The artificial geniuses had found a great many links between Gabriel King and Michi Urashima to add to the coincidence of their possible attendance at the same university—more links, in fact, than anyone could reasonably have expected, even allowing for the fact that they had been acquainted for more than a hundred and seventy years. There was, however, no clear evidence as yet that King’s funding of Urashima’s various exploits had been compensated by slightly larger sums paid to him by third parties who did not wish to be seen funding brain-feed research themselves.

Charlotte could see that the AI searches had only just begun to get down to the real dirt. No one whose career was as long as King’s was likely to be completely clean, especially if he’d been in business, but a man in his position could keep secrets even in today’s world, just as long as no one with state-of-the-art equipment actually had a reason to probe. It was only to be expected that his murder would expose a certain amount of dirty linen, but to Charlotte’s admittedly naive eyes King’s laundry basket seemed fuller than anyone could have expected. She began to wonder whether Lowenthal had made a mistake in starting at the beginning of the King/Urashima relationship rather than the end. Even when Michi Urashima had landed in deep trouble, it seemed, his connections with King had remained intact, but they had been hidden. King had not only funded Urashima but had helped to establish all kinds of shields to hide his work and its spin-off. Hal’s silvers had only just begun to build Paul Kwiatek into the picture, but they had already uncovered some commercial links between King and Kwiatek that were as surprising in their way as the links between King and Urashima. Rappaccini’s involvement with Urashima was, by contrast, beginning to seem perfectly straightforward.

Maybe all this flimflam with Wilde, Czastka, and Rappaccini is just a smoke screen, Charlotte thought. Maybe its sole purpose is to blind the silvers with superfluity, to distract us from the real pattern. But what could that pattern possibly be? As the data tying Gabriel King to Paul Kwiatek’s allegedly esoteric and uncommercial research continued to accumulate, Charlotte saw that Gabriel King had not been quite as colorless a character as Oscar Wilde had implied. Perhaps no one was who had lived a hundred and ninety-four years and had learned along the way to despise the affectations and showmanship of men like Wilde. But if King, Urashima, and Kwiatek had been murdered for business reasons, what could those reasons be? And who was the mysterious female assassin? Charlotte broke in on the data stream and said: “Hal—is there any news of Kwiatek yet?” “Any time now,” he said. “They’re executing the entry warrant as we speak, although the building supervisor’s doing his level best to obstruct them.

Protecting the privacy of his tenants, he says. What he’s paid for. Any idea where you’re headed yet?” Charlotte glanced out of the window, but there was nothing to be seen now except the eight lanes of the superhighway. “Mexico City, for now,” she said. “Exactly how far toward it we’ll go—or how much further beyond it—is anyone’s guess. Is there any sign of the woman traveling south out of San Francisco?” “No match yet,” Hal admitted. “As I said, the money trail’s looking better than the picture trail, for the moment. Hold on… they’re in Kwiatek’s apartment now.

No sign of him, unless he’s in the cradle…” Charlotte looked up. Michael Lowenthal was peering through the gap between the headrest of his seat and the drive compartment. Oscar Wilde seemed equally rapt, although his posture was as languid as ever.

“Yes,” said Hal, evidently dividing himself between two conversations. “In the cradle. That’s confirmed. Kwiatek’s dead—same method. We already have a fourth name that may have to be added to the list, but it’s going to take time to get investigators out to the place where he’s supposed to be. Same pattern—no response even to top-priority calls.” “Who?” said Lowenthal.

“Magnus Teidemann—the ecologist. Graduated from the University of Wollongong in 2322, with Czastka—a year ahead of King, Urashima, and Kwiatek. He’s in the field, working on some kind of biodiversity project; he hasn’t checked in with his base for a week. Not particularly unusual, they say, but…” “If he’s dead too,” Lowenthal opined, “Wollongong has got to be the crucial link.” “If he’s dead,” Charlotte echoed. “There are other links binding King to Urashima and to Kwiatek. If it’s just the three of them, the motive might have arisen a lot later than 2322. Let’s face it, no one but a madman would formulate a murder plan that would take so long to come to fruition. If you have a powerful desire to kill someone, you don’t wait a hundred and seventy years, until they’re practically at death’s door, before you implement it.” “Czastka called in his report on the first murder weapon,” Hal put in. “It confirms Wilde’s in every respect but one.” “Which one?” Charlotte wanted to know.

“He can’t see any evidence of a link to Rappaccini.” “That fault is in Walter’s sight, not in the evidence,” Wilde was quick to say.

“Even so,” said Hal, “the only name mentioned in Czastka’s report is Wilde’s—because he’s the only one known to have worked with the basic Celosia gentemplate. Czastka’s still on standby. I’ll send him the data on Urashima’s killer—and Kwiatek’s when we have it.” “Did you ask him about being at Wollongong with King and Urashima?” Charlotte wanted to know.

“Of course I did. He says that he doesn’t remember anything about events that long ago. He supposes that he must have known King, given that some of their courses overlapped, but he has no memory of ever having met Michi Urashima.” “He would say that, wouldn’t he?” murmured Michael Lowenthal.

“Got to go,” said Hal, breaking the connection.

Oscar Wilde immediately began tapping out a phone number on the comcon set in the back of Lowenthal’s seat.

“Who are you calling?” Charlotte demanded.

“Walter Czastka, of course,” Oscar replied with his customary equanimity.

“You can’t do that!” Lowenthal exclaimed. Charlotte was glad that he’d beaten her to it, because she knew exactly what Wilde’s reply would be.

“Of course I can,” said Wilde. “We’re old acquaintances, after all. If he’s involved with this business, I’m the best person to find out how and why—I know his little ways.” By the time he had finished speaking, it was a dead issue. The call had gone through and had been answered.

Charlotte could see the image on Wilde’s screen even though she was invisible to the camera that was relaying Wilde’s image to Czastka. She knew immediately that the face must be that of the flesh-and-blood Czastka, not his dutiful sloth. No one would ever have programmed so much wizened world-weariness into a simulacrum.

“Hello, Walter,” said Wilde.

Czastka peered at the caller without the least flicker of recognition. He looked very old—far older than King or Urashima—and distinctly unwell. His skin was discolored and taut about the facial muscles. Charlotte could not imagine that he had ever been a handsome man, and he had obviously decided that it was unnecessary to compromise with the expectations of others by having his face touched up by cosmetic engineers. In a world where almost everyone was good-looking, unmarked by the worst ravages of time and circumstance, Walter Czastka was an obvious anomaly. There was nothing actually ugly or monstrous about him, however. To Charlotte, he simply seemed ancient and depressed. His eyes were a curious faded yellow color, and his stare had a rather disconcerting quality.

“Yes?” he said.

“Don’t you know me, Walter?” asked Wilde, in genuine surprise.

For a moment, Czastka simply looked exasperated, but then his stare changed as enlightenment dawned.

“Oscar Wilde!” he said, his tone redolent with awe. “My God, you look well. I didn’t look like that after my second rejuvenation… but you already had… how could you need a third so soon?” Oddly enough, Oscar Wilde did not swell with pride in reaction to this display of naked envy. It seemed to Charlotte that Wilde’s anxiety about Czastka’s condition outweighed his pride in his own. This surprised her a little, and she wondered what motives Wilde might have for feigning such a response.

“Need,” Wilde murmured, “is a relative thing. I’m sorry, Walter—I didn’t mean to startle you. In my mind’s eye, you see, I always look like this.” “You’ll have to be brief, Oscar,” said Czastka curtly. “I’m expecting the UN police to call back—ever since they got past my AI defenses they’ve been relentless. Someone’s using flowers to murder people. I’ve given them one report, but they want more. People like that always want more. I should have known better than to respond to the first call, I suppose. Terrible nuisance.” Charlotte noticed that Czastka had dutifully avoided mentioning to Oscar Wilde the fact that he’d been obliged to mention Wilde’s name in his report on the lethal flowers. Czastka did not seem to relish the idea of a long conversation with his old acquaintance.

“The police can break in on us if they want to, Walter,” said Oscar gently.

“They showed the Celosia gentemplate to me too. I came to one conclusion that you apparently failed to reach.” “And what was that?” Czastka asked sharply. Charlotte knew that Hal Watson wouldn’t want Wilde putting ideas into Czastka’s head, but she was powerless to prevent it.

“It seemed obvious to me that Rappaccini had designed them,” said Oscar. “Do you remember Rappaccini?” “Of course I remember him,” snapped Czastka. “I’m not senile, you know.