Architects of Emortality (29 page)

The sight of the seemingly infinite sea calmed him, as it always had done, and helped him to feel that his true self had been restored to him. Ever since childhood, Stuart had been claustrophobic. He had consulted therapists of half a dozen different kinds, but their analyses and practical advice had never had the least impact on the problem. Before his second rejuve, while it still seemed that brainfeed research might yield results, he had taken as keen an interest as any nonspecialist could in the painful advance of neurophysiological science and technology, but he had waited in vain for a product that might cure him of his unwanted delicacy.

There were, of course, worse afflictions that a man might be condemned to live with for a hundred and ninety-four years, but Stuart had never been able to take comfort from that fact. His situation would not have been so bad if he had only been required to avoid such close confinement as that associated with elevators and whole-body VE apparatuses; that would have been a definite inconvenience, but not a crippling handicap. The real problem was the slow unease which crept upon him by day whenever he was confined to his house. It was not something that caused him any acute pain, and it never threw him into a panic attack no matter how long the pressure was sustained, but its very slightness was annoying. It was like an insidious internal tickling, whose effect grew by degrees until its psychological effect was out of all proportion to its sensational marginality.

In order to maintain his sense of equilibrium, he had to get out into the open for an hour or more at least once a day. That was one of the reasons why he lived on Kauai, where the air was always warm enough and rarely too hot for comfort, and where the stars were clearly visible at night in order that they might emphasize the limitlessness of the universe. That was also why he lived close to the beach, where the land met the huge and seemingly infinite sea. He had always loved beaches. All the most significant encounters in his life had taken place on beaches.

Ever since his second full rejuve, his claustrophobia seemed to be more easily aggravated than it had been before. The repair work, which the nanotech shock-troops had carried out within his brain seemed to him to have increased the magnitude of the innate flaw in his makeup, if only slightly. Nowadays, it required only the merest disturbance of his routines to set him on edge and to cause the inexorable closing-in of his walls to proceed just a little bit faster.‘ When Inspector Watson of the UN police had called to tell him that he might be on the hit list of a mad murderer, it had not mattered in the least that the assertion was patently absurd; it had unsettled him nevertheless.

He had been angry, of course—especially when he discovered what had led Watson to contact him. “Are you calling everyone who was at Wollongong in 2322?” he demanded.

“Yes,” Watson had replied, as if there were nothing even slightly unreasonable about the policy. “Everyone who’s still alive.” “You can’t possibly think that this lunatic intends to murder everybody who happened to be at university with him!” “That’s not the point,” the policeman had told him, as if he were the one who was being obtuse. “Until we know more about his motive, we have no idea how he’s selecting out his victims. All we know for sure is that the people killed so far were all at Wollongong in that year. Until we know exactly what links Gabriel King, Michi Urashima, Magnus Teidemann, and Paul Kwiatek, we can’t figure out which of their contemporaries might have to be added to the list. One of the reasons we’re contacting everybody is the hope that somebody who was there at the time might be able to identify the connection for us. Can you think of any such connection, Professor McCandless?” “Don’t be ridiculous,” Stuart had said. “It was more than a hundred and seventy years ago. Nobody can remember that far back—and it’s preposterous to think that anyone might start killing people in 2495 because of something that happened in 2322.” “The person actually delivering the fatal blow seems to be a much younger person,” Watson had admitted. “We’re having trouble tracking her movements because she keeps changing her appearance. I’m posting three images now—please look at them very carefully, Professor McCandless, and tell me if you recognize this person. Please bear in mind that if she is known to you, she will have confronted you with an appearance as subtly different from these as they are from one another.” “That’s even more ridiculous,” Stuart had told him, becoming even angrier.

“Every woman nowadays aspires to one or other of the conventional ideals of beauty, Inspector, and every one has access to the technologies which allow her to secure it. As a university administrator, I’ve been in contact with young people all my life, and I must have known thousands of young women who sculpted their faces along those general lines. This is a small island, and there can only be a few hundred authentically young women residents here, but at least half of them could pass for one of these three if she put her mind and cosmetic skills to work on the problem. The same is true of any woman who’s just undergone a first rejuve.” Watson had tried to assure him that it wasn’t true, and that if he would only look carefully enough he would be able to discern certain distinguishing features, but Stuart hadn’t had the time to waste. As a university administrator, he’d long grown used to seeing young people in quantity, as a kind of undifferentiated mass. Their academic records varied, but in person they were merely segments of an infinite crowd. Things were different now, of course; since retiring from administrative work to concentrate on research he no longer saw young people at all, except for Julia—but that only proved the point. Julia could have made herself look like the woman in Watson’s pictures with no difficulty at all, and there was nothing unusual about Julia.

Even so, he had looked up the four victims named by the policeman, to jog his memory as to who they were and what their accomplishments had been. He had also taken a second look at the pictures, just in case he could discern something meaningful therein.

There wasn’t anything meaningful. They could have been anyone. They could even have been Julia.

Stuart knew that he had to put the whole matter out of his mind now and concentrate his mind on the sea, and on infinity—but it wasn’t easy. The puzzle was too intriguing. What could possibly link Gabriel King the demolition man, Michi Urashima the brainfeed buccaneer, Magnus Teidemann the econut, and Paul Kwiatek the software engineer turned VE veg? Stuart had known them all by reputation, although he hadn’t previously realized that they had all been at Wollongong at the same time, and he’d needed the encyclopedia to remind him of exactly what they were famous for. He must, presumably, have been aware of their simultaneous presence at the university way back in the 2320s, but the memory of the coincidence had faded long ago. Their subsequent careers had diverged as widely as those of any four individuals picked at random, and it was difficult to imagine why anyone might want all four of them dead—especially when one considered that Urashima and Kwiatek were half-dead already. There was, it seemed, a young woman involved—perhaps more than one, if Inspector Watson was incorrect in his estimation that the three pictures were all representations of the same woman—but that didn’t offer any clue as to the connection. It was difficult to imagine a crime of passion involving Urashima or Kwiatek, and it seemed that the only thing about which Teidemann was capable of being passionate was his hypothetical Mother Goddess.

King was surely the only one who had it in him to attract the wrath of a jealous lover, if one could believe in a lover jealous enough to kill.

Stuart could believe in a lover jealous enough to kill, because he knew that jealousy—like claustrophobia—was one of those soul afflictions with which nanotechnology had never quite come to grips. He could not, however, believe in a lover jealous enough to kill four times over, picking out victims who were all approaching two hundred years old. Who in the world could possibly be jealous of a man whose brain had exploded in a chaotic mess of superfluous neural connections? Or a man who had almost lost contact even with simulations of the real world, preferring expeditions into the remoter reaches of perverted perception? “I knew I’d find you here.” The voice cut through Stuart’s ruminations like a knife, and he felt his heart lurch as he started—but by the time he turned, he was in control of himself.

“Julia!” he said. “You shouldn’t creep up on a man when he’s just been told that he might be about to be murdered. Not a man of my age, at any rate. I’m fragile.” Her vivid green eyes seemed to be laughing, although her beautiful mouth was only slightly curved into a quizzical smile. The sultry breeze drifting from the sea was barely sufficient to stir her red-gold hair, but the hairs were so fine that her tresses shifted like the surface of the patient sea. Her hair had always seemed to Stuart to have a life of its own. “Murdered?” she echoed. “Why would anyone want to murder you?” “They wouldn’t,” he answered. “They couldn’t possibly. But someone, it seems, has a grudge against selected Wollongong alumni of my particular vintage. The UN police are actually calling everyone who was there at that time, fishing for a motive. And you needn’t feel complacent about it—they’re circulating a description of a murder suspect who’s almost as beautiful as you. If you were to change the color of your hair and eyes, and apply a little synthetic flesh to the contours of your cheeks… you should be grateful that I know you so well and that I’m not in the least paranoid. A lesser man might have given your name to the police, and you’d be under arrest by now.” “I doubt that,” Julia said, coming forward to take him by the arm and turning him so that he could walk back to the house with her. “They’d have to find me first, then catch me.” “It’s a small island,” he pointed out, “and there’s nowhere to run or hide.” “It’s big enough,” she assured him. “I brought you some flowers, by the way. I put them in your living room. It’s a new design, by Oscar Wilde.” “I can’t quite understand your fondness for that man’s work,” Stuart confessed.

“He’s a nineteenth-century man, insofar as he’s a historian at all. Not one of us.” By us he meant specialists in the twenty-second century: the most eventful era in human history, when history itself had trembled on the brink of extinction; the era of the great plague, the Crash, the New Reproductive System, and the nanotech revolution.

“He designs beautiful flowers,” Julia said. “He’s an artist. There are very few true artists in the world.” “But he’s not original,” Stuart said. “It’s all recapitulation and recomplication.” “All human life is recapitulation and recomplication,” she said, with the casual confidence of unfalsified youth.

“No, it’s not,” he assured her. “There are genuine ends and authentic beginnings. Conrad Helier was a true artist. He put an end to the old world and forged a new one. He designed the womb which ultimately gave birth to the New Human Race. He, not Eveline Hywood, was the original designer of the fundamental fabric of the alternative ecosphere—the stuff she tried to pass off as alien life after his death. You can’t compare a mere flower designer to a man like that.” “According to the best evidence available,” Julia said gently, “Conrad Helier only designed one of the chiasmatic transformers, and his was only the first artificial womb to be mass-produced—at best, a tiny recomplication of designs that were being produced in some profusion. The time had come to put an end to so-called natural childbirth, and it would have ended anyhow. When historians put the bloody knife in Helier’s hand, it’s as much a matter of scapegoating as anything else. He’s the heroic villain appointed to the role, but he was just an instrument of causal process. As for Hywood’s fake alien life, it was her foster son who actually worked out most of the key applications: LSP, SAP systems, shamirs, and so on. In any case, you can’t call that kind of utilitarian endeavor Art. Art is essentially superfluous, and that’s why it’s so necessary to human existence.” “Nothing is historically superfluous,” Stuart told her sternly. “Nothing is outside the causal process by which the world is made and remade. Art is merely an expression of that process, no matter what individual artists may think.” It was a serious argument, but not in the sense that their disagreement might come between them as a hurdle or a moat. He and Julia had an understanding which allowed them to debate points of intellectual nicety without being divided.

That, in Stuart’s view, was what friendship amounted to—and in spite of the difference in their ages, he and Julia were the firmest of friends. The rapport between them went far beyond their common interest in the study of history.

“Even the art of murder?” Julia asked lightly.

“If murder were not an expression of historical causality,” Stuart insisted, “it would have to be considered devoid of artistry, even by the most daring interpreter.” Stuart had always considered himself a daring interpreter. His ambition had always been to understand the whole of human history and the whole of the human world: to hold it entirely in his mind’s eye, as if it were a vast panorama in which every element stood in its proper relation to every other element, a huge seamless whole whose horizons held the promise of infinity. In a way, he had to reckon himself a failure, because he knew well enough that there was a great deal which he did not understand, and never would understand, but he could forgive himself that inadequacy—which was, of course, an inadequacy which he shared with all other living men—because he had at least made the effort. He had never allowed himself to be intellectually confined in the way that men like Urashima and Teidemann had. “You must understand that you too will fail to grasp the whole,” he had told Julia when she had first come to him as his pupil.