Architects of Emortality (39 page)

Once the helicopter was off the ground and its cabin was sealed, the background noise became bearable again—and Oscar Wilde was already clamoring for the attention of the machine’s comcon. Charlotte took his call.

“He told us what would happen!” Wilde lamented. “He told us—and I failed to hear it!” “What?” she said. “Who told us?” “Rappaccini! The simulacrum costumed as Herod said, ‘This is no cocoon of hollowed stone; it is my palace. Hear me, Oscar: you will see the finest roc of all before the end.’ I heard it as r-o-c-k, but he meant r-o-c all the time. A cheap trick, but when Michael’s friends release the tape of Herod’s performance, everyone who hears it will wonder why it never occurred to us. We are being made to look foolish, Charlotte—and we have only one opportunity left to redeem ourselves.” “She can’t get away,” Charlotte said grimly. “I don’t know how far or fast that thing can fly, but we can fly further, and maybe even faster. She is not going to get away.” “I don’t think she’s even trying,” said Wilde, with a sigh. “She’s merely leading us to the much-joked-about Island of Dr. Moreau, so that we may cast our wondering eyes upon her father’s demiparadise: his Creation.” Charlotte’s heart was no longer pounding quite so hard, and she forced herself to relax into the seat. She glanced out of the viewport at Walter Czastka’s island, already dwindling to a green diamond rimmed with silver and set on a bed of royal blue.

“We’ve got to warn Czastka,” she said. “We have to tell him not to unseal his locks.” “That’s not necessary,” said Oscar Wilde. “He has a TV set. If he’s taking any notice of anything, he must have seen the woman release the spores—but he will not fall into the trap that claimed us. He knows, as I think he always knew, what form the final murder was always intended to take.” “What do you mean?” Charlotte asked.

“I mean that we failed to anticipate the last ironic twist and turn of Rappaccini’s plot. It’s not Walter those spores are after—it’s his ecosphere.

The woman didn’t come here to murder Walter, but to murder his world. But what will poor Walter be, when his entire Creation is gone? Or should the question be: What has he become during these last forty years, while it was taking shape? Did you not see, Charlotte? Did you not see what lay beyond the palms fringing the beach?” Charlotte remembered, vaguely, that as her helicopter had come in to land she had looked briefly sideways, scanning the trees which stood guard on the margin of the island’s vegetation. She recalled a blurred impression of lush ferny undergrowth nestled about the boles of palmlike trees. She half remembered an extensive patchwork of vivid green, flecked with darker colors: crimsons, purples, and blues deep enough to be almost black—but nothing distinct. She had looked, but she had not observed. Her attention had been fixed on the woman and the rival helicopters; she had not spared a moment’s thought for Walter Czastka’s exercise in petty godhood.

“I didn’t notice anything in particular,” she told Oscar Wilde.

“Nothing can stop them,” Oscar said, his voice reduced almost to a whisper.

“Each murderer is one hundred percent specific to its victim. Walter’s own body is safe inside the house, but that’s not what Walter cares about… it’s not what Walter is. What you didn’t even notice, in particular, was Walter Czastka. It was all that was left of him, the sum total of his life’s achievement.

Rappaccini’s instruments will devour and digest his ecosphere—every last molecule of it—and in doing so will devour Walter more absolutely than they could ever have done by transforming his flesh. I doubt that he can or will be thankful for the fact that he’s already past caring, and that the spores are carrion-feeders consuming something that had never properly come to life.” For the first time, Charlotte realized, Oscar Wilde was genuinely horrified. The infuriating equanimity which had hardly been rippled by his first sight of Gabriel King’s hideously embellished skeleton, or anything else they had seen in their travels, had at last been moved to empathetic outrage. The thought that this kind of murder might be visited upon a fellow human being—a fellow Creationist—had finally cracked his composure.

For the first time, Oscar was identifying with one of Rappaccini’s victims—ironically enough, with the one who had most aroused his contempt. He was finally seeing Rappaccini as a great criminal as well as a mediocre artist.

“Why do you say that Czastka’s miniecosphere had never properly come to life?” Charlotte asked.

“Did you really see nothing?” he countered. “Did you really not see what kind of demi-Eden Walter Czastka had been endeavoring to build? Perhaps that is the most damning indictment of all. Were you to visit my island in Micronesia, even under such stressful circumstances…” As Wilde left the sentence dangling, Charlotte tried once again to remember what she might have glimpsed—in addition to helicopters—from the corners of her eyes while she confronted the red-haired woman on the beach. There had been trees, bushes, flowers—but no animals. Nothing remarkable. Nothing which had called attention to itself. Even so, given the strength of the competition from the items which had grabbed and held her gaze, was that in any way remarkable? While she was trying to remember, Wilde’s fingers stabbed at the console in front of him. No sooner had she admitted defeat than the image she could not summon to mind was displayed for her—by courtesy, she supposed, of the cameras attached to one of the hovering helicopters.

There were, as she had vaguely observed, tall palm trees bordering the beach.

Within their picket line was a complex array of broad-leaved bushes, lavishly decorated with brightly colored flowers. Charlotte could not tell a rhododendron from a magnolia, but the flowers seemed to her to be very nicely shaped as well as capacious. The bushes were not gathered into hedges, but they were planted in such a way as to form curving lines, which mapped out a circular maze interrupted by dozens of elliptical gardens, where other flowers grew on pyramidal mounds, their contrasted colors swirling around one another in carefully contrived patterns. It was impossible to see much detail from the camera’s vantage point, but the overall effect seemed to Charlotte to be not unpleasing. She actually formed that phrase in her mind before realizing that it concealed a barb.

Walter Czastka’s Eden was not unpleasing. Its elements were very nicely shaped.

The whole vast expanse was neat and delicately coordinated, colorful, and clever, but ultimately lifeless. Perhaps, Charlotte thought, Walter Czastka had never seen his work from such a distance and altitude. Perhaps it all seemed very different at ground level. Perhaps, if one could only see the fine detail, the meticulous workmanship, the delicacy of each individual flower… “I can’t judge it,” she said to Oscar Wilde. “I’m not qualified.” “I am,” Wilde told her, with all the assurance of perfect arrogance. “So was Rappaccini. What a miserably enfeebled Arcadia poor Walter had built! Immature and incomplete though it undoubtedly was, its limitations were painfully conspicuous. Had you only had time to stand and stare, you would have seen—and even you, dear Charlotte, would have known that you had seen—the work of a hack.

A hack, admittedly, who was trying to exceed his own potential, but the work of a hack nevertheless. Had you my eyes, you would see plainly enough even in this snapshot the work of a man who had not even the imagination of blind and stupid nature. Skills honed by a hundred years and more of careful practice had been exercised on that isle, but the result was mere kitsch.” “That’s not fair,” Charlotte said. “You don’t know what he was trying to achieve, or what he would have achieved, given time.” “No,” said Oscar, “it’s not fair—but neither is artistry. I know now why Walter tried to keep me away. I understand the message which he engraved upon the minuscule soul of his nearest and dearest simulacrum. But Rappaccini had seen it! Rappaccini must have kept careful watch on Walter for more than half a lifetime, ever since his mother took the trouble to tell him what and who he was. How disappointed he must have been in his Creator!“ “Creator?” Charlotte queried.

“But of course! What is the subject of this melodrama, if not Creation? Unless Walter cares to tell us, or Rappaccini has left a record, I doubt that we shall ever know the intimate details, but I cannot believe that Maria Inacio’s pregnancy was an accident or the result of a rape. Hal blithely assumed that she could never have known that she was immune to the endemic chiasmatic transformers until she became pregnant, and perhaps he was right—but when did she first become pregnant, and who did she tell? If we suppose that her first pregnancy was surreptitiously terminated, we may also suppose that she might then have come to seem, in the eyes of an ambitious but desperately naive Creationist, a unique resource. Suppose, for a moment, that the plagues which sterilized the human race had never occurred and never forced the universalization of ecto-genesis. Had the chiasmatic transformers not ravaged all the wombs that Mother Nature had provided, what other kinds of transformers might have been sent forth in their stead?” “You’re saying that Walter Czastka used Maria Inacio in some kind of clandestine experiment in human genetic engineering—that he used her as an incubator for a modified embryo that he’d never have got permission to grow in an artificial womb?” “It was 2322,” Oscar Wilde reminded her, “more than eighty years before the Great Exhibition. The limitations of indwelling nanotech had come to light, but work to put something in its place had hardly begun in earnest. The Green Zealots were in their heyday, and the Robot Assassins were not yet a spent force. The opportunity for daring was there—but so was the need for secrecy. We know that Jafri Biasiolo had been subjected to considerable genetic manipulation that was idiosyncratic in nature and unusual in extent. Who could or would have done that but Walter? Who else but he could have removed ova from her womb, fertilized them with his own sperm, then set about remaking them? Who else but he could have selected out the best of the transformed embryos and reimplanted it within her womb? “I don’t know how the other five were involved, but each of them must have contributed something to the project, even if some or all were ignorant of the contributions made by the others. Perhaps one of them was responsible for Maria Inacio’s first pregnancy, while another assisted in its termination. Perhaps one was Walter’s accomplice in the laboratory, while another played some part in having the second embryo removed to a Helier womb. Perhaps one was to have provided safe accommodation for the pregnant mother when she could no longer be seen in public. There are a thousand different scenarios I could imagine… but the one salient point is that Jafri Biasiolo did not think of Walter Czastka as his father. He thought of him as his Creator! In all of this, he has engaged himself with Walter the Creator—and in preparing to obliterate all the products of Walter’s Creationist ambition, he also took it upon himself to obliterate all those named by Maria Inacio as accomplices in the exploitation of her unexpectedly fertile womb.” “You certainly have an extraordinarily vivid imagination, Dr. Wilde,” Charlotte murmured. Her policeman’s conscience had already reminded her that there was not a shred of hard evidence to support any of it, but she could see that it had to be true in its essentials.

“Yes, Charlotte, I certainly have,” he said, casually accepting the compliment.

“Walter Czastka, alas, has not. He had the seed of the gift, but he lost it—or killed it. He let it shrivel within his soul, out of shame, or guilt, or fear, or petty regret. Though his heart still beats within his withered frame, he has already begun to rot. Rappaccini’s worms are feeding on his carcass.” “But what was he trying to do with Maria Inacio?” Charlotte asked.

“The one thing worth attempting, at that time and in that context,” Wilde said, with a heavy sigh. “Walter must already have known, even though the rest of the world was only just beginning to realize and had not yet openly admitted, that the nanotech escalator had stalled. Human emortality could not be attained by means of nanotech and superficial somatic engineering; it required genetic engineering in embryo. What Walter attempted was a transformation of the kind that was not perfected for a further century and more: a Zaman transformation.

Alas, its effects were purely cosmetic; Jafri Biasiolo retained the appearance of dignified maturity longer than his contemporaries, but he remained as mortal as they. He must have known soon after the Great Exhibition that he was little different from other men.” “And that’s why Rappaccini decided to kill Czastka and all his accomplices? Because they failed?” Charlotte was incredulous. That seemed to her like monstrous ingratitude.

“I doubt that it was as simple as that. Rappaccini was too sensible and sensitive a man to condemn a fellow scientist for an experiment that produced a negative result. Perhaps he decided to kill his Creator and all the accomplices in his Creation because, having failed in their bold attempt to be midwives of a new era, they gave up. Perhaps Rappaccini the scientist and Rappaccini the artist could forgive them their failure, but not their repentance. Perhaps he hoped that his Creator might return to the true path, and in the end despaired.

On the other hand, he may simply, have decided that he had been a closely kept secret for far too long, and that he ought to be remembered for what he truly was: a unique man, and a unique artist. Perhaps he became determined to shout from the rooftops that which Walter and his coconspirators were so determined to keep quiet, by way of compensation for his own betrayal. By the time the casters have unraveled the thread of this plot, everyone in the world will know what Jafri Biasiolo was, and what he made of himself.” By the time that Gustave Moreau’s green-clad island came in view, Charlotte had placed a bubblebug on her forehead in preparation for the landing. Hal Watson would be able to use it as an eye as long as she stayed within a few hundred meters of the copter. Given that Moreau’s island was more or less identical in size and shape to Walter Czastka’s, it seemed unlikely that she would have to stray beyond that limit.