Architects of Emortality (28 page)

Salome, having bowed to the three visitors from the future who had watched her dance at far closer range than any of the fictitious multitude, turned around to bow to another watcher: to the biblical king of Judea, Herod, seated on his throne.

Charlotte could not remember whether Herod had been Salome’s father or merely her stepfather, but she was certain that he had been one or the other. She was certain too that there had never been a throne like this one in the entire history of empires and kingdoms. None but the most vainglorious of emperors could even have imagined it; and none of them could have ordered it built. 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, to constitute an offense to any taste or sense of proportion.

All of this was a calculated insult to the delicacy of effective illusion. It was a parody of grandiosity, an exercise in profusion for profusion’s sake. And yet, she understood the kind of technological sophistication that must have been required to produce this. She knew how much more difficult it was to produce such a fabulous extravaganza than it would have been to produce something which would have seemed possible and likely, on any scale.

“Do you like it?” asked the man on the throne: the king on the throne, who had even drawn himself three times life-size, as a bloated, overdressed grotesque.

Herod’s body, even had it been reduced to a natural scale, 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 Jafri Biasiolo, alias Rappaccini, had worn in the three photographs which Hal Watson had shown to Oscar, Lowenthal, and herself the day before.

But we know that she’s not his daughter, Charlotte thought. She’s supposed to be his mother now! Charlotte felt Oscar Wilde’s hand take up her wrist and squeeze it. He was still invisible to her, as she was to herself, although the glorious light of the illusory palace surrounded them. “Tread carefully,” Wilde whispered, his 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.” Herod/Rappaccini burst into mocking laughter. The sim’s tumultuous flesh heaved and seethed with it: “Do you think that I have merely human ears, my dear Oscar? You can hardly see yourselves, I know, but you are not hidden from me. Your friends are charming, Oscar, but neither the woman nor the man is one of us.

They are of an age which has forgotten and erased its past. They are neither revenants nor artists.” AI or not, thought Charlotte, it’s still mad. As absolutely and irredeemably insane as the man whose simulacrum it is. She wondered whether she might be in mortal danger, if the man beside her really was the secret designer of all of this: Rappaccini’s creator and puppet master.

“Gustave Moreau might have approved,” Wilde said offhandedly, “but he always tended to become dispirited and leave his work half-done. His vision always outpaced his capacity for detail. Michi Urashima would not have been satisfied so easily even when he was a VE technician, although I detect his early handiwork in some of the effects. Did Gabriel King supply the artificial organisms which hollowed out this Aladdin’s cave, perchance?” “He did,” answered the gargantuan Rappaccini, squirming in his uncomfortable seat like a huge painted slug. “I have made art with his sadly utilitarian instruments. I have taken some trouble, as you have seen, to weave the work of all my victims into the tapestry of their destruction.” The sim was obviously a high-grade silver rather than a sluggish sloth, but it was making preprogrammed speeches rather than responding with any real intelligence to Wilde’s provocations.

“It’s overdone,” said Oscar Wilde with insultingly mild contempt. “Grotesquely overdone and more than a little chaotic. As a show of apparent madness, it’s too excessive to be anything but pretense. Can we not talk as one civilized man to another, Jafri, since that is what we are?” Rappaccini smiled. “That is why I wanted you here, my dear Oscar,” he said.

“Only you could suspect me of cold rationality in the midst of all this. But you understand civilization far too well to wear its gifts unthinkingly. You may be the only man in the world who understands the world’s decadence, but you cannot hide that understanding from me, or deny it to my face. Have the patient bureaucrats of the United Nations police force discovered my true name yet?” “Jafri Biasiolo?” Wilde queried. “Is that what you mean by your true name? I doubt it. Even Rappaccini is truer than that. Half a dozen other pseudonyms have come to light—but I doubt that we have found the true one yet. Would you care to tell us what it is?” “Not Herod,” said the sim. “Be sure of that, at least.” “It’s only a matter of time, as you must know,” Charlotte put in, unable to resist the temptation. “By the time we get back to the car, it might be all over.” The sim turned its bloodshot eyes upon her, and she could not help but shrink before the baleful stare.

“The final act has yet to be played,” Rappaccini told her. “Even the penultimate phase of the drama has not yet reached its fatal climax. You may already know all of my true names, but you might still have difficulty in identifying the one which I presently use as my own, for reasons which dear Oscar will readily understand.” The sardonic gaze moved again, to meet Wilde’s invisible stare.

“You will thank me for this evasiveness, Oscar—an element of surprise is indispensable to the enjoyment of any unfolding drama. You would never have forgiven me had I not been just that little bit too clever for you.” “The car chase was entirely gratuitous,” said Oscar. “A jarring note of modernism in a performance which might otherwise have had the benefit of consistency, if not of coherency. I cannot concede that manifestation of cleverness.” “Consistency is the hallmark of a narrow mind,” replied the sim, seemingly unworried by the criticism.

“If you wanted to kill six men,” said Oscar Wilde, in a pensive tone which rather suggested that he was talking to himself rather than the AI, “why did you wait until they were almost dead? I cannot understand the timing of your performance. At any time in the last seventy years fate might have cheated you.

Had you waited another month, you might well have been too late to find Walter Czastka alive.” “You underestimate the tenacity of men like these,” Biasiolo-as-Herod replied.

“You think they are ready for death because they have ceased to live, but longevity has ingrained its habits deeply in the flesh. Without me to help them, they might have protracted their misery for many years yet—even dear, sad Walter. But I am nothing if not loyal, nothing if not affectionate to those most deserving of my tenderness. I bring them not merely death but glorious transfiguration—‘Mortality, Behold and Fear! What a change of flesh is here!’ But even you, Oscar, can never have read Beaumont… the point is, dear Oscar, that the mere fact of death is not the central motif here. Did you think me capable of pursuing mere revenge? It is the manner of a man’s death which is all-important in our day and age, is it not? Have we not rediscovered all the ancient joys of mourning, and all the awesome propriety of solemn ceremony and dark symbolism? “Wreaths are not enough for the likes of us, Oscar—not even wreaths which are spiders in disguise. The death of death itself is upon us, and how shall we celebrate that, save by making a new and better compact with the grim reaper? Murder is almost extinct—but it should not be, and cannot be, and must not be.

Murder must be rehabilitated, Oscar, made romantic and flamboyant, made gorgeous and excessive, made glamorous and hideous and larger than life. What have my six victims left to do but set an example to their younger brethren? Who is more fitted than I to appoint himself their deliverer, their ennobler, the proclaimer of their fame—and who more fitted than my beloved daughter to serve as my instrument?” “But she’s not—,” Michael Lowenthal began—and Charlotte suddenly realized what should have been plain even as they sat in the car, distractedly arguing possibilities.

“She’s a clone!” whispered Charlotte fiercely.

“I fear, my friend,” said Wilde, loudly overriding their brief exchange, “that this performance might not make the impact that you intend. If you hope for sympathy from me, and find none, what can you expect from the world at large? Perhaps you pretend too hard to madness. If the world thinks you merely mad, they will see neither motive nor artistry in anything you may have done. For myself, I do not deny that you have intrigued me, but I have always been an unnaturally generous man. My attention is easy to capture—my approval is less so. So far, Dr. Rappaccini, I have yet to see the merit in your murders or your absurd distractions, not because they seem too clever but because they seem so stupid.” The hologrammatic sim of Rappaccini smiled again. “You will repent that cruelty, Oscar,” he said. “You must, for you are already committed, already exposed, already known to me. Your hands are bound; the privilege of disapproval was surrendered when you chose the truth of your name. You must judge me as a true liar, Oscar Wilde, and no trick of the mind or the pen can reduce what I have done to mere deception. No matter how hard you resist, I will convince you. You know in your heart that what surrounds you now is no mere rock, rough-hewn and polished for delusion’s sake. You know in your heart that this marvelous appearance is real, and the hidden reality a mere nothing. This is no cocoon of hollowed stone; it is my palace. Hear me, Oscar: you will see the finest rock of all before the end.” Wilde did not reply to that immediately; Charlotte could imagine the frown of vexation which must lie upon his forehead.

“Your representations are deceptive, King Herod,” she said. “Your dancing stepdaughter showed us Gabriel King’s head first and foremost, but Kwiatek died before him, and I suspect that Magnus Teidemann was probably dead even before Kwiatek. It was optimistic too—we have already warned your fifth and sixth intended victims, and we intend to save them both.” Herod turned back to face her. She had not been able to deduce, so far, exactly how high a grade of artificial intelligence its animating silver had, but she hoped that it might be less clever than it seemed. It was responsive, to be sure, but much of what it said consisted of scripted speeches fairly loosely connected to the reactive remarks which prefaced them. She was not optimistic about the prospect of provoking it to reveal anything authentically useful, nor did she expect any explicit confirmation of her guess that Magnus Teidemann was indeed a victim, but she felt obliged to try.

“All six will go to their appointed doom whatever you do,” the sim told her.

“You do not understand what is happening here. You and your companion must look to Oscar to provide what explanations he can. If he does not understand yet, he will understand soon enough.” Charlotte noted that the sim did not use her name, even though Wilde had addressed her by her first name as they had entered; that made her feel slightly better, because it was a welcome reminder to her that the abilities of the mercurial Rappaccini were not, after all, supernatural. All this was mere artifice, albeit of Byzantine complexity. She wanted to get out now, to transmit a tape of this encounter to Hal Watson so that he could identify the fifth face—but she hesitated.

“What can these men possibly have done to you?” she asked, trying to sound contemptuous although there was no earthly point in it. “What unites them in your hatred?” “I do not hate them at all,” replied the sim, “and the link that unites them in my affections is not recorded in that silly Web built by cyberspiders to trap the essence of human experience.” The image was no longer looking at her, but at Oscar Wilde. She suspected that it had somehow received the cue for another programmed speech, which it was determined to direct to the intended recipient.

“I have done what I have done,” the AI continued, steadfastly following its programming, “because it was absurd and unthinkable and comical, lies have been banished from the world for far too long, and the time has come for us not merely to tell them, but to live them also. It is by no means easy to work against the grain of synthetic wood, but we must try. All this is for you, dear Oscar—the last and best gift you will ever receive.” “I think I could have done without it,” said Oscar, not quite as coldly as before. “In any-case, this is not my birthday. I repeat—I cannot fathom your timing.” “Oh, but it is your birthday,” countered the fatuous creature on the ridiculous throne. “And you look simply fabulous.” And with that, darkness fell.

The gloom would have been absolute and impenetrable were it not for a single tiny pinprick of light which shone behind them, marking the door through which they had entered the underworld.

Stuart McCandless walked along the beach on the southern shore of Kauai east of Puolo Point, patiently awaiting the restoration of his subjective equilibrium.

His IT had already taken charge of his heart, and his pituitary monitors would ensure that his endocrine system would soon be finely tuned and perfectly balanced, but within the gap that separated state of being from state of mind there was still a considerable margin of unease.

Stuart adjusted the brim of his hat to take better account of the angle of the afternoon sun and stared out over the quiet Pacific, fixing his eyes on the distant horizon. Although he knew that there were countless smaller islands out there, hidden by the subtle curvature of the earth, it was easy enough to imagine that the ocean went on forever, unsullied by the dabblings of the so-called continental engineers and their Creationist clients. One day, he supposed, the Hawaiian archipelago would be so extensively augmented that there would be islet eyesores by the score visible in every direction, but he counted himself fortunate to have lived in an era of relative stability, when the most ingenious efforts of the world’s environmental revisionists had been directed to the repair of the damage done to the natural islands by the Greenhouse Crisis and the eco-catastrophic Crash.