Architects of Emortality (34 page)

“What is incontrovertible,” the geneticist said in a more level tone, “is that Jafri Biasiolo, alias Rappaccini, alias Gustave Moreau, devoted his life to the design and manufacture of funeral wreaths—and whatever else this series of murders may be, it is Rappaccini’s own funeral wreath. All its gaudy display, including the invitation sent to me, is explicable in those terms, and only in those terms. Rappaccini has supplied materials to so many funerals that he must have decided a long time ago that he could never be satisfied by any mere parade through the streets of a city, however grandiose. He wanted a funeral to outdo every other funeral in the history of humankind—and we are part and parcel of its ceremony. These condolence cards are not addressed to his victims—they are leaves from his own Book of Lamentations, and must be understood in that light.” “I can’t believe it,” said Michael Lowenthal, shaking his head. “It’s too ridiculous.” Wilde’s remark about refraining from jumping to silly conclusions had obviously needled him.

“Maybe it is ridiculous,” said Charlotte, “but it’s no more so than the crimes themselves. Go on, Dr. Wilde—Oscar.” Wilde beamed, welcoming her belated concession. Then he relaxed back into his seat and half closed his eyes, as if preparing himself to deliver a long speech—which, Charlotte realized, was exactly what he intended to do.

“It may seem unduly narcissistic,” Oscar Wilde began, “but I wonder whether the most fruitful approach to the puzzle might be to unpack the question of why Rappaccini chose me to be its expert witness. The Herod sim informed us that it was because I was better placed than anyone else to understand the world’s decadence. The quotations reproduced on the condolence cards are taken from works identified in their own day as ‘decadent,’ but it is not ancient history per se that is the focus of attention here. It’s the repetition of history: the resonance implied by Jafri Biasiolo’s performances as Rappaccini and Gustave Moreau, and my own performance as my ancient namesake.

“According to the tape which you kindly showed me, Gabriel King described me as a ‘posturing ape,’ and you probably took some slight pleasure in the implied insult. The description is, however, perfectly accurate, provided one assumes that ape is a derivative of a verb meaning to imitate rather than a reference to an extinct animal. I am, indeed, an imitation; my whole existence is a pose—but the original Oscar Wilde was a poseur himself, and ironic echoes of my performance extend through my own work and through his. Once, when someone complained that my namesake had criticized a fellow artist for stealing an idea when he was an inveterate thief himself, he observed that he could never look upon a gorgeous flower with four petals without wanting to produce a counterpart with five, but could not see the point of a lesser artist laboring to produce one with only three. You will understand why that analogy has always been particularly dear to me—but there are other echoes more vital still.

“In the first Oscar Wilde’s excellent novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, the eponymous antihero makes a diabolical bargain, exchanging fates with a portrait of himself, with the consequence that the image in the picture is marred by all the afflictions of age and dissolution while the real Dorian remains perpetually young. In the nineteenth century, of course, the story of Dorian Gray was the stuff of which dreams were made: the purest of fantasies. We live in a different era now, but you and I, dear Charlotte, have been caught on the cusp between two ages. We can indeed renew our youth—once, twice, or thrice—but in the end, the sin of aging will catch up with us. It still remains to be proven whether Michael’s New Human Race is really capable of enduring forever, but the glorious vision is in place again: the ultimate hope is there to be treasured.

“Like me, Charlotte, you will doubdess do what you may to make the best of the life you have. I am living proof of the fact that even our kind may set aside much of the burden with which ugliness, disease, and the aging process afflicted us in days of old. We are corruptible, but we also have the means to set aside corruption, to reassert in spite of all the ravages of time and malady the image which we would like to have of ourselves. I daresay that you will play your part bravely and make the best of what is, after all, a golden opportunity for achievement and satisfaction. Perhaps, even as you watch the progress of such contemporaries as Michael, you will never experience a single moment’s anguish at the thought that you are a mere betwixt-and-between, becalmed halfway between mortality and authentic emortality. Perhaps, though, you will not find it impossible to find a grain of sympathy for Rappaccini’s obsession with death and its commemoration. In designing a funeral for himself that would surpass all the funerals of the past in its ludicrous self-indulgence and mawkish extravagance, he must also have had it in mind that there would soon come a time when funerals would lose their aura of inevitability, occurring only in the wake of rare and unexpected accidents.” “But I still don’t see—,” Charlotte began.

Oscar Wilde silenced her with an imperious wave of his delicate hand. “Please don’t interrupt,” he said. “I realize that you may well find this boring as well as incomprehensible, but I am trying hard to arrange my own thoughts in order, and I hope you might allow me to bore and confuse you a little while longer.

Even if you fail, in the end, to make sense of what I have to say, you will be no worse off than you are now.” “I wasn’t—,” Charlotte protested, but stopped as he pursed his perfect lips. She felt a perverse pulse of lust as his gleaming eyes bade her be silent.

“The nineteenth-century writers who were called decadent,” Wilde continued, “saw themselves as products of a culture in terminal decay. They likened their own era to the days of the declining Roman Empire, when the great city’s grandeur gradually ebbed away, and its possessions were overrun by barbarians. According to this way of thinking, the aristocracy of all-conquering Rome had grown effete and self-indulgent, so utterly enervated by luxury that its members could find stimulation only in orgiastic excess. By the same token, the decadents asserted, the ruling classes of nineteenth-century Europe had been corrupted by comfort, to the extent that anyone cursed with the abnormal sensitivity of an artistic temperament must bear the yoke of a terrible ennui, which could only be opposed by sensual and imaginative excess.

“An entire way of life, according to the decadents, was damned and doomed to collapse; all that remained for men of genius to do was mock the meaninglessness of conformity and enjoy the self-destructive exultation of moral and artistic defiance. Many of them died of excess, poisoned by absinthe and ether, rotted in body and in mind by syphilis—but they were, of course, absolutely right. Theirs was a decadent culture, absurdly distracted by its luxuries and vanities, unwittingly lurching toward its historical terminus. The next two hundred years saw wars, famines, and catastrophes on an unprecedented scale, in which billions of people died, although the hectic increase in human population was not halted until the descent of the final plague: the plague of sterility. The comforts of the nineteenth century—hygiene, medicine, international trade—were the direct progenitors of the feverish ecocatastrophe whose crisis was the Crash.

Throughout the twentieth century the petty deceivers of politics maintained their ruthless grip upon the fettered imagination of the vast majority of humankind, ensuring that few men had the vision to understand what was happening, and even fewer had the capacity to care. Addicted to their luxuries as they were, even terror could not give them adequate foresight. Blindly, stupidly, madly, they laid the world to waste and used all the good intentions of their marvelous technology to pave themselves a road to hell.

“What a waste it all was!” Wilde paused again, but only for effect. This time, it wasn’t Charlotte who made haste to interrupt him. “You can’t compare the present era to the one that preceded the Crash, Dr. Wilde,” said Michael Lowenthal, the agent of the MegaMall. “There’s no prospect whatsoever of another ecocatastrophe. Everything is under control now.” “Exactly so,” said Wilde. “The old world ended with a bang and a whimper. Ours will not. Ours is far more likely to end in Hardinist stasis, in perfect order, with everything under control.” “That’s not what I meant, and you know it!” Lowenthal protested. “The masters of the MegaMall like change. They need change. Change is what keeps the marketplace healthy. There has to be demand. There has to be innovation. There has to be growth. There has to be progress. But…” “But it all has to be managed” Oscar Wilde finished for him. “It has to be measured and orderly. Change is good but chaos is evil. Growth is good but excess must be stifled. There are still those among us who cannot agree. Few of them are authentic revolutionaries—even the most extreme Green Zealots and Decivilizers, like the Eliminators and Robot Assassins before them, probably ought to be reckoned clowns and jesters rather than serious anarchists—but they still desire to make their dissenting voices heard. I think you will agree that whatever the outcome of this comedy may be, Rappaccini will certainly succeed in being heard. When dawn breaks, five men will be dead and a sixth will be under sentence of execution. A vast swarm of helicopters and hoverflies will be headed for Walter Czastka’s island, avid to watch the denouement of the drama at close quarters. Can Walter be saved? Can the woman be apprehended? What has been done, and how, and why? Above all else: why? “Perhaps, when all is said and done, the question is the answer; perhaps the sole purpose of every move in this remarkable play is to force us to recognize that it is, indeed, play. At any rate, my friends, we are no longer an audience of three: tomorrow, we will merely be the avant-garde of an audience of billions. Tomorrow, everyone will listen, even if hardly anyone will actually understand, while Rappaccini informs us, in the most grandiosely bizarre way he can contrive, that our culture too has reached its terminus, and that it is on the brink of being interred forever, mourned for a while, and then forgotten.” “It’s nonsense!” Michael Lowenthal protested. “Everything worthwhile will be preserved. Everything!” “But you and those like you, Michael, will be the ones who decide what is worthwhile,” Wilde pointed out. “Even if men like Rappaccini and I were to agree with you, we should still feel the need to mourn the loss of the superfluous.

What Rappaccini is trying to make us understand, I suppose, is the horror of a Hardinist world of carefully stewarded property, inhabited entirely by the old.

That might, after all, be the ultimate consequence of the Zaman transformation.

Children have already become rare on the surface of the earth; they will eventually become as nearly extinct as those obscure species which are never decanted from the ark banks except to supply the demands of zoos.

“Whatever might happen on Mars, or in the circum-lunar colonies, Earth will presumably remain what it has already become: the MegaMall-dominated Empire of the Old. In time, maturation will ensure that it becomes the Empire of the Eternal. Some form of that empire is the heart’s desire of every thinking man and the ambition of every practical scientist—even those, like me, who stand condemned as the last generation of the envious—but its emergence is bound to cause us anxiety and fear. The death of death is a prospect we ought to celebrate, but it is also a prospect we ought to approach with solemn concern.

Who better to remind us of that than Rappaccini, the master of commemoration, the monopolist of wreaths?” Charlotte suddenly realized that Wilde was deliberately understating the case.

He was waiting for someone else to take the next step in the sequence, lest it be thought that he understood a little too well what the man he called Rappaccini wanted to achieve.

“He’s murdering people,” she said, taking it upon herself to fill the gap. “He’s murdering old men. He’s not just making an aesthetic statement; he’s writing an ad for the philosophy of Elimination. That’s how some of the vidveg are going to read this crazy business, at any rate—and I, for one, think that he always intended them to read it that way. His sim said as much, when it said that murder mustn’t be allowed to become extinct.” Oscar Wilde smiled wryly. “He did indeed,” he admitted.

“And is that the way you were supposed to read it?” Charlotte followed up. “Is that part of the interpretation that you were supposed to put to the world on his behalf?” “I don’t know,” he answered frankly. “But I am, as you have cleverly observed, reluctant to go so far in my approval.” “So you don’t agree with him, then?” Michael Lowenthal put in. “When all the fancy rhetoric is set aside, you agree with us.” Charlotte knew that the implied collective was the masters of the MegaMall, not Lowenthal and herself.

“I do share Rappaccini’s anxieties,” Wilde replied, “but I don’t think the threat is as overwhelming as he seems to think. I don’t believe that the old men will ever take over the world completely, no matter how few they are or how long they live, or how clever they are in sustaining their claim to own the earth. I can’t believe that a world in which death has been virtually abolished will be a world full of Walter Czastkas. I may, of course, be prejudiced by vanity, but I think that such a world could and should be a world full of Oscar Wildes. I’m even prepared to concede that the world will probably get by perfectly adequately even if I’m half wrong, and men like me are forced by circumstance to live alongside men like Walter.

“The spark of authentic youth can be maintained, if it’s properly nurtured. The victory of ennui isn’t inevitable. When we really can transform every human egg cell so as to equip it for eternal physical youth, at least some of those children—hopefully the greater number—will discover ways to adapt themselves to that condition by cultivating eternal mental youth. My way of trying to anticipate that is, I will admit, primitive and rough-hewn, but I am here to help prepare the way for those who come after me: the true children of our race; the eternal children; the first authentically human beings.” “That’s all very well,” Charlotte said, “but it’s Rappaccini, not you, who’s going to be world-famous tomorrow, at least for a while. Others may be more sympathetic to the violent aspects of his message than you are.” “Undoubtedly,” said Wilde.