Architects of Emortality (35 page)

“On the other hand,” said Michael Lowenthal, “the great majority will be horrified and sickened by the whole thing.” “I’m a police officer,” said Charlotte sourly. “I’ll be dealing with the troublesome minority.” “That was another thing the decadents helped to demonstrate, or at least to reemphasize,” Oscar Wilde observed, stifling a yawn. “Human beings are strangely attracted to the horrific and the sick. We have been careful in this guilt-ridden age of dogged reparation to invent a multitude of virtual realities which serve and pander to that darker side of our nature, but we have no guarantee that it can be safely and permanently confined in that way. With or without Rappaccini’s bold example, we might well be overdue for a new wave of Eliminator activity or a new cult of hashishins. We have done sterling work in displacing our baser selves, but the impulse to sin is not something that can be entirely satisfied by vicarious fulfillment. As our indefatigable murderess has demonstrated, actual sexual intercourse is coming back into fashion. Can violence be far behind?” Charlotte turned to look out of the viewport beside her, lifting her head to stare at the patient stars. I’m a police officer, she repeated in the privacy of her own thoughts. If he’s right, it’s me, not him or Michael Lowenthal, who’ll bear the brunt of it. It might have been a symptom of her own exhaustion, but she couldn’t bring herself to believe that Wilde might be wrong, even about the likelihood of Julia Herold evading all Hal’s traps. She no longer had any faith at all in the ability of the UN and the MegaMall to prevent the late Jafri Biasiolo, alias Rappaccini, alias Gustave Moreau, from bringing this affair to the conclusion which he had predetermined, or from making as deep an impression upon memory and history as he had always intended.

Whenever Walter Czastka attempted to focus his attention on the practical questions which still required settlement, they slipped away. He could not confront them without first confronting the sheer enormity of the fact, unkindly revealed to him by the UN’s hapless investigators, that Jafri Biasiolo was his son.

He had, of course, always known that he had a son, but he had never made any attempt to find out what name the boy had been given following his perfectly orthodox birth. It would have been very foolish of him to make any such inquiry, given that it would have been compounding a criminal act, whose commission had been carefully covered up by calculatedly bad record keeping—but that had not been the real reason for his refusal to investigate.

The truth was, Walter admitted to himself at long last, that he simply had not cared enough. Once the experiment had been rudely taken out of his hands, he had forsaken all interest in it. The authorities had taken over, and the young Walter had reacted in a way that had been typical of the young Walter; he had resentfully washed his hands of the whole affair. The fact that he had escaped punishment for his alleged misdeed had made things worse rather than better; it had been the local authorities which had stepped in, undertaking in their wisdom to keep the “problem” confined, to enter the child into the records in a calculatedly and deceptively economical fashion: to pretend, in essence, that the whole thing had never happened, and to demand—on pain of punishment—that he should do likewise.

Presumably they had done that for the child’s sake, but all that the young Walter had seen was a brutal minimization of his heroic effort, a casual refusal to see it as anything important, anything meaningful, anything worth recording.

And his own direly youthful reaction had been: So be it; if that’s what you think, you’re welcome to it. You want pretense, I’ll pretend—and I’ll never try to change the world again. From now on, the world can rot.

He saw, now that he was forced to see, that it had been a petty and childish reaction—but he had been no more than a child.

Perhaps, he thought, pettiness was something he had not entirely grown out of, even now. What had become of his once-grand ambitions, his once-fervent lust to be a pioneer? He had followed through with his threat, and had let the world’s corruption alone, leaving it to fester. He had pretended, as the supposedly generous authorities pretended, that he had done nothing, and that nothing had been the right thing to do.

Now, at the age of a hundred and ninety-four, he had nothing to look back on but that determined pretense. Apart from the single experiment that had produced Jafri Biasiolo—which had to be recognized, in retrospect, as a failure—had he ever even tried to pioneer anything worth pioneering? He had tried… but what had he tried, and how hard? He had abandoned all thought of human engineering and had turned instead to the engineering of pretty flowers. He had thought himself accomplished in that safe and lucrative field, and he had been successful. Had he really been outdone by those who came after him: Oscar Wilde and his unacknowledged son? Had he somehow consented to be upstaged by a clown and a designer of funeral wreaths? Surely not. And yet… Had he been allowed to follow his experiment through, Walter thought, his career path would have been very different, and his life too—but it had been taken from him in too brutal a fashion. The unborn child had been transferred to a Helier womb, and its transference undocumented, so that no one referring to the bare record of the child’s birth would see at once that he was anything but an ordinary product of the New Reproductive System.

The “local authorities” who had discovered what he had done had died off one by one, but the young men who had helped him out, in their various mostly trivial ways, had not. Like him, they had gone unpunished; like him, they had probably pushed the memory of their involvement to the very backs of their minds and might even have contrived to forget it entirely. Only three of them had known the whole story, and not one of them knew the names of all the others who had helped him. Maria Inacio was the only one who could have listed all five names and coupled them to his. Clearly, she had—but the only person to whom she had revealed the names was her son.

Her presumably beloved son.

Her presumably uniquely beloved son. Or was that presuming too much, given that the world of 2323 had changed so drastically since the days when all women had been born like Maria Inacio, capable of conception and parturition? There was no reason, of course, why Maria Inacio or any of his accomplices should ever have spoken publicly of what they knew. None of them could have won any credit by revealing that they had been part of such a wild endeavor. It was in no one’s interest belatedly to add into the record that which had been carefully excluded therefrom—not even Jafri Biasiolo’s. Now, Biasiolo had gone to his grave and had taken King, Urashima, Kwiatek, and Teidemann with him. That only left McCandless, and McCandless did not even know that the other four had been involved. Even if McCandless were spared, or had been spared long enough to tell the police what he knew, he would be unable to connect himself to Urashima or Kwiatek. The most he might remember—and even that would require a prodigious feat of memory—was that Walter might have mentioned King’s interest, and Teidemann’s, while the two of them had walked along that lonely beach discussing a little favor which McCandless might do in order to help Walter keep a secret.

The secret was safe now. Or was it? There was one other person who might—perhaps must—have heard from Biasiolo’s lips the names of those involved and the nature of his scheme: the woman who was carrying out Rappaccini’s scheme.

And that too was a mystery.

“What, exactly, is my murder intended to achieve?” Walter murmured aloud. “What, if anything, is it intended to demonstrate?” Saying it aloud did not help. There was no answer waiting in the wings for an audible prompt.

All of it, Walter thought, is beyond understanding. If I were to wrestle with the puzzle for a hundred years, I would not get close to a solution.

He sat on his bed and stared into the depths of an empty suitcase. He had opened it with the intention of filling it with everything he needed and fleeing the island, but the plan had spontaneously aborted within ten. seconds of its launch. It had taken him no longer than that to realize that he had nothing whatsoever to put in the case. The world had changed while he had lived in it.

When he had been a young man, people really had packed luggage when they needed to travel; suitskins and household dispensers had not been as clever in the early twenty-third century as they were in the late twenty-fourth, and utilitarian possessions had not been so easily interchangeable. Information technology had been almost as clever, but people’s attitudes to its instrumentality had been far more cautious; even people with nothing to hide had routinely kept data bubbled up, and had carried self-contained machines wherever they went in order to access and process the bubbles. In those days, the notion of “personal property” had meant far more than it seemed to mean now.

Walter realized belatedly that there would have been no point in filling the case even if there had been anything to put into it. No matter what the UN police said, he was not going to leave. There was no need, because there was nothing left to be afraid of—not even the threat of murder.

“After all,” he murmured, “I am guilty of something. No matter how long I have lived, and no matter how much time I have wasted, I am still the man who found Maria Inacio, still the man who tried to grasp that single slender reed of opportunity… and failed.” He wondered whether there might be grounds for perverse gratitude in the fact that his unnatural son had somehow found in that unique circumstance a motive for murder. He could not fathom that motive, and it was too late now to repair the omission of a lifetime and make the attempt to communicate with his son, but at least he knew now that his son had not been as neglectful of their relationship as he. The fact that his son, having discovered the circumstances of his birth, had decided to murder his father and all of his father’s accomplices was surely proof that the matter of paternity was not irrelevant to him, and could therefore be construed as a compliment of sorts.

That, at any rate, was surely what Oscar Wilde would have said.

“Damn him to hell,” Walter murmured—meaning Oscar Wilde, not Jafri Biasiolo, alias Rappaccini.

The profoundest mystery of all, of course, was why Jafri Biasiolo, having learned from Maria Inacio the identity of his father and the circumstances of his birth, had done nothing for so long. Had he postponed his “revenge”—if “revenge” it was—until he himself was dead merely in order to avoid punishment? If so, he was worse than a coward, because his agent undoubtedly would be caught and would suffer his punishment in his stead.

It made no sense.

Walter left the bedroom and ordered a bowl of tomato soup from the dispenser in the living room. He ordered it sharp and strong, and he began to sip it while it was still too hot, blistering his upper palate. He carried on regardless, forcing the liquid down without any supplementation by bread or manna. He contemplated chasing the soup with a couple of double vodkas, but there was a difference between the stubborn recognition that he ought to eat and mere folly.

In any case, the benign machines which had colonized his stomach would not let him get drunk unless he first sent messengers to rewrite their code—and that would take hours.

He tried yet again to drag his mind back to the matter in hand. Why should his son want to kill him? Because he—the son—felt abandoned? Because the experiment had failed? Because his mother had asked him to? But why should Maria Inacio want him dead, when she had been a willing partner in the escapade? Why should she want all those who had helped to set it up to be killed along with him, when not one of them had hurt her in any way? And if Maria or her son had wanted to take revenge, why had they waited so long? Why now, when there was so little life left in any of their intended victims? If Moreau had lived thirty or forty years longer—as he certainly would have, had the experiment not failed so ignominiously—there would probably have been no one left for him to murder. Only luck had preserved all five of the people who had given Walter the resources with which to work, a place to hide his experimental subject, and the alibis he had needed to keep his endeavors secret. Only luck had preserved him long enough to outlive his son—if his current state of body and mind could be thought of as “preservation.” Perhaps that was what Moreau resented: the fact that Walter and his five accomplices had all outlived him, when the whole point of his creation was that he was supposed to outlive them. Perhaps, if he had been a better artist, a better Creationist, he would not have failed. Perhaps that was what his forsaken son had been unable to forgive him. Perhaps that was why his forsaken son had said to himself: when I die, you must come with me, for it was your failure that determined the necessity of my death. That almost made sense. Could it also begin to make sense of the fact that the instrument of the son’s murderous intent was a replicate of his mother? The game of God, Walter reflected, must have been the only one he had wanted to play when he was young and devoid of pretense. Perhaps, when he had been forced to put that game aside he had put aside playfulness itself. Perhaps, thereafter, he had presented to the world at large the perfect image of a man who was down-to-earth and matter-of-fact. Everyone thought of him as a realist: a man of method, a hardheaded person without any illusions about himself or anything else. He had lived that pretense for nearly two hundred years—unless, of course, it was no pretense at all, and he really was down-to-earth and matter-of-fact, hard of head and hard of heart, incapable of play.