Architects of Emortality

 Brian Stableford

  

 This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book

 are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

 ARCHITECTS OF EMORTALTTY Copyright © 1999 by Brian Stableford

 All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions

 thereof, in any form.

 Edited by David G. Hartwell

 A Tor Book

 Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

 175Fifth Avenue

 New York,NY10010

 www.tor.com

 Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

 ISBN: 0-812-57643-8

 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-22201

 First, edition: October 1999

 First mass market edition: May 2000

 Printed in theUnited States of America0987654321

 For Jane, and all who nourish fond remorse

 Acknowledgments

 A much shorter and substantially different version of this story was published

 in the October 1994 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction. I owe considerable debts

 of gratitude to Gardner Dozois, for publishing that novella and reprinting it in

 his annual collection of the Year’s Best Science Fiction, and to Charles

 Baudelaire, Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, the original Gustave Moreau,

 John Milton, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, without whose contributions and general

 inspiration the story would have been much slighter. I should also like to thank

 Sonia Feldman for the shamirs, Jane Stableford for proofreading services and

 helpful commentary, and Andy Robertson for being prepared to claim that he had

 read every word.

  

 CONTENTS

 Initiations

 Investigation: Act One

 Intermission One

 Investigation: Act Two

 Intermission Two

 Investigation: Act Three

 Intermission Three

 Investigation: Act Four

 Intermission Four

 Investigation: Act Five

 Intermission Five

 Finale

 Epilogue

  

 Initiations

 A King in His Countinghouse

 ^ »

 Gabriel King stared out of the window of his thirty-ninth-floor apartment in the

 TrebizondTower. He was looking at theislandofManhattan, where the apparatus

 of civilization was being slowly but surely demolished. The old skyline was

 decaying; the sharp sharks’ teeth of the traditional skyscrapers were collapsing

 into mere blunfed molars. One by one, the oldest buildings in the world were

 gently folding into them-selves, meekly putting themselves away.

 The sight made Gabriel feel slightly sad. It should, in theory, have had the

 opposite effect; he, after all, was the man primarily responsible for the many

 kinds of rot that had set in and the voracity of their consumption. Every minute

 diminution of the classic silhouette sent a surge of credit into his

 multifarious bank accounts. The MegaMall was paying him generously for his

 efforts, as it always did. Those who had served the MegaMall well—as Gabriel

 always had, in dealings under the counter as well as above it—were always well

 served in their turn.

 The squat foundations of thenew citywere already in place behind and among the

 decaying edifices, and the shamirs were ready to begin the reshaping. They too

 were Gabriel’s slaves, and their labors would maintain the flow of his capital,

 but contemplation of the endeavors and rewards to come could not lift his mood.

 The simple fact was thatNew Yorkhad always stood, in Gabriel’s

 quintessentially American consciousness, for the world, and he could not see a

 world the without a slight pang of regret. He had not been born in the USNA—his

 nominal citizenship was Australian—but he had always been a demolition and

 construction man, a materialist, and an ardent champion of progress. Those were

 the core values of the realAmerica: theAmericathat knew no geographical

 boundaries, because it was a dream. To witness the demolition ofNew Yorkwas,

 for Gabriel, to witness the end of a historical epoch. He had witnessed the

 ending of mere eras and felt nothing but joy in the contemplation of progress,

 but this was different. The new dawn which his shamirs were programmed to break

 for the MegaMall was the dawn of an epoch: the epoch of the New Human Race. It

 was not merely Old New York that had been declared redundant; it was the people

 who had lived in it for the last few hundred years.

 The personal shamirs that had seen Gabriel’s body through two full rejuvenations

 and countless cosmetic patch-ups had all but exhausted their resources. With

 luck he might live for another thirty or forty years, but the chances of his

 mind surviving a third full rejuve were very slim indeed. For the moment, he was

 compos mentis, with no more holes in his memory than the average

 one-hundred-and-ninety-four-year-old, but the integrity of his personality had

 grown perilously brittle; any sudden jolt might shatter it. The shadow of death

 was hanging over him, ready to descend upon his person as it was now descending

 upon Old New York.

 When he looked upon the rotting of New York, therefore, Gabriel saw the end of

 his world, and everything that it had meant. At long last, progress had

 outstripped him and all of his kind. Progress would go on, but he and others

 like him could not. Even if he survived another sixty years, or a hundred, he

 could make no further progress—and nor could any man of his obsolete kind.

 He was what he was; for him, the process of becoming was finished. Any sons born

 after him would be members of a new species, children of the MegaMall and the

 Architects of Emortality.

 The miracle was, he supposed, that he only felt slightly sad. Fortunately, he

 had led a good and productive life, as a loyal servant of the MegaMall. He had

 never reached the upper echelons even of its servant class, let alone its Inner

 Circle, but he had been richly rewarded. Nor was wealth the limit of his good

 fortune, he told himself; although he could not claim a place in the new world

 that he was helping to build, he still had pleasures in store. There was much in

 life that could still be savored. Within the hour, he knew, his sadness would be

 lifted—for a while.

 Gabriel brushed the back of his right hand over his lips, wiping away a trace of

 moisture which had accumulated in the corner of his mouth. He had no difficulty

 whatsoever in visualizing the new skyline which would eventually replace the one

 already decayed. He had seen it often enough in virtual reality, modeled with

 exquisite care, lit by a sky much brighter than the sullen one which loomed over

 the city now.

 The new edifices would not reach for the heavens in the same thrusting and

 predatory fashion as the old. Their discreet curves would be the harbingers of a

 new era of harmony and stability: an era in which the New Human Race would put

 an end forever to death and its terrible handmaidens, angst and war.

 The carefully worded but unvoiced thought brought forth an unexpectedly sour

 surge of resentment. “The Age of the Human Herbivores,” he murmured, speaking

 loudly enough for the apartment’s recorders to catch the words, although he was

 not entirely sure that he wanted evidence of a childish explosion of envy to

 remain on the record. “The Cud-Chewing Era.”

 The wave of resentment died quickly enough, and the manufactured contempt with

 it. Intellectually, Gabriel did not begrudge the New Human Race its dreams, and

 he was not a man to let his emotions get the better of his intellect. The

 judgment of his intellect was—as it had to be—that the demolition of New York

 was work of which a man of his sort should be proud. It was, after all, a

 fitting culmination of his career.

 Long ago, while Gabriel had been a student at Wollongong, someone—probably

 Magnus Teidemann—had told him that sharks’ teeth were not like the teeth of

 humans. Sharks’ teeth were continually renewed, new ones growing in the rear and

 migrating forward to replace the old as they were worn down by use. New York’s

 skyscrapers had followed that pattern for more than five hundred years; whenever

 one had been removed, another had sprung up to take its place, usually brighter,

 sharper, and more durable. Despite piecemeal change, the whole ensemble had

 remained essentially the same. No one had ever taken on the entire island

 before, let alone the entire city. This was the first time that the whole set of

 shark’s teeth had been swept away, along with the implicit shark. From now on,

 New York would be the mouth of a very different social organism. Gabriel was

 proud to have been the man appointed to that task. In fact, he was very

 proud—intellectually speaking, of course.

 Gabriel felt perfectly entitled to think of himself as the man appointed to the

 task, although a pedant would have insisted that he was merely one of many, and

 perhaps not the most important. History would give primary credit to the

 planners who had pronounced a sentence of death on the old city and the

 architects who had designed the new. If the engineers who actually carried out

 the work were to be remembered at all, they would be seen as mere applicants of

 a suite of technologies that still bore the name of their ancient founder, Leon

 Gantz, and a nickname borrowed from the legend of Solomon.

 Gabriel knew well enough that when the day finally came for the news tapes to

 record his obituary and commemorate his life, he would be described as a gantzer

 and a master of shamirs, as if all he had ever done was to use another man’s

 tools—but he also knew that the description would be misleading and unfair. Leon

 Gantz had only laid the foundations of biological cementation and

 deconstruction; it was not until the late twenty-second century that the

 anonymous nanotechnologists of PicoCon had succeeded in forming the first vital

 partnership between the organic and the inorganic, and not until the

 mid-twenty-fourth century that the MegaMall had delivered the full spectrum of

 modern nanomanipulators into the eager hands of ambitious young men like

 himself.

 Leon Gantz, the PicoCon teamworkers, and the MegaMall’s backroom buccaneers had

 all been scientists, but Gabriel King was a practical man, a materialist through

 and through. In his own estimation, Gabriel was a maker, and an artist in the

 truest sense of the word—a truer sense, at any rate, than the sense in which the

 word was used by certain people he could name.

 “Posturing apes in fancy dress,” Gabriel murmured, again speaking loudly enough

 to impress the words upon the microscopic ears with which all the apartment’s

 rooms save one were liberally supplied. Being a practical man, Gabriel did not

 approve of the “posturing” by means of which certain so-called artists attempted

 to attract the public eye. Nor did he approve of “apes” who dedicated their

 lives to making ever more flamboyant versions of entities that were useless in

 the first place. Nor did he approve of “fancy dress”; his own suitskins were

 always gray or dark blue, always neatly tailored in such a way as to proclaim

 that they and he were good utilitarians, with no energy to spare for nonsensical

 display.

 Gabriel knew that there were some who thought that the work in which he was now

 engaged was an assault on nonsensical display. The would-be prophets of

 De-civilization had formed a particular hatred for New York and the supposed

 symbolism of its skyline. It was, in their eyes, the ultimate city, and hence

 the ultimate symbol of the supposedly decadent past that the De-civilizers

 desired to obliterate—regardless of the needs and desires of the New Human Race.

 Gabriel was prepared to admit that if ever there was a city whose ugliness

 demanded that it be torn down and built anew, that city was Old New York, but he

 found talk of “eliminating the display of history” and “shedding the empty

 cultural heritage of the past” difficult to endure. He had more than a little

 respect for “the display of history,” on the grounds that if mankind’s mistakes

 were not made manifest as well as remembered, they might be repeated, even by a

 New Human Race engineered in the artificial womb for true emortality. To make

 this unrepentantly misshapen metropolis a scapegoat for antediluvian folly and

 greed seemed to him to be foolish and simpleminded.

 To Gabriel, as to all Americans in spirit, Manhattan was the last urban

 wilderness, the last geographically confined space on Earth where so many people

 so ardently desired to gather that it had been forced to grow further and

 further upward, extending its magnificently vicious fangs into gleaming blades

 of crystal and alloy. Given that the island had to be domesticated and made fit

 for habitation by the ironically titled Naturals, Gabriel would not have wanted

 the labor of its deconstruction to be entrusted to anyone else—but it was hardly

 surprising that the job had imported a sadness into his soul that he could not

 shake off and did not really want to.

 It was only natural—was it not?—that he should be unable to take as much delight

 in contemplation of the raising of the tame city as he was from contemplation of

 the devastation of the wild.

 “The devastation of the wild,” he repeated, aloud, in order that he could savor

 the phrase. Some thoughts were too precious to remain unspoken.

 Then the door chime sounded, and his sadness vanished like smoke as he turned

 away from the window. His heart was already beginning to beat a little faster in

 anticipation of delight.

 Gabriel checked the viewscreen, although he knew perfectly well who it was. As a

 conscientious utilitarian, he never received personal visitors in the many

 temporary homes which business forced him to adopt, except for purposes that

 were strictly personal. He was of the old school, which held that all

 professional matters should be consigned to virtual environments, where the full

 panoply of technical support was available—and he was also of the even older

 school, which held that the pressures of the flesh were best dealt with in the

 flesh.

 He was certain that the woman waiting to be admitted to the apartment was

 authentically young, not because he had expertise enough to detect a first-rate

 rejuve, but because the way she talked and the fact that she was here at all

 smacked of awesome naivete. At a distance, one might have judged that she looked

 like thousands of other young women, sculpted to a currently fashionable ideal,

 but at close quarters her uniqueness became obvious. Her eyes were wonderful,

 her hair utterly glorious. In an age where only the subtlest nuances could

 discriminate between the very beautiful and the extremely beautiful, she

 belonged to the furthest reaches of the extreme category.

 “Come in,” Gabriel said as he released the locks and slid the door aside.

 It seemed that she understood what it meant to belong to a very old school,

 because she had brought him flowers. “These are for you,” she said as she handed

 them over, smiling broadly. The blooms were like miniature sunflowers, and their

 densely clustered petals had the color and texture of nascent gold.

 “They’re beautiful,” Gabriel said. “I don’t think I’ve seen their like before.”

 “They’re new,” she said, still smiling. “An Oscar Wilde original.”

 Gabriel could not help falling prey to the slightest hint of a frown, but he

 turned his head so that his visitor would not see it, and the phrase he

 murmured—“That posturing ape!”—was pronounced too softly for her merely human

 ears to discern.

 Lest she ask him what he had said, and why, he was quick to add: “I have a vase

 somewhere. Should I put them in water, or do they require something more

 nourishing?”

 “Oh no,” she said. “They’re self-sufficient, provided that the atmosphere isn’t

 too dry. You can mount them on the wall if you don’t want them cluttering up a

 table.” Her gaze traveled around the walls as she spoke, offering silent comment

 on the fact that the apartment was unfashionably bare of vegetative decoration.

 “That’s all right,” Gabriel replied, a little more stiffly than he would have

 liked. He handed them back to her while he went to search for the vase.

 When they had first met, in the park, the woman had been delighted to find out

 who he was and what had brought him to the city. She had been fascinated to hear

 him talk about himself, and he had talked more freely to her than he had to

 anyone since the ninth and last of his bond marriages had come to the inevitable

 parting of the ways.

 She had told him almost nothing about herself, but that was probably because she

 had little or nothing to tell. Given the presumable difference in their ages, it

 was only natural that she should be content to listen and learn. When Gabriel

 had told her that he had been twice rejuvenated, and how long ago his second

 rejuvenation had been, her eyes had grown wide.

 “You must be one of the oldest men in the world,” she had said. “But you seem

 much better preserved than most others of your generation.”

 “I suppose so,” he had replied. “Many people—men and women alike—seem to come

 apart quite rapidly once the effects of their second full rejuve wear off, but

 I’ve been lucky, at least superficially. Internally, the balance of my organic

 and inorganic IT is way past critical. If I were to attempt another rejuve I’d

 very probably end up a vegetable, but if I can stay reasonably fit I can

 probably keep on getting older for another thirty years, and keep some faint

 echo of my fading looks until the day I die.”

 “You look wonderful,” she had assured him. “So wonderfully wise.” When he came

 back into the reception room the woman was standing at the window, exactly where

 he had been standing a few moments before. He hoped that she was admiring his

 handiwork—and that her admiration was not tainted by the slightest sadness. “Let

 me take the vase,” she said.

 Gabriel surrendered his find with a vague gesture of apology for its mere

 adequacy. He had never believed the die-hard psychobiologists who had insisted

 that the aesthetic judgments which underlay sexual attractiveness were

 genetically hardwired so that the idea of beauty and the appearance of youth

 were inextricably tied together. He had scored too many notable successes in

 pick-up spots far less promising than Central Park to accept the apologetic

 argument that the attraction which the very young sometimes manifested for the

 very old was merely a matter of the momentary fascination of the extraordinary.

 “It’s a fine view,” he said, nodding toward the softening skyline.

 “It certainly is,” she replied. “The outline of the city is changing day by day,

 and you’re the man responsible.”

 “Only one of many,” he said, deeply regretting the duty of false modesty and

 hoping that she might contradict him.

 “Oh no,” she said, right on cue. “You’re the one who’s actually doing it. You’re

 the deconstructor, the De-civilizer.”

 He was determined not to let the final noun distract from the effect of the

 compliment.

 “Would you like a drink?” he asked.

 “Oh no,” she said again. “I prefer making love without the aid of chemical

 stimulants—don’t you?”

 He did, but he knew that she would have assumed as much because of the way he

 dressed. He knew too that she would never have used a phrase like “making love”

 when talking to someone of her own generation. For a fleeting moment, he

 wondered whether she might be making a little too much effort, but then he

 smiled, realizing that she was only trying to make a good impression. Her eyes

 were wonderful, and the way she brushed her flowing tresses aside so that she

 could see him more clearly was nothing short of divine. No VE siren could ever

 replace the quotidian reality of her presence and the naive insouciance of her

 gesture. She placed the vase on the table in front of the sofa, carefully

 spreading the blooms. There had been a card hidden among them, and she plucked

 it out, standing it on its edge against the vase. There was something written on

 the card, but Gabriel made no attempt to read it. There would be time for that

 later.

 “A long time ago,” Gabriel said, making the most of the phrase, “I wrote a

 thesis for my doctorate on the twenty-first-century Greenhouse Crisis. The

 rising sea levels forced New York’s citizens to fight a fantastic battle to

 preserve it from the flood, raising the entire island and remodeling the

 buildings so that the old streets became flood tunnels. In those days, New York

 was a symbol of United America’s defiance of the forces of nature: an embodiment

 of the determination of the Hundred States to survive the crisis and remake the

 world. Sometimes I can’t help thinking that it’s slightly disrespectful to the

 efforts of those twenty-first-century heroes to renounce the city’s heritage—and

 whatever motivates my paymasters, that’s not the spirit in which I’m working.

 I’m trying to do as they did, to save the city and everything it has

 symbolized.” Silently he cursed himself for excessive pomposity, but the young

 woman seemed to mop it up.

 “Yes,” she said. “I see. I understand what you’re saying—what you’re doing.”

 Gabriel felt a sudden moment of dizziness, which had nothing to do with the

 elevation of the thirty-ninth floor of the undeconstructed Trebizond Tower.

 He realized that he could not now remember what complex chain of accidents and

 decisions had made him a master of demolition. He must have begun adult life as

 a historian, if he had indeed written the thesis he had glibly recalled, and

 must have continued it as a businessman enthusiastic for any opportunity.

 Deconstruction was the pattern.into which his life had eventually fallen, but he

 no longer knew exactly how or why. It must have been the trail of profit and

 loss, not any special interest, which had led him into the specific line of

 business whose master he now was, but he had developed a passion for it

 nevertheless. He was an engineer, not a scientist, and he still knew next to

 nothing about the molecular biology of the bacterial agents which were his

 ultimate minions, but he loved the discretion and the artistry of their work.

 Felling by artificial decay was neat as well as economical.

 “Wouldn’t it be more satisfying, Gabriel,” one of his aides had recently asked

 him, “if you made as much money building things as you do tearing them down?”

 Would it? he wondered as he stared at his visitor’s beautifully guileless eyes.

 He honestly didn’t know.

 He rallied himself, blinking away the momentary hint of vertigo and breaking

 away from his companion’s gaze. On the far side of Central Park the rotting

 teeth were slowly and politely folding themselves away into their internal

 cavities. He had to remind himself that he was not at all like them; he was no

 ugly transient, fading into decrepitude for the last time. The presence of the

 lovely woman was adequate proof of that fact. She was authentically young,

 perhaps even a Natural, and yet she was here, ready to embrace him, to savor the

 thrill of being with a man who had done so much: a complete man.

 “What do you love best in all the world?” the young woman asked Gabriel King as

 she took his hand and drew him away from the table where she had placed the

 vase.

 It was a strange question, but she asked it as if it were serious—and she was,

 after all, authentically young. She had come to him in the flesh, seeking

 enlightenment

 Gabriel had not the slightest idea what he loved best in all the world.

 Everything he had done—everything, at least, that he remembered having done—he

 had done for money, but he had never been an overdevout worshipper at the shrine

 of Mammon. He had made money because that was what people of his particular

 tribe had always done. His foster father and his foster grandfather before him

 had made money, in the crisis and its aftermath, and six or seven generations of

 woman-born Kings before them had made money even during the Dark Ages of the

 unextended life span. Kings had always been the most loyal and best-rewarded

 servants of the forebears of the MegaMall, even in the dark days before the

 Pharaohs of Capitalism had formed the Hardinist Cabal and brought a precious

 world order out of primordial chaos.

 Gabriel was sure that those primitive Kings had never been ashamed to make

 money. Even before the days of Leon Gantz and his marvelous shamirs they had

 probably made it from decadence, devastation, destruction, decay, dereliction,

 and decivilization… It had been, he had to suppose, their particular version of

 divine right. But Gabriel, unlike the worst of them, had never loved money. No

 matter what he had done in the name of progress and the service of the MegaMall,

 he had severed his connection with that heritage of unalloyed greed,

 “I’ve loved many people and many things at different times,” he told the woman,

 knowing that his answer was a little belated. “Too many, I think, for any one

 person or any one thing to stand out as the best.”

 It might even have been true. You’ve lived too long, his forefathers might have

 said. You’ve had three life-times instead of one, and no true sons to carry

 forward the family name. You’ve betrayed our heritage for your own selfish

 pleasure. And you never even loved the money you made.

 The Kings are dead, he said silently, by way of imaginary reply. Long live the

 King.

 He guided the young woman to the door of the bedroom, which was

 privacy-screened. Given that the apartment building was so relentlessly

 respectable, he had every faith in the assurance that the bedroom walls

 contained neither hidden eyes nor hidden ears.

 As me door slid open before them Gabriel increased the length of his stride

 slightly, but the woman reached out to pull him back, forcing him to hesitate on

 the threshold.

 She turned to look briefly at the golden flowers, as if approving her own

 excellent taste; then she turned back to him, looking up into his face as if to

 do exactly the same. She reached up, put her hand at the back of his neck, and

 eased his face forward and down, so that she could kiss him on the lips.

 The kiss was deliberately languorous, as if she were savoring a moment that

 would remain precious in memory for a long time.

 Gabriel felt giddy again. He could not help but wonder why the young woman

 seemed to like him so much. For a moment, he was half-convinced that her

 presence—indeed, her very existence—was a mere delusion, a siren unnaturally

 wrenched by some trick of his failing intellect out of some uniquely seductive

 virtual environment. He was, however, old enough and wise enough not to question

 his good fortune too closely.

 A man of his age—a member of the last generation which had no alternative but to

 be mortal—owed it both to himself and his vanishing species to do his utmost to

 drain the last drop of pleasure from every random whim of happy chance.

 Like his as-yet-undiscovered predecessors, Gabriel King did not know that he had

 already begun to die, and that the murderous shadow would move upon him with

 remarkable swiftness.

 Investigation: Act One

 The Trebizond Tower

 « ^ »

 Charlotte had plugged her beltphone into a wall socket so that she could bring

 up a full-sized image on the screen mounted beside the door of Gabriel King’s

 apartment. Unfortunately, the only image of Walter Czastka she had so far been

 able to obtain was that of a sim which must have been coded eighty or ninety

 years ago. It was a very low-grade sim, no more capable than the meanest of

 modern sloths, and it had obviously been programmed with brutal simplicity.

 “Dr. Czastka is unable to take your call at the moment,” it said for the fourth

 time.

 “The codes I’ve just transmitted are empowered to set aside any instruction

 written into your programming,” Charlotte replied, unable to help herself. She

 was used to dealing with silvers, even when she had to talk to an answerphone.

 “This is Detective Sergeant Charlotte Holmes of the United Nations police, and

 your programmer will be guilty of a criminal offense if you do not summon him

 immediately to take this call in person.”

 “Dr. Czastka is unable to take your call at the moment,” said the missing man’s

 doppelganger, as it had been programmed to do in response to any and all

 inquiries. In programming it thus, Walter Czastka was indeed committing a

 technical offense, given that he was a fully certified expert whose services

 could be commandeered by any duly authorized agent of the World Government—but

 he had probably never expected to receive any kind of urgent summons from the

 police, given that his field of certified expertise was the design and

 development of flowering plants.

 As she broke the connection, temporarily admitting defeat, Charlotte bit her

 lip. It was bad enough to be assigned as site supervisor to an area which the

 forensic team had insisted on sealing tight—after rating it a grade A biohazard,

 thus forcing her to conduct her part of the investigation from the corridor

 outside—without having expert witnesses ducking out of their duties by assigning

 obsolete sims to the vital task of answering their phones.

 She tried desperately to collect her thoughts. This was by far the biggest case

 of her fledgling career, and it was certainly the most remarkable. Routine

 police work was incredibly dull, at least for site-supervision officers, and

 there had been nothing in her training or experience to prepare her for anything

 half as bizarre as this. When the newscasters got hold of it, it was going to

 generate a lot of interest—interest which would put immense pressure on Hal

 Watson and his silver surfers, if they hadn’t yet got to the bottom of the

 affair.

 The building supervisor, whose name was Rex Carnevon, handed her a bag full of

 eyes and ears. He was an unfashionably small man, whose girth suggested that his

 IT was having difficulty compensating for the effects of his appetites. There

 wasn’t much that could be done to add to his height, but even a building

 supervisor should be sufficiently well paid to afford regular body-image

 readjustments.

 “That’s it,” Carnevon said resentfully. “Every last one. The lobby, the

 elevator, and the corridor are all blind and deaf until I can get the

 replacements in.”

 “Thanks,” she said dully.

 “You’re welcome,” the supervisor informed her, implying by his tone that she was

 not at all welcome.

 Charlotte was supposed to treat members of the public with politeness and

 respect at all times, especially when they were cooperating to the best of their

 ability, but something in the supervisor’s manner got right up her nose.

 “If anything turns up on the evening news, Mr. Carnevon,” she said, in what she

 hoped was a suitably menacing manner, “I’ll make sure that whoever leaked it

 never holds a position of trust in this city again.”

 “Oh, sure,” Carnevon said. “I really want it broadcast all over the world that

 the King of Shamirs was murdered in my building. I can’t wait to give them the

 pictures of the killer riding up in my elevator carrying a bunch of fancy

 flowers. Miss Holmes, if anything leaks, you’d better make sure that your own

 backyard is clean, because it sure as hell won’t have come from me.”

 “We don’t know for certain that anyone has been murdered, Mr. Carnevon,”

 Charlotte informed him with a sigh. “And if, in fact, someone has, we certainly

 don’t know that the young woman who came up in the elevator was responsible.”

 “Of course not,” the supervisor said sarcastically. “I’m only the one who

 answered the alarm call. If I’d been fool enough to barge in after seeing what I

 saw through the spy eyes I’d probably be dead too—and there wouldn’t be any

 point in your friends staggering around in those damn moon suits. Believe me,

 Miss Holmes, that wasn’t any accidental death—and he was absolutely fine before

 that whore called in on him. She was even carrying a bunch of fancy flowers—what

 more do you want?”

 What Charlotte wanted, and what Hal would certainly demand, was evidence.

 Carrying a bunch of flowers—even state-of-the-art flowers formed according to a

 brand new gentemplate—was not yet illegal, although it might one day become so

 if the forensic team was right about the biohazard aspect of the case.

 “Thank you, Mr. Carnevon,” said Charlotte, meaning Go away, you horrid little

 man. The meaning was clear enough to have the desired effect, although Carnevon

 might have decided to hang around out of spite if he’d caught the full import of

 her thought.

 As the screen above the elevator began to count down the car’s descent,

 Charlotte turned back to the screen beside the apartment door, which was now

 occupied by an unsimulated image of her superior officer.

 “I’ve enhanced the audiotapes the team transmitted from the apartment’s ears,”

 Hal said laconically. “I’m ninety-nine percent sure that we have all the

 subvocalized remarks. The first of the three he muttered before the girl came in

 was ‘The age of the human herbivores; the cud-chewing era.’ The second was

 ‘Posturing apes in fancy dress.’ The third was ‘The devastation of the wild.’

 The one that was an aside to his conversation was ‘That posturing ape,’ first

 word stressed—presumably referring to the man she named, Oscar Wilde. It’s

 possible, of course, given that he seems to have had posturing apes on his mind,

 that the previous reference was to the same person, but the fact that he said

 ‘the wild’ makes it unlikely. It’s also possible, I suppose, that the three

 remarks might be symptomatic of a suicidal turn of mind, but all the other

 evidence I’ve looked at seems to be against that.”

 “Do you have Wilde’s number?” Charlotte asked.

 “Already tried it,” Hal told her, in a tone which implied that she should have

 realized that. “The sim which answered says that he’s here in New York, but that

 he’s currently in transit and never takes calls in cabs because it’s

 unaesthetic.”

 What is it with these flower designers? Charlotte wondered. “I’ll bet the sim

 was a Stone Age sloth, carefully designed for maximum stupidity,” she said.

 “On the contrary,” said Hal. “It was a medium-level silver, as clever as any

 answering machine I’ve ever had occasion to speak to, but it’s still a slave to

 its programming, and it hasn’t been programmed with the authority to break in

 while the Young Master is in a cab.”

 “The Young Master?” Charlotte queried.

 “The silver’s phrase, not mine,” said Hal. “I’ll get through to him as soon as I

 can—and if he still feels like playing the winsome eccentric I’ll get tough with

 him. In the meantime, the public eyes are beginning to turn up a lot of

 tentative matches to the girl’s face—far too many and much too tentative for my

 liking. It’s bad enough that she’s been sculpted to a standard model without her

 having changed key details of her appearance both before and after leaving the

 building. If she did carry the murder weapon in, she was almost certainly more

 than a mere mule. With luck, I’ll have the case cracked in a matter of hours,

 once the moonwalkers have run tests on the bedsheets. She can hide her idealized

 face from the street’s eyes, but she can’t hide her DNA.”

 “Great,” said Charlotte. “At the pace the boys and girls inside are working,

 they should be able to get the data to you by the middle of next week.”

 “Don’t worry,” Hal said. “It’ll all open up once we have the forensics. It’s

 just a matter of starting with the right data—at the moment I’m fiddling around

 the periphery. With average luck, we’ll have it all wrapped up before the story

 leaks out to the vidveg.”

 When Hal broke the connection Charlotte went to the window at the end of the

 corridor in order to look out over the city. She was on the thirty-ninth floor

 of Trebizond Tower, and there was quite a view.

 Central Park looked pretty much the way it must have looked for centuries,

 carefully restored to its antediluvian glory, but the decaying skyline was very

 much a product of the moment. She wondered whether the fact that Gabriel King

 had been in New York to execute the demolition of the old city might have

 provided the motive for his murder. Some Manhattanites had become very angry

 indeed when the Decivilizers had finally claimed the jewel in their crown, and

 murder was said to be the daughter of obsession.

 There was a funeral procession making its patient way along the southern flank

 of the park. The traffic must have been backed up for miles, and anyone in the

 queue older than a hundred must have been complaining that such a thing would

 never have been allowed in the old days. Nowadays, deaths were so rare that it

 was tacitly taken for granted that even the meanest corpse had an inalienable

 right to hold up traffic for an hour or two, whatever the letter of the law

 might be.

 How long, Charlotte wondered, would Gabriel King’s funeral train be, and how

 long a standstill would it cause?

 The train she was watching was led by six carriages laden with flowers, all of

 them black, white, or scarlet. Each of the carriages was drawn by four jet-black

 horses. Behind the carriages came the black-clad mourners. Professionals,

 friends, and family members were all mingled together, but they were

 distinguishable even at this distance by the tall stovepipe hats the

 professionals invariably wore. Charlotte counted thirty-some pros and estimated

 that there must be about a hundred and forty amateurs. For New York, that was

 very small-scale. Gabriel King would probably command ten times as many, maybe

 more; he had, after all, been one of the oldest men in the world. In his time,

 he must have met—as well as made—millions.

 Among those millions, it seemed, was one who had found motive enough to kill

 him, and to kill him in a manner so bizarre as to be utterly without precedent.

 Murder was nowadays the rarest of crimes, and such murders which did happen

 usually occurred when some private tsunami of rage or spite smashed through the

 barriers erected by years of primary-school biofeedback training. Planned

 murders were virtually unheard-of in these not-yet-decivilized times. Charlotte

 was very conscious of the fact that such a crime required the maximum of respect

 and effort from all concerned, even people whose lowly station in life involved

 visiting crime scenes and threatening building supervisors.

 The Decivilization movement, she thought, must have been a great boon to King’s

 business. He must have been very grateful indeed to the city-hating prophets,

 although the more extreme among them would have detested Gabriel King as

 thoroughly as they detested all old-fashioned entrepreneurs—especially those who

 were fabulously wealthy double rejuvenates. King could easily have made enemies

 even among the people whose crusade he was furthering, and among the business

 rivals who had competed with him for the contracts—but those who hated him most

 fervently of all must surely be the New Yorkers whose city he was even now

 subjecting to unnaturally rapid decay. If she could only figure out which one of

 them had sent the young woman and armed her with her remarkable murder weapon,

 she would be famous—at least for a day.

 Unfortunately, Hal was the one to whom the forensic evidence would be sent, and

 he was the one who would pull the relevant DNA match from the records. The best

 Charlotte could hope for was to be part of the team sent to make the arrest.

 Charlotte heard the hum of the motor as the elevator became active again, and

 she glanced back at the screen above the door; it dutifully revealed that the

 left-hand car was bound for thirty-nine.

 Charlotte frowned. It had to be Rex Carnevon—the whole floor had been

 temporarily quarantined until the forensic team had made a more accurate

 assessment of the biohazard.

 She moved to meet the elevator car, psyching herself up for another

 confrontation, but when the door opened, it was not the supervisor’s elliptical

 form that emerged but that of a tall young man with perfect blond hair and

 luminous blue eyes. His suitskin was sober in hue but very delicately fashioned,

 taking full advantage of the sculpted curves of his elegant frame. Now that

 cosmetic engineering was available to everyone, it had become exceedingly

 difficult for its artisans to produce striking individual effects, but this man

 struck her instantly as a person of exceptional beauty and bearing.

 “Sergeant Holmes?” he inquired.

 The warmth and politeness of his tone cut right through her intention to say

 “Who the hell are you?” in a petulant fashion, and all she could contrive was a

 rather weak “Yes.”

 “My name is Lowenthal,” he said. “Michael Lowenthal.”

 “You shouldn’t be here, Mr. Lowenthal,” she said, having recovered her breath

 and something of her sense of purpose. “This area is under quarantine.”

 “I know,” he said, taking a swipecard from an invisible pocket without

 disturbing the line of his suitskin. He held the card out to her, and while she

 took it in order to slot it into her beltphone he added: “I’m a special

 investigator.”

 The display on her phone read: FULLY AUTHORIZED. OFFER FULL COOPERATION.

 Charlotte, slightly numb with shock, turned around in order to plug her machine

 into the wall socket again. She summoned Hal’s image to the screen beside

 Gabriel King’s door.

 “What’s this, Hal?” she said.

 “Exactly what it says,” her superior replied rather brusquely. “The instruction

 came down from above, presumably from the very top. We’re to copy Mr. Lowenthal

 in on the progress of our investigation. Anything we get, he gets.”

 Charlotte knew that it would be as useless to express surprise as it would be to

 object. She had never known that such an instruction was possible, but she was

 uncomfortably aware that she had not been long in the job. She had only the

 vaguest idea of what and where the “very top” might be from which this

 remarkable command had apparently descended. She turned to stare at Michael

 Lowenthal as if he were some kind of legendary beast.

 “I’m sorry,” he said. “To tell you the truth, I don’t really know what’s going

 on either. The serious investigation is being done by my superiors—Webwalkers

 working in close collaboration with Inspector Watson, and a pack of silver

 surfers to join forces with his. Like you, I’m just a… what’s the term?

 Legman—I'm just a legman.”

 “You’re a private investigator?” said Charlotte incredulously.

 “Nothing so glamorous, I’m afraid,” he replied. “Merely a humble employee, like

 yourself.”

 She opened her mouth to say “Employee of what?” but was saved from the verbal

 infelicity by the opening of the apartment door. It slid back into its bed to

 reveal a shimmering plane, like the surface of a soap bubble. The first of the

 protectively clad forensic investigators was already stepping into the bubble.

 She was carrying a camera in one hand and a bulky plastic bag in the other, but

 the bubble stretched to accommodate everything and folded around her, equipping

 her suit and her luggage with yet another monomolecular layer of protection.

 Her three companions followed her one by one, each one stepping through the

 quarantine barrier in careful slow motion, as if fearful of puncturing the

 surface—although that would, of course, have been impossible.

 The team leader looked at Michael Lowenthal with obvious apprehension, unwilling

 to say anything until the stranger’s presence was explained.

 “It’s okay,” Charlotte told her. “This is Michael Lowenthal, special

 investigator. He’s been cleared. Mr. Lowenthal, this is Lieutenant Regina Chai”

 Lowenthal merely nodded, evidently as eager to hear what the lieutenant had to

 say as Charlotte was.

 “We’ve stripped the place,” Chai reported in her usual businesslike manner. “You

 can lock the door now. The air’s been thoroughly cleaned, but until we get a fix

 on the agent, the apartment has to stay sealed. Given that the woman walked in

 and out without a care in the world—and given that you’ve been standing around

 out here for the past couple of hours—the surrounds must be safe, and if they

 aren’t it’s too damn late to do anything about it, so you can unseal the other

 apartments and free up the floor.

 “We transmitted all the film back to Hal—he should have an edited version ready

 for briefing purposes in a couple of minutes. The skeleton is definitely King’s,

 but there’s nothing on the tapes to indicate how the agent was administered. The

 bedroom was privacy-sealed, just like the brochure says—classy building! All I

 can say for sure is that he looked happy enough when he came out. The card that

 came with the yellow flowers might have given him a clue, if he’d bothered to

 read it, but he didn’t. Died without ever knowing that there was anything really

 wrong—even his alarm call wasn’t panic-stricken. If this thing ever gets loose…

 but I guess that’s why you’re here.”

 The last remark was addressed to Michael Lowenthal. Chai had obviously assumed

 that he was from whatever UN department was responsible for maintaining eternal

 vigilance against the possibility that the specter of plague war might one day

 return to haunt the world. The blond man didn’t make any sign that could be

 construed as a confirmation or a denial.

 “Thanks, Lieutenant,” said Charlotte. “Can you get all that stuff down to the

 van and away without being seen?”

 “As long as the supervisor’s following instructions. Be seeing you.” Chai turned

 away to join her companions, who were waiting in the elevator car that had

 brought Lowenthal up to the thirty-ninth floor. There was just about room for

 her to squeeze in along with all the equipment and the plastic bags. Charlotte

 watched the door slide shut behind them, and stabbed the button that would

 summon the second car from the lobby. The display screen informed her that it

 had not begun to move.

 Cursing under her breath, Charlotte punched out Rex Carnevon’s number on her

 beltphone, which was still plugged into the wall socket.

 “You can liberate the second elevator car now,” she told him. “I’m ready to come

 down.”

 “I know,” the horrid little man replied smugly, “but I thought I’d better hold

 it. I was just on the point of calling you. There’s a man here who says that

 he’s got an appointment with Gabriel King. He’s anxious to get up there because

 he’s a little late—his cab got held up by a funeral procession, or so he says. I

 thought you might want me to bring him up—unless you’d rather talk to him in my

 office.”

 Charlotte was uncomfortably aware of Michael Lowenthal’s bright blue eyes. She

 dared not meet his inquisitive stare.

 “What’s this man’s name?” she asked.

 The smug expression on Rex Carnevon’s face deepened as he relished his petty

 supremacy. He gave himself the luxury of a three-second pause before he decided

 that he had drunk his fill of satisfaction and said: “Oscar Wilde.”

 Charlotte, although slightly stunned by the news, thought fast. Evidently the

 cab in which the self-styled Young Master had been traveling, unwilling to be

 disturbed even by the UN police, had been heading for Trebizond Tower—and the

 Young Master himself had been heading for Gabriel King’s apartment, to see the

 murdered man. Given that the girl who had probably carried out the murder had

 been carrying a bunch of Oscar Wilde flowers, and given that the murder weapon

 was also a flower, that put Oscar Wilde at the dead center of the puzzle.

 Charlotte was very enthusiastic to talk to him—but the last thing she wanted to

 do was allow Rex Carnevon to eavesdrop on her conversation. It would be bad

 enough having Lowenthal looking on, even though she’d have had to hand over a

 tape in any case.

 “Send him up,” said Charlotte tersely as soon as she had recovered her

 composure. “Alone.”

 This, she thought, was a golden opportunity to do some real detective work: to

 question a witness; to get to grips with a mystery; to play a significant part

 in cracking a case. Hal was a top-class fisherman—his average time for

 completing an investigation was two hours, seventeen minutes, and fourteen

 seconds—but he never had suspects turn up on his doorstep ready for questioning.

 This case had already lasted longer than Hal’s average cracking time, and it

 seemed highly likely to set a new record. It would be a very good case in which

 to get more deeply involved, and Wilde’s unexpected arrival at the crime scene

 had to be reckoned a godsend to a humble site supervisor.

 While the elevator car made its stately ascent, Charlotte tried hard to collect

 herself and focus her mind. Please let him be guilty! she prayed. If not of the

 murder, of something—something far more serious than programming his silver to

 block official phone calls. Beneath the silent prayer, however, was an

 uncomfortable feeling that she might be out of her depth. She was only what

 Lowenthal had called a legman, after all. She knew that Hal Watson wouldn’t like

 this new turn of events one little bit. Having an expert witness turn up in the

 flesh before he’d even been contacted by phone added yet another item to a

 growing list of things that simply didn’t make sense.

 When the newcomer emerged from the elevator car Charlotte felt a curious sense

 of deja vu. He was by no means Michael Lowenthal’s twin—his hair was russet

 brown and flowing, his eyes were green, and his bodily frame was much more

 abundantly furnished with flesh—but he was exactly the same height, and he had

 something of the same air about him. Like Lowenthal, he was one of the most

 beautiful men—handsome would have been the wrong word—Charlotte had ever seen,

 and like Lowenthal, he was well aware of his beauty. He was wearing a green

 carnation in the lapel of his neatly tailored jet-black suitskin, whose color

 was a perfect match for his eyes.

 Oscar Wilde bowed to Charlotte with deliberate grace and favored Michael

 Lowenthal with a slight nod of the head. Then he glanced up, briefly, at the

 place where a discreet eye would normally have been set in the wall to record

 the faces of everyone emerging from the lift. The eye in question was in the bag

 Charlotte was holding, along with all the others, but Wilde couldn’t know that.

 Charlotte was puzzled by the glance. Public eyes and private bubblebugs were

 everywhere in a city like New York, and all city dwellers were entirely

 accustomed to living under observation; those who had grown up with the

 situation took it completely for granted. In some WG-unintegrated nationettes it

 still wasn’t common for all walls to have eyes and ears, but within the compass

 of the World Government everyone had long since learned to tolerate the

 ever-presence of the benevolent mechanical observers which guaranteed their

 safety. Most people ignored them, but Wilde obviously did not belong to the

 category of “most people.” Might his reflexive glance toward the eye be a tacit

 admission of guilt?

 Wilde smiled broadly—and Charlotte realized, belatedly, that she had jumped to

 the wrong conclusion. Wilde hadn’t glanced at the place where the eye should

 have been because he resented its assumed presence, but because he welcomed its

 attention. He had actually adjusted his stance as he moved out of the elevator

 so that he might better be observed, not merely by her and Lowenthal but by the

 cameras he supposed to be recording the encounter.

 Posturing ape! Charlotte thought, remembering Gabriel King’s muttered aside.

 “Mr. Wilde?” she said tentatively. “I’m Detective Sergeant Charlotte Holmes, UN

 Police Department. This is my, um, colleague, Michael Lowenthal.”

 “Please call me Oscar,” said the beautiful man. “What exactly has happened to

 poor Gabriel? Something nasty has happened, has it not? The orotund gentleman

 downstairs left me in no doubt of it, but would not tell me what it was.”

 “He’s dead,” Charlotte replied shortly. “I understand from Carnevon that you had

 an appointment with him. Will you tell me what the purpose of the appointment

 was to have been?” She winced at the unintentionally clumsy phrasing of the

 question.

 “I’m afraid that I can’t,” Wilde told her smoothly. “The message summoning me

 here came as text only, with a supplementary fax. I received it about two hours

 ago. It was an invitation—although it was, I fear, couched more in the manner of

 a command. I suppose that it was sufficiently impolite to warrant disobethence,

 but sufficiently intriguing to be tempting. Dead, you say?”

 “That message wasn’t sent from this apartment,” Charlotte told him, ignoring his

 teasing prompt.

 “Then you must trace it,” Wilde replied affably, “and discover where it did come

 from. If Gabriel was already dead when it was sent, it would be very interesting

 to know who sent it in his stead—and why.”

 Charlotte hesitated. She was not entirely certain what to say next but she

 wanted to say something lest Michael Lowenthal should decide to step into the

 breach. She was saved from the hazards of improvisation by Hal Watson, whose

 image reappeared on the screen by the apartment door.

 “What’s going on, Charlotte?” he asked sharply.

 Her heart sank. She felt as if she were at infants’ school and had been caught

 doing something naughty in the playground.

 “Oscar Wilde arrived here a few moments ago,” she said. “He has an appointment

 to see Gabriel King. I’m just trying to find out—”

 “Of course,” Hal said, brusquely cutting her off. “Dr. Wilde?”

 Having been effectively instructed to surrender her position in front of the

 beltpack’s camera to Wilde, Charlotte reluctantly handed it over.

 “I’m Hal Watson, Dr. Wilde,” Hal said politely. “I’ve been trying to contact

 you, but your silver refused to interrupt your journey. We need your services as

 an expert witness. I’m required to inform you that you will henceforth be acting

 under UN authority, bound by the duty to report honestly and fully on everything

 you may see, hear, or discover. Will you affirm that you accept that duty and

 all that is implied thereby?”

 That’s what I should have done! Charlotte thought, mortified by the error of

 omission.

 “Of course,” said Wilde. “I shall be delighted to assist you in any way that I

 can, and I hereby affirm my willingness and intention to tell the truth, the

 whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Will that suffice?”

 “It will,” said Hal grimly. “Now, Dr. Wilde, I’m going to display a videotape on

 the screen. I’m sorry the picture quality is so poor, but time is of the

 essence. I want you to look at it carefully, and then I want you to tell me

 everything you know, or are able to deduce, about the contents of the tape.”

 Charlotte stood to one side, quietly fuming, as Wilde casually handed back her

 beltphone and took up his own instead, plugging it in beside hers. The tape

 began to run, beginning with a pan around the crime scene.

 The reception room where Gabriel King had died was furnished in an unusually

 utilitarian manner; the gantzer’s tastes had obviously been rather Spartan.

 Apart from the food delivery point, the room’s main feature was a particularly

 elaborate array of special-function telescreens. There were VE-mural screens on

 two of the walls, but they displayed plain shades of pastel blue. There was no

 decorative plant life integrated into either of the remaining walls, nor was

 there any kind of inert decoration within the room—except for the vase

 containing the golden flowers that King’s last visitor had given to him, which

 had been set on a glass-topped table in the center of a three-sided square

 formed by a sofa and two chairs.

 On the sofa lay all that remained of the late Gabriel King. The “corpse” was no

 more than a skeleton, whose white bones were intricately entwined with gorgeous

 flowers.

 The camera zoomed in on the strange garlands which dressed the reclining

 skeleton. The stems and leaves of the marvelous plant were green, but the petals

 of each bloom—which formed a hemispherical bell—were black. The waxy stigma at

 the center of each flower was dark red and was shaped into a decorated crux

 ansata.

 Charlotte watched Oscar Wilde lean forward to inspect the structure and texture

 of the flowers as closely as the wallscreen permitted. The camera followed the

 rim of a corolla, then passed along a stem. The stem bore huge curved thorns,

 paler in color than the flesh from which they sprouted. Each thorn was tipped

 with red, as if it had drawn blood. There were other embellishments too—bracts

 of intricate design, like little lace handkerchiefs, arrayed beneath each flower

 head.

 Wilde seemed to Charlotte to be lost in rapt contemplation of the way that the

 stems wound around the long bones, holding the skeleton together even though

 every vestige of flesh had been consumed. The plant had no roots but had

 supportive structures like holdfasts, which maintained the shape of the whole

 organism and the coherence of the skeleton too.

 Charlotte knew that all this could not be mere accident; the winding of the

 stems had been carefully programmed for exactly this purpose. The skull, in

 particular, was very strikingly embellished, with a single stem emerging from

 each of the empty eye sockets. Charlotte knew well enough what level of genius

 this meticulous design implied—and what level of insanity.

 “Can you be certain that it’s Gabriel?” asked Oscar finally.

 “Absolutely certain.” Hal sounded strangely remote; the tape was still playing

 and he was reduced to the status of a mere voice-over.

 “Do you know when he died?”

 “Yes—it’s all on camera. I suppose we’re lucky that he never made it back to the

 bedroom. The metamorphosis happened very quickly. It appears that the seeds of

 that plant devoured him as they grew, transforming his flesh into its own.”

 “Quite remarkable,” said Oscar Wilde. He said it very lightly, but the

 understatement must have been carefully calculated. “How did the seeds get into

 him—or onto him?”

 “We don’t know. We’re trying to trace his last visitor, of course, but it’s

 conceivable that the seeds might have been lying dormant in his body for some

 time.”

 “Fascinating,” Wilde opined, in a tone which seemed to have more admiration in

 it than horror.

 “Fascinating!” Charlotte echoed in exasperation. “Wouldn’t you say it was a

 little more than merely fascinating, Dr. Wilde? Can you imagine what an organism

 like that might do if it ever got loose? We’re looking at something that could

 wipe out the entire human race.”

 “Perhaps,” said Wilde calmly, “but I think not. How long ago did he die?”

 “Between two and three days,” Hal told him, swiftly excluding Charlotte from the

 conversation yet again.

 “He seems to have felt the first symptoms about seventy hours ago; he was

 incapacitated soon afterward and died a few hours later.”

 Oscar Wilde licked his full lips, as if to savor his own astonishment. “Those

 delightful flowers must have a voracious appetite,” he said.

 Charlotte eyed him carefully, wondering exactly what his reaction might signify.

 “I don’t have to explain to you how serious this matter is, Dr. Wilde,” Hal

 said. “Quite apart from the fact that the man must have been deliberately

 infected, the laws regarding the creation of artificial organisms hazardous to

 human life have clearly been breached. We need your help to find the maker of

 those flowers. Incidentally, do you happen to recognize the other flowers—the

 ones in the vase?”

 “Indeed I do,” the designer replied. “They’re mine—my newest line. I’m rather

 proud of them; I never suspected that Gabriel had such good taste. You realize,

 of course, that the flowers which have replaced poor Gabriel’s flesh are similar

 to mine in that they’re single-sexed flowers from a dioecious species? They’re

 all female, incapable of producing fertile seed. Our murderer isn’t as reckless

 as he may seem.”

 OUR murderer! Charlotte echoed silently. This investigation is becoming

 ridiculously crowded.

 “Could you make plants like those, Dr. Wilde?” Hal asked insouciantly.

 Oscar Wilde glanced sideways to meet Charlotte’s inquisitive gaze. She was at

 least six centimeters shorter than he, but she attempted to look at him as if

 their stares were perfectly level, trying with all her might to deny him the

 psychological advantage. He frowned slightly as he appeared to consider the

 question. Then he said: “It all depends what you mean by ‘like,’ Inspector

 Watson.” He was still looking at Charlotte.

 “Don’t play games with me, Dr. Wilde,” Hal retorted. “Just answer the question.”

 “I’m sorry,” Wilde said silkily, his eyebrows arching slightly as he invited

 Charlotte to join him in a conspiracy of sympathy. “I meant no offense. I assume

 that you’re asking whether I could make a plant which would do what this one has

 apparently done—grow in the flesh of a human being, utterly consuming everything

 but the bones. I believe that I could, although I assure you that I never have

 and never would.”

 “And how many other people could do it?” Hal wanted to know.

 “You’re going too fast, Inspector Watson. I was about to continue by saying that

 although I—and many other men—could design a plant to do what this one has done,

 I must confess that I could not have designed this plant. I could not have

 designed an organism to work with such astonishing speed and such amazing

 precision. Until I saw this marvel I would have judged that no man could. This

 is work of a quality that the world has never seen before, and I am eaten up by

 envy of the genius which produced it.”

 “You’re saying that you know of no one who could have done this?” Hal said.

 Although he was invisible, the impatience in his voice made it obvious that he

 was skeptical.

 “Had you asked me yesterday whether this were possible,” Wilde stated

 punctiliously, “I would have said no. Clearly, I have underrated one of my

 peers.”

 Charlotte stared hard at the uncannily beautiful Oscar Wilde, trying hard to

 weigh him up. She wondered whether anyone in the world were capable of

 committing a crime like this and then turning up in person to confront and mock

 the officers investigating it. It seemed difficult to believe that anyone who

 looked so young and so perfect could be guilty of anything, but she knew that

 his apparent youth and apparent perfection were both products of ingenious

 technology. Wilde was not a man who could be judged by appearances—and those of

 his appearances that were entirely under his own control announced clearly

 enough that he was a man who loved artifice and ostentation.

 Charlotte decided that if Oscar Wilde could be guilty of the primary madness of

 planning and committing a crime such as this, the secondary madness of

 revisiting the scene while it was still under the supervision of investigating

 officers might easily be within his compass.

 “Someone clearly has the required technical expertise to do this, Dr. Wilde,”

 she said stiffly, to lend unnecessary support to Hal’s patient inquisition.

 Oscar Wilde shook his luxuriantly furnished head slowly. He did seem genuinely

 perplexed, even though the apparent level of his concern for the victim and for

 the fact that a serious biohazard had been let loose left much to be desired.

 “The technical expertise, my dear Charlotte, is only a part of it,” he said. “I

 might be able to cultivate the relevant technical expertise, were I to attempt

 such a thing. Perhaps a dozen others might have been able to do it, had they

 been prepared to put in the time and effort. But what kind of man would devote

 his energies to such a project for months on end? Who has a reason for doing

 this kind of work with this degree of intricacy? I confess that I am deeply

 intrigued by the sheer demonic artistry of the organism.”

 “I really don’t think that matters of demonic artistry are important here, Dr.

 Wilde,” said Charlotte, taking sarcastic advantage of Hal’s continued silence.

 “This is murder.”

 “True,” admitted the green-eyed man. “And yet—a great genetic artist is every

 bit as distinctive in his work as a great painter. Perhaps we might learn as

 much from the style of the creation as from its evident purpose. My presence

 here suggests that some such judgment is required. It seems—does it not?—that

 the UN Police Department was not alone in requiring my presence as an expert

 witness.”

 “What do you mean?” Charlotte asked warily.

 “Given that it seems to be impossible that I was summoned here by the victim,”

 Wilde said, as though it were perfectly obvious, “I can only conclude that I was

 summoned by the murderer.”

 As if to provide a dramatic counterpart to this remarkable statement, the tape

 that was running on the wallscreen was abruptly switched off. Hal Watson’s face

 reappeared in its stead. “I find that hard to believe, Dr. Wilde,” Hal said,

 reclaiming the interrogation.

 “It is hard to believe,” Wilde agreed. “But when we have eliminated the

 impossible, are we not committed to believing the improbable? Unless, of course,

 you think that I did this to poor Gabriel and have come to gloat over his fate?”

 Charlotte had to look away when he said that, and could only hope that she was

 not blushing too fiercely.

 “I can assure you,” Wilde continued, still looking at Charlotte with arched

 eyebrows, “that although I disliked the man as heartily as he disliked me, I did

 not dislike him as much as that— and if I had for some peculiar reason decided

 to murder him, I certainly would not have revisited the scene of my crime in

 this reckless fashion. A showman I might be, a madman never.”

 A posturing ape, Charlotte thought, yet again. “Why should the murderer take the

 trouble to summon you to the scene of his crime?” she demanded. “We would

 probably have shown all this material to you anyway, given that Walter Czastka’s

 in the Hawaiian islands and that I couldn’t get through to him by phone. Why

 would the murderer send you a message?”

 “I’m deeply offended by the fact that your first choice of expert witness was

 Walter Czastka,” Wilde murmured infuriatingly, “but I suppose that I must

 forgive you. He has, after all, made so much more money than I have.”

 “Dr. Wilde—,” Hal cut in—and was promptly cut off.

 “Yes, of course,” said Oscar Wilde. “This is a very serious matter—a murder

 investigation and a potential biohazard. I’m sorry. At the risk of annoying you

 further, I think I might be able to guess why a message was sent in order to

 summon me here. It seems insane, I know, but I suspect that I might have been

 brought to identify the person who made those flowers. As to whether or not he

 is your murderer, I cannot say, but I believe that I know who forged the

 weapon.”

 “How do you know?” Charlotte demanded.

 “By virtue of his demonic artistry,” Wilde replied. “I hesitate to accuse a man

 of a serious crime on the basis of a purely aesthetic judgment, but on due

 reflection, I believe that I do recognize his style.”

 “That’s ridiculous,” Hal Watson said petulantly. “If the murderer had wanted to

 identify himself, all he had to do was call us or leave a signed message. How

 would he know that you would recognize his work—and why, if he knew it, would he

 want you to do it?”

 “Those are interesting questions,” admitted Oscar, “to which I have as yet no

 answers. Nevertheless, I can only suppose that I was sent an invitation to this

 mysterious event in order that I might play a part in its unraveling. I can see

 no other possibility—unless, of course, I am mistaken in my judgment, in which

 case I might have been summoned in order to lay down a false trail. I repeat,

 however, that I cannot conclusively identify your murderer—merely the maker of

 his instrument.”

 “Who?” said Charlotte, more succinctly than she would have preferred.

 Oscar Wilde opened his arms wide in a gesture of exaggerated helplessness. “I

 cannot claim to be absolutely certain,” he said, “but if appearances and my

 expert judgment are to be trusted, those flowers are the work of the man who has

 always been known to me by the pseudonym Rappaccini!”

 The name of Rappaccini was perfectly familiar to Charlotte, as it was to

 everyone who had ever attended a funeral procession or watched one on TV, but

 she had always assumed that it was the name of a company rather than an

 individual. The carriages leading the funeral train she had been watching only a

 few minutes before would undoubtedly have been decked with produce bearing that

 name, although the actual flowers would have been the handiwork of

 subcontractors using mass-produced seeds manufactured according to patented

 gentemplates. No fashionable funeral—and there were no longer many unfashionable

 ones within the boundaries of the USNA—could be reckoned complete without

 flowers by Rappaccini Inc. The name would doubtless have been found on every

 condolence card attached to every wreath.

 Charlotte remembered something Regina Chai had said: “The card that came with

 the yellow flowers might have given him a clue, if he’d bothered to read it, but

 he didn’t.”

 “I fear,” Wilde continued with annoying casualness, “that I never thought to ask

 Rappaccini’s real name in the days when he used to appear in public. Most

 members of the Institute of Genetic Art preferred to exhibit their work

 pseudonymously in those days—a hangover from the era when there were too many

 people still alive who associated genetic engineers with the weapons employed in

 the plague wars and the chiasmatic transformers which caused the Crash.”

 “Is Oscar Wilde a pseudonym?” Hal Watson was quick to ask.

 Wilde shook his head. “My name was a jest naively bestowed upon me by my

 parents. I was happy to use it in those days because it sounded like a

 pseudonym—a double bluff encouraged by the delight I took in aping the

 mannerisms of my ancient namesake.”

 “Perhaps,” Hal said suspiciously, “the message which summoned you here was also

 a double bluff. Perhaps your identification of the pseudonymous Rappaccini as

 the person who made the flowers is a double bluff too.”

 Oscar Wilde shook his head sorrowfully and breathed in deeply, as though to

 prepare for a huge sigh. “I wish that I could take pride in being a prime

 suspect,” he said dolefully, “but I really am aware of the serious implications

 of this matter. Perhaps I should be flattered that you think me to be capable

 not only of producing these astounding blooms, but also of returning to the

 scene of my crime in this cavalier manner; I really must not be tempted to take

 credit for such daring and arrogance, however. It would only hold up your

 investigation. I can assure you that I have an ironclad alibi for the time of

 death. Three days ago I was in a small private hospital, and the flesh of my

 outer tissues was unbecomingly fluid. I had been there for some time, undergoing

 rejuvenation treatment.”

 “That doesn’t prove anything,” Charlotte put in. She was beginning to think that

 this facetious poseur might be capable of almost anything. “You might have made

 the seeds months ago, and you might have taken great care to make sure that they

 were delivered—or, at least, that they began to take effect—while you were in

 the hospital.”

 “I suppose I might have,” said the man who had programmed his sim to call him

 the Young Master in anticipation of his reemergence from the hospital, “but I

 didn’t. If you are determined to ignore my advice there is evidently nothing I

 can say to change your mind—but I assure you that your investigation will

 proceed much more smoothly if you forget about me and concentrate on

 Rappaccini.”

 Charlotte could not tell whether or not Wilde’s manner was calculated to give an

 impression of arrogant insincerity. It was, she supposed, just about possible

 that he conducted himself in this florid fashion all the time. She could not

 help glancing at Michael Lowenthal, as if to inquire what he thought of all

 this, but the blond man was content to watch in fascination; he did not even

 meet her glance.

 “If the murderer wished to be identified,” Hal Watson said, “why didn’t he

 simply leave his own name on the screens in King’s apartment, with an

 explanation of his motive?”

 “Why did he not simply shoot Gabriel King with a revolver?” countered the

 geneticist. “Why has he gone to the effort of designing and making this fabulous

 plant? There is something very strange going on here, no matter how much you

 might wish that it were simpler than it seems. We must accept the facts of the

 matter and do our best to see the significance within them.”

 Charlotte noticed Michael Lowenthal nodding his head slightly, presumably in

 mute agreement. She wished, belatedly, that she had had the patience to stand

 by, as Lowenthal had done, and watch the farce unfold while wearing an

 expression of keen concentration. Unlike Hal and herself, Lowenthal had not yet

 contrived to make a fool of himself by dueling verbally with Oscar Wilde.

 “Perhaps there is no real significance in the more bizarre facts,” Hal said,

 stubbornly plugging on. “As you must have realized, Dr. Wilde, we’re obviously

 dealing with a mad person: a very dangerous mad person. The method of murder may

 simply be an expression of his—or, of course, her—madness.”

 “Perhaps we are dealing with a mad person,” Wilde agreed, refusing to respond to

 the obvious suggestion that he might be the mad person in question, “but if this

 is madness, it is very methodical madness, and madness with a hint of artistic

 genius. You must confess that as crimes go, this qualifies as one of the most

 unusual ever devised—highly original, and executed with great care.”

 “Dr. Wilde,” said Hal, his voice weary with tried patience, “originality is not

 an issue here. This was cold-blooded murder, and it has to be treated like any

 other murder.”

 “I love that phrase,” said the geneticist teasingly. “Cold-blooded murder. It’s

 so provocative.”

 Charlotte stared at him, wondering whether she might indeed be face-to-face with

 a uniquely dangerous madman—and whether, if so, he might still be a murderously

 inclined madman. She did not know what to make of the man at all, any more than

 she knew what to make of the crazy investigation into which he had so casually

 intruded himself. She knew that she was supposed to leave the real detective

 work to Hal Watson, but she couldn’t help wrestling with the logic of the

 affair, trying hard to see some glimmer of sense somewhere within the absurd

 pattern.

 “Hal,” she put in, remembering again what Regina Chai had said. “Wasn’t there a

 card with the flowers? Have you a still you can put up on the screen?”

 Hal apparently had sufficient respect for her judgment not to ask her

 why—although, for once, he was probably glad of the opportunity to let go of the

 conversation.

 * * *

 The image on the screen flickered, then shifted to a shot in which the camera

 was zooming in on something which lay on the glass-topped table, propped up

 against the vase containing the yellow flowers. It was a small cardboard

 rectangle. It had already been monomol-sealed as a safety measure, but the

 transparent film did not obscure the words written on the card.

 Charlotte’s eyes went directly to the bottom right-hand corner of the card,

 which bore the legend: Rappaccini Inc.

 Perhaps he did leave his name after all, Charlotte marveled. If the flowers in

 the vase are one of Wilde’s designs, the card might conceivably refer to the

 others: the ones which consumed Gabriel King. If Wilde’s right, the arrogant

 swine has actually signed his crime! But what, she quickly wondered, if Wilde

 were a liar? What if this had been planted purely and simply to back up his

 story?

 Her eyes had reflexively moved from the bottom of the card to the top, so that

 she could read the message of condolence inscribed there. Unfortunately, she

 couldn’t understand the words; the message was not written in English. It read:

 La sottise, l’erreur, le péché, la tésine, Occupent nos esprits et travaillent

 nos corps, Et nous alimentons nos amiables remords, Comme les mendiants

 nourrissent leur vermine.

 “ ‘Stupidity, error, sin, and poverty of spirit,’ ” Oscar Wilde obligingly

 translated, thoughtfully, “ ‘possess our hearts and work within our bodies, and

 we nourish our fond remorse as beggars suckle their parasites.’ Hardly an

 orthodox condolence card—if Rappaccini mass-produces them, I can’t believe that

 he sells very many.”

 “Do you recognize the words?” Charlotte asked suspiciously.

 “A poem by Charles Baudelaire. ‘Au lecteur’—that is, ‘To the Reader.’ From Les

 Fleurs du Mal. A play on words, I think.” The camera’s eye had obligingly moved

 back, to focus once again upon the black flowers which had destroyed Gabriel

 King. It occurred to Charlotte that Hal must have known about this all along—and

 in spite of that advantage and all of his experience, he had still allowed Oscar

 Wilde to rattle him.

 “He’s right,” Hal said, as if on cue. “I checked—that’s where the words come

 from. The book was originally published in eighteen fifty-seven. Dr. Wilde is

 also an expert of nineteenth-and twentieth-century literature. The condolence

 card is a fake, though—no such message has ever been commercially released by

 Rappaccini Inc.”

 “My expertise does not extend to all of nineteenth-and twentieth-century

 literature,” said Oscar Wilde modestly. He was wearing a slight frown, as if he

 had taken offense at the suggestion that his judgment might have been mistaken.

 Charlotte wondered how many men there were in the world who could recognize

 six-hundred-year-old poems written in French. Surely, she thought, Wilde must

 have made up the card himself. He must be the person behind all this. But if so,

 what monstrous game was he playing?

 “What significance do you attach to the poem, Dr. Wilde?” Hal asked, having

 recovered his most officious manner.

 “Assuming that my earlier reasoning was correct, I must suppose that its message

 is directed to me,” replied the imperturbable and ever ingenious Wilde.

 “Rappaccini—if he is indeed the ultimate author of this affair—seems to have

 made every effort to ensure that I would be a witness to, and perhaps a partner

 in, your investigation. I must assume that all of this is communication—not

 merely the card, and the message which summoned me, but the flowers, and the

 crime itself. The whole affair is to be read, decoded, and understood. I am here

 because Rappaccini expects me to be able to interpret and comprehend what he is

 doing. There is more to this, Sergeant Holmes and Inspector Watson, than has yet

 met our eyes. May I address you as Charlotte and Hal, by the way? If we are to

 work together in this matter, it will be more convenient—and you, of course,

 must call me Oscar.”

 Charlotte tried to remain impassive, but she knew that her amazement must be

 showing. She was grateful when Michael Lowenthal spoke to Wilde for the first

 time. “In that case,” he said, “you must call me Michael. It seems that we shall

 all be working together.”

 There was a pause before Hal’s voice came back on line. “I’m blocked on

 Rappaccini for the moment,” he said, evidently having turned away to consult one

 of his many assistant silvers. “Publicly available information regarding the

 founder of the company gives his real name as Jafri Biasiolo, but there’s hardly

 any official data on Biasiolo at all apart from his date of birth, 2323. It’s

 all old data, of course, and it’s possible that it’s just sketchy

 disinformation. I’ll have to mount a deep scan into Rappaccini’s more recent

 activities—especially his business interests—but it looks as if that will

 involve cutting through some very tangled undergrowth.”

 Charlotte knew what Hal’s contemptuous reference to “old data” implied. Old data

 was incomplete data, often corrupted by all kinds of omissions and

 errors—although she noticed that Hal had said “disinformation,” which meant

 lies, rather than “misinformation,” which meant mistakes. In Hal’s view, old

 data was senile and corrupt data, too decrepit and intrinsically unreliable to

 be of much use in a slick, modern police inquiry. But Gabriel King had been

 nearly two hundred years old, and Oscar Wilde—in spite of appearances—might well

 be over a hundred, given that he had just undergone intensive rejuvenation

 treatment. If the man who had once called himself Rappaccini really had been

 born in 2323, the motive for this affair might conceivably date back to the

 mid-twenty-fourth century.

 In theory, the Web had been fully formed as early as the beginning of the

 twenty-first century, but its checkered history was full of holes. In the wake

 of the epidemic of sterility that had caused the Crash a century afterward many

 data stores—including many that had come through the plague wars unscathed—had

 been irredeemably lost and many others fragmented. The losses had been further

 compounded by data sabotage, which had itself become epidemic as the

 twenty-second century gave way to the twenty-third, loudly advertised as

 “youth’s last stand against the empire of the old.” Once it had become clear, in

 the late twenty-third century, that all the miracles of nanotechnology could not

 give human minds more than two centuries of effective life, the young had

 realized that they would, after all, inherit the earth if they would only be

 patient - but the years spanning the birth dates of Gabriel King and Jafri

 Biasiolo, 2301 and 2323, remained years of acute data blight in the reckoning of

 perfectionists like Hal Watson. It was an era in which the truth, the whole

 truth, and nothing but the truth had rarely been recorded, and whose already

 inefficient records had been markedly eroded in the interim.

 Given that the data on file was so old and so sparse, and quite probably

 misleading, Charlotte knew that it might be very difficult to find—or even

 reliably to identify—the founder of Rappaccini Inc. It was, alas, easy enough in

 the late twenty-fifth century to establish electronic identities whose

 telescreen appearances could be wholly maintained by silver-level sims. Virtual

 individuals could play so full a role in modern society that their puppet

 masters could easily remain anonymous and hidden, at least until they came under

 the intense scrutiny of a highly skilled Webwalker. Hal had the authority to get

 through any conventional information wall, and he was clever enough to work his

 way through any data maze, but if the man behind Rappaccini Inc. had gone into

 hiding, it would take time to winkle him out.

 Charlotte still had a gut feeling which told her that the real author of this

 crazy psychodrama was right in front of her, taunting her with his excessively

 lovely presence, but she didn’t dare say so to Hal. Hal Watson was no respecter

 of gut feelings.

 “Have you traced the call which summoned Dr. Wilde here?” Michael Lowenthal

 asked Hal Watson. Charlotte heard the hesitation in Hal’s voice and knew that

 natural discretion must be begging him not to lay all his cards on the table

 where both Lowenthal and Wilde could see them, but he answered the question.

 “It was placed some days ago from a blind unit, time-triggered to arrive when it

 did,” Hal reported reluctantly. “Effectively untraceable, I fear—the ticket too.

 My best surfers are working on it, but they haven’t even been able to track the

 woman to or from the building. I need the DNA analyses before I can take the

 next step.”

 The wall unit buzzed as another caller clamored for attention.

 “Hold on,” Charlotte said to Hal, thumbing the relevant key. Rex Carnevon’s face

 appeared on the screen as the image of the apartment blinked out.

 “I have tenants, you know,” said the building supervisor rudely. “As long as

 your quarantine lasts, half of them are trapped inside their apartments and the

 other half are locked out. Your forensic team drove off thirty minutes ago.

 What’s the holdup?”

 “Please be patient, Mr. Carnevon,” Charlotte said, painfully aware that she was

 under observation from all sides. “We’re conducting an investigation here.”

 “I know,” Carnevon retorted. ”What I want to know is when you’re going to

 conduct it somewhere else.”

 “We’ll let you know,” Charlotte said brutally, switching back to Hal without

 further ado.

 Hal’s face didn’t reappear. The tape patched together from the apartment’s eyes

 was playing again. Now there was somebody in the apartment. This section had

 been recorded several days before. Gabriel King, alive and well, was talking to

 a young woman.

 “Ah,” said Oscar Wilde softly. “Cherchez la femme! Without a mysterious woman,

 the puzzle would be lacking its most important piece.”

 Charlotte studied the woman carefully, although her back was turned to the

 camera. She seemed to be authentically young—perhaps eighteen or nineteen years

 of age—with a profusion of lustrous brown hair that she wore unfashionably long.

 When the tape switched to a different eye, Charlotte saw that the woman had

 clear blue eyes like Michael Lowenthal’s. She also had finely chiseled

 features—but they had not, of course, been molded in recognition of the same

 ideal of beauty as Lowenthal’s. Psychobiologists had produced seven supposed

 female archetypes and seven male ones; whereas the woman’s flesh had been

 sculpted into a variant of the most commonplace female archetype, Lowenthal had

 been modeled on one of the less fashionable male ideals.

 Even in this day and age, when cosmetic engineers could so easily remold

 superficial flesh, the exceptional beauty of Gabriel King’s visitor was very

 evident—but it did not seem to Charlotte to be as striking as the beauty of

 Michael Lowenthal, or of Oscar Wilde. That, presumably, was a matter of taste

 and sexual orientation; Hal probably saw things differently.

 King and his visitor were speaking to one another, but the sound track had not

 yet been added to the tape. Charlotte watched as the two of them moved toward

 the bedroom door, and saw the woman stop the gantzer in his tracks, compelling

 him to turn and kiss her on the lips before proceeding into the room and closing

 the door behind them.

 The kiss did not seem particularly passionate to Charlotte, but it was

 definitely tender. It might, she thought, as easily have been a polite greeting

 between people who had some history of intimacy as a prelude to a first erotic

 encounter, but it certainly did not have the appearance of a transaction between

 a prostitute and a client.

 The tape ended, and Hal’s face returned to the screen.

 “She was inside for about half an hour,” said Hal, presumably addressing Oscar

 Wilde. “King was still perfectly healthy when she left, and it wasn’t until some

 twelve or thirteen hours later that he felt sufficient discomfort to call up a

 diagnostic program. He never had a chance to hit his panic button; the progress

 of the plant was too swift. The woman might have had nothing to do with it, but

 she was the last person to see him alive. Do you have any idea who she might

 be?”

 “I don’t believe that I’ve ever seen her before,” Wilde answered. “I fear that I

 can only offer the obvious suggestion.”

 “Which is?” Hal said.

 “Rappaccini’s daughter.”

 Hal had nothing to say in reply to that, and neither did Charlotte. They simply

 waited for clarification.

 “It’s another echo of the nineteenth century,” said Oscar, with a slight sigh.

 “Rappaccini borrowed his pseudonym from a story by Nathaniel Hawthorne entitled

 ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter.’ You don’t know the period, I take it?”

 “Not very well,” Charlotte said awkwardly, when it became obvious that Hal

 wasn’t about to reply. “Hardly at all” would have been nearer the truth.

 “Then it’s as well that I’m here,” the beautiful man said in a manner that

 surely must be calculated to infuriate. “Otherwise, this exotic performance

 might be entirely wasted.”

 The wall unit’s buzzer sounded again.

 Charlotte stabbed at it angrily and didn’t give Carnevon the opportunity to open

 his moudi. “All right!” she snapped, no longer caring whether she was under

 observation or not. “We’re going. Apart from King’s apartment, everything’s

 usable—but you’d better remember what I said about leaks, Carnevon, because if

 any information gets loose from here that might confuse or impede our

 investigation, I’ll be back.”

 Then she ripped the plug of her beltphone from the wall and said, “We’d better

 continue this conversation in the elevator and the car. It would probably be

 better if we were all back at base when that DNA data begins to come in. Then

 Hal can get to work on tracing the woman and Dr. Wilde can get to work on the

 gentemplate of the killer plant—while you and I, Mr. Lowenthal, can rest our

 weary feet. With luck, we’ll have the killer in custody in time to make the

 Breakfast News.”

 “I fear, dear Charlotte,” murmured Oscar Wilde as they all moved toward the open

 elevator car, “that this might be the kind of case in which luck will not be of

 much assistance.”

 Intermission One

 A Lover in the Mother's Arms

 « ^ »

 Magnus Teidemann was exhausted by the time he got back to the tent, but it was a

 good kind of exhaustion: the kind that resulted from a long walk through

 resentful undergrowth, carrying a heavy pack loaded with specimen jars.

 The specimen jars had been carefully dug out of the humus-littered forest floor,

 where they had served as pitfall traps to capture wandering insects and

 arachnids. As the director of the Seventh Biodiversity Survey, Magnus had a

 legion of assistarits to carry out such work, but he insisted on taking shifts

 himself. There was no tokenism about the gesture; the reason he had involved

 himself with the Natural Biodiversity Movement in the first place was to have

 the opportunity to work at ground level.

 Old though he was, Magnus was not ready to be confined to a laboratory, let

 alone a desk. A man of his age had to be reckoned to be taking a serious risk if

 he insisted in isolating himself out here, where help might take ten or twelve

 hours to reach him if he contrived to send an alarm call and ten or twelve days

 if he did not, but it was a risk he was prepared to take. Indeed, his dearest

 and most secret wish was to die in some such place as this, in the humid

 maternal shadow of the forest giants, where his body would decay in a matter of

 days into the placental humus so that its atoms could be redistributed within

 the organisms that collaborated in the constitution of one of the world’s new

 lungs.

 Magnus had always worked in the cause of life—the greatest cause there was—and

 he knew that a man condemned to die, as all men of his misfortunate generation

 were, ought to make a gift of his body to Mother Earth. He did not want a gaudy

 funeral in which his coffin would be dragged around the streets of some sterile

 city, followed by cartloads of Rappaccini flowers purchased from the MegaMall.

 He would rather die in the sisterly company of sylphs and dryads, surrounded by

 the flowers of the forest, donating his flesh to the seething cauldron of benign

 witchery.

 The “tent” in which Magnus was temporarily resident was not, of course, an

 actual tent. It was a bubble dome made out of Life-Simulating Plastic, of a kind

 originally designed for use on Mars. It was second cousin to those which

 currently dotted the airless plains of the moon and those which were anchored to

 the bedrock beneath the snows and glutinous muds of Titan. It was a high-tech

 product of the MegaMall, and its presence here confirmed that no matter what

 Magnus’s dreams and wishes might be, he was a stranger in an alien environment.

 Man was an alien invader here, as he was everywhere else in the solar system.

 Man was a product of the savanna, a creator of fields and deserts. The forest

 was its own world, but the entire ecosphere was part of the human empire now.

 The forest could not survive without the protection and support of such

 benevolent invaders as himself, and the LSP dome was the price of his own

 comfortable survival within it.

 The purpose of Magnus’s dome, as of its extraterrestrial cousins, was to secure

 a miniature alien environment and to keep a natural ecosphere at bay. The only

 difference was that the primary purpose of his dome was to protect the

 environment without, rather than the environment within. The biospheric fragment

 in which the dome was set had to be guarded from contamination because it was,

 in spite of its relative geographical isolation, too near a neighbor that was

 the most dangerous and malign of all alien environments: the fin de siecle

 cities of the twenty-fifth century. The humming hives of the MegaMall’s

 customers and sales force were far beyond the horizon, but while they shared the

 same spherical surface and the same atmosphere they had to be reckoned close

 neighbors. From the forest’s viewpoint, the MegaMall’s minions were the

 neighbors from hell.

 Ultimately, of course, it was the MegaMall that paid Magnus his living wage,

 just as it paid the wage of every other man and woman living on and beyond

 Earth, but Magnus always thought of his particular portion of the great

 capitalist pie as conscience money, or as a tribute to the oldest goddess of

 them all: the ultimate mother, Gaea the Great.

 Tired as he was, Magnus had neither the inclination nor the energy to make an

 elaborate investigation of his new captives. The most interesting specimens, in

 any case, would be too small to see without the aid of a magnifying glass, and

 his eyes, long overdue for replacement, were too weak to take the strain. He

 took his time decanting the contents of his specimen jars into more economical

 storage units, and then put the empty jars into the sterilizer, ready to be

 taken out into the field again tomorrow. They would be alternated with their

 duplicates for the sixty-third time, with thirty-seven still to go.

 When his duty had been adequately done, Magnus used the microwave oven—which had

 been dutifully storing solar power all day long—to heat up a plastic-wrapped

 meal. The sole meuniere tasted excellent, as was to be expected of one of the

 finest products of modern food science, but Magnus hardly noticed. In the

 wilderness, eating was a utilitarian business, a mere matter of fueling the

 body.

 The tropical night arrived with characteristic swiftness, but Magnus did not

 reach for the wall panel whose virtual control keys were displayed in patterns

 of red light. He could have instructed the Life-Simulating Plastic to become

 opaque, but he did not want to do that. Privacy was not an issue hereabouts, and

 the fact that the discreetly muted lights inside the bubble dome would attract

 every moth for miles around did not concern him—except, of course, insofar as

 the moths themselves might be inconvenienced.

 Magnus loved wilderness better than anything else in the world. That is to say,

 he loved green wilderness: wilderness the color of the world that men had all

 but lost What he hated most in all the world was wasteland: gray wasteland, the

 color of the glutinous organic dust which had consumed the first-generation

 cities left derelict by the Crash, and the color of the second-generation cities

 that had been gantzed out of that dust to supply the alleged needs of the

 multitudinous produce of Conrad Helier’s New Reproductive System. Today’s

 third-generation cities were multicolored, and Magnus knew that the

 fourth-generation complexes which were no longer to be called cities—out of

 respect for the current fashionability of the absurd philosophy of

 Decivilization—would take care to mimic the green which had been banished from

 the ever-extending jet-black SAP fields; to Magnus, however, the underlying

 color of the human hive and all its honeycombs would always be gray.

 Magnus loved to sleep beneath the stars, as if in the open air. Even though the

 LSP prevented his breathing in the myriad scents of the renewed rain forest

 while he lay upon his bunk, he felt that he was sharing communion with the

 benign soul of the world. Thanks to the protective power of the tent, he could

 lie naked on his bed without the least fear of cold or persecution by predators

 and parasites.

 It was still early when he finished his strictly utilitarian meal, but he was

 too tired for serious work, and the last thing he wanted was to watch TV. He

 discarded his beltphone along with his clothes, knowing full well that it would

 not emit the slightest sound. His answering machine was a low-grade silver, and

 he had trained it very carefully to be as stubborn as it was clever. It would

 not break into his communion even to give him news of the end of the world.

 He turned the light down to a mere glow. Then he laid himself down on his bed,

 displaying himself with all due reverence, feeling deliciously humble in the

 presence of Gaea. In public, he always denied that he was a Gaean Mystic,

 because two centuries of mockery had contrived to attach a comical significance

 to the term, but in private he was prepared to admit that Gaea had been the one

 true love of his life, the core of his spirituality. Her cause was his cause,

 and would be for as long as he lived.

 Sleep did not come to Magnus immediately, but he was unworried by its lack of

 hurry. He was content to look serenely up at the handful of stars that were

 visible through the forest canopy.

 Darkness had leached all color from the outside world, but it was still green to

 him. Green was more than mere appearance, after all; it was essence and symbol,

 belonging at least as much to inner vision as to the deceptive wisdom of the

 eye.

 In the days of his youth, which Magnus could no longer remember with any

 clarity, there had been such an abundance of gray in the world that he must

 surely have been filled with anguish by its contemplation. Even then, he had

 been avid—recklessly avid, on occasion—to work in the cause of life, although he

 had not had such a clear idea of what the cause of life required of a man. In

 those days, he had associated freely with the engineers whose cause was to

 subdue and manipulate life and reduce it to the status of one more MegaMall

 product; nowadays, he knew better. He had not seen or spoken to Walter Czastka

 for more than a century.

 Now that he was old, Magnus was exceedingly glad that the empire of the gray had

 been so much reduced. The one good thing to be said for the vast black

 landscapes of modern agri-industry was that they had liberated space for the

 limited restoration of the greenery of Ancient Nature. Magnus was now old for

 the third time, and he knew that this time would be the last. He was glad enough

 and wise enough to accept that truth; he was not one of those vainglorious

 individuals who would dare anything and everything in the usually futile pursuit

 of a fourth youth.

 The lessons of the twenty-third and twenty-fourth centuries had been hard, but

 the limits of inorganic nanotechnology had finally been recognized and admitted

 by his own generation. Had they been admitted two hundred years earlier, he

 knew, far more research might have been redirected into pure bioscience, and

 members of the new generation of Naturals might now be welcoming their second

 century of hopefully eternal youth instead of climbing out of slightly

 protracted adolescence. Magnus was not unduly resentful of the fact that he had

 been born too soon to benefit from Zaman engineering, however; nor did he

 begrudge the fact that he had lived to see the advent of the New Human Race

 while still confined to the tattered flesh of the Old, doomed to become a thing

 of nanotech thread and patches.

 Magnus knew that there were many people in the world—most of them younger by far

 than he—who considered the reborn wilderness to be an artifact of nostalgia, a

 brief folly of the MegaMall’s Dominant Shareholders, but he was convinced that

 the work he was doing would provide a legacy for which the new inheritors of the

 earth would be deeply grateful. He would die, and soon, but the work to which he

 had dedicated his life would go on. The forest would survive. Alien to man it

 might be, but man would protect it nevertheless. The members of the New Human

 Race had even elected to call themselves Naturals. Gaean Mystics they were not,

 but at heart—or so Magnus believed—every true human was a Gaean in essence. The

 inheritors of Earth would guard their heritage far better than his own kind ever

 had.

 As these thoughts wandered across his mind, Magnus had to blink a tear from the

 corner of his left eye. He immediately suffered a sudden stab of doubt, which

 was not so easily blinked away. He could not help but recall the fact that many

 people considered him to be an obsessive fool, not merely a lunatic but—and this

 was surely the final insult—a harmless lunatic.

 “In the empire of the ecosphere, Magnus,” a once-valued colleague had said to

 him, only a few weeks before, “everything is controlled. It has to be. What you

 call ‘wilderness’ was born from the gene banks which conserved DNA from the

 world which existed before the ecocatastrophes of the twenty-first and

 twenty-second centuries. It flourishes by our permission, entirely subject to

 our guidance. Its freedom is merely the result of our refusal fully to exercise

 our ecological hegemony. You’re fooling yourself if you think that it’s Ancient

 Nature reborn, in any meaningful sense. Ancient Nature began to die with the

 first discovery of agriculture and ended its long torment in the years before

 the Crash. Your so-called wilderness is at best a ghost and at worst a mere

 echo.”

 “I know and understand all that,” Magnus now took leave to reply, exercising his

 inalienable right to l’esprit de I’escaller. “I am not a fool—I merely recognize

 both the necessity and the propriety of returning these tracts of land to the

 dominion of natural selection. It is a wholly desirable act of expiation, whose

 efficacy is clearly displayed by the results of the biodiversity surveys.”

 “It’s a shallow gesture,” the colleague had told him, in response to a less

 carefully formulated reply. “It’s a temporary indulgence—a brief guilt trip

 whose futility will be recognized by the New Human Race as soon as its first

 generation reaches true adulthood. The time has already arrived when forest

 green is just as much an artifact as SAP black. You can’t halt progress, Magnus.

 You can’t turn back the clock. Your forest is a sham, and a temporary folly.”

 “I’m trying to turn the clock, forward,” Magnus had not thought to say at the

 time. “What I’m doing is progress. The forest is forever, and its flesh is as

 real as its soul.”

 And yet, he could not deny that all the forest trees whose company he preferred

 to that of his fellow men had been planted within his own lifetime. The seeds

 from which they were grown had come from gene banks: the static arks that had

 been hastily stocked in the twenty-first century, before the Greenhouse Crisis

 had sent a second Deluge to devastate the lowlands of civilization. The young

 trees had required careful protection and assiduous nurture for decades before

 they could be left to fend for themselves. The re-creation of wilderness had

 been, in its fashion, as delicate a task as any exercise in Creation of the kind

 which hundreds of hubristic engineers were now carrying out in the real and

 artificial islands of the vast Pacific.

 In spite of all this, Magnus knew that he must somehow have faith in the

 assertion that what surrounded him, as he slept beneath the stars, really was a

 part of the authentic soul of the world. He had to believe that the gene banks

 had merely been a phase in an evolutionary story that stretched back from the

 present to the magical day when life had first ventured forth from the littoral

 zones of the primordial ocean to embrace the land.

 Like all good Gaeans, Magnus preferred to think of that adventure as an

 “embrace”; he had always hated to hear it described as a “conquest.”

 Had he not been assailed by such troublesome doubts, Magnus would not have been

 delighted to receive an unexpected visitor—but it happened that he was assailed

 by doubts on that particular night, and that his visitor brought welcome relief.

 When Magnus first heard the noise of the newcomer’s approach, he could not help

 the reflexive twitch of his hand which impelled it toward the place where his

 dart gun lay hidden, but he suppressed the impulse readily enough. Within the

 dome, he was invulnerable to attack by any creature which had only teeth and

 claws to use as weapons. When he saw that the approaching figure was a human

 woman, however, a different set of reflexes was immediately invoked, and he

 tumbled from his bed with indecent haste.

 By the time the woman had come through the protective undergrowth, Magnus had

 framed his protests, but they were halfhearted, motivated by shame that she

 should have come upon him naked in a transparent tent rather than by annoyance

 at the violation of his privacy.

 “You shouldn’t have come,” he said when he had let her in—having partly clothed

 himself, although he still felt more than a little exposed. “It’s dangerous to

 walk through the forest by night.”

 “I was lonely,” she said. “My dome’s only a couple of kilometers from yours, and

 it seemed foolish to endure the loneliness when company was so close to hand. By

 day, the nature of our work confines us to our own tracts, but that’s no reason

 why we can’t get together in our own time. There is a track, after all—it’s not

 as if I had to hack my way through thorny bushes and sticky creepers with a

 machete. I would have called to tell you I was coming, but that damned silver of

 yours wouldn’t let me through. You really should instruct it to allow a few

 exceptions.”

 Magnus didn’t have the heart to tell her that if he had been disposed to file a

 list of people exempted from the silver’s stalling strategy, her name would not

 have been among them. She was undeniably lovely—her eyes were perfectly

 delightful, her flowing hair absolutely magnificent—but he hardly knew her. He

 had never seen her at the base, nor had he even noticed her name in any of the

 documents that flitted across his busy screens. Had she not taken it into her

 head to begin making these mercifully infrequent journeys from her LSP tent to

 his, he would probably never have become aware of her existence, let alone made

 love to her. But even in the depths of his beloved forest he could take comfort

 from genuine human warmth, and she did seem genuine, in that naive fashion that

 only the authentically young could manifest.

 They talked for a while, as they always did. She liked him to talk and never

 thought him pompous or foolish.

 She was not a Natural, but she was one of the committed ones, one of those who

 understood—or was, at least, capable of understanding, given the guidance of a

 man as wise as himself.

 “If you are to understand what you are,” he told her, when they had got to the

 strong meat of the conversation, “you must understand the true history of your

 own genes. Like everyone else, you were born from an artificial womb, the child

 of a sperm and an ovum which might well have been stored in the banks for

 centuries. I’m sure that the resultant egg was carefully screened, before cell

 division was even allowed to begin, for immunity to those hereditary diseases

 for which even the best IT cannot compensate—but that doesn’t mean that you’re a

 creature of human artifice. No matter how extensively the designers of the New

 Human Race may tamper with the blueprint which is written in the DNA carried by

 our kind, the DNA retains a history which extends in an unbroken double helix

 all the way back to the cradle of life itself. Like the forest, you and I are

 part of the soul of the world—and so is the legion of Naturals whose privilege

 it will be to inherit that world.”

 The woman had always replied to such proud and portentous statements with a

 welcoming smile, and she did so now. “That’s right,” she said. “I was born from

 a Helier womb, like my mother before me, but the essence of my being didn’t

 begin its development in an artificial environment. As it happens, the sperm and

 egg whose combination formed my own gentemplate hadn’t been stored in the banks

 for centuries, and in spite of everything that was done to the embryo, and

 everything else which separates me from the moment of my first genesis, I feel

 that I’m less a creature of artifice than many. It’s a pity that the Naturals

 have been allowed to hijack that label. I was educated to believe that I too am

 a Natural of sorts.”

 Magnus heard the entire speech as an echo of his own voice. The young woman had

 never tried to contradict him and always seemed to be genuinely inspired by his

 vision. Although she would presumably be one of the last-born members of the Old

 Human Race, her youth allowed her to feel completely at ease with herself and

 completely at ease with the world. That easefulness was far more precious than

 her silken hair, her luminous flesh, or her lithe limbs.

 Although he was not ungrateful to be old, and not afraid to die, Magnus was

 still capable of loving youth. He was still capable of loving her, even though

 she really should not have left her own bubble dome to visit him in his. He had

 to forgive her the breach of protocol. He had forgiven her before, and he did so

 now.

 It was a fine irony, Magnus thought, that the cycle of fashion had come full

 circle yet again, so that the young people of her generation were once again

 inclined to favor sexual intercourse with actual human beings over the

 infinitely more various seductions of intimate technology. The truly young had,

 of course, always been inclined to such experiments, but the newest generation

 seemed more fervent than its predecessors in challenging the inherited opinion

 of their elders that only virtual reality could offer ideal partners.

 Magnus was old enough and wise enough to have known all along that real partners

 were better than virtual ones. He had always had faith in the sanctity of true

 flesh. His love of wilderness and his love of authentic youth were, he supposed,

 merely different aspects of his faith in the sanctity of flesh. Flesh itself

 might be seen as a kind of wilderness, and wilderness as a kind of youth.

 When the soul of the world was young, Magnus thought as he prepared to lie down

 upon his bed for a second time, naked and unashamed, and man’s ancestors were

 hairy apes on the point of venturing forth from the forests to the great African

 plain, everything was wilderness. There was wasteland even then—the slopes of

 active volcanoes; the polar ice fields; the true deserts—but the latter-day

 wastelands which men have made by deforestation and civilization and biotech

 wars had not yet offended the all-embracing empire of flesh and youth. Nothing

 then had been made by ignorance and stupidity and greed, and we still have the

 opportunity to recall and recreate that lovely innocence. This too is a

 sacrament offered to Gaea. This too is worship, and labor in the cause of life.

 No man or woman has been born from a human womb for nearly two centuries—longer

 than that if the official records are believable—but the womb is still a temple

 of life, and its rites of approach are Gaea’s rites. This is not merely love but

 worshipful love, the antithesis of ignorance, stupidity, and greed.

 Magnus hated ignorance, stupidity, and greed. All wise men, he supposed, must

 hate ignorance, stupidity, and greed. Wisdom was love of knowledge,

 intelligence, and moderation. Wisdom was thinking in terms of embraces, and not

 in terms of conquests. He did not think of the wondrous woman as a conquest, and

 he was certain that she did not think of herself as having been conquered.

 When he kissed her before lowering her onto the narrow bed, Magnus thought for a

 fleeting instant that he might have known the young woman before—that somewhen

 in the mists of time which had clouded his memory over the years, he had caught

 a glimpse of a supremely beautiful face almost exactly like hers—but he

 dismissed the thought. She was far too young, and her face had clearly been

 somatically modified to bring the features into line with one of the so-called

 seven archetypes of female beauty. He had long grown used to the silly tricks

 which memory sometimes played, and was too wise to let them bother him unduly.

 The kiss was delicious, the taste of it far from merely utilitarian.

 Before the sun rose again, Magnus Teidemann was dead.

 He had died peacefully, and happily, in the forest which he loved. Because it

 was wilderness, to which human access was, by necessity, very strictly

 controlled, no one found his body for a long time. No alarm had been raised, and

 no one thought it in the least odd that they could not get access to him via his

 answering machine.

 By the time his body was discovered, the cunning flowers which had transmuted

 his flesh into their own had withered and died. The humus had reclaimed them,

 and in reclaiming them had reclaimed him. He was no longer alien to the forest;

 he had been assimilated. It was the end for which he had yearned.

 Of all the kindly murders which the innocent flowers and their innocent host

 were to commit, this was both the first and the most generous.

 Investigation: Act Two

 Across Manhattan

 « ^ »

 As soon as the elevator door slid shut, Oscar Wilde seemed to take it for

 granted that Charlotte’s interrogation had been temporarily suspended. Had she

 been quick enough to seize the initiative, Charlotte might have established that

 no such suspension had been granted, but she was not. While she paused to

 collect her thoughts, Wilde turned his attention to Michael Lowenthal.

 “I hope you won’t think me impolite, Michael,” said Wilde, “but I believe you

 are what common parlance calls a Natural, or a member of the New Human Race.”

 “Yes, I am,” Lowenthal agreed in a slightly surprised tone. “I congratulate you

 on your perspicacity. Most people can’t identify a Zaman transformation by means

 of superficial appearances.”

 “I’m something of a connoisseur of authentic youth,” Wilde admitted. “Charlotte

 is, of course, a fine specimen of the Old Race, but I could never doubt that she

 and I are of the same sad kind. Perhaps you think that I am too old to share her

 inevitable regret that her foster parents did not seize the opportunity of

 subjecting her embryo to the Zaman transformation, but I am not. I have been a

 genetic engineer all my life, you see, born in the days of prejudice. Like

 others of my kind, I have always known the perversity and tragedy of the folly

 which long withheld the generosity of the Finest Art from the most precious

 flower of all: the flower of human youth.“

 “You are not so very old, Dr. Wilde,” said Lowenthal politely.

 “Call me Oscar,” said Wilde reflexively. “Indeed I am not—but my youth has been

 hard-won. I have had to renew it three times over. Having been immunized against

 the ravages of age from the moment of conception, you have every right to

 expect—or at least to hope—that you will look hardly a day older than you look

 now when you have lived as many years as I.”

 A triple rejuvenate! Charlotte thought, knowing that her astonishment must be

 visible. I never saw a triple rejuvenate who looked like that! Even Gabriel

 King, who was far better preserved than most, had skin like weathered wood,

 until he was rudely transformed into flesh of a very different kind.

 “The error which our forebears made in concentrating their efforts on the

 development of cleverer nano-technologies was understandable,” Lowenthal said,

 his tone relentlessly neutral. “They believed, not unreasonably, in the

 escalator effect—that true emortality would eventually be bestowed upon them if

 only they could keep on reaping the rewards of new and better instruments of

 repair. With the aid of hindsight, we can see that the hope was illusory—but as

 a triple rejuvenate, you must have believed in your own youth that presently

 imperfect technologies would nevertheless be adequate to deliver you into a

 world in which improved nanotechnologies really would give you the means to

 preserve your body and mind indefinitely.”

 “I never believed it,” Wilde said bluntly. “Even as a child, I could see that

 the logical end point of excessive reliance on inorganic nanotechnologies would

 be a dehumanizing robotization—that the only entities which could emerge from an

 endless process of repair would be creatures less human than the cleverest

 silvers: caricaturish automata. The only respect in which I have been forced to

 alter my opinion is that I feared such travesties would actually be able to

 think of themselves as human and even to believe themselves to be the same

 individuals who had been born into an earlier era. Mercifully, the workings of

 the Miller effect have spared us that. And now, at last, the old folly is over

 and done with. Now, we have a New Human Race, as artfully created as the best

 products of my own industry.”

 “I wish that you could be one of them,” said Michael Lowenthal politely as the

 elevator car came to a halt and the door slid open again to reveal the modified

 gloom of the Trebizond Tower’s subterranean garage, “since you wish it so

 fervently.”

 “Thank you,” said Oscar Wilde. “I hope that I shall never grow used to the

 cruelties of fate—and I hope that you, dear Charlotte, will preserve your own

 resentments as jealously. It will help you to be a better policeman.”

 Charlotte nearly fell into the trap of declaring that she had no such

 resentments and that she was perfectly content with the decision her eight

 parents had made to produce and foster a child of their own kind, but she

 strangled the impulse. Time was passing, and there was work to be done.

 “My car’s over there,” she said, extending a finger to indicate to Wilde the

 direction he should take. “Will you follow us, Mr. Lowenthal?”

 “I’d rather travel with you, if you don’t mind,” Lowenthal said. “My superiors

 sent me out in person so that I could keep my finger on the pulse of the

 investigation, so to speak. There’s no purpose in my actually being here if I

 have to keep in touch with you by phone.”

 “Suit yourself,” said Charlotte shortly. “But I’d be obliged if you could both

 keep it in mind that this is an investigation, not a dinner party. We’re not

 here to talk about the relative merits of internal technology and Zaman

 engineering. We’re here to figure out who killed Gabriel King—preferably before

 the news tapes get hold of the grisly details of his demise.”

 “Of course,” said Lowenthal. “With luck, the DNA samples collected by Lieutenant

 Chai will lead us to the murderer—and then we shall only be required to figure

 out why.”

 He said it in a vaguely admonitory manner—as if he were suggesting that the

 relative merits of internal nanotech and engineered emortality might perhaps be

 the crux of the matter.

 For the moment, Charlotte could only wonder whether, perhaps, they might.

 Charlotte opened the doors of her car and climbed into the seat which offered

 primary access to the driver, leaving Wilde and Lowenthal to decide for

 themselves which seats they would take. As if to emphasize their newly cemented

 alliance, they both got into the rear of the vehicle, leaving the other front

 seat vacant.

 Having keyed in their destination, Charlotte left the silver to plan and

 navigate a route. She turned to face her passengers, but she was too late to

 take control. Oscar Wilde had already begun talking again.

 “I fear,” he said, addressing himself to Lowenthal, “that it might not be

 possible to get to the bottom of this affair before the newsmen unleash their

 electronic bloodhounds. If what I have so far seen is a reliable guide, the

 puzzle must have been carefully designed so as not to unravel in a hurry.”

 Lowenthal nodded his head sagely. “It does seem—”

 “That’s all the more reason to concentrate our efforts on the facts we have,”

 Charlotte cut in rudely. “So will you please tell me what you meant, Dr. Wilde,

 about the supposedly obvious suggestion that the woman in the tape might be

 Rappaccini’s daughter.”

 “Ah,” said Wilde. “The thickening of the plot. May I tell you a story?”

 “If you must,” Charlotte said as evenly as she could contrive. It did not help

 her mood to observe that Michael Lowenthal seemed to be suppressing a smile.

 “In an age that was long past even in the nineteenth century,” Wilde began,

 relaxing into the delicate embrace of the car’s LSP upholstery, “a young man

 comes to study at the University of Padua. He takes a small room beneath the

 eaves of an old house, which looks out upon a walled garden filled with exotic

 flowers. This garden, he soon learns, is tended by the aged Dr. Rappaccini and

 his lovely daughter, Beatrice.

 “Over a period of weeks, the student watches the delightful Beatrice while she

 is at work in the garden. Having some knowledge of botany, he soon notices that

 she can handle with impunity certain plants which he knows to be poisonous to

 other living things. He is fascinated by this revelation—and, of course, by the

 lovely girl herself. Eventually, his landlady shows him a secret way into the

 garden so that he can meet her.

 “Beatrice, who has led an extraordinarily secluded life, is as fascinated by the

 handsome student as he is by her. Innocence and beauty are a fine and deadly

 combination in a young woman—a combination which ensures that he soon falls in

 love with her—and she mirrors his infatuation. The student is, however, a very

 respectable young man, and he is careful to maintain an appropriate distance

 from his chaste beloved.

 “One of Rappaccini’s colleagues at the university discovers that the young man

 has managed to obtain access to the secret garden. He warns the student that he

 is in great danger, because the plants in the garden—many of which are

 Rappaccini’s own creations—are all poisonous. Beatrice, because she has grown up

 there, is immune to the poisons; but she has in consequence become poisonous

 herself. This rival professor, who despises Rappaccini as a ‘vile empiric’

 defiant of tradition, gives the student a vial which, he claims, contains an

 antidote to the poisons. This, he says, can redeem the unfortunate Beatrice and

 make her as harmless as other women.

 “The student gradually realizes that he too is being polluted by the deadly

 plants. By virtue of having entered the garden so frequently, he has been

 infected with the power to blight and kill. He accuses Beatrice of visiting a

 curse upon him but then proposes that they should both drink the antidote and be

 cured.

 “Rappaccini has by now discovered the intrigue between his daughter and her

 suitor. He tries to intervene, warning Beatrice not to take the antidote because

 it will destroy her. He insists that what he has bestowed upon her is a

 marvelous gift, which makes her powerful while all other women remain weak.

 “Beatrice will not listen to her father; she prefers the advice of her young

 lover. He, being deluded as to the true situation, recklessly urges her to drink

 the potion, which is to her peculiar nature a poison rather than an antidote.

 She dies, and in dying, breaks the hearts of her father and lover alike.”

 Charlotte had struggled hard to follow the implications of this curious tale

 while it was being told, trying to figure out how it could possibly have

 anything to do with the murder of Gabriel King—or why Oscar Wilde might think

 that it did. In the end, she could only say: ”You think that the man you know as

 Rappaccini might be acting the part of his namesake—much as you make a show of

 acting the part of yours?”

 Wilde shrugged his shoulders. “In the story, it was Rappaccini’s jealous

 colleague who committed murder, if anyone did. But Rappaccini did collect the

 fatal flowers: les fleurs du mal. In today’s world, of course, it would be very

 difficult indeed to raise a child in such perfect seclusion as Beatrice. If the

 man I knew as Rappaccini had a daughter raised to be immune to poisons, but

 poisonous herself, we must assume that she would be wiser by far than her

 predecessor. She would surely know, would she not, that her glamor and her kiss

 would be poisonous?”

 “Her kiss?” Charlotte echoed.

 “We saw her kiss poor Gabriel, did we not? Did you not think that it was a very

 deliberate kiss?”

 “This is too bizarre,” Charlotte complained.

 “I quite agree,” said Wilde equably. “As lushly extravagant as a poem in prose

 by Baudelaire himself. But then, we have been instructed to expect a

 Baudelairean dimension to this affair, have we not? I can hardly wait for the

 next installment of the story.”

 “What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Charlotte.

 “I doubt that the affair is concluded,” Wilde replied.

 “You think this is going to happen again?”

 “I’m almost sure of it,” said the beautiful but exceedingly infuriating man,

 with appalling calmness. “If the author of this mystery intends to present us

 with a real psychodrama, he will not stop when he has only just begun. The next

 murder, as your aptly named colleague must by now have deduced, might well be

 committed in San Francisco.”

 Charlotte could only look at Oscar Wilde as if he were mad—but she could not

 quite believe that he was. For a moment, she thought that his reference to her

 “aptly named colleague” was to Lowenthal, but then she remembered the stale

 jokes about Holmes and Watson, which had had to be explained to her when she had

 first been teamed with Hal. She recalled that Wilde considered himself an expert

 on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature—or some of it, at least.

 “Why San Francisco?” she asked, wishing that she did not have to hold herself in

 such an awkward position while her car threaded its way through the dense

 traffic. The funeral was long gone, but its congestive aftereffects still

 lingered.

 “The item which was faxed through to me along with the peremptory summons that

 took me to the Trebizond Tower here was not a copy of the text which appeared on

 my screen,” Wilde belatedly informed her. “It’s a reservation for the midnight

 maglev to San Francisco. Inspector Watson discovered that when he traced the

 call.”

 The flower designer took a sheet of paper from a pocket in his suitskin and held

 it out for Charlotte’s inspection. She took it from him and stared at it dumbly.

 “Why, didn’t you show me this before?” she said.

 “I’m sorry,” Wilde said, “but my mind was occupied with other things. I do hope

 that you won’t try to prevent me from using the ticket. I realize that Hal took

 great care to recruit me as an expert witness in order to make sure that I might

 be kept under close surveillance, but I assure you that I will be of more use to

 the investigation if I am allowed to follow the trail which the murderer seems

 to be carefully laying down for me.”

 “Why should we?” she replied, bitterly aware of the fact that it was entirely

 Hal’s decision. “We’re the UN police, after all—and this isn’t a game. Whether

 or not those flowers that killed Gabriel King were capable of producing fertile

 seeds, they constitute a serious biohazard. If something like that ever got

 loose… why do you think Lowenthal’s here?”

 “I thought he was with you,” said Wilde mildly.

 “Well, he’s not,” Charlotte snapped back. “He’s from some mysterious upper

 stratum of the World Government, intent on making sure that we aren’t trembling

 on the brink of a new plague war.”

 “I hope you’ll forgive the contradiction, Sergeant, but I never said any such

 thing,” said Michael Lowenthal, speaking just as mildly as the man beside him.

 “You seem to have taken the wrong inference from my declaration that I’m just a

 humble employee.”

 This was too much. “Well who the hell are you, then?” she retorted.

 “I’m not required to divulge that information,” Lowenthal countered, apparently

 having taken it upon himself to see if he could match Oscar Wilde’s skill in the

 art of infuriation. “But I’d rather you weren’t laboring under any delusions

 about my working for the UN. I don’t.”

 Charlotte knew that every word of this conversation would eventually be replayed

 by Hal Watson, even if he were content for the time being to rely on her summary

 of its results while he was busy chasing silvers through the dusty backwaters of

 the Web. She was painfully aware of the fact that the replay wasn’t going to

 make her look good—or even halfway competent.

 “What do you think is going to happen in San Francisco, Dr. Wilde?” she asked,

 taking a firm grip of her temper.

 “Call me Oscar,” he pleaded. “I fear, dear Charlotte, that it may already have

 happened. The question is: what am I being sent to San Francisco to discover? I

 daresay that Hal is doing what he can to make the relevant discovery before I

 get there, and we shall doubtless find out whether he has succeeded in a few

 minutes’ time, but the pieces of the puzzle have so far been placed with the

 utmost care. There is so much in the unfolding picture that I am able to

 recognize without having to delve in esoteric databases that I am forced to the

 conclusion that the whole affair was planned with my role as expert witness very

 much in mind. I don’t know why this ingenious murderer should have taken the

 trouble to invite me to play detective, but it seems that I may be better

 equipped to draw inferences from whatever discoveries you may make than anyone

 else. I hope that you will trust my judgment, allowing me to help you in the way

 that seems most appropriate to me.”

 “And if we did that,” Charlotte said, “we’d look even more idiotic than the

 meanest sloth if it eventually turned out that you were the one who had planted

 all these crazy clues, wouldn’t we? If it turned out that you were the architect

 of the whole affair, and we’d let you lead us halfway around the world while

 posing as an expert witness, we’d look like the stupidest idiots that ever

 enlisted in the UN police.”

 “I suppose you would,” said Oscar Wilde. “I fear that I can’t offer you any

 incontrovertible proof that I’m innocent—but you’ll seem just as foolish, I

 fear, if you refuse to avail yourself of my expertise, and it later turns out

 that I am innocent and could have given you significant help in solving the

 mystery.”

 Charlotte had to admit, if only silently, that it was true. If Wilde really did

 have the temerity to have himself summoned to the scene of a crime which he had

 committed, so that he could savor the frustration of the UN’s investigators, the

 ticket to San Francisco might be a means of escape that he was flaunting in

 front of her, but if not…

 “If you’re going to San Francisco,” she said, hoping that she could get Hal to

 back her up, “then I’m going too.” On the theory that a reckless gamble shared

 was an uncomfortable responsibility halved, she added: “How about you, Mr.

 Lowenthal?”

 “I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Lowenthal said. “I’ll book our tickets now.”

 He unhooked his beltphone and set about doing exactly that.

 “We have several hours in hand before midnight,” Charlotte said to Oscar Wilde,

 feeling a little better now that she had actually made an executive decision.

 “Even if Hal hasn’t cracked the case by then, he’s sure to have turned up a

 wealth of useful information. If you really have been invited to the party in

 order to give us the benefit of your expertise, you’ll doubtless be able to give

 us a better idea of what it might all mean than any impression we can form on

 our own behalf.”

 “I certainly hope so,” he replied warmly. “You can count on my complete

 cooperation—and, of course, on my absolute discretion.”

 And you, Charlotte said silently, can count on being instantly arrested, the

 moment Hal digs up anything that will stand up in court as evidence of your

 involvement in this unholy mess. If you’re trying to run rings around us, you’d

 better not count on our getting dizzy.

 The “new” UN complex built in 2431 was now under sentence of death, along with

 every other edifice on Manhattan Island, but it was intended to remain

 functional for at least another year while its multitudinous departments were

 relocated on a piecemeal basis. Charlotte thought that its loss would be a pity,

 given that it had so much history attached to it—the complex embraced the site

 of the original building, which had been demolished in 2039—but the MegaMall and

 the Decivilizers both saw the matter in a different light.

 Charlotte had only the vaguest notion of how the Decivilization movement had

 come to be so influential, but she could see perfectly well that it was a matter

 of fashion rather than ideological commitment. Perhaps people had been huddled

 into the old cities for far too long, and perhaps the populations of the New

 Human Race ought to be more diffusely distributed if they were really to develop

 new and better ways of life, but that didn’t mean that history ought to be

 forgotten and all its artifacts rendered down into biotech sludge. What would

 happen when the fashion passed, and “Decivilization” ceased to be a buzzword?

 Would the Naturals then begin to restore everything that Gabriel King had

 demolished?

 There had once been talk of the UN taking over the whole of Manhattan, but that

 had gone the way of most dream schemes during the still-troubled years of the

 late twenty-second century. Now, an even more grandiose plan to move the core of

 the UN bureaucracy to Antarctica—the “continent without nations”—was well

 advanced and seemed likely to proceed to completion. Fortunately, that was

 unlikely to include the Police Department. Charlotte didn’t want to relocate to

 a penguin-infested wilderness of ice.

 Oscar Wilde mentioned to Charlotte as they transferred from her car to the

 elevator that he had visited the UN complex many times before but had never

 penetrated into the secret sanctum of the Police Department. He seemed to find

 the prospect of a visit to Hal’s lair rather amusing. Charlotte was confident

 that he would be disappointed by the clutter; Hal was not a tidy man, and

 Wilde’s manner of dress suggested that he valued neatness.

 “How well did you know Gabriel King, Dr. Wilde?” she suddenly asked as they

 stepped across the threshold of the elevator. Having seen and understood what

 had happened last time, she was determined to seize the initiative before the

 ascent commenced.

 “We used to meet for business reasons at infrequent intervals,” Wilde replied,

 apparently having given up on his attempt to achieve first-name status, “and we

 must have been in the same room on numerous social occasions. I think of myself

 as belonging to a different generation, but the world at large presumably

 considers us to be of equivalent antiquity. I haven’t spoken to Gabriel for more

 than twenty years, although I would undoubtedly have bumped into him sometime

 soon had I remained in New York and had he remained alive. I’ve supplied his

 company with decorative materials for various building projects, but we were

 never friends. He was one of the great bores of his era, and not for want of

 competition, but I had nothing else against him. Even a man of my acute

 aesthetic sensibilities would not stoop so low as to murder a man merely for

 being a bore.”

 “And how well do you know Rappaccini?” she followed up doggedly.

 “I haven’t seen him in the flesh for more years than I can count. I know the

 body of his work far better than I know the man behind it, but there was a

 period immediately before and after the Great Exhibition when we used to meet

 quite frequently. We were often bracketed together by critics and reporters who

 observed a kinship in our ideas, methods, and personalities, and tended to

 oppose us to a more orthodox school headed by Walter Czastka. The reportage

 created a sense of common cause, although I was never sure how closely akin we

 really were, aesthetically speaking. Our conversations were never intimate—we

 discussed art and genetics, never our personal histories and ambitions.”

 Charlotte would have pursued the line of questioning further, but the elevator

 had reached its destination.

 Oscar Wilde did not seem in the least surprised or reluctant to comply when

 Charlotte asked her two companions to wait in her office for a few minutes while

 she consulted her colleague in private, but Michael Lowenthal almost voiced an

 objection before deciding better of it. She could not tell whether he was being

 scrupulously polite, or whether he thought that there might be more advantage in

 remaining with Wilde. As soon as she had shown Wilde and Lowenthal into her

 room, the two of them fell into earnest conversation again, seemingly losing

 interest in her before she closed the door on them.

 Charlotte made a mental note to review the tape before she went to bed, even if

 she had to do it in a sleeper on the maglev.

 Charlotte saw no point in beating about the bush when she presented herself to

 her superior officer.

 “I brought Wilde with me,” she said brusquely. “I think he did it. I think this

 whole mad scheme is a bizarre game. He may be a victim of mental disruption

 caused by excessive use of repair nanotech within the brain. He’s older than he

 looks.”

 Even in the dim light of Hal’s crowded quarters Charlotte was easily able to see

 the expression of amusement which flitted across the inspector’s face, but all

 he actually said was: “I know how old he is. Less than one-fifty, and already

 he’s risked a third rejuve—but every test they applied at the hospital says that

 he’s still in possession of a mens sana in corpore sano. I’ve checked his

 records.”

 “He knows far too much about this business for it to be mere coincidence,”

 Charlotte insisted, wishing that her argument hadn’t collapsed quite as feebly

 on exposure to the oxygen of publicity. “I know it sounds crazy, but I think he

 set this whole thing up and then turned up in person to watch us wrestle with

 it.”

 “So you think his introduction of Rappaccini’s name is just a red herring?”

 “He’s been careful not to say that Rappaccini’s guilty of the murder,” she

 pointed out. “When he told us that silly story about Rappaccini’s daughter, he

 pointed out that the murderer, if there was one, was a jealous rival. Wilde’s a

 flower designer, like Rappaccini—and he put on a convincing show of being

 offended when I told him that our first choice of expert witness was Walter

 Czastka. If this Biasiolo character hasn’t been glimpsed for decades, it’s

 possible that Wilde has actually taken over the Rappaccini pseudonym from its

 original user.”

 “It’s an interesting hypothesis,” said Hal, with an air of affected tolerance

 that was almost as excruciating as Oscar Wilde’s. “But my surfers haven’t found

 a jot of evidence to support it.”

 Charlotte hesitated but decided that it would be best not to continue. She’d put

 her suspicions on the record; the best thing to do now was to follow them up

 herself, as best she could. She figured that it would be sensible to change the

 subject of the present conversation—and there was a question she had been

 longing to ask.

 “Who the hell is this Lowenthal, Hal? When you said that the order to copy him

 in came from upstairs I assumed that he came from upstairs too, but he says he

 didn’t. Who’s he really working for?”

 Hal shrugged. “Pick your cliche,” he said. “The Secret Masters. The Hardinist

 Cabal. The Nine Unknown. The Ice-Age Elite. The Knights of the Round Table. The

 Gods of Olympus. The Heirs Apparent. The Inner Circle. The Dominant

 Shareholders.”

 “The MegaMall?” Charlotte completed the sequence incredulously. “Why would the

 MegaMall be interested in this? King’s murder can’t possibly have any

 macro-economic implications.”

 “Everything has macroeconomic implications,” Hal informed her, although—as his

 recitation of the list of names by which the world’s economic elite were

 mockingly known suggested—he didn’t seem to be entirely serious. “This is a very

 sensitive time, world-supply-and-demand-wise. We’re on the hot upslope of the

 economic cycle, and the Dominant Shareholders have taken what must seem even to

 them to be a brave decision in pandering to the prophets of Decivilization.

 Clearing out the old cities and changing the lifestyle of the race will

 certainly generate a lot of lovely economic activity, but the Shareholders must

 be a little nervous about the possibility that it might all boil over. They

 don’t want anything to get out of hand, and the assassination of a man like

 King—the publicly acknowledged spearhead of the demolition of New York—might be

 a symptom of something ugly.”

 “Are you saying that King was part of the Inner Circle?” Charlotte asked

 incredulously.

 “No. But he was a committed servant—close enough to make the real Shareholders

 think that it might be worthwhile to track my investigation move for move.

 Lowenthal’s just learning the ropes, though. For him, this is schoolwork. Be

 nice to him—one day, he’ll probably be up there on Olympus with the rest of the

 Heirs Apparent, jockeying for a good seat at the Round Table, at the right hand

 of the Once and Future Managing Director.”

 Hal was still taking the trouble to sound nonserious, but Charlotte wondered

 whether he was only doing it to conceal the true seriousness of what he was

 saying.

 “You really think Lowenthal’s going to be a big wheel in the MegaMall one day?”

 she said, uncertain as to whether it was the sort of question that should even

 be asked, if it might receive an affirmative answer.

 “Him or someone very like him,” Hal replied. “Once members of the New Human Race

 get their bums on the boardroom seats, they’re likely to be there forever and a

 day—unless, of course, Zaman transformations turn out to be a storm in a teacup,

 just like PicoCon’s much-vaunted nanotech escalator. The prophets of

 Decivilization know that, of course, and they probably understand well enough

 why the MegaMall is letting them play their games with real cities. If they were

 to decide not to be content with their concessionary inch, and set out to claim

 a mile… well, some might say that it’s a short enough step from being a

 hard-line Decivilizer to becoming an Eliminator.”

 “Oh,” said Charlotte, recognizing that this line of thought might be the basis

 of a much more intriguing hypothesis as to the why of Gabriel King’s murder than

 her supposition that Oscar Wilde was an insane criminal genius. After a pause

 she said: “Have you got the DNA analyses from King’s apartment yet?”

 “Twenty minutes,” Hal told her. “Maybe thirty. Better wheel Wilde in anyway,

 though. My silvers have turned up some other stuff he might be interested to

 look at—and it really isn’t a good idea to appear to be shutting Lowenthal out.”

 “Wilde wants to go to San Francisco on the midnight maglev,” Charlotte reported

 mechanically. “Lowenthal wants to go with him. So do I.”

 “I know,” said Hal in the infuriating manner he always reserved for her best

 revelations. “Wilde’s got every right to do so, of course, provided that he

 gives the gentemplate of the killer plant his full and immediate attention once

 Regina’s finished the analysis. What difference does it make? If he has done

 something wrong, we can find him easily enough, whether he’s in San Francisco or

 on the moon. You don’t have to go with him.”

 “Suppose he were the murderer and went on to murder someone else?” Charlotte

 asked desperately.

 “He’ll be under close surveillance whether you’re with him or not—but if you

 want to go, you can. I don’t need you here. If Lowenthal chooses to go with you

 instead of sticking with me, it’s his choice.”

 Charlotte had no difficulty at all in deducing that Hal would far rather

 Lowenthal went with her, especially if she led him off on a wild-goose chase for

 which she had taken sole responsibility. The simple fact was, however, that Hal

 didn’t need her here. Modern police work involved packs of assiduous silver

 surfers checking objective data, carefully attempting to sort the relevant from

 the irrelevant, and the real information from misinformation and disinformation.

 Talking to people, even on the phone, was a “real-time activity,” generally

 considered by most seasoned policemen to be a terrible imposition and a woefully

 uneconomic use of precious hours—and if she remained here, talking to people on

 the phone was exactly what she would be doing.

 “I’ll go with Wilde,” she said. “It’s okay—I’ll take the blame if it turns out

 to be a stupid move. I’ll just have to hope that Lowenthal will one day find it

 in his heart to forgive me.”

 Hal smiled, and his eyes expressed wry gratitude-but what he said aloud, for the

 sake of listening ears, was: “If you think it’s necessary.”

 Charlotte collected Oscar Wilde and Michael Lowenthal from her office and

 brought them into Hal’s workplace. The space was overcrowded with screens and

 comcons, and there were trails of printout hanging down like creepers from every

 shelf and desktop—Hal had an absurdly anachronistic and altogether unreasonable

 fondness for paper—but there were enough workstations for both of them to sit

 down in reasonable comfort.

 “Oscar Wilde, Michael Lowenthal—Hal Watson,” she said with awkward formality.

 Hal got up to shake hands with both of them, but he took Lowenthal’s hand first.

 He met the Natural’s eyes with an expression of pure professional concern and

 muttered something about always being appreciative of extra professional help.

 Charlotte observed that he was careful to put that particular mask away before

 greeting Wilde.

 “Charlotte tells me that your unique insight into the motives and methods of the

 man behind Rappaccini Inc. might be of considerable help in the investigation,

 Dr. Wilde,” said Hal, implying by his indifferent tone that he shared his

 assistant’s skepticism regarding Wilde’s usefulness as an amateur detective.

 “Call me Oscar,” said Wilde smoothly. “I certainly hope so. There are, I think,

 times when instant recognition and artistic sensitivity might facilitate more

 rapid deduction than the most powerful analytical engines. I’m a naive invader

 in your territory, of course—and I confess, as I contemplate this awesome

 battery of electronic weaponry, that I feel like one of those mortals of old who

 fell asleep on a burial mound and woke to find himself in the gloomy land of the

 fairy folk—but I really do feel that I can help you. I have some time in hand

 before the midnight maglev leaves, if there’s anything you’d like to tell me by

 way of background.”

 “As I say, I’m always grateful for any help I can get,” said Hal, still feigning

 casual indifference. “You’re welcome to listen in while I fill Mr. Lowenthal in

 on some relevant details, provided that he has no objection.”

 “None,” said Lowenthal. “I agree that Dr. Wilde’s special insights might be

 valuable. I’m keen to hear what he thinks.”

 Charlotte was glad, but not surprised, to observe that her colleague seemed

 equally unimpressed by Oscar Wilde’s recently renewed handsomeness and Michael

 Lowenthal’s authentically youthful beauty. Hal, whose machine-assisted

 perceptions ground up all the richness and complexity of the social world into

 mere atoms of data, had not the same idea of beauty as common men. In a

 Webwalker’s eyes, the cataract of encoded data which poured through his screens

 and VE hoods was the only reality. Hal never thought of himself as a man

 watching a shadow play; he found his aesthetic delights in patterns woven out of

 information or enigmas smoothed into comprehension, not in the hard and soft

 sculptures of stone and flesh.

 Unfortunately, it seemed that the unshadowy world of hard and superabundant data

 had yet to be persuaded to explain how it had produced the eccentric masterpiece

 of mere appearances which was the murder of Gabriel King.

 “I’m afraid that the man behind Rappaccini Inc. is proving rather evasive,” Hal

 told his visitors offhandedly, while his eyes continued to scan his screens.

 “His business dealings are fairly elaborate, but he’s been effectively invisible

 for a long time. Jafri Biasiolo still holds a flag-of-convenience citizenship in

 the Kalahari Republic, but he has no recorded residency. There’s no record of

 his death, but he seems to have faded out of fleshy existence by degrees. The

 currently listed telephonic addresses of his pseudonym are black boxes, and all

 his financial transactions are conducted by silver-level computer-synthesized

 simulacra; the implication is that Biasiolo has constructed an entirely new

 identity under a different name. That’s not so very unusual these days, of

 course, especially among those older people whose reflexive response to

 increasing intensity of observation is to devise ever more elaborate means of

 hiding. Most of the macabre stories about people dying and nobody finding out

 for years because their sims keep up a ghostly dialogue with the world are

 exaggerated, but a man who seriously wants to vanish behind a smoke screen of

 electronic appearances can produce some very dense smoke. Any who then decide to

 recreate themselves as someone else can just as easily manufacture a new

 electronic identity. My surfers will winkle out the truth about Rappaccini

 eventually, but it all takes time, and time is the great enemy.”

 “Timing is the essence of any psychodrama,” said Oscar Wilde. Michael Lowenthal

 gave no overt indication that he or his employers felt any particular sense of

 urgency, but Charlotte knew that he would not be here if they did not.

 “The story so far is that Jafri Biasiolo first became manifest as Rappaccini in

 2380,” Hal continued evenly. “That’s when he registered as a member with the

 Institute of Genetic Art in Sydney. He participated in a number of public

 exhibitions, including the Great Exhibition of 2405, sometimes putting in

 personal appearances. Unlike other genetic engineers specializing in flowering

 plants, Rappaccini never got involved in designing gardens or in the kind of

 interior decoration that is Dr. Wilde’s chief source of income. He appears to

 have specialized almost exclusively in the design of funeral wreaths, although

 his unusual patterns of expenditure suggest that he may have been involved in

 other business activities under other names.”

 “What unusual patterns of expenditure?” Lowenthal wanted to know.

 “He was a heavy investor in encephalic augmentation research. So was Gabriel

 King, it seems.”

 It took Charlotte a second or two to realize that “encephalic augmentation” was

 the polite term for brain-feed technology. “But that’s illegal!” she blurted

 out, knowing as soon as the words had passed her lips that it was a stupid thing

 to say. Attempts to augment the capabilities of the brain by stimulating the

 growth of extra neurons which could then be hooked up via synthetic synapses to

 inorganic electronic equipment were currently hedged around by all manner of

 legal restrictions, as human genetic engineering had been in the days that Oscar

 Wilde still remembered less than fondly—but those laws were mostly of recent

 origin. Gabriel King and Jafri Biasiolo were very old men.

 “There’s still scope for legitimate inquiry,” was all that Hal said in reply.

 Charlotte frowned, realizing that he was being deliberately terse. Obviously,

 this was a link he was still chasing hard. Lowenthal’s lovely face was

 impassive, but Charlotte wasn’t convinced that he thought the detail

 insignificant.

 “Rappaccini Inc.’s flowers have always been grown under contract by middlemen,”

 Hal continued, evidently more than willing to share this aspect of his inquiry.

 “Insofar as the corporation can be said to have a home base, it’s located in

 Australia, in a sector of what used to be called the outback that was

 re-irrigated for conventional use in the days before the advent of Solid

 Artificial Photosynthesis. We’re checking the routes by which seeds used to be

 delivered to the growing areas, trying to backtrack them to the laboratories of

 origin. Unfortunately, it seems that Rappaccini Inc. hasn’t put anything really

 new onto the market in forty years, even though the increasing ostentation of

 funerals has boosted its profits enormously. Nor has Jafri Biasiolo appeared in

 public during that time. He still has bank accounts drawing royalty credit from

 the corporation, but nobody within the organization has had any personal contact

 with him since 2430. It’s probable that he’s been using at least one other name

 for at least the last sixty-five years—possibly more than one.

 “By virtue of his flag-of-convenience citizenship, Biasiolo avoided inclusion in

 most official records, but there is a DNA print allegedly taken immediately

 after birth. It doesn’t match any other print registered to any living person,

 but he evidently made a thorough job of building a new identity; the print

 attached to his current name is probably fake. Rappaccini continued to maintain

 a telephone persona until 2460 or thereabouts, but the sim involved was an

 elementary sloth. I can’t tell whether it was taken off-line or simply broke

 down. There aren’t many programs like that still functioning.”

 “Walter Czastka has one,” Charlotte put in.

 “The only surprise in that instance,” Oscar Wilde adjudged, “is that Walter is

 still functioning.”

 “Given that he still hasn’t returned my call,” Charlotte observed, “he might not

 be.”

 “Have you turned up anything which might suggest a possible motive for King’s

 murder?” asked Lowenthal, who presumably suspected—as Charlotte did—that Hal’s

 concentration on the mystery of Rappaccini’s new identity might be something of

 a red herring screening the real substance of his investigation.

 “We’re delving into King’s background, of course,” Hal assured him. “If there’s

 a motive in his financial affairs, we’ll find it. We’re examining every

 conversation he’s had since coming to New York, and we’re examining all activity

 in opposition to his demolition work. The truly remarkable thing about the

 murder is, however, the method. If we can understand that, we might be in a

 better position to understand the motive. Like Sergeant Holmes, I’m disappointed

 that Walter Czastka hasn’t returned our call. If he were to confirm Dr. Wilde’s

 judgment that the flowers were designed by Rappaccini…”

 “He won’t,” said Oscar Wilde airily.

 “Why not?” asked Charlotte.

 “Because the judgment required a sense of style,” Wilde said. “Walter has none.

 He never had.”

 “According to our database,” Hal observed, “he’s the top man in the field of

 flower design—or was, until he retired to his private island to play the

 Creationist.”

 “Databases are incapable of forming opinions,” Wilde stated firmly. “The figures

 presumably show that Walter has made more money than anyone else out of

 engineered flowers. That is not at all the same thing as being the best

 designer. Walter was always a mass-producer, not an artist. Ancient Nature

 provided all his models, and such amendments as he made to the stocks extracted

 from the arks were mere tinkering. I’m afraid that you will be unable to find

 anyone capable of reassuring you that my identification of Rappaccini as the

 designer of Gabriel’s executioner was not a self-protective lie. The only man I

 ever knew with sufficient sense of style to be capable of offering an informed

 opinion is, I fear, Rappaccini himself.”

 He might have said more but was interrupted by a quiet beep from one of Hal’s

 comcons. A silver was reporting news that required Hal’s immediate attention.

 The conversation lapsed while the Webwalker’s fingers raced back and forth

 across the relevant keyboard for a few seconds. The pregnant silence persisted

 while Hal stared thoughtfully at a screen half-hidden from Charlotte’s view.

 Lowenthal had turned back to Wilde, but his expression did not seem to be

 redolent with suspicion; Charlotte hoped that her own was equally opaque.

 After half a minute or so, Hal said: “You might be interested to see this, Dr.

 Wilde.” He pointed to the biggest of his display screens, which was mounted high

 on the wall directly in front of them. His fingers danced from one keyboard to

 another, and then another.

 A picture appeared on the left of the screen, covering about a third of the

 display area. It showed a tall man with silver hair, a dark beard trimmed into a

 goatee, and a prominent nose.

 “Jafri Biasiolo, alias Rappaccini, in 2381,” Hal said.

 He pressed more keys, and another image appeared in the center of the screen.

 This one showed two men side by side, apparently posing for the camera. One of

 them was clearly the same man whose image was on the left of the screen.

 “Isn’t that…?” Charlotte began as she recognized the other.

 “I fear that it is,” said Wilde regretfully. “I looked a lot older then, of

 course. The photograph was taken in 2405,1 believe, at the Sydney exhibition.”

 “It was 2405,” agreed Hal. At the command of his fingers a third picture

 appeared, again showing Biasiolo alone. This time, Charlotte realized why Hal

 had taken the trouble to display them.

 “This is 2430,” Hal said. “Rappaccini’s last personal appearance in the

 corridors of his own organization.”

 There was hardly any difference between the three images of Jafri Biasiolo. The

 man had evidently not undergone a full rejuvenation between 2381 and 2430,

 although he must surely have employed conventional methods of light cosmetic

 reconstruction to maintain the appearance of dignified middle age.

 “If he really was born in 2323 he seems to have delayed rejuvenation far longer

 than was usual,” said Lowenthal pensively.

 “He must have had a comprehensive rejuve very soon after the last picture was

 taken,” Hal agreed. “He probably came out with a very different appearance as

 well as a new name—but now we know the approximate date, I can set a silver to

 trawl all the records.”

 “On the other hand,” Lowenthal suggested, “he could have used purely cosmetic

 somatic engineering to appear older than he actually was in 2381.”

 “If he was actually born considerably later than 2323 he might have falsely

 assumed the identity of Jafri Biasiolo,” Hal conceded. “It’s possible that he

 always maintained a second identity alongside his manifestations as Rappaccini

 and merely reverted in 2430 to being the person he’s really been all along. It’s

 a pity that picture-search programs are so unreliable—very messy data. That’s

 why it’s proving so difficult to track the woman who visited Gabriel King’s

 apartment. There are plenty of cameras on those streets, and the silvers which

 are interrogating them are state-of-the-art, but a little old-fashioned paint

 and powder and a wig can cause a great deal of confusion when half the people on

 the street have modified themselves to fit a currently fashionable ideal. We’re

 checking all the passengers who took the maglev to San Francisco during the

 twenty-four hours after she left the apartment, of course.”

 There was another beep. Charlotte knew immediately, by virtue of the expression

 of relief that formed on Hal’s face, that it was Regina Chai’s forensic report.

 Hal immediately began printing out a gentemplate, presumably that of the flowers

 which had consumed Gabriel King’s flesh, but he didn’t watch its emergence from

 the printer’s mouth. His fingers were dancing with what seemed to Charlotte to

 be impossible rapidity, and he was watching a virtual display whose detail she

 could not make out at all.

 “We’ve got a good DNA print of the woman from the bedsheet detritus,” he said

 eventually, sounding far less enthusiastic than he should have. “Unfortunately,

 we can’t get a match with the print of any living person. Ordinarily, that would

 imply that she must be much older than she seems—”

 “But in this case,” said Oscar Wilde, “it might mean that I was wrong to suggest

 that it would be impossible to raise a child in absolute seclusion in today’s

 world.”

 “What do you mean by ordinarily?” Charlotte asked Hal, judging from his

 expression that he had not even considered Wilde’s caveat.

 Hal glanced at Michael Lowenthal before replying. “Regina says that the woman’s

 DNA trace also shows evidence of some rather idiosyncratic somatic engineering.

 It’s possible that the tissues which left the traces on King’s bedsheets have

 been deliberately modified to obscure the print—to make sure that it wouldn’t

 match the woman’s natal record. We’re conducting a more detailed search for near

 matches, but I don’t know how far we can narrow down the field of suspects, or

 how fast.”

 Michael Lowenthal nodded, as if the bad news was not unexpected.

 “Did you check the print against Rappaccini’s?” asked Wilde.

 “It’s been very carefully checked against Biasiolo’s, in toto and piece by

 piece,” said Hal carefully. “The basic similarity index is only forty-one

 percent, but inspection of individual key sequences suggests that it might well

 have been fifty percent before the somatic modifications were made. If so, the

 woman could be Biasiolo’s daughter, even though there’s no official record of

 his ever having fathered, or even fostered, a child.”

 Wilde nodded sagely, as if this datum confirmed every impression he had so far

 formed about the nature and twisted logic of the crime.

 Hal handed Wilde the other gentemplate, which had now printed out in full with

 all its associated annotations. “Your sense of style has taken you as far as it

 can, Dr. Wilde,” he said. “It’s time for some hard work now. We need your expert

 opinion as a genetic engineer—everything you can tell us about the nature of the

 plant and the level of biohazard it poses. Do you want a workstation here, or

 would you rather use a private cubbyhole?”

 “I’ll need access to my own records,” Wilde said in a thoroughly businesslike

 manner. “Any VE hood will do; I won’t be distracted by conversation.”

 “I think it’s best if you’re privacy-screened anyway,” said Hal, for reasons

 which Charlotte was easily able to deduce. “If you’ll come this way, I’ll get

 you set up.”

 Charlotte and Michael Lowenthal looked on as Hal guided the awkwardly oversized

 Wilde through an inconveniently narrow gap in his labyrinth. Charlotte knew that

 she ought to say something, if only for the sake of conversation, but she didn’t

 know what, so she kept silent. Lowenthal didn’t step in to fill the gap.

 Charlotte made herself busy picking up streamers of printout from Hal’s

 machines, scanning the data accumulated by his silvers. She couldn’t help

 nurturing the frail hope that there might be something there which Hal had

 considered too trivial to mention but which might in the fullness of time prove

 to be the nub of the case. She looked for a streamer holding data relating to

 Oscar Wilde, but none came readily to hand. She did, however, pick up a stray

 sheet which contained cross-correlated data on Gabriel King and Michael

 Lowenthal—and instantly lowered her head lest her expression attract the

 interest of her companion.

 The page revealed that Lowenthal and King had been simultaneously involved—along

 with dozens of others—in a series of Web conferences relating to the plans for

 New York’s reconstruction. Lowenthal had been present in the capacity of an

 observer, allegedly reporting to the boards of eight different corporations.

 Five of the names were unfamiliar to Charlotte, but that was irrelevant; the

 fact that Lowenthal was reporting to all eight implied that they were mere parts

 of a greater whole: the huge cartel which was the engine of the world economy.

 The industrial/entertainment complex which most people nowadays referred to as

 the MegaMall was a constant preserice in Charlotte’s life, as it was in

 everyone’s, but it had always been a background, unobtrusive precisely because

 it was so all-pervasive. She had learned in school, if not actually at the

 manifold knees of her foster mothers, that the MegaMall was a private

 corporation, and that effective ownership of the world’s entire means of

 production had long rested in the hands of a few hundred individuals, but the

 thought had never crossed her mind that one day she might actually meet a

 flesh-and-blood individual who belonged—however peripherally or provisionally—to

 that intimate inner circle. Nor had it occurred to her that the MegaMall’s

 administrators, whether reckoned as the Hardinist Cabal or any of the ironic

 alternatives that Hal had proffered, must already have set plans in place to

 hand over their empire to a favored few of the New Human Race. Now, though, she

 tried to force her attention away from the infuriating Oscar Wilde in order to

 focus her thoughts on the quieter of her new companions, and the question of

 exactly what his interest in this puzzling affair might be.

 She had just made up her mind to ask Lowenthal directly when Hal returned—at

 which point Lowenthal made his own belated bid for the center-stage position.

 “Is there any sign of a Decivilizationist connection?” he asked bluntly.

 “Not that I can see, as yet,” Hal told him. “Do your own investigators have any

 particular reason to think that there might be?”

 “No, but we’re anxious about the possibility. Someone has gone to a great deal

 of trouble to make this murder newsworthy—such gaudy display is an obvious bid

 for attention. Wilde may well be right to see it as some kind of theatrical

 performance.”

 “I can understand that your employers might be jealous of their monopoly on the

 art of window dressing,” Hal said mildly, “but I can’t quite see the prophets of

 Decivilization as serious rivals.”

 “Don’t mistake my meaning, Inspector Watson,” Lowenthal said with equal

 mildness. “My employers approve of the Decivilization movement. Stability

 Without Stagnation has always been their motto. They approve wholeheartedly of

 change, novelty, fashion, and eccentricity. They even approve of social

 movements opposed to their own ideals, whose leaders disapprove of their very

 existence. An element of challenge is a healthy thing in a society, always

 provided that it doesn’t get out of hand. It’s a thin line that separates

 challenge from conflict, reform from revolution—and there are a good many people

 here in New York who wonder whether the Decivilization movement might have been

 granted too many concessions.”

 “None of the movement’s spokesmen has ever criticized the institution of

 ownership or the logic of Global Hardinism,” Hal pointed out. “Their attacks on

 the idea of civilization have always been narrowly focused on the supposedly

 stultifying effects of city life and city landscapes. They’re essentially a

 bunch of aesthetes, not too different in kind from the flamboyant Dr. Wilde. If

 they did have anything to do with the murder of Gabriel King, they’re more

 likely to have done it because he was a crude utilitarian than because he was an

 accessory to the supposed tyranny of the MegaMall. If you have any evidence that

 the Decivilization movement is fostering a revival of the Eliminators, or the

 Robot Assassins, I’d very much like to see it—but if not, I think you might be

 wasting your time chasing that particular hare.”

 “Not if that plant’s as dangerous as your Dr. Chai thinks it might be,”

 Lowenthal countered. “That could be a powerful agent of Decivilization.”

 “Dr. Chai’s paid to be supremely cautious,” Hal retorted. “We’ll know more when

 we get Wilde’s report, but my guess is that there’s no danger of an epidemic. If

 the people who designed and deployed it wanted to start a new plague war, they

 would have gone about the work in a very different way.”

 “And if they only wanted to threaten to start a new plague war?” Lowenthal

 asked.

 Hal laughed. “I thought that the MegaMall never gave in to blackmail,” he said.

 “According to history, it never has—but I suppose history would say that, given

 that it’s just as much a MegaMall product as Solid Artificial Photosynthesis.”

 Charlotte was surprised by the provocatively naked cynicism of the comment,

 although she had heard Hal express similarly skeptical opinions before, when he

 had occasion to despair of the quality of old data. If the Web’s vast tree of

 knowledge really was infested with disinformation, it was more likely to have

 been placed there by its owners than its detractors. She realized that Hal must

 be more resentful of Lowenthal’s intrusion than she had supposed.

 “No one sensible ever gives in to blackmail,” Lowenthal replied lightly.

 “Capitulation gives out the wrong signals. It’s difficult enough coping with

 hobbyist vandals and software saboteurs without fostering the illusion that

 there’s profit in malevolence. I don’t suppose, by any chance, that your

 industrious silvers have turned up any connection between Rappaccini Inc. and

 any eccentric political organizations?”

 “Not unless the organizations sponsoring encephalic augmentation count as

 political,” said Hal. “Have yours?”

 Lowenthal merely smiled at that, as if to say that if they had, he wouldn’t have

 bothered to ask.

 Charlotte didn’t imagine for a moment that she understood all the implications

 of Lowenthal’s involvement in the investigation, but she was beginning to see

 some of them.

 Perhaps it was the fact that politically motivated murders had become so very

 rare since the demise of the Robot Assassins that was causing the Natural’s

 employers to examine the possibility so carefully. If King’s murder turned out

 to be merely personal, there was no need for the MegaMall to be concerned about

 it, but if it was not—and now she came to think about it, Gabriel King might be

 exactly the kind of person that the ancient Eliminators might have regarded as

 “unworthy of immortality”—then the killing might be an early warning of far

 worse to come. The Decivilization movement’s front men were harmless enough, but

 every such movement had its lunatic fringe—and the encouragement that had been

 given to the movement’s official agenda might well have enthused those with more

 radical ideas.

 The biohazard aspect of the case was especially worrying, if it was indeed the

 opening shot of some kind of campaign. The apparent use of an untraceable

 assassin, whose DNA print could not be matched to that of any living person,

 also seemed ominous. If someone else was already dead in San Francisco, awaiting

 discovery by Oscar Wilde, this affair was likely to escalate—and whether Rex

 Carnevon tipped anyone the wink or not, the newscasters would catch hold of it

 soon enough. If the assassin had gone to San Francisco immediately after killing

 King, she might already have left, continuing westward. If any more bodies were

 to turn up, she might soon qualify as a terrorist.

 “I think we should send someone out to Walter Czastka’s island,“ she said, on a

 sudden impulse. “I’m worried about the fact that he never returned my call.”

 Hal turned to look at her. “Old men are often fiercely jealous of their

 privacy,” he said. “Creationists especially. Designing an entire self-enclosed

 ecosystem is an intricate business, and they’re all desperately secretive about

 it because they all feel that they’re involved in a competition. Every islet in

 those parts, natural or engineered, has been taken over by some semiretired

 engineer avid to turn it into his own little Garden of Eden. It’s a large-scale

 replay of the run-up to the Great Exhibition, when every genetic engineer in the

 world was paranoid about his best ideas being stolen. Anyway, it’s only been a

 matter of hours, and it’s still daylight in the Pacific. If Czastka hasn’t

 checked in by midnight, our time, I’ll ask the Hawaiian police to send out a

 drone.”

 Hal and Lowenthal turned again as Oscar Wilde reappeared, carefully maneuvering

 his massive frame through the narrow gap into which Hal had dispatched him. Hal

 frowned, obviously having expected his deliberations to take a lot longer.

 “You can’t possibly have finished,” Hal said.

 “Indeed not,” said Wilde. “But I have temporarily abandoned the detailed work to

 a trusted silver, who will report in due course on the precise capabilities of

 the murderous organism. In the meantime, given that it’s nearly nine o’clock,

 and that rejuvenation always sharpens my appetite, I wonder if I might give you

 my preliminary observations over dinner? I presume that even policemen have to

 eat.” He didn’t seem entirely certain of this conclusion; his inquiring

 expression implied that he might be wondering whether there were some kind of

 intravenous feeding mechanisms concealed in the back of Hal’s chair.

 “There’s a restaurant upstairs,” said Charlotte. “We can eat there.”

 Oscar looked at her, raising his eyebrow just a fraction.

 “Upstairs?” he queried. “I had thought of the Carnegie, or perhaps Gautier’s.

 Quail en croute was my first inspiration, but if…”

 “The restaurant here is as good as any in the city,” she assured him. “We have a

 first-rate synthesization service, and there’s an excellent dining room.”

 “I can’t leave my workstation,” Hal said, “but if you leave a phone link open so

 that I can ask questions…”

 “Of course,” said Wilde. “Will you join us, Mr. Lowenthal?”

 “Certainly,” said the man from the MegaMall.

 “Excellent. I should reassure you immediately, of course, that there is

 absolutely no need to panic regarding the possibility of a random outbreak of

 homicidal flowers—less need, in fact, than even I had feared. This particular

 weapon will never be used again, because it was designed expressly to consume

 the flesh of Gabriel King. It is what the parlance of the old plague wars called

 a smart agent—far smarter, in fact, than any agent then devised. It may well

 qualify as the most narrowly targeted weapon in history.”

 Hal and Lowenthal absorbed this information silently. Even Charlotte knew enough

 about genetics to be astonished by it.

 “Perhaps I ought also to say,” Oscar went on, “that although I remain absolutely

 convinced that the plant’s designer was Rappaccini, it appears to have been

 derived from a natural template that Rappaccini has never actually used—a

 temporarily extinct species that was recovered from a twenty-first-century seed

 bank by another person, and which has so far been developed for the marketplace

 exclusively by that person.”

 “Which person?” Hal asked—although Charlotte presumed that he must already have

 guessed.

 “Me,” said Oscar Wilde. “Although the finished product bears little enough

 resemblance to its model, the gentemplate makes it clear that the original was a

 globoid amaranth of the genus Celosia-once popularly known, my research assures

 me, as the cockscomb. That is as far as facts can take us. If I am to make more

 of the information I have gleaned, I shall have to make use of intuition—and I

 intuit far more effectively on a full stomach. There is nothing like good food

 and a bottle of fine wine to liberate the power of the imagination.”

 Hal Watson would undoubtedly have protested that what was required of an expert

 witness was scrupulous attention to fact rather than indulgence of the

 imagination, but he was distracted by two beeping sounds, which immediately

 entered into competition for his attention. While he tried to deal with both of

 them, a third commenced its siren song, and he was forced to begin juggling all

 three data streams.

 “Go,” he said. “I’ll be listening.”

 “It’s good to know,” Wilde observed as Charlotte led her two companions toward

 yet another elevator, “that there are so many silvery recording angels sorting

 religiously through the multitudinous sins of mankind. Alas, I fear that the

 capacity of our fellow men for committing sins may still outstrip their best

 endeavors.”

 “Actually,” Charlotte observed as she pressed the button to summon the car, “the

 crime rate is still going down—as it always has while the number of spy eyes and

 bubblebugs embedded in the walls of the world has increased.”

 “I spoke of sins, not crimes,” said Wilde as they moved into the empty car.

 “What your electronic eyes do not see, the law may not grieve about, but the

 capacity for sin will lurk in the hearts and minds of men long after its

 expression has been banished from their public actions.”

 “People can do whatever they like in the privacy of their virtual environments,”

 Charlotte retorted. “There’s no sin in that. The point is that what lurks in the

 darker corners of their hearts and minds shouldn’t—and mostly doesn’t—affect the

 way they conduct themselves in the real world.”

 “If there were no sin in our adventures in imagination,” Wilde said, evidently

 reluctant to surrender the last word even in the most trivial of arguments,

 “there would be no enjoyment in them. While we are as vicious at heart as we

 have ever been, and are encouraged to remain so by the precious freedom of

 virtual reality, we cannot be entirely virtuous even in the real world. The

 ever-presence of potential observers will, of course, make us exceedingly

 careful—but in the end, that will only serve to make all murders as intricate

 and ingenious as the one we are investigating. If you do not understand that, my

 dear Charlotte, I fear that you will not be comfortable in your chosen career.”

 Charlotte tried hard not to be infuriated by his condescension, but it wasn’t

 easy. It wouldn’t have been easy even if she hadn’t formed the impression that

 Michael Lowenthal was amused by her distress. She wondered whether it might be

 natural that so-called Naturals would find amusement in the petty quarrels of

 mere mortals.

 As they left the car two uniformed officers got in, one of them a sergeant in

 whose company Charlotte had gone through basic training.

 “Any progress, Charlotte?” the sergeant asked, his inquisitive gaze sliding

 sideways to examine her two companions.

 “Not yet, Mike,” Charlotte said as breezily as she could, “but all the

 bloodhounds are out.”

 “Newshounds too,” Mike murmured. “They don’t know the details yet, but King’s

 big enough to make them chase hard. Watch out for hoverflies.”

 Charlotte nodded, glad that she had been adamant that they ought to eat within

 the building. Even police headquarters couldn’t be guaranteed to be 100 percent

 secure, but eating in any public restaurant would have been tantamount to hiring

 a loudhailer.

 Once they were seated, Oscar Wilde decided that what his appetite demanded was

 toumedos bearnaise with saute potatoes, carrots, and broccoli. He informed

 Lowenthal, while Charlotte was busy acknowledging other greetings from

 sympathetic colleagues, that he had had an unusually taxing day for one so

 recently restored to youth, and that the solidity of beef would serve his needs

 better than the delicacies of quail. He decided on a bottle of Saint Emilion to

 go with it—the occasion, he declared, cried out for a full-bodied wine.

 Lowenthal agreed to take the same dish and share the wine, but Charlotte punched

 out an individual order for tuna steak and salad, with water to drink.

 The police restaurant’s food technology was, of course, easily adequate to the

 task of meeting Wilde’s requirements. Its beef was grown by a celebrated local

 tissue culture which had long rejoiced in the pet name of Baltimore Bess: a

 veritable mountain of muscle which was fiercely guarded by traditionalists from

 the strong competition offered by SAP-derived “meat.” The Saint Emilion was

 wholly authentic, although the Bordeaux region and its immediate neighbors had

 been replanted from gene banks as recently as 2330, when connoisseurs had

 decided that the native rootstocks had suffered too much deterioration in the

 tachytelic phase of ecospheric deterioration which had followed the

 environmental degradations of the Crash.

 The dispenser delivered fresh bread, still warm from the oven, and a selection

 of hors d’oeuvres. Charlotte took some bread but left the rest to her

 companions; she had never liked excessively complicated food.

 Hal had been silent while they made their way to the restaurant, but as soon as

 Charlotte had opened a link from the table’s screen he took up the theme of

 Wilde’s observations about the murder weapon. “According to my records,” he

 said, “no one but you has ever withdrawn specimens of this particular globoid

 amaranth from the bank—which implies that you must have supplied the stocks from

 which the weapon was developed.”

 “Supplied seems a trifle exaggerated,” Wilde objected. “My amaranths have been

 on open sale for decades. Tens of thousands of people have fertile specimens

 growing in their walls and gardens.”

 “I wasn’t implying that you intended to supply the raw material for a murder

 weapon,” Hal said disingenuously. “I’ve set one of my silvers to collaborate

 with one of yours in sorting through your records. I’d be obliged if you’d keep

 track of them, just in case some idiosyncratic modification of yours can be

 traced through a particular customer to the murder weapon.”

 “I’ll do that,” Wilde promised, although his tone suggested that he didn’t

 expect a result. Hal nodded, and his face disappeared from the screen.

 “Assuming that it would be relatively easy, once the basic pattern was in place,

 to modify this kind of smart weapon for other targets,” Michael Lowenthal put in

 pensively, “I assume that it would also be relatively easy to plant individually

 targeted booby traps in gardens and hotel rooms all over the world.” Charlotte

 inferred that he was still pondering the possibility that King’s murder was just

 a warning shot, and that the murderer’s next target might be closer to the Inner

 Circle.

 “It’s an intriguing possibility,” Wilde agreed, “although the involvement of

 Rappaccini suggests that booby-trapped funeral wreaths might be more likely—as

 well as more artistic—than booby-trapped gardens.”

 Lowenthal didn’t react to the reference to artistry, and Charlotte stifled her

 own objection. Wilde had hesitated, but he obviously had more to say.

 “The idea of plants which take root in animal or human flesh, consuming living

 bodies as they grow, is very old,” the geneticist went on, “but it’s a trick

 that no natural species ever managed to pull off. There are fungi which grow in

 flesh, of course, but fungi are saprophytic by nature. Flowering plants are late

 products of the evolution of multicelled photosynthesizers. Legend and rumor

 have always alleged that they flourish with unaccustomed exuberance and luxury

 when planted in graveyards or watered with blood, but the motif is sustained by

 macabre notions of aesthetic propriety rather than by observation. The person

 who adapted my Celosia to develop in such a remarkable environment did so by a

 complex process of hybridization, much more elaborate than anything routinely

 attempted by specialist engineers. He has taken genes from nematode worms and

 cunningly grafted them onto the Celosia gentemplate. That’s extremely difficult

 to do. We’re all familiar with tired old jokes about genetic engineers crossing

 plants and animals to make fur coats grow on trees and produce flower heads with

 teeth, but in actuality those kinds of chimeras are almost impossible to

 generate.

 “The artworks which Rappaccini showed at the Great Exhibition of 2405 were

 certainly bizarre, but they were not nearly as ambitious as this. If he really

 did take on a new identity fifty or sixty years ago, he must also have taken on

 a new lease of intellectual and creative life. He has made inroads into realms

 of innovation in which no one else has dared to trespass. Michael is right to

 conclude that once the basic pattern was in place, targeting the weapon at a

 particular individual could be regarded as a secondary matter, but we should not

 lose sight of the fact that this plant was designed purely and simply for the

 purpose of murdering Gabriel King. Given the complexity of the modified Celosia,

 it seems almost certain to me that this plot—including the selection of its

 victim—must have been hatched at least half a century ago, and probably long

 before. My instinct also tells me that no matter how reluctant I may be to

 accept the fact, Rappaccini must be the actual murderer, not merely the supplier

 of the weapon. Its deliverer, I feel sure, is his daughter. I only wish that I

 could divine his motive.”

 Wilde took a careful sip of wine after finishing this speech, but his eyes were

 on his companions, waiting for a reaction. Before he obtained one, however, the

 dispensary signaled that their main courses were now ready.

 The three diners disposed of the plates which they had so far been using and

 took delivery of larger ones. Charlotte’s meal was accommodated easily enough,

 but Wilde and Lowenthal took their time dividing up their vegetables. While

 waiting for them to catch up, Charlotte studied their faces soberly, comparing

 their different styles of beauty. Even in an age of inexpensive off-the-peg

 glamour they were both striking, but Lowenthal’s beauty was more conventional,

 more carefully respectful of the popular ideal. Lowenthal’s face might well have

 benefited from the assistance of a first-rate somatic artist, but she felt sure

 that Wilde must have designed his own features before hiring an expert

 technician to execute his plan. It was rare to see such flamboyant femininity in

 the lines of a male face. Charlotte had to admit that it not only suited Wilde

 particularly well but also subjected her own appreciative sensations to a unique

 agitation.

 Charlotte kept all the usual intimate technology at home, and her sexual desires

 were nowadays mostly served within that context, but she had found that there

 was a certain ^/raron which she could only gain from eye contact with actual

 human beings. She did not consider herself a slave to fashion and did not care

 at all whether real partners were in or out just now. She had not the slightest

 interest in joining an aggregate household, because she could not bear the

 thought of sacrificing all the joyous luxuries of solitude, so she was

 reasonably well accustomed to the tactics of forming occasional temporary

 liaisons. She could not help considering such a possibility while she bathed in

 the slight thrill of lust awakened by Wilde’s perfect features, even though she

 was more than half-convinced that he was a murderer whose present occupation was

 trying to make a fool of her.

 “Can you make, an antidote?” said Michael Lowenthal suddenly, as he finally

 finished spooning broccoli from the serving dish to his plate.

 The question obviously shifted Wilde’s train of thought onto a new track, and

 for a moment or two he looked puzzled. Then he said: “Oh, of course! You mean a

 generic antidote—one that could be used to protect anyone and everyone against

 the possibility of encountering an amaranth tailored to consume his own flesh.

 Yes, Mr. Lowenthal, I could—and so could any halfway competent doctor now that

 we have the fundamental Celosia gentemplate. A problem would arise if another

 natural species had been used as a starting point for a similar weapon, but

 given the complexity of the project that seems unlikely. One would, of course,

 have to be able to identify the individuals who might require such protection,

 unless one were to administer the antidote to the whole population.”

 Not if you were only concerned with defending a small minority, Charlotte

 thought. As long as the Knights of the Round Table could be protected, and the

 Gods made safe in their Olympian retreat, the rest of us could take our own

 risks. She knew as she formed the thought, however, that the judgment was

 unfair. What the proprietors of the MegaMall would actually be enthusiastic to

 do would be to put the antidote on the market as soon as their faithful

 newscasters had wound public alarm up to its highest pitch. She even found time

 to wonder whether it was conceivable that the MegaMall might commission the

 murder of a high-profile target in order to stimulate the market for a product

 that might otherwise seem unnecessarily expensive—but she dismissed the idea as

 a monstrous absurdity.

 “You met the man who posed as Rappaccini more than once,” Charlotte said, trying

 to return her wandering mind to more fruitful areas of conjecture. “Did he seem

 to you then to be a madman—a potential murderer?”

 “I must confess that I rather liked him,” Wilde replied. “He had an admirable

 hauteur, as if he considered himself a more profound person than most of the

 exhibitors at the Great Exhibition, but he did not strike me as a violent or

 vengeful person. I dined with him several times, usually in the presence of

 others, and I found him to be a man of civilized taste and conversation. He

 appeared to like me, and we shared a taste for antiquity—particularly the

 nineteenth century, to which we were both linked by our names. Memory is such a

 feeble instrument that I really cannot remember in any detail what we discussed,

 but I may have some recordings in my private archives. It would be interesting,

 would it not, to know whether we talked about nineteenth-century literature in

 general, and Baudelaire in particular?”

 “We’ll need access to those archives,” said Charlotte.

 “You are more than welcome,” Wilde assured her. “I’m sure that you’ll find them

 absolutely fascinating.”

 “A silver would do the actual scanning, of course,” she added, blushing with

 embarrassment over the reflex that had caused her to state the obvious.

 “How sad,” Wilde replied teasingly. “Artificial intelligence is admirable in so

 many ways, but even its so-called geniuses have never quite mastered the sense

 of humor, let alone a sense of style. A human eye would find so much more to

 appreciate in the record of my life.”

 “Do you remember anything useful?” Charlotte asked, her voice suddenly sharp

 with resentment of the fact that he was making fun of her. “Anything at all

 which might help us to,identify the parallel existence which Biasiolo must have

 maintained alongside his life as Rappaccini, and into which he subsequently

 shifted.”

 “Not yet,” Wilde replied, taking another appreciative sip of the Saint Emilion.

 “I am trying, but it was a long time ago, and our memories were not shaped by

 evolution to sustain themselves over a life span of a hundred and thirty years.

 I have preserved my mental capacity far better than some of my peers—but not, it

 seems, as well as Rappaccini.”

 Charlotte’s beltphone buzzed and she picked up the handset. “Yes, Hal,” she

 said.

 “Just thought you’d like to know,” he said. “Walter Czastka called in. He’s

 alive and well. I sent him the data Wilde’s been looking over, so we should have

 a second take on that by morning. We have a highly probable link between the

 suspect and a passenger who boarded a maglev two hours after she left the

 Trebizond Tower. Her ticket was booked in the name of Jeanne Duval. The ID’s

 fake and the account is a cash-fed dummy, but I’ve got a flock of surfers

 chasing every last detail down. It could be the vital break.”

 “Thanks,” said Charlotte. Polite discretion had presumably dissuaded Hal from

 simply reappearing on the table’s screen and interrupting their meal—unless he

 was using politeness as an excuse for leaving Michael Lowenthal out of the loop

 for a few minutes. If so, she thought, she had better be careful. Hal would, of

 course, have to copy Lowenthal’s employers in on the results of his chase—but if

 it were possible, he would infinitely prefer to catch the quarry first. In a

 race like this, minutes might make all the difference, and the reputation of the

 UN police was on the line.

 “We reached Walter Czastka,” Charlotte informed Wilde as she picked up her fork

 again. “He’s alive and well—and he’s double-checking your work.”

 “You might have made contact with him,” Wilde said waspishly, “but I doubt that

 anyone has actually reached Walter for half a century or more.”

 “You don’t seem to like Walter Czastka,” Charlotte observed. “A matter of

 professional jealousy, perhaps?”

 Wilde hesitated briefly before responding, but decided to ignore the insulting

 implication. “I don’t dislike Walter personally” he said carefully. “I will

 admit, however, to a certain distaste for the idea that we’re two of a kind,

 equal in our expertise. He’s an able man, in his way, but he’s a hack; he has

 neither the eye nor the heart of a true artist. While I have aspired to

 perfection, he has always preferred to be prolific. He will identify the Celosia

 and will doubtless inform you that it is based on a gentemplate of mine, but he

 will not be able to see Rappaccini’s handiwork in the final product. I hope that

 you will not read too much into that omission.”

 “But Czastka must have artistic ambitions of his own,” Michael Lowenthal

 observed. “While you’ve been in New York, undergoing a third rejuvenation which

 most people would consider premature, he’s been laboring away on his private

 island, patiently building his personal Eden.”

 “Walter has Creationist ambitions, just as I have,” Wilde admitted, “but that’s

 not what you’re interested in, is it? You’re exploring the possibility that

 Walter might be the man behind Gabriel King’s murder, and wondering whether I

 might be underestimating him. You’re wondering whether he knows what I think of

 him—and whether, if so, he might have involved me in his criminal masterpiece

 merely in order to make a fool of me. You’re wondering whether he might have

 planned this magnificent folly to show the world how absurdly wrong I have been

 in my estimate of his abilities. I almost wish that it were conceivable,

 Michael, but it is not. I’ll gladly stake my reputation on it.”

 “Walter Czastka knew Gabriel King quite well,” Lowenthal observed mildly. “They

 were both born in 2301, and they attended the same university. Czastka has done

 a great deal of work for King, on various building projects—far more than you

 ever did, Dr. Wilde. They seem to have been on good terms, but they’ve had

 plenty of time to generate a motive for murder. Most murders involve people who

 know one another well.” He had obviously done some background work on this

 hypothesis, presumably while Charlotte had failed to engage him in conversation

 in Hal’s office.

 “I daresay that nothing I can say will affect your pursuit of this line of

 inquiry,” said Wilde wearily, “but I assure you that it is quite sterile. Walter

 has not sufficient imagination to have committed this crime, even if he had a

 motive. I doubt that he did have a motive; Walter and Gabriel King are—or were,

 in the latter case—cats of a similar stripe. Like Walter, Gabriel King might

 have been a true artist, but like Walter, he declined the opportunity.”

 “What do you mean by that?” Lowenthal asked.

 “A modern architect, working with thousands of subspecies of gantzing bacteria

 and shamirs, can raise buildings out of almost any material, shaped to almost

 any design,” Wilde pointed out, reverting to quasi-professorial mode. “The

 integration of pseudoliving systems to provide water and other amenities adds a

 further dimension of creative opportunity. A true artist could make buildings

 that would stand forever as monuments to contemporary creativity, but Gabriel

 King’s main interest was always in productivity—in razing whole towns to the

 ground and reerecting them with the least possible effort. His business, insofar

 as it is creative at all, has always been the mass production of third-rate

 homes for second-rate people. Walter has always been the first choice to provide

 those third-rate homes with third-rate interior and exterior floral

 decorations.”

 “I thought the original purpose of bacterial cementation processes was to

 facilitate the provision of decent homes for the very poor,” said Charlotte.

 “Gabriel King was a structural bioengineer, after all, not an architect.”

 “Even so,” Wilde said, “I find it infinitely sad to see modern methods of

 construction being applied so mechanically to the mass production of housing for

 people who are wealthy enough not to need mass-produced housing. The building of

 a home, or a series of homes, ought to be part of an individual’s cultivation of

 his own personality, not a matter of following convention—or, even worse, some

 briefly fashionable fad, like so-called Decivilization. Like education, making a

 home will one day be one of the things every man is expected to do for himself,

 and there will be no more Gabriel King houses with Walter Czastka subsystems.”

 “We can’t all be Creationists,” objected Charlotte.

 “Oh, but we can, Charlotte,” Wilde retorted. “We can all make every effort to be

 whatever we can be—even people like us, who have not Michael’s inbuilt

 advantages.”

 “Even the members of the New Human Race still die in the end,” said Charlotte.

 “Lowenthal might be able to have ten careers, or twenty, instead of a mere

 handful, but there are thousands of different occupations—and as you pointed out

 yourself, our memories are finite. The human mind can only hold so much

 expertise.”

 “I’m talking about attitudes rather than capacities,” said Oscar. “The men of

 the past had one excuse for all their failures—man born of woman had but a short

 time to live, and it was full of misery—but it was a shabby excuse even then.

 Today, the cowardice that still inhibits us is far more shameful. There is no

 excuse for any man who fails to be a true artist and declines to take full

 responsibility for both his mind and his environment. Too many of us still aim

 for mediocrity and are content with its achievement—”

 He would undoubtedly have continued the lecture, but Charlotte’s beltphone began

 to buzz again. She put the handset to her ear again.

 “Shit hits fan,” said Hal tersely. “The worst-case scenario just kicked in.”

 By the time Charlotte put the handset down again Wilde and Lowenthal knew that

 something important had happened. Wilde was still cradling his last glass of

 Saint Emilion, but he wasn’t drinking. He was waiting for the bad news.

 “Michi Urashima’s just been found dead in San Francisco,” she reported. She knew

 that it wasn’t necessary to tell either of them who Michi Urashima was. For the

 sake of completeness she added: “He was murdered. Same method as King.”

 “Michi Urashima!” Lowenthal repeated incredulously.

 “I’m very sorry to hear that,” said Wilde. “Michi was a better man by far than

 Gabriel King.”

 Lowenthal had snatched up his own handset by the time Wilde had finished his

 sentence, and had turned away to speak into it. Charlotte had no difficulty at

 all in deducing that Michi Urashima’s was not one of the names Lowenthal’s

 employers had feared or expected to hear in this context—although there was one

 item of their discussion downstairs which had pointed to a pattern into which

 Urashima fit as snugly as a hand into a glove.

 Before his trial and imprisonment, Michi Urashima had been one of the world’s

 foremost pioneers of “encephalic augmentation”: brainfeed research. Gabriel King

 must have known him well. So must Jafri Biasiolo, alias Rappaccini.

 On the other hand, it was difficult to imagine anyone less in tune with the

 MegaMall’s economic and social philosophy than Urashima. Even in the earliest

 phase of his career, when he had been an expert in computer graphics and image

 simulation, widely celebrated for his contributions to synthetic cinema, he had

 been a political radical. If the Hardinist Cabal feared that King’s

 assassination had been the first move in a conspiracy directed against their

 ownership of the world, Michi Urashima was the last person they would expect to

 find on the hit list.

 “Not everyone would agree with you about his being a better man,” Charlotte said

 to Wilde speculatively, “but he must, I suppose, have been of the same

 generation. In any case, there’s no need for you to take the midnight maglev

 now.”

 “On the contrary,” said Oscar. “Even if this revelation is, by Rappaccini’s

 reckoning, premature, I feel that he would still want me to visit the scene.

 This affair is still in its early stages, and if we want to witness the further

 phases of its unfolding we really ought to follow the script laid down for us.”

 “You think there will be more murders?” Charlotte asked.

 “I always thought so,” said Wilde. “Now, I am certain of it.”

 Intermission Two

 A Pioneer on the Furthest Shore

 « ^ »

 As if it were caught by the surge of a fast-flowing black river, the soul of

 Paul Kwiatek was hurled upon its wayward course through the warp of infinity. It

 was outside the universe of atoms, beneath the wayward play of nuclear

 interaction forces, having been reabsorbed into the implicate order itself. Paul

 knew that his fleshy envelope must be dead and that his body must already be in

 its coffin, borne through the streets of Bologna on a black-draped bier—but his

 soul was free, miraculously inviolate.

 Tossed as he was by the whim of the reckless current, Paul could see nothing of

 the river’s shore, the Land of the Dead. Perhaps it was only his imagination

 which assured him that he could hear the whispering voices of the spirit

 legions, welcoming him with gossip as they marveled over the achievements of his

 life.

 The guardian at the entrance to an older heaven might have stopped him at the

 gate, for his life had not been entirely without sin, but he had always worked

 in the cause of Mind and the further evolution of the human intellect. In the

 reckoning of cowards, he had committed crimes—crimes from whose legal

 consequences the agents of the MegaMall had fortunately condescended to shield

 him—but everything he had done he had done for the sake of increased

 understanding of the last and greatest of the ancient mysteries: the nature of

 consciousness, the fundamental phenomenon of the human mind. In any case, the

 heaven of tradition was now a virtual theme park owned and operated by the

 MegaMall, through which silver saints offered guided tours to the living; this

 was the world beyond death, the ultimate upload, the exit to eternity.

 Paul knew that the flow of the river was not the flow of time, because he was

 now beyond the reach of time, although his consciousness had no alternative but

 to arrange its thoughts and feelings consecutively, preserving the illusion of

 duration even in a realm without any such dimension. Nor was his soul confined

 in any way; free of his body, it had neither width nor breadth nor depth—but

 consciousness had no alternative but to define itself in terms of “position” and

 “magnitude,” and so he perceived himself as an inconsiderable atom in the

 flotsam of a river which fed the Sea of Souls—an atom as yet alone, but fit

 nevertheless to join the company of all humankind at the omega point of

 creation.

 Paul did not fear dissolution in the ocean of the implicate order, nor did he

 fear annihilation at the Climacticon; he knew that he could not be lost, even in

 infinity. Nothing, ultimately, could be lost, no matter how many inflationary

 domains bubbled up from the wellspring of creation, making worlds within worlds

 within worlds and selecting those best fitted to be cradles of further worlds,

 further minds, further candidates for the ultimate upload. The surge of

 creativity was illimitable, possessed of no vestige of a beginning and no

 prospect of an end, and the surge of mind within it was irresistible in its

 insistence on being heard and felt. Every sensation that was ever felt, every

 thought that was ever framed, was gathered here into the river of intelligence,

 neatly bound into identities and personal histories, stories made from memory,

 racing upon the tide toward omega, the summation of all.

 Souls bound for lesser heavens were supposed to be joyous, worshipful, and above

 all grateful, but Paul was prey to no such petty treasons. He was an explorer,

 whose mind was questioning, and he had no space within his virtual self for

 gladness or triumph, ecstasy or awe. He had come to see all that there was to be

 seen, to feel all that there was to be felt, and above all else to know all that

 there was to be known. His purpose was discovery: to go to the undiscovered

 country where multitudes had been before, but from whose bourn no traveler had

 yet returned; to be what multitudes would one day be, although they could not

 know it.

 It was, of course, a virtual experience—Paul had always despised the phrase

 “virtual reality” as a vile oxymoron, and thought “virtual environment”

 misleading because it implied that a person within one had merely altered his

 existential wallpaper without altering himself—but that did not make it any less

 valuable, in Paul’s reckoning. As he was fond of reminding the few friends he

 had left, all experience was virtual, because that was the very essence of Mind.

 The cogitative brain was a machine for generating virtual experiences of a kind

 that would allow the body to function in the world of things-in-themselves, but

 to describe the phenomenal world of things-as-perceived as the real world was a

 conceptual step too far.

 Few would have agreed with him, but Paul felt perfectly entitled to put the

 experience of the black river on a par with his experience of the Tiber or the

 Po, and to deem the implicate order of the Sea of Souls as sensible as the

 streets of Rome and the shores of the Adriatic.

 Paul had no doubt of his own effective immortality, but still he could not shake

 the last vestiges of his fear of death. Perhaps, if he had been able to do that,

 he would have been able to ride the black current to its terminus, without the

 necessity of a return to vulgar quiddity. As things were, however, he felt

 compelled to call an end to his odyssey when his IT began to send unmistakable

 distress calls from his not-quite-abandoned flesh.

 Paul lifted the VE hood from his head and set about unsealing the special

 suitskin in which he had been enwrapped for thirty-six hours. He fumbled every

 seam, his quivering fingers seeming huge and repulsive.

 When he was finally free he made no immediate attempt to raise himself into a

 sitting position, let alone to swing his legs from the cradle to the floor. He

 simply lay there, becoming reaccustomed to his lumpen body and his mere

 humanity. He felt utterly deflated as well as severely disoriented; it was an

 effort even to blink his rheumy eyes.

 He could no longer remember a time when this kind of return had seemed like

 returning home. He felt as if he had been washed up on an alien shore, stranded

 there as a castaway in a state of utter exhaustion. There was nothing he could

 do, until he recovered far better possession of himself, but lie still and wait.

 His IT was no longer transmitting distress calls, but it was laboring under

 duress. Although he had not consulted a physician in some time, his personal

 nanotech was neither obsolete nor broken down, but while the law forbade

 “explicit neural cyborgization,” IT could only do so much to help the brain to

 maintain its efficient grip on the motor nerves. Given that the whole point of a

 VE hood-and-suitskin was to distract the brain from its involvement with a body,

 it was hardly surprising that the efficiency of that grip could be compromised

 while a person was lost in virtual experience.

 Suitskins designed for everyday use were purely organic—even supposedly

 state-of-the-art sexsuits and commercially augmented VE trippers were only

 lightly cyborgized—but the suitskin Paul had been wearing was nearly 40 percent

 inorganic. Fortunately, there was no law specifying the limits of explicit

 neural cyborgization in artificial constructions. The suitskin was as awkwardly

 bulky as a twenty-second-century deptank, but it carried ten times as much

 fibertech and fifty times as much nanotech—and every single nanosuite was a

 great deal sleeker than its ancient ancestors. The suitskin’s power was so much

 greater than a deptank’s, and the virtual realities to which it took its user

 were so much more complicated, that the difference had to be reckoned as a

 qualitative one rather than a merely quantitative exaggeration.

 Paul thought of the suitskin as his own invention, refusing to admit that the

 contribution of the giants on whose shoulders he had stood while drawing up its

 blueprint had been significant. He also thought of it as his own personal

 property, although he could never have financed its construction. All the money

 he had ever extracted from the MegaMall in the days when he had been a pioneer,

 oblivious of the cautionary elements of the emerging brainfeed laws, would not

 have served to buy an eye and a glove, let alone a whole suit—but if ever it

 became an item of controversy, he would have to take sole responsibility for its

 possession and its use. The Secret Masters of the world were hardly likely to

 come forward in his defense and say: the guilt is ours, and the penalty too. He

 had ceased to be an officially acknowledged employee of the MegaMall on the day

 that Michi Urashima had been thrown to the wolves. Others had thought of it as

 expulsion, but Paul had thought of it as freedom. In his eyes, the augmented

 suitskin was his creation, his property, and his gateway to eternity, no matter

 who had fed the cash into his bank account or what elaborate chain of transfers

 had culminated in the final delivery.

 Paul’s friends occasionally took leave to inform him—as if he had asked, or

 cared, or needed to know—that his apparatus was simply a souped-up version of

 the VE kits that ordinary folk used for remote work and virtual tourism. He

 always denied it, pointing out that suitskins intended for the use of VE

 tourists and others like them were content to pretend merely to alter the worlds

 in which their users moved, while ostensibly leaving their sense of self

 unmolested. Relatively few VE suitskins were actually designed to alter their

 users’ subjective experiences of their own persons as profoundly as they altered

 the environments through which their bodies appeared to be moving. Most of the

 ones which could and did were geared to produce the illusion of being some other

 kind of animal: “a leopard stalking its prey; a dolphin in the deep; an ant in

 the hive. Paul’s pride and joy was far more ambitious than that, and the virtual

 worlds in which he routinely immersed himself were stranger by far. He was an

 explorer of artificial universes whose physical laws were markedly different

 from those pertaining to our own inflationary domain, and of alien states of

 being as remote from the human as the digital imagination could produce.

 He was always prepared to explain this, not merely to his friends but to anyone

 who would listen, but no one really understood who had not done what he had done

 and been where he had been. Had he tried much harder, he might eventually have

 persuaded one or more of his friends to do that, but he never tried too hard. To

 evangelize was one thing; to share the embrace of his most intimate possession

 was another.

 * * *

 When he had finally managed to sit up, Paul reached for the plastic bottle

 waiting on the shelf beside the cradle, uncapped it with hands that were almost

 steady, and sucked at the tube. He held the glucose-rich liquid in his mouth for

 six or seven seconds before easing it into his esophagus. The last of the

 time-release capsules that he had carefully committed to his stomach before

 donning the suitskin had exhausted its cargo of nutrients five hours before; he

 and his loyal IT were both in need of the energy fix.

 Another ten minutes passed while he flexed the muscles in his limbs, preparing

 for the arduous journey to the bathroom. An everyday sleepskin would have

 absorbed the secretions of his skin as easily as it absorbed all other excreta,

 then turned him out perfectly fresh, but the suit he had been using had only the

 most elementary provision of that kind. He needed a shower and a generous

 dusting of talcmech before he was fit to receive company.

 Sometimes he wondered whether it might be better to become a total recluse, but

 he did not like to be called a VE addict and he knew that.if he were to withdraw

 from all human contact it would be taken as proof that the label had not been

 unjustly attached to him. The idea of a permanent retreat into the suitskin’s

 inner worlds was not altogether attractive, even though it was now practicable.

 Thanks to the sudden flood of wealth produced by their stake in Zaman

 transformation technology, the Ahasuerus Foundation had been able to put a whole

 fleet of new susan technologies on the market, including a DreamOn facility

 which promised year-round support. He had enough money to pay for his upkeep for

 far longer than his body and mind were likely to hold out, and his doctors had

 advised him that a third core-system rejuvenation was out of the question unless

 he wanted to start over with a tabula rasa personality. The whole point of his

 odysseys in exotica was, however, to undertake voyages of discovery. How could

 he be reckoned a true explorer unless he brought the fruits of his labor back to

 Earth? Whatever people might say, he was not a VE addict; he was a pioneer.

 Even susan-becalmed dreamers were, of course, only a phone call away from their

 real-world neighbors, but those voluntary Endymions to whom Paul had talked on

 various virtual grounds had always given abundant evidence of the fact that they

 were entranced. When they posed as scrupulous scientific observers reporting on

 their findings, they never gave the impression of reliability. Paul did not want

 to be seen as an unreliable witness, let alone a figure of fun; his journeys

 into the remotest regions of virtual space were attempts to expand reality, not

 attempts to escape it, and in order to make that plain he had to retain the

 capability of wakefulness.

 He set the temperature control on the shower ten degrees too low, so that the

 first jet of water would startle his flesh, but he held on to the knob so that

 he could twist it to a more comfortable setting as soon as the benign shock had

 worked its way through his system. After that first reminder of what manner of

 being he was, it became far easier to relax into what he still considered-even

 after all his amazing adventures—to be his true self.

 By the time he had slipped into a conventional day-suit Paul was beginning to

 wonder if he had left himself enough time to check his mail and get something to

 eat, but he still had thirty minutes to spare before the appointed time for his

 rendezvous, and he had already taken note of the fact that his visitor’s sense

 of timing was extraordinarily exact. Although he had known her for less than a

 fortnight, he felt that he knew the young woman as well as he knew anyone else

 in the world, and he trusted her to appear at the appointed time, neither a

 minute early nor a minute late.

 He did not, of course, have time to reply to any of his mail, but no one who

 knew him even slightly would be expecting a rapid response. His meal was whole

 diet manna, as uncomplicated as possible, but he followed it with hot black

 coffee, as authentic in taste and texture as his dispensary could contrive.

 While he drank the coffee he reflected that although his lifestyle might have

 appeared frugal to anyone who had cause to consult the record stored by the

 mechanical eyes which had him under observation, they would have been wrong.

 “Only those with extensive experience of the unreal,” he murmured, “can properly

 appreciate the real.” It was one of his favorite aphorisms; he could no longer

 remember from whom he had stolen it.

 “That’s not what most people say,” the beautiful woman had observed when he had

 quoted the saw on the occasion of their first meeting. “Some reckon that the

 near perfection of virtual reality can only devalue actual experience, by

 proving that it is—at least in principle, and nowadays very nearly in

 practice—reducible to a mere string of ones and zeroes.”

 “That’s absurd,” Paul had told her. “Even if one were to ignore the hardware

 whose structures are animated by the digital programs, it’s as grossly

 misleading to think of the programs merely as a string of ones and zeroes as it

 is to think of living organisms merely as a string of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts

 threaded on a DNA strand. In any case, how can it be a devaluation to know that

 everything, in the ultimate analysis, can be reduced to the pure and absolute

 beauty of abstract information?”

 The beautiful woman had been as deeply impressed by his eloquence as she was by

 his originality. There had been a spark between them from the very first moment:

 a spark that was emotional as well as intellectual. The fact that he was a

 hundred and ninety-four years old while she could hardly be more than

 twenty—twenty-five at the most—was no barrier to empathy. On the contrary: the

 difference between them actually increased the quality of their relationship by

 marking out complementary roles. She had so much to learn, and he so much to

 teach. She had such bright eyes, such fabulous hair… and he had such a wealth of

 experience, such a wonderful elasticity of mind.

 “The professions of information technology have generated many derisory

 nicknames over the centuries,” Paul had explained to his new lover when she

 wondered aloud whether she ought to follow a career trajectory in Webwork, “but

 those of us who have a true vocation learn to bear them all with pride. I’ve

 never been ashamed to be a chipmonk, or a bytebinder, or a cyberspider. I’ve

 devoted my life to the expansion of the Web and its capabilities. It is, after

 all, the mind of the race. In my youth I found it tattered and torn, ripped

 apart by the Crash, and in my middle years I had to fight with all my might to

 preserve its scaffolding from the vandalistic activities of the new

 barbarians—but in the end, I saw the triumph of the New Order and felt free to

 move on to further fields, searching for the road that would lead to the

 ultimate upload. That’s the way to true immortality, after all. No matter what

 the so-called New Human Race is capable of, it can only be emortal; if we’re to

 look beyond the very possibility of death, it’s to the Web that we must look in

 the first instance, because it’s the Web that will ultimately be fused with the

 Universal Machine, the architect of the omega point. It’s a pity that so many of

 the people whose souls are inextricably caught in the embrace of the Web feel

 compelled to belittle it with their talk, even while they enjoy the wonderful

 privileges of its caresses, but it seems to be human nature to take the best

 things in life for granted.”

 “Rumor has it,” she had told him while inspecting his cradle and his collection

 of uncommon suitskins, “that the most realistic VEs of all don’t require a

 suitskin. The illusion is produced entirely by internal nanotech while the

 dreamer lies unconscious in a kind of susan. It’s said that the suite was never

 put on the market because the illusions were too convincing for some of its

 users.”

 “Actually, the system in question was made commercially available for a while,”

 Paul had been able to tell her, “but it was withdrawn after the first half-dozen

 shock-induced fatalities. An overreaction, in my opinion, but typical of the way

 the World Government works, always turning panic into legislation. All that was

 required was a slight tightening of the IT safety net, but the vidveg never see

 that, and democracy gives the vidveg the right of campaign. I’ve used the

 relevant IT myself, but work on the software stopped when the scandal forced the

 product off the market, and the existing VEs aren’t nearly as sophisticated as

 the best of those designed to run on equipment like mine. If the MegaMall ever

 puts it back on the market I’d certainly consider adapting my own work to that

 kind of system, but it would involve some heavy and exceedingly laborious work.

 I’m probably too old for that kind of project.”

 “I doubt that,” she had said, with a brilliant smile. “You’ve worn better than

 any other two-hundred-year-old man I know.”

 He hadn’t even bothered to point out that he was still six years short of his

 second century.

 By the time the door chime sounded, Paul was entirely ready to receive his

 visitor. He felt perfectly at home in his flesh, and perfectly at home in his

 apartment

 “Why thank you,” he said as she offered him a bouquet of golden flowers. “I

 think I have a vase, somewhere. Are they Wildes or Czastkas?”

 “Wildes,” she told him. “His latest release.”

 “Of course—I should have known. The style’s unmistakable. Czastkas always look

 so lackluster, so very natural— although I suppose we’ll have to give up calling

 things natural, now that the adjective’s been turned into a noun by the new

 emortals.”

 Paul did have a vase, although it wasn’t easy to find. He was not a man who

 liked clutter, and he kept the great majority of his possessions neatly and

 efficiently stored away. “My memory isn’t what it used to be,” he explained

 while he searched for it.

 “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “You can set them in the wall if you have the

 right kind of plumbing.”

 “I don’t,” he replied, still searching. “In my day, picture windows and virtual

 murals were all the rage. Nobody wanted creepers and daisy chains covering their

 interior walls—even daisy chains designed by Oscar Wilde or Walter Czastka. I

 was at university with Czastka, you know. He was so intense in those days—so

 full of plans and schemes. A little bit crazy, but only in a good way. He was an

 explorer uienj like me. Sometimes I wonder where all his daring went. I haven’t

 spoken to him for decades, but he’d become exceedingly dull even then.”

 “It really doesn’t matter about the vase,” the woman told him anxiously.

 “It’s here somewhere,” he said. “I really ought to remember where I keep it. I

 might have thirty or forty years in me yet, if only I can keep my mind alive and

 alert. My brain might be a thing of thread and patches, but as long as I can

 keep the forces of fossilization at bay I can keep the neural pathways intact.

 As long as I can look after my mind…”

 Paul realized that he was rambling. He shut up, wondering whether he could find

 an opportunity to ask her whether or not she was a Natural, engineered for such

 longevity that she might not ever need “rejuvenation.” If so, her mind might

 have a thousand years to grow and learn, to refine itself by the selection of

 forgetfulness. He wondered whether it would really be indelicate simply to ask

 her—but he decided against it, for the moment. She was authentically young; that

 was what mattered. What would become of her in two or five hundred years was

 surely none of his concern.

 “The apartment sloth will know where it is,” he told her while he continued to

 move hither and yon uncertainly, “but if I ask it, I’ll be giving in to erosion.

 Sloths never forget, but that shouldn’t tempt us to rely on them too much, lest

 we lose the ability to remember. A good memory is one that’s as adept in the art

 of forgetfulness as it is in the art of remembrance.” He realized, somewhat

 belatedly, that he was losing the thread of his own argument—and that he still

 had not found the vase.

 “I’ll put them down here,” the woman said, laying the flowers down on the table

 beside the food dispensary. “They’ll be fine for an hour or two—longer, if

 necessary. You can look for the vase later, if you really want to.”

 “Yes, of course,” Paul said, trying not to sound annoyed with himself lest she

 take the inference that he was also annoyed with her. He resolved to start the

 encounter again, and went back to greet her for a second time, in a better way.

 The young woman was extraordinarily beautiful, in an age where ordinary beauty

 was commonplace. Her eyes sparkled, and her hair was a delight to eye and hand

 alike. The touch of her lips seemed to Paul’s old-fashioned consciousness to be

 a sensation which not even the most elaborate and sensitive virtual experiences

 could yet contain.

 “Sometimes, when I emerge into the daylit world,” he told her, “I feel as if I

 had passed through a looking glass into a mirror world which is subtly

 distorted. It seems very like the one I left behind, but not quite the same. I

 always need the touch of a human hand or a kiss from human lips in order to be

 sure that I’m really home.”

 “You can be sure of that,” she told him. “This is the world, and you’re

 certainly in it.”

 And so he was, for a while.

 By the time death came to claim him, Paul Kwiatek was deep in yet another waking

 dream, and it seemed to him that he was in a very different body, in a very

 different world. Even before the seeds began to germinate within his flesh, he

 was a ghost among ghosts, in a world without light, adrift on a black torrent

 pouring over the edge of a great cataract, falling into an infinite and empty

 abyss.

 The memory of the kisses he had so recently shared had already been stored

 neatly away, ready to be forgotten. Now, like the elusive vase, they would be

 forever lost.

 So far as most people were concerned—even others like himself—Paul Kwiatek had

 been a mere phantom of the information world for years. His extinction passed

 unnoticed by any kind of intelligence, human or artificial, and the fact of it

 might have remained undiscovered for months had no one found a particular reason

 to search for him. It was not until a dutiful silver linked his name to those of

 Gabriel King, Michi Urashima, and Walter Czastka that anyone thought to wonder

 where he actually was, or what he had actually become.

 Investigation: Act Three

 Across America

 « ^ »

 By the time she had installed herself in the maglev couchette, Charlotte was

 exhausted. It had been a long, eventful, and mentally taxing day. Unfortunately,

 her head was still seething with crowded thoughts in Brownian motion, and she

 knew that sleep would be out of the question without serious chemical

 assistance. She knew that her disinclination to avail herself of such assistance

 would undoubtedly punish her the next day, when she would doubtless need

 chemical assistance of a different kind to maintain her alertness, but that

 seemed to her to be the dutiful way to play it. There was plenty of work she

 could do while she stayed awake, even if her powers of concentration were not at

 their peak.

 The couchette had a screen of its own, but it was situated at the foot of the

 bed, and Charlotte found it more comfortable by far to plug her beltphone into

 the bed’s head and set the bookplate on the pillow while lying prone on the

 mattress.

 At first she was content to scan data which had already been collated by Hal’s

 silvers, but she soon grew bored with that. Now that she had elected to play the

 detective, she knew that she ought to be doing research of her own. She could

 hardly compete with Hal’s private army in matters of detail, but even Hal had

 confessed to her once that the principal defect of his methodology was the

 danger of losing sight of the wood among the trees. Given that she was a legman,

 operating in the human world rather than the abstract realm of digitized data,

 she needed to think holistically, making every effort to grasp the big picture.

 To have any chance of doing that, however, she needed more information on the

 game’s players. Hal had already shown her the near vacuum of data that was

 supposedly the man behind Rappaccini, but if her suspicions could be trusted,

 the real key to the mystery must be Oscar Wilde.

 She had, of course, to hope that her suspicions could be trusted; if they could

 not, she was going to look very foolish indeed. Modern police work was

 conventionally confined to the kind of data sifting at which Hal Watson was a

 past master. Legmen were at the bottom of the hierarchy, normally confined to

 the quasi-janitorial labor of looking after crime scenes and making arrests. She

 was mildly surprised that Hal had actually consented to let her accompany Wilde,

 because he obviously felt that this trip to San Francisco was a wild-goose

 chase, and that it was of no relevance whatsoever to the investigation. She

 wondered whether he would have given her permission if it had not been for

 Lowenthal. Although he would never be able to say so out loud, Hal would be much

 happier if the man from MegaMall were chasing distant wild geese instead of

 looking over his shoulder while he did the real detective work. At any rate,

 Charlotte knew that she could expect no backup and no encouragement, and that

 her one chance of avoiding a nasty blot on her record was to prove that her

 instincts were correct. If she could do that, the outlandishness of her action

 would be forgiven—and if she were spectacularly successful, her efforts might

 actually make the UN hierarchy think again about the methodology of modern

 police work.

 It was the work of a few moments to discover that Oscar Wilde was anything but a

 data vacuum. That did not surprise her—although she was slightly startled by the

 revelation that there was almost as much data in the Web relating to the

 nineteenth-century writer after whom the contemporary Oscar had been named as

 there was to the man himself. It took her a further fifteen minutes fully to

 absorb the lesson that mere mass was a highly undesirable thing when it came to

 translating information into understanding. By the time that quarter hour had

 elapsed, she had cultivated a proper appreciation for the synoptic efforts of

 compilers of commentaries and encyclopedists.

 She tried out half a dozen points of entry into the hypertextual maze,

 eventually settling for the Condensed Micropaedia of the Modern World. From

 there she was able to retrieve a reasonably compacted description of the life

 and works of Oscar Wilde (2362- ) and Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde

 (1854-1900). When she had inwardly digested that information, she looked up

 Charles Baudelaire. Then she looked up Walter Czastka, then Gabriel King, and

 then Michi Urashima. She had been hoping for inspiration, but none came; she

 felt even more exhausted but even less capable of sleep.

 On a whim, she looked up Michael Lowenthal. She found references to a dozen of

 them, none of whom could possibly be the man in the next-but-one couchette. She

 keyed in MegaMall, but had to go to the Universal Dictionary to find an entry,

 which merely recorded that the word was “A colloquial term for the

 industrial/entertainment complex.” There were no entries even in the Universal

 Dictionary for the Secret Masters, the Nine Unknown, or the Dominant

 Shareholders, and the entries on the Gods of Olympus and the Knights of the

 Round Table were carefully disingenuous. There were, however, entries in both

 the dictionary and the Condensed Micropaedia on Hardinism, each of which deigned

 to include a footnote on the Hardinist Cabal.

 According to the micropaedia, Hardinism was the name adopted by a loose

 association of early twenty-first-century businessmen to dignify their assertive

 defense of the principle of private property against steadily increasing demand

 that a central planning agency administered by the United Nations should be

 appointed to supervise the management of the ecosphere. The name had been

 appropriated from an obscure twentieth-century text called The Tragedy of the

 Commons, by an agricultural economist named Garrett Hardin. There, Hardin had

 pointed out that in the days when English grazing land had been available for

 common use, it had been in the interests of every individual user to maximize

 his exploitation of the resource by increasing the size of his herds. The

 inevitable result of this rational pursuit of individual advantage had been the

 overgrazing and ultimate destruction of the commons. Those former English

 commons which had been transformed into private property by the Enclosures Act

 had, by contrast, been carefully protected by their owners from dereliction,

 because they had been calculated as valuable items of inheritance whose bounty

 must be guarded.

 According to the footnote, the members of the consortium of multinational

 corporations who had masterminded the so-called Zimmerman coup, which had taken

 advantage of a financial crisis in the world’s stock markets to obtain a

 stranglehold on certain key “trading derivatives” relating to staple crops, had

 justified their actions by citing Hardinist doctrine. Although they had left

 Adam Zimmerman to acquire the primary notoriety of being “the man who cornered

 the future” or “the man who stole the world,” they had nevertheless been stuck

 with the nickname of the Hardinist Cabal.

 Neither the dictionary nor the micropaedia had anything to say about the

 contemporary use of the nickname, but it did not require much imagination to see

 the implication of its continued currency. Whatever the truth behind the myth of

 the Zimmerman coup might be, its effects were still in force. If a cartel of big

 corporations really had acquired effective ownership of the world in the early

 twenty-first century, they still had it. Even the Crash could not have served to

 loosen their grip; indeed, the establishment of the New Reproductive System must

 have helped to insulate it from the main kind of disintegration to which private

 property had previously been subject: dissipation by distribution among multiple

 inheritors.

 In a sense, this was not news. Everybody “knew” that the United Nations didn’t

 really run the world, and that the MegaMall did—but the ease with which that

 ironically cynical doctrine was accepted and bandied about kept the awareness at

 a superficial level. The idea of the MegaMall was so numinous, so difficult to

 pin down, that it was easy to forget that in the final analysis, it really was

 under the control of a relatively small number of Dominant Shareholders, whose

 names were not generally known. Like the ingenious Rappaccini, they had slipped

 away into the chaotic sea of Web-held data, forging new apparent identities and

 abandoning old ones, hiding among the electronic multitudes.

 According to Hardinist doctrine, of course, such men were the saviors of the

 world, who had prevented the ecosphere from falling prey to the tragedy of the

 commons. Presumably, they were Hardinists still, utterly convinced of the virtue

 as well as the necessity of their economic power—and the next generation, to

 whom the reins of that power would be quietly handed over, would have the

 opportunity to hold it in perpetuity.

 Michael Lowenthal had said that he was only a humble employee, like Charlotte,

 but while she only worked for the World Government, he was a servant of the

 Secret Masters of the world. Those Secret Masters had thought it necessary to

 take an interest in the murder of Gabriel King, in case it might be the

 beginning of a process that might threaten them. Now Michi Urashima was dead

 too—and to judge by Michael Lowenthal’s reaction, that had been both unexpected

 and unwelcome. If it had suggested that their initial anxieties had been

 unfounded, it must also have suggested a few new anxieties to take the place of

 the originals. With luck, Lowenthal and his associates would be as confused and

 frustrated at this moment in time as she was.

 If Oscar Wilde really was the killer, Charlotte realized, then this whole affair

 was nothing more than a madman’s fantasy. How grateful the Hardinist Cabal would

 be if that were indeed the case—or if, indeed, it turned out to be some other

 madman’s fantasy! The question that still remained, however—the question which

 was presumably responsible for Michael Lowenthal’s continued presence on the

 maglev—was whether there was any kind of method within the seeming madness.

 If so, she wondered, what kind of method could it possibly be? What could anyone

 possibly achieve, or even seek to achieve, by the murders of Gabriel King and

 Michi Urashima?

 Charlotte rose somewhat earlier than was her habit—the couchette was not the

 kind of bed which encouraged one to lie in, no matter how little sleep one had

 had.

 She immediately patched through a link to Hal Watson in order to get an update

 on the state of his investigations, but he wasn’t at his station yet.

 She decanted all the messages that he had left in store for her, and took

 careful note of those which seemed most significant before walking to the dining

 car in order to obtain a couple of manna croissants and a cup of strong coffee.

 She did not doubt that Michael Lowenthal would do the same as soon as he awoke,

 if he had not done so already; she could only hope that her estimations of

 significance might prove better than his.

 By the time Charlotte had finished her breakfast, the train was only three hours

 out of San Francisco. Oscar Wilde joined her while she was sipping coffee. He

 was looking very neat and trim save for the fact that the unrenewed green

 carnation in his buttonhole was now rather bedraggled. When he saw her looking

 at it, he assured her that he would be able to obtain a new one soon after

 arrival, because one of his very first commissions, had been to plan the

 interior decor of the San Francisco Majestic.

 “Such has been the mercy of our timetable,” he observed, peering through the

 tinted window, “that we have slept through Missouri and Kansas.”

 She knew what he meant. Missouri and Kansas were distinctly lacking in

 interesting scenery since the restabilization of the climate had made their

 great plains prime sites for the establishment of vast tracts of artificial

 photosynthetics. Nowadays, the greater part of the Midwest looked rather like

 sections of an infinite undulating sheet of matte black, which could easily

 cause offense to eyes that had been trained to love color. The SAP fields of

 Kansas always gave Charlotte the impression of looking at a gigantic piece of

 frilly and filthy corrugated cardboard. Houses and factories alike had retreated

 beneath the Stygian canopy, and the parts of the landscape which extended toward

 the horizon were so blurred as to be almost featureless.

 By now, though, the maglev passengers had the more elevating scenery of Colorado

 to look out upon. Most of the state had been carefully reforested; apart from

 the city of Denver—another of the Decivilizers’ favorite targets, but one they

 had not yet claimed—its centers of population had taken advantage of the

 versatility of modern building techniques to blend in with their surroundings.

 Chlorophyll green was infinitely easier on the human eye than SAP black,

 presumably because millions of years of adaptive natural selection had ensured

 that it would be, and the Colorado landscape seemed extraordinarily soothing.

 Had the hard-core Green Zealots not been so fixated on the grandiose glories of

 rain forest, they might have nominated this as a corner of Green Heaven. Had it

 been authentic wilderness, of course, it would have been mostly desert, but no

 one in the USNA would go so far in the cause of authenticity as to insist upon

 land remaining desolate; the republics of Gobi and Kalahari had a monopoly on

 that kind of nostalgia.

 While Oscar ordered eggs duchesse for breakfast, Charlotte activated the

 wallscreen beside their table and summoned up the latest news. The fact of

 Gabriel King’s death was recorded, as was the fact of Michi Urashima’s, but

 there was nothing about the exotic circumstances. She was momentarily puzzled by

 the fact that no one had yet connected the two murders or latched onto the

 possible biohazard, but she realized that the MegaMall’s interest in the affair

 had advantages as well as disadvantages. The MegaMall owned the casters, and

 until the MegaMall decided that discretion was unnecessary, the casters would

 keep their hoverflies on a tight rein.

 “Where’s Lowenthal?” she asked. “Still sleeping the sleep of the just, I

 suppose.” She wondered briefly whether she ought perhaps to wait for the man

 from the MegaMall before talking to Wilde about the investigation, but figured

 that it was up to her, as the early bird, to go after any available worms as

 quickly and as cleverly as she could. Unfortunately, she wasn’t at all sure how

 to start.

 “My dear Charlotte,” said Oscar, while she dithered, “you have the unmistakable

 manner of one who woke up far too early after working far too hard the night

 before.”

 “I couldn’t sleep,” she told him. “I took a couple of boosters before

 breakfast—once the croissants get my digestive system in gear they’ll clear my

 head.”

 Wilde shook his head. “I am not normally a supporter of nature,” he said. “No

 one who looks twenty when he is really a hundred and thirty-three can possibly

 be less than worshipful of the wonders of medical science—but in my experience,

 maintaining one’s sense of equilibrium with the aid of drugs is a false economy.

 We must have sleep in order to dream, and we must dream in order to discharge

 the chaos from our thoughts, so that we may reason effectively while we are

 awake. Your namesake, I know, was in the habit of taking cocaine, but I always

 thought it implausible of Conan Doyle to suggest that it enhanced his powers of

 ratiocination.”

 Charlotte had already taken note of Oscar Wilde’s date of birth while

 researching his background, and the fact that he had mentioned his age offered

 her an opportunity to ask what seemed to be a natural—if not conspicuously

 relevant—question. “If you’re only a hundred and thirty-three,” she said, “what

 on earth possessed you to risk a third rejuvenation? Most people that age are

 still planning their second.”

 “The risks of core-tissue rejuvenation mostly derive from the so-called Miller

 effect,” Wilde observed equably. “In that respect, the number of rejuvenations

 is less significant than the absolute age of the brain. Given the limitations of

 cosmetic enhancement, I felt that an increased risk of losing my mind was amply

 compensated by the certainty of replenishing my apparent youth. I shall

 certainly attempt a fourth rejuvenation before I turn one hundred and eighty,

 and if I live to be two hundred and ten I shall probably try for the record. I

 could not live like Gabriel King, so miserly in mind that I allowed my body to

 shrivel like the legendary Tithonus.”

 “He didn’t look so bad, until the flowers got him,” Charlotte observed.

 “He looked old,” Wilde insisted. “Worse than that, he looked contentedly old. He

 had ceased to fight against the ravages of fate. He had accepted the world as it

 is—perhaps even, if such a horror could be imagined, had actually become

 grateful for the condition of the world.”

 Charlotte remembered that Wilde had not yet arrived at the Trebizond Tower when

 Hal had forwarded King’s last words, which had carried a different implication.

 She did not attempt to correct him; he had turned his attention to his eggs

 duchesse.

 It was a pity, Charlotte thought as Colorado flew past, that there was no longer

 a quicker way to travel between New York and San Francisco. She had an

 uncomfortable feeling that she might end up chasing a daisy chain of murders all

 around the globe, always twenty-four hours behind the breaking news—but the

 maglev was the fastest form of transportation within the bounds of United

 America, and had been since the last supersonic jet had flown four centuries

 before. The energy crises of the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries were

 ancient history now, but the inland airways were so cluttered with private

 flitterbugs and helicopters, and the zealots of Decivilization so enthusiastic

 to crusade against large areas of concrete, that the scope of commercial

 aviation was now reduced to intercontinental flights. Even intercontinental

 travelers tended to prefer the plush comfort of airships to the hectic pace of

 supersonics; electronic communication had so completely taken over the

 lifestyles and folkways of modern society that almost all business was conducted

 via com-con.

 When the silence proved too oppressive, Charlotte began to talk again, although

 Wilde was still engrossed in his breakfast. “The detail is still piling up by

 the bucketload,” she said, “but we’ve had no major breakthrough. We still

 haven’t pinned down the current name and location of the woman who visited the

 victims or the man who used to be Rappaccini, although Hal thinks that we’re

 getting close on both counts. Most of the new information concerns the second

 murder, and possible links between Urashima and King. You knew Urashima at least

 as well as you knew King, I suppose?”

 “We met on more than one occasion,” Wilde admitted, laying down his fork for a

 moment or two, “but it was a long time ago. We were not close friends. He was an

 artist, and I had the greatest respect for his work. I would have been glad to

 count him as a friend, had that ridiculous business of house arrest not made it

 virtually impossible for him to sustain and develop his social relationships.”

 “He was released from the terms of his house arrest and communications

 supervision thirteen years ago,” Charlotte observed, watching for any reaction,

 “but he seems to have been institutionalized by the experience. Although he

 began to receive visitors, he never went out, and he continued to use a sim to

 field all his calls. The general opinion was, I believe, that he was lucky to

 get away with house arrest. If he hadn’t been so famous, he’d have been packed

 off to the freezer.”

 “If he hadn’t deserved his fame,” Wilde countered, “he wouldn’t have been able

 to do the work he did. His imprisonment was an absurd sentence for a nonsensical

 crime. He and his coworkers placed no one in danger but themselves.”

 “He was playing about with brainfeed equipment,” Charlotte observed patiently.

 “Not just memory boxes or neural stimulators—full-scale mental cyborgization.

 And he didn’t just endanger himself and a few close friends—he was pooling

 information with other illegal experimenters. Some of their experimental results

 made the worst effects of a screwed-up rejuve look like a slight case of

 aphasia.”

 “Of course he was pooling information,” Wilde said, pausing yet again between

 mouthfuls. “What on earth is the point of hazardous exploration unless one makes

 every effort to pass on the legacy of one’s discoveries? He was trying to

 minimize the risks by ensuring that others had no need to repeat failures.”

 “Have you ever experimented with that kind of equipment, Dr. Wilde?” Charlotte

 asked. She had to be vague in asking the question because she wasn’t entirely

 sure what multitude of sins the phrase “that kind of equipment” had to cover.

 Like everyone else, she bandied about phrases like “psychedelic synthesizer” and

 “memory box,” but she had little or no idea of the supposed modes of functioning

 of such legendary devices. Ever since the first development of artificial

 synapses capable of linking up human nervous systems to silicon-based electronic

 systems, numerous schemes had been devised for hooking up the brain to computers

 or adding smart nanotech to its cytoarchitecture, but almost all the experiments

 had gone disastrously wrong. The brain was the most complex and sensitive of all

 organs, and serious disruption of brain function was the one kind of disorder

 that twenty-fifth-century medical science was impotent to correct. The UN,

 presumably with the backing of the MegaMall, had forced on its member states a

 worldwide ban on devices for connecting brains directly to electronic

 apparatuses, for whatever purpose—but the main effect of the ban had been to

 drive a good deal of ongoing research underground. Even an expert Webwalker like

 Hal Watson would not have found it easy to figure out what sort of work might

 still be in progress and who might be involved. In a way, Charlotte thought,

 Michi Urashima was a much more interesting—and perhaps much more likely—murder

 victim than Gabriel King.

 “There is nothing I value more than my genius,” Wilde replied, having finished

 the eggs duchesse and inserted the plate into the recycling slot, “and I would

 never knowingly risk my clarity and agility of mind. That doesn’t mean, of

 course, that I disapprove of anything that Michi Urashima and his associates

 did. They were not infants, in need of protection from themselves. Michi could

 not rest content with his early fascination with the simulation of experience.

 For him, the building of better virtual environments was only a beginning; he

 wanted to bring about a genuine expansion of the human sensorium, and authentic

 augmentations of the human intellect and imagination. If we are ever to make a

 proper interface between natural and artificial intelligence, we will need the

 genius of men like Michi. I am sorry that he was forced to abandon his quest,

 and very sorry that he is dead—but that is not what concerns us now. The

 question is, who killed him—and why?” While completing this speech he refilled

 his coffee cup, then ordered two rounds of lightly buttered white wholemeal

 bread, slightly salted Danish butter, and coarse-cut English marmalade.

 “So it is,” said Charlotte. “Did you know that Michi Urashima was at university

 with Gabriel King—and, for that matter, with Walter Czastka?”

 “Not until Michael communicated the fact to me,” he replied calmly. “I had

 already suggested, if you recall, that the roots of this crime must be deeply

 buried in the fabric of history. I immediately asked him where this remarkable

 institution was, and whether Rappaccini was also at the same institution of

 learning. He told me that it was in Wollongong, Australia, and that there is no

 record of Jafri Biasiolo ever having been there. If it were Oxford, or the

 Sorbonne, even Sapporo, it would be far easier to believe that the alma mater

 might be the crucial connection, of course, but it is difficult to believe that

 anything of any real significance can ever have occurred in Wollongong. I could

 believe that Walter, who is an impressively dull man, learned everything he knew

 in such a place, but I would not have suspected it of Michi—or even of Gabriel

 King. Even so, it is a very interesting coincidence.” He collected his toast and

 began to spread the butter, evening it out so carefully that the knife in his

 hand might have been a sculptor’s.

 “When did Lowenthal tell you about the Wollongong connection?” Charlotte asked,

 although the answer was obvious. She remembered belatedly that one thing she had

 forgotten to check up on was the contents of Wilde’s earlier conversation with

 Lowenthal. Now, it seemed, she had missed a second and even more significant

 one.

 “We exchanged a few notes last night, after you had retired,” Wilde explained

 airily.

 “You exchanged a few notes” Charlotte echoed ominously. “It did occur to you, I

 suppose, that I’m the police officer in charge of this investigation, not

 Lowenthal.”

 “Yes, it did,” he admitted, “but you seemed so very intent on following up your

 hypothesis that I am the man responsible for these murders. Because I know full

 well that I am not, I felt free to ignore your efforts in order to tease a

 little more information out of Michael. Unfortunately, he seems to have no

 interest at all in the most promising line of inquiry, which derives from the

 interesting coincidence that both King and Rappaccini had invested heavily in

 Michi’s specialism. Indeed, he was so uninterested in it that I suspected him of

 deliberately trying to steer me away from it. I presume that one of the reasons

 the MegaMall decided to monitor this investigation is that they did not like the

 idea of Hal Watson digging too deeply into the murkier aspects of Gabriel King’s

 past—which suggests to me that in putting money into brainfeed research Gabriel

 was a mere delivery boy. Alas, Michael seems intent on trying to build the

 Wollongong connection into grounds for establishing Walter Czastka as a key

 suspect. He will be of little help to the investigation, I fear—but I daresay

 that you will not be too disheartened to hear that.”

 Charlotte regarded her companion speculatively, wondering how carefully his

 flippancy was contrived. “What other little nuggets of information did he throw

 your way?” she asked, keeping her voice scrupulously level, as if in imitation

 of his own levity.

 “He showed me a copy of the second scene-of-crime tape,” Wilde admitted. He was

 as scrupulous in distributing his marmalade as he had been with the butter.

 “We’re still trying to figure out where the woman went after she left Urashima,”

 Charlotte said, to demonstrate that she had not been idle in this particular

 matter. “Hal’s set up silvers to monitor every security camera in San Francisco.

 If she’s still there, we’ll find her in a matter of hours. If she’s already

 gone, we ought to be able to pick up her trail by noon. She’s presumably altered

 her appearance again in order to confuse the standard picture-search programs,

 but we’ll check every possible match, however tentative. If she moved on quickly

 enough, though, she might have had time to deliver more packages.”

 “We must assume that she did move on,” Wilde said, licking a crumb from the

 corner of his mouth. “You noted, of course, that my name came up in the

 conversation, as her presentation of the bouquet of amaranths was doubtless

 intended to ensure. The poem inscribed on the condolence card caused it to be

 repeated. I do hope that you will not read too much into that.”

 Charlotte blushed slightly. If he had not caused the card to be placed at the

 scene of the crime, could he possibly have reacted so calmly? And if he had

 placed the card there, would he have dared to react so calmly?

 Reflectively, Wilde quoted in a reverent but rather theatrical whisper:

 The vilest deeds like poison weeds, Bloom well in prison-air; It is only what is

 good in Man That wastes and withers there: Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate,

 And the Warder is Despair.

 “The Ballad of Reading Gaol was, of course, the only thing my poor namesake

 published after the humiliation of his trial and subsequent imprisonment—which

 was, of course, far harsher and even more unjust than the punishment visited on

 Michi Urashima. Perhaps that was why Rappaccini thought the poem particularly

 apposite.“

 “What did you make of the last words he spoke?” Charlotte asked, not wishing to

 waste any more time in discussing the murderer’s taste in poetry.

 “Could you possibly jog my memory by displaying the tape on the wallscreen

 here?” Wilde countered.

 Charlotte shrugged. She punched out a code number to connect the table’s

 wallscreen to UN headquarters, and sorted through the material that Hal had left

 for her until she found the tape. Like the one she had displayed for Oscar

 outside Gabriel King’s apartment, it had been carefully edited from the various

 spy eyes and bubblebugs which had been witness to Michi Urashima’s murder. She

 cut to the end.

 “I am,” said Urashima’s voice, curiously resonant by virtue of the machine’s

 enhancement. “I was not what I am, but was not an am, and am not an am even now.

 I was and am a man, unless I am a man unmanned, an it both done and undone by

 I-T.”

 “Alas,” said Wilde, “I have no idea what it might mean. Could you wind the tape

 back so that I could take another look at the woman?”

 Again, Charlotte obliged him, glad of the opportunity to take a more leisurely

 look herself.

 The similarity between the two records was almost eerie. The woman’s hair was

 silvery blond now, but still abundant. It was arranged in a precipitate cataract

 of curls. The eyes were the same electric blue, but the cast of the features had

 been altered subtly, making her face slightly thinner and more angular. The

 complexion was different too. The changes were, sufficient to deceive a normal

 picture-search program but because Charlotte knew that it was the same woman she

 could see that it was the same woman. There was something in the way her eyes

 looked steadily forward, something in her calm poise that made her seem remote,

 not quite in contact with the world through which she moved.

 “She carries herself like an angel,” murmured Oscar Wilde, finally pushing his

 breakfast plate aside, “or a sphinx—with or without a secret.”

 There was a studied close-up, taken by the door’s eye while the woman was

 waiting to be admitted, then an abrupt cut to an interior anteroom, where the

 woman’s entire body could be seen. She was not tall—perhaps a meter

 fifty-five—and she was very slim. She was wearing a dark blue suitskin now,

 whose decorative folds hung comfortably upon her seemingly fragile frame. It was

 the kind of outfit which would not attract much attention in the street.

 Like Gabriel King, Michi Urashima was visible only from behind; there was no

 chance to read the expression on his face as he greeted her. As before, the

 woman said nothing, but moved naturally into a friendly kiss of greeting before

 preceding her victim into an inner room beyond the reach of conventional

 security cameras. There was a brief sight of her which must have been obtained

 by a bubblebug, but it cut out almost immediately; Urashima had screened the

 bug. Her departure was similarly recorded by the spy eye. She seemed perfectly

 composed and serene.

 There were more pictures to follow, showing the state of Urashima’s corpse as it

 had eventually been discovered, and the card bearing the words of the poem

 penned by the original Oscar Wilde. There were long, lingering close-ups of the

 fatal flowers. The camera’s eye moved into a black corolla as if it were

 venturing into the interior of a great greedy mouth, hovering around the crux

 ansata tip of the bloodred style like a moth fascinated by a flame. There was,

 of course, a layer of monomol film covering the organism, but its presence

 merely served to give the black petals a weird sheen, adding to their near

 supernatural quality.

 Charlotte let the tape run through without comment and left the link open when

 it had finished, after repeating the words they had already heard. “What do you

 see?” she asked.

 “I’m not sure. I’d like to have a closer look at the flowers. It’s difficult to

 be sure, but I think they were subtly different from the ones which ornamented

 poor Gabriel’s corpse.”

 “They are. You’ll get a gentemplate in due course, but Regina Chai’s counterpart

 in San Francisco has already noted various phenotypical differences, mostly to

 do with the structure of the flower. It’s another modified Celosia, of course.”

 “Of course,” Wilde echoed.

 “The woman traveled to San Francisco on a scheduled maglev,” Charlotte told him.

 “The card she used to buy the ticket connects to a credit account held in the

 name of Jeanne Duval. It’s a dummy account, of course, but Hal’s tracking down

 all the transactions that have moved through it. She didn’t use the Duval

 account to reach New York, and she’ll presumably use another to leave San

 Francisco.”

 “It might be worth setting up a search for the names Daubrun and Sabatier,”

 Wilde suggested. “It’s probably too obvious, but Jeanne Duval was one of

 Baudelaire’s mistresses, and it’s just possible that she’s got the others on her

 list of noms de guerre.”

 Charlotte transmitted this information to await Hal’s return. The maglev was

 taking them down the western side of the Sierra Nevada now, and she had to

 swallow air to counteract the effects of the falling pressure on her eardrums.

 As she did so she saw Michael Lowenthal making his way through the car, looking

 wide awake and ready for action.

 “By the time we get to San Francisco,” she said to Oscar Wilde, although she was

 still looking at Lowenthal, “there probably won’t be anything to do except to

 wait for the next phone call.”

 “Perhaps,” said Wilde. “But even if she’s long gone, we’ll be in the right place

 to follow in her footsteps. Michael! It’s good to see you. We’ve been catching

 up on the news—you’ve doubtless been doing the same.”

 “I think I might be a little ahead of you,” Lowenthal said, in a casual manner

 that had to be fake. “My associates and I think that we might have identified a

 third victim.”

 Charlotte’s first reaction to Lowenthal’s dramatic statement was to reach out to

 the comcon beneath the screen, intending to put in an alarm call to Hal, but

 Lowenthal raised a hand in what was presumably intended as a forbidding gesture.

 “There’s no need,” he said. “Your colleagues in New York have already been

 informed—they’re checking it out. It’s possible he’s simply not responding. VE

 addicts are even worse in that respect than Creationists.”

 “Who’s not responding?” Charlotte wanted to know.

 “Paul Kwiatek.”

 Charlotte had never heard of Paul Kwiatek. VE addicts didn’t normally fall

 within her sphere of concern. She immediately looked at Oscar Wilde to see what

 his reaction to the name might be.

 The geneticist was content to raise a quizzical eyebrow while meeting

 Lowenthal’s eye. “I had no idea that he was still alive,” he said—but then he

 turned to Charlotte and added: “I did not know him well, and I had no reason at

 all to wish him dead.” Then he turned back to Lowenthal and said: “He was an

 associate of Michi’s at one time, was he not? Is that why your employers think

 that his lack of response to their calls may be significant?”

 “He was more than an associate,” the Natural said as he lowered himself into the

 seat beside Charlotte’s.

 “Paul Kwiatek and Michi Urashima were at university together, at Wollongong in

 Australia.”

 “Ah yes!” said Wilde blithely. “The Wollongong connection strikes again. Given

 that Gabriel and Michi were there at the dawn of modern time, it can’t have been

 too onerous a task for you to obtain the names of everyone still living who was

 there at the same time. Have the MegaMall’s assiduous market researchers tracked

 down every single one of them? Is Paul Kwiatek the only one who failed to

 reply?”

 “No,” Lowenthal replied, “but his name stood out, partly because of his one-time

 connections with Urashima and partly because we’re certain that he’s at home. He

 might, admittedly, be so deeply immersed in some exotic virtual environment that

 even the most urgent summons can’t get through to him—but we’ll know soon

 enough. There are a dozen other people we haven’t been able to get a reply from

 as yet, but there seem to be perfectly good reasons for their being

 unavailable.”

 “Who is this Kwiatek?” Charlotte demanded. “Apart from being a VE addict, I

 mean.”

 “A software engineer,” Lowenthal told her. “He worked in much the same areas as

 Michi Urashima for some years, while they were both involved in education and

 entertainment. They went their separate ways when their interests diverged,

 becoming more… esoteric.”

 “Illegal, you mean.”

 “Not necessarily. Not in Kwiatek’s case, anyhow. Extreme, perhaps; uncommercial,

 certainly—but he was never charged with any actual offense.”

 “So the connection between them doesn’t suggest any obvious motive?” Charlotte

 said.

 “Not that connection, unless Kwiatek’s recent work has implications of which

 we’re unaware. What interests me is the fact that they and King were at

 Wollongong together. That’s the one solid link between all three victims.”

 “When you say together,” Wilde put in, “how close a tie do you mean. Did they

 room together? Did they all take the same courses? Did they even graduate at the

 same time?”

 “Well, no,” said Lowenthal. “None of those, so far as we can determine—but the

 data’s old and very scrappy. The fact remains that they were all at Wollongong

 during the years 2321 and 2322. You see the significance of the timing, of

 course.“

 Charlotte didn’t, but dearly wished that she had when Oscar Wilde said: “You

 mean that Jafri Biasiolo was born in 2323.”

 “Yes,” said Lowenthal. Then, after a moment’s pregnant pause, he said: “You’re a

 much older and wiser man than I am, Dr. Wilde, and you obviously have all kinds

 of insights into this affair that I don’t have. This is all new to me and I’m

 completely out of my depth, but I’ve formed a hypothesis and I’d like to put it

 to you, if I may. It might be stupid, and I’d like your advice before I relay it

 to my employers. May I?”

 Flattery, thought Charlotte, will get you almost anywhere. The cynical thought

 could not quell the rush of resentment she felt. She, after all, was the

 policeman. This was her investigation. What monstrous injustice had determined

 that she had to sit here listening to the self-congratulatory ramblings of two

 amateurs? Why was Michael Lowenthal, agent of the Secret Masters, sucking up to

 her chief suspect while ignoring her completely?

 “Please do,” said Oscar Wilde, as smug as a cat in sole possession of a

 veritable lake of cream.

 “Whoever is responsible for this flamboyant display has taken great care to

 involve you in it,” Michael Lowenthal said. “He or she has also gone to some

 trouble to place Rappaccini’s name at the very center of the investigation. You

 have suggested—and I agree with you—that the roots of this affair must extend

 into the remote past, and that it may have been more than a century in the

 planning. When you made the suggestion, what you seemed to have in mind was a

 scenario in which Jafri Biasiolo, alias Rappaccini, had decided at some point in

 his career to construct an entirely new identity for himself, leaving behind an

 electronic phantom, and that he had done this in order to prepare the way for

 this theatrical series of murders.

 “The problem with that scenario is that it gives us no clue as to how, why, or

 even when Biasiolo could have formed a grievance against the two people who are

 so far definitely numbered among the victims. If Paul Kwiatek is, in fact, the

 third, that puzzle becomes even more awkward. If Kwiatek is the third, I think

 we must consider a different scenario, whereby the motive for the crime

 originated in Wollongong in 2321 or 2322. If that is the case, then it is

 possible that every record of Jafri Biasiolo’s existence and every aspect of his

 subsequent career as Rappaccini might have been a contrivance aimed toward the

 eventual execution of this plan. If so, we should not be asking our surfers to

 discover who Jafri Biasiolo became when he vanished into thin air in 2430 or

 thereabouts, but to discover who the person was who created him in the first

 place and used him as a secondary identity for the preceding hundred years. Do

 you see my point, Dr. Wilde?”

 “I certainly do,” Wilde replied with perfect equanimity. “I fear, dear boy, that

 I have also anticipated your punch line—but I would not dream of depriving you

 of the opportunity to declaim it. There is certainly considerable virtue in your

 powers of imagination, and not a little in your logic, but I fear that your

 conclusion will not seem so compelling. Do tell us—who is the person that you

 suspect of harboring this remarkable grudge against Gabriel and Michi for more

 than a hundred and seventy years?”

 Charlotte could see that Wilde’s teasing sarcasm had had a far more devastating

 effect on Lowenthal’s confidence than any simple appropriation of the Natural’s

 conclusion could have had. The young man had to swallow his apprehension before

 saying: “Walter Czastka.”

 Having already heard Wilde’s response to the observation that Czastka had been

 at Wollongong at the same time as King and Urashima, Charlotte expected another

 dose of scathing sarcasm—but Wilde seemed to have repented of his cruelty in

 setting Lowenthal up to deliver a punch line that was bound to fall flat. He

 leaned back, giving the appearance of a man who was thinking a matter through,

 reappraising everything he had previously taken for granted.

 “I can see the attractions of the hypothesis,” Wilde admitted finally. “Walter

 can be cotemporally linked to both the murdered men, and to one who might have

 been murdered. As an expert in creative genetics, specializing in flowering

 plants, he might conceivably have had the expertise necessary to run two careers

 instead of one, diverting all his flair and eccentricity into the work allocated

 to the Rappaccini pseudonym while cunningly taking credit for a flood of vulgar

 commercial hackwork. You have observed that I have a very low opinion of Walter,

 and you presume that he must have an equally low opinion of me—thus providing a

 possible motive for the admittedly curious determination of the murderer to

 involve me in the investigation.

 “It would certainly be ironic if I were to insist now that Walter could not

 possibly be the murderer because he is so utterly dull and unimaginative, if it

 were to turn out in the fullness of time that he is the murderer, and that I had

 spent the greater part of my life mistakenly despising him. The possibility is

 so awful that I am almost moved to caution. Nevertheless, I feel obliged to

 stand by my earlier judgment. Walter Czastka could not have invented Rappaccini

 because he does not have the necessary aesthetic resources. He is not the author

 of this bizarre psychodrama. If I am proved wrong, I shall unhesitatingly admit

 that he has outplayed me magnificently, but I cannot believe that I will be

 proved wrong.”

 “Do you have an alternative hypothesis to offer?” Lowenthal demanded, carefully

 suppressing his ire.

 “Not yet,” Wilde replied. “I am obliged to wait until I discover what awaits me

 in San Francisco.”

 Charlotte was just about to say that thanks to the presumably premature

 discovery of Michi Urashima’s body they already knew what awaited them in San

 Francisco, when the buzzer on her beltphone sounded. She snatched up the

 handset, but that was unnecessary; the table’s screen was still patched through

 to UN police headquarters, and it was there that Hal Watson’s face appeared.

 “One of Rappaccini’s bank accounts just became active again,” Hal informed them.

 “A debit was put through about ten minutes ago. The credit was drawn from

 another account, which had nothing on deposit but which had a guarantee

 arrangement with the Rappaccini account.”

 “Never mind the technical details,” Charlotte said. “What did the credit buy?

 Have the police at the contact point managed to get hold of the user?”

 “I’m afraid not,” Watson told her. “The debit was put through by a courier

 service. They actually got the authorization yesterday, but it’s part of the

 conditions of their service that they guarantee delivery within a certain time

 and don’t collect until they’ve actually completed the commission. We’ve got a

 picture of the woman from their spy eye, looking exactly the same as she did

 when she went to Urashima’s apartment, but it’s almost three days old. It must

 have been taken before the murder, immediately after she arrived in San

 Francisco.”

 Charlotte groaned softly. “What did she send, and where did she send it to?” she

 said.

 “It was a sealed package—a broad, shallow cylinder. It was addressed to Oscar

 Wilde, Green Carnation Suite, Majestic Hotel, San Francisco. It’s there now,

 awaiting his arrival.”

 Even though Charlotte had not quite had time to get her foot into her mouth, she

 felt a sinking feeling in her stomach. She turned from the screen to stare at

 Oscar, who shrugged his shoulders insouciantly. “I always stay in my own

 personalized hotel suites,” he said. “Rappaccini would know that.”

 “We don’t have the authority to open that package without your permission,” Hal

 put in. “I could get a warrant—but it would be simpler, with your permission, to

 send an order to the San Francisco police right now, instructing them to inspect

 it immediately.”

 “Certainly not,” Wilde replied without a moment’s hesitation. “It would spoil

 the surprise. We’ll be there in less than an hour.”

 Charlotte frowned deeply. “You’re inhibiting the investigation,” she said. “I

 don’t think you should do that, Dr. Wilde. We need to know what’s in that

 package. It could be a packet of deadly seeds, fine-tuned to your DNA.”

 “I do hope not,” said Wilde airily. “I can’t believe that it is. If Rappaccini

 wished to murder me he surely wouldn’t treat me less generously than his other

 victims. If they’re entitled to a fatal kiss, it would be unjust as well as

 unaesthetic to send my fleurs du mal by mail.”

 “In that case,” Charlotte said, “it’s probably just another ticket. If we open

 it now, we might be able to find out where the woman’s next destination is in

 time to stop her making her delivery.”

 “I cannot believe it,” said the insultingly beautiful man, in his most

 infuriating tone. “The delayed debit was almost certainly timed to show up after

 that event. The third victim—whoever it might have been—is probably already

 dead. Perhaps the fourth and fifth also. No, I must insist—the package is

 addressed to me and I shall open it. That is what Rappaccini intended, and I am

 certain that he has his reasons.”

 “Dr. Wilde,” Charlotte said, in utter exasperation, “the reasons of a

 murderer—or a murderer’s accessory—are hardly deserving of respect. You seem to

 be incapable of taking this matter seriously.”

 “On the contrary,” Wilde replied with a sigh. “I believe that I am the only one

 who is taking it seriously enough. You, dear Charlotte, seem to be unable to

 look beyond the mere fact that people are being killed. At least Michael has

 imagination enough to see that if we are to understand this strange business, we

 must consider hypotheses which are extraordinarily elaborate and frankly

 bizarre. We must take all the features of this flamboyant display as seriously

 as they are intended to be taken: the kisses, the flowers, the cards… everything

 that is calculatedly strange and superfluous. They are, after all, the details

 that the newscasters will focus on as soon as Michael’s careful employers decide

 to let them off the leash. Those details hold the key to the nature and purpose

 of the performance.

 “At any rate, whatever message is in this mysterious packet is intended for me,

 and I intend to take receipt of it. We will not reach our next port of call any

 sooner by having it opened prematurely.”

 “I hope you’re right,” said Charlotte, grimly and insincerely. She was annoyed

 by her utter helplessness in the face of what now seemed certain to be a series

 of murders quite without parallel, in this or any other century—so annoyed, in

 fact, that she now did not know whether to hope that Oscar Wilde would turn out

 to be the murderer or Walter Czastka’s dupe.

 When the three travelers arrived at the Majestic they found, as promised, that

 the mysterious package had been set upon a polished table in the reception room

 of the Green Carnation Suite. It was, as Hal had told them, a broad and shallow

 cylinder, but it was somewhat larger than the vague description had led

 Charlotte to expect. It was about a hundred centimeters in diameter and twenty

 deep. The box itself was emerald green, but it was secured by a cross of black

 ribbon neady knotted in a bow.

 Charlotte went straight to the table, but Oscar Wilde paused in the doorway.

 Michael Lowenthal, bringing up the rear of the party, had no alternative but to

 pause with him.

 “The walls are not blooming as they should,” Wilde said in a vexed tone. “The

 buds are browning at the edges before they have even opened—there must be a

 fault in the circulatory system within the walls of the hotel. I’ve never really

 trusted the Majestic; its staff have no flair for aesthetic detail.”

 Charlotte stared at him, making every attempt to display her exasperation.

 Eventually, he condescended to join her.

 Charlotte was taking no chances, in case the box did contain dangerously illegal

 products of macabre genetic engineering. The policeman stationed at the door of

 the apartment had passed her a spray gun loaded with a polymer which, on

 discharge, would form itself into a bimolecular membrane and cling to anything

 it touched. She also had a plastic bladder of solvent ready. Her hands were

 gloved.

 Another officer had followed them in—a uniformed inspector named Reginald Quan,

 who had been assigned by the local force to the Urashima murder. “You’d better

 let me open that with a knife,” he volunteered as soon as Oscar Wilde reached

 out to take hold of the knot in the black ribbon which secured the box.

 “It is addressed,” said Wilde with heavy dignity, “to me.”

 Charlotte met Quan’s eye, raising her own eyebrows as if to say: “What can we

 do? Let him have his way.” Although the local man outranked Charlotte, she was

 operating under the technical authority of Hal Watson, and Quan had to defer to

 her. The inspector shrugged his shoulders and took a step back. Michael

 Lowenthal immediately moved into the gap, craning his neck to get a better view.

 Charlotte held the spray gun ready, her finger on the trigger.

 The ribbon yielded easily to Wilde’s quick fingers, and he drew it away. The lid

 lifted quite easily, and Wilde laid it to one side while he, Lowenthal, and

 Charlotte looked down at what was in the box.

 It was, as Charlotte had half expected since she had first seen the shape and

 size of the container, a Rappaccini wreath. Its base was a very intricate tangle

 of dark green stalks and leaves. The stalks were thorny, the leaves slender and

 curly. There was an envelope in the middle of the display, and around the

 perimeter were thirteen black flowers like none she had ever seen before. They

 looked rather like black daisies—but there was something about them that struck

 Charlotte as being not quite right.

 Oscar Wilde extended an inquisitive forefinger and was just about to touch one

 of the flowers when it moved.

 “Look out!” said Michael Lowenthal and Reginald Quan, in unison.

 As if the first movement had been a kind of signal, all the “flowers” began to

 move. It was a most alarming effect, and Wilde reflexively snatched back his

 hand as Charlotte pressed the trigger of the spray gun and let fly.

 When the polymer hit them, the creatures’ movements became suddenly jerky. They

 had been moving fairly slowly, in random directions, but now they thrashed and

 squirmed in obvious distress. The limbs which had mimicked sepals struggled

 vainly for purchase upon the thorny green rings on which they had been mounted.

 Now that Charlotte could count them she was able to see that each of the

 creatures had eight excessively hairy legs. What had seemed to be a cluster of

 florets was a much embellished thorax.

 They were not perfectly camouflaged; it was simply that she had been expecting

 to see flowers, not spiders, and Charlotte’s expectation had enabled them to get

 away with their masquerade for a few seconds. She was perversely gratified to

 notice that Michael Lowenthal’s eagerness to get in on the act had evaporated;

 he had taken a big stride backward and now appeared to be awkwardly caught

 between conflicting desires. Now that the man from the MegaMall had a hypothesis

 at stake, he was desperately anxious to keep up with the data flow, but he was

 clearly arachnophobic. Either he had undergone some unfortunate formative

 experience while in the care of his foster parents or the Zaman transformation

 had not tidied every last vestige of deficiency from the human genome.

 “Poor things,” said Oscar Wilde as he watched the spiders writhe in desperate

 distress. “They’ll asphyxiate, you know, with that awful stuff all over them.”

 “I may have just saved your life,” observed Charlotte dryly. “Those things are

 probably poisonous.”

 “My dear Charlotte,” said the geneticist tiredly, “the last human being to die

 of a spider bite did so more than five hundred years ago—and that was the result

 of a totally unexpected allergic reaction.”

 “It was a perfectly ordinary spider too,” Charlotte retorted. “Those aren’t. If

 this murderer can make man-eating plants, he can make deadly spiders.”

 “Perhaps,” Wilde conceded. “But this little performance was no attempted murder.

 It’s a work of art—presumably an exercise in symbolism.”

 “According to you,” she said, “the two are not incompatible.”

 “Not even the most reckless of dramatists,” said Wilde, affecting a terrible

 weariness, “would destroy his audience at the end of act two of a play that is

 clearly intended to extend over twice or three times that number. I am quite

 certain that I am safe from any direct threat to my well-being, at least until

 the final curtain falls. I am almost certain that the same immunity will extend

 to anyone accompanying me on my journey of discovery. Even when the final act is

 done, I assume that Rappaccini will want us alive and well. He surely would not

 take the risk of interrupting a standing ovation and cutting short the cries of

 Encore!—and he surely will not want my obituary to appear before my review of

 his work.”

 While the man Gabriel King had described as a “posturing ape” was making this

 speech, and because he showed no inclination to do so himself, Charlotte reached

 out a gloved hand to pick up the sticky envelope which still sat on its dark

 green bed at the center of the ruined display.

 The envelope had been splashed by the polymer, but it was not sealed. Although

 the gloves made her dumsy, Charlotte contrived to open it and to take out the

 piece of paper which it contained. She took what precautions she could to screen

 its contents from the inquisitive eyes of Lowenthal and Quan. For once, she

 wanted to have the advantage, if only for half a minute

 It was a car-hire receipt. The invoice stated that the car in question was ready

 and waiting in a bay beneath the hotel, and was stamped with a warning note in

 garish red ink: ANY ATTEMPT TO INTERROGATE THE PROGRAMMING OF THIS VEHICLE WILL

 ACTIVATE A VIRUS THAT WILL DESTROY ALL THE DATA IN ITS MEMORY.

 It was probably a bluff, but Charlotte had a strong suspicion that Oscar Wilde

 wasn’t about to let her call it—and Hal still didn’t have any legal authority to

 take over the trail of clues. He couldn’t commandeer the car unless and until he

 could get a warrant. By that time, Charlotte suspected, the car would be en

 route, with Oscar Wilde in it. She had every intention of being in it with him.

 While there was a trail to follow, she might as well be on it—and if it

 transpired that Oscar Wilde was the layer of the trail as well as its follower,

 she wanted to be the one to arrest him.

 Charlotte turned to Reginald Quan, trying hard to give the impression that

 everything was comfortably under control. The image of the UN police had to be

 preserved at all costs. “Our forensic team will have to examine these things,”

 she said. “The biotechnics are almost certainly illicit, perhaps dangerous. Hal

 Watson will sort out the details.”

 Quan shrugged. “Going somewhere?” he inquired innocently, with a nod toward the

 receipt. Her attempts to screen it from his view had obviously not been entirely

 successful.

 “Yes, we are,” she said, pausing only to pass the relevant details to Hal before

 handing the document to its rightful owner, “and there’s no time to lose.”

 While they took the elevator down to the car park, Hal gave Charlotte a rapid

 update on his most recent findings. The car-hire company had reported that they

 had delivered the vehicle three days earlier, and that they had no knowledge of

 any route or destination which might have been programmed into its systems after

 dispatch.

 “It looks as if we’re going on a mystery tour,” she said to Oscar Wilde dourly.

 “We’ve been on a mystery tour since yesterday afternoon,” he pointed out. “I do

 hope that our next destination will be a little more interesting than the places

 we have so far visited.”

 Hal also reported that he’d launched an investigation of the account used to pay

 for the hire car, although it appeared that it had been set up entirely for that

 purpose. The initial deposit had been adequate to cover the car’s expenses for

 three days’ storage and a journey of two thousand kilometers.

 “That could take you as far north as Anchorage or as far south as Guatemala,”

 Hal pointed out unhelpfully. “I can’t tell for sure how many more accounts there

 might be on which Rappaccini and the woman might draw, but the transfers made so

 far have allowed me to trace several that are held under other names; it’s

 possible that one of them is his current name.”

 “What are they?” Oscar Wilde inquired.

 “Samuel Cramer, Gustave Moreau, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, and Thomas De

 Quincey.”

 Wilde sighed. “Samuel Cramer is the hero of a novella by Baudelaire,” he said.

 “Gustave Moreau was a French painter associated with the French decadent

 movement. Thomas Griffiths Wainewright was a critic and murderer who was the

 subject of an essay by my namesake called ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’—an exercise

 partly inspired by Thomas De Quincey’s more celebrated essay ‘Murder Considered

 as One of the Fine Arts.’ I fear that these aliases are little more than a

 series of jokes—decorative embellishments of the unfolding plot.”

 “The names don’t matter,” said Hal. “What matters is where the money that fed

 the accounts originated, and where it goes when it makes its exits. I already

 have surfers going through the books of Rappaccini Inc. with a fine-toothed

 comb. At present, the money trail seems more likely to deliver the goods than

 the picture searches. With luck, I’ll eventually be able to find out where the

 man who used to use the Rappaccini name and our mysterious nonexistent woman

 have their basic supplies delivered—food, equipment, and so on—and when I know

 that, I’ll know where they are, and what names they use when they’re not using

 silly pseudonyms. Then we can pick them both up and charge them.”

 “What about this brainwave of Lowenthal’s?” Charlotte asked—having reported the

 conjecture while the maglev was pulling into the San Francisco station. “Have

 you found any evidence to suggest that Czastka might have set up the Biasiolo

 identity?”

 “Not yet,” said Hal noncommittally. Charlotte guessed that Hal wasn’t taking

 Lowenthal’s hypothesis any more seriously than Wilde was. Although he was

 reluctant to say so, Hal was presumably still beavering away at the brainfeed

 link—which could easily extend from King, Urashima, and Rappaccini to Kwiatek,

 but not to Czastka. Or to Wilde, for that matter, Charlotte admitted to herself.

 Despite her aggressive question about whether he had ever used brainfeed

 equipment, she had found not the slightest shred of evidence that he had ever

 had a substantial financial or practical interest in the field.

 The car which awaited them in the underground garage was roomy and powerful.

 Once it was free of the city’s traffic-control computers it would be able to zip

 along the transcontinental at two hundred kilometers per hour. If they were

 headed for Alaska, Charlotte thought, they’d be there sometime around midnight

 They’d need a couple of thermal suits.

 Michael Lowenthal opened the door to the seat which faced the driver’s control

 panel and politely stood aside, offering it to her—but she remembered their

 journey across Manhattan only too well. She shook her head, leaving him no

 alternative but to take the front himself while Charlotte got into the rear with

 Oscar Wilde.

 As soon as they were all settled, Wilde activated the car’s program. The car

 slid smoothly up the ramp and into the street.

 Michael Lowenthal, who had skipped breakfast on the maglev in order to lay his

 beautiful hypothesis before the stern gaze of Oscar Wilde, called up a menu from

 the car’s synthesizer and looked it over unappreciatively.

 “I fear,” said Wilde as he scanned the duplicate which had appeared in the panel

 on the back of the seat in front of him, “that we are in for a rather Spartan

 trip.” Most hire cars only stocked manna with a choice of artificial flavorings;

 this one was a deluxe model, but it didn’t have anything else to offer.

 “The time to worry about that,” Charlotte said tersely, “is when we reach

 Guadalajara.” She had taken note of the fact that the car had turned southeast,

 heading for intersection nine of the transcontinental instead of eight. Wherever

 they were headed, it was not Alaska.

 Lowenthal was obviously used to better fare than the car had to offer; he

 decided not to bother with breakfast after all.

 Charlotte plugged her beltphone into the screen mounted in the back of the drive

 compartment and began scrolling through more data that Hal’s silvers had

 collated while she had been otherwise occupied. The artificial geniuses had

 found a great many links between Gabriel King and Michi Urashima to add to the

 coincidence of their possible attendance at the same university—more links, in

 fact, than anyone could reasonably have expected, even allowing for the fact

 that they had been acquainted for more than a hundred and seventy years. There

 was, however, no clear evidence as yet that King’s funding of Urashima’s various

 exploits had been compensated by slightly larger sums paid to him by third

 parties who did not wish to be seen funding brain-feed research themselves.

 Charlotte could see that the AI searches had only just begun to get down to the

 real dirt. No one whose career was as long as King’s was likely to be completely

 clean, especially if he’d been in business, but a man in his position could keep

 secrets even in today’s world, just as long as no one with state-of-the-art

 equipment actually had a reason to probe. It was only to be expected that his

 murder would expose a certain amount of dirty linen, but to Charlotte’s

 admittedly naive eyes King’s laundry basket seemed fuller than anyone could have

 expected. She began to wonder whether Lowenthal had made a mistake in starting

 at the beginning of the King/Urashima relationship rather than the end. Even

 when Michi Urashima had landed in deep trouble, it seemed, his connections with

 King had remained intact, but they had been hidden. King had not only funded

 Urashima but had helped to establish all kinds of shields to hide his work and

 its spin-off. Hal’s silvers had only just begun to build Paul Kwiatek into the

 picture, but they had already uncovered some commercial links between King and

 Kwiatek that were as surprising in their way as the links between King and

 Urashima. Rappaccini’s involvement with Urashima was, by contrast, beginning to

 seem perfectly straightforward.

 Maybe all this flimflam with Wilde, Czastka, and Rappaccini is just a smoke

 screen, Charlotte thought. Maybe its sole purpose is to blind the silvers with

 superfluity, to distract us from the real pattern. But what could that pattern

 possibly be?

 As the data tying Gabriel King to Paul Kwiatek’s allegedly esoteric and

 uncommercial research continued to accumulate, Charlotte saw that Gabriel King

 had not been quite as colorless a character as Oscar Wilde had implied. Perhaps

 no one was who had lived a hundred and ninety-four years and had learned along

 the way to despise the affectations and showmanship of men like Wilde. But if

 King, Urashima, and Kwiatek had been murdered for business reasons, what could

 those reasons be? And who was the mysterious female assassin?

 Charlotte broke in on the data stream and said: “Hal—is there any news of

 Kwiatek yet?”

 “Any time now,” he said. “They’re executing the entry warrant as we speak,

 although the building supervisor’s doing his level best to obstruct them.

 Protecting the privacy of his tenants, he says. What he’s paid for. Any idea

 where you’re headed yet?”

 Charlotte glanced out of the window, but there was nothing to be seen now except

 the eight lanes of the superhighway. “Mexico City, for now,” she said. “Exactly

 how far toward it we’ll go—or how much further beyond it—is anyone’s guess. Is

 there any sign of the woman traveling south out of San Francisco?”

 “No match yet,” Hal admitted. “As I said, the money trail’s looking better than

 the picture trail, for the moment. Hold on… they’re in Kwiatek’s apartment now.

 No sign of him, unless he’s in the cradle…”

 Charlotte looked up. Michael Lowenthal was peering through the gap between the

 headrest of his seat and the drive compartment. Oscar Wilde seemed equally rapt,

 although his posture was as languid as ever.

 “Yes,” said Hal, evidently dividing himself between two conversations. “In the

 cradle. That’s confirmed. Kwiatek’s dead—same method. We already have a fourth

 name that may have to be added to the list, but it’s going to take time to get

 investigators out to the place where he’s supposed to be. Same pattern—no

 response even to top-priority calls.”

 “Who?” said Lowenthal.

 “Magnus Teidemann—the ecologist. Graduated from the University of Wollongong in

 2322, with Czastka—a year ahead of King, Urashima, and Kwiatek. He’s in the

 field, working on some kind of biodiversity project; he hasn’t checked in with

 his base for a week. Not particularly unusual, they say, but…”

 “If he’s dead too,” Lowenthal opined, “Wollongong has got to be the crucial

 link.”

 “If he’s dead,” Charlotte echoed. “There are other links binding King to

 Urashima and to Kwiatek. If it’s just the three of them, the motive might have

 arisen a lot later than 2322. Let’s face it, no one but a madman would formulate

 a murder plan that would take so long to come to fruition. If you have a

 powerful desire to kill someone, you don’t wait a hundred and seventy years,

 until they’re practically at death’s door, before you implement it.”

 “Czastka called in his report on the first murder weapon,” Hal put in. “It

 confirms Wilde’s in every respect but one.”

 “Which one?” Charlotte wanted to know.

 “He can’t see any evidence of a link to Rappaccini.”

 “That fault is in Walter’s sight, not in the evidence,” Wilde was quick to say.

 “Even so,” said Hal, “the only name mentioned in Czastka’s report is

 Wilde’s—because he’s the only one known to have worked with the basic Celosia

 gentemplate. Czastka’s still on standby. I’ll send him the data on Urashima’s

 killer—and Kwiatek’s when we have it.”

 “Did you ask him about being at Wollongong with King and Urashima?” Charlotte

 wanted to know.

 “Of course I did. He says that he doesn’t remember anything about events that

 long ago. He supposes that he must have known King, given that some of their

 courses overlapped, but he has no memory of ever having met Michi Urashima.”

 “He would say that, wouldn’t he?” murmured Michael Lowenthal.

 “Got to go,” said Hal, breaking the connection.

 Oscar Wilde immediately began tapping out a phone number on the comcon set in

 the back of Lowenthal’s seat.

 “Who are you calling?” Charlotte demanded.

 “Walter Czastka, of course,” Oscar replied with his customary equanimity.

 “You can’t do that!” Lowenthal exclaimed. Charlotte was glad that he’d beaten

 her to it, because she knew exactly what Wilde’s reply would be.

 “Of course I can,” said Wilde. “We’re old acquaintances, after all. If he’s

 involved with this business, I’m the best person to find out how and why—I know

 his little ways.” By the time he had finished speaking, it was a dead issue. The

 call had gone through and had been answered.

 Charlotte could see the image on Wilde’s screen even though she was invisible to

 the camera that was relaying Wilde’s image to Czastka. She knew immediately that

 the face must be that of the flesh-and-blood Czastka, not his dutiful sloth. No

 one would ever have programmed so much wizened world-weariness into a

 simulacrum.

 “Hello, Walter,” said Wilde.

 Czastka peered at the caller without the least flicker of recognition. He looked

 very old—far older than King or Urashima—and distinctly unwell. His skin was

 discolored and taut about the facial muscles. Charlotte could not imagine that

 he had ever been a handsome man, and he had obviously decided that it was

 unnecessary to compromise with the expectations of others by having his face

 touched up by cosmetic engineers. In a world where almost everyone was

 good-looking, unmarked by the worst ravages of time and circumstance, Walter

 Czastka was an obvious anomaly. There was nothing actually ugly or monstrous

 about him, however. To Charlotte, he simply seemed ancient and depressed. His

 eyes were a curious faded yellow color, and his stare had a rather disconcerting

 quality.

 “Yes?” he said.

 “Don’t you know me, Walter?” asked Wilde, in genuine surprise.

 For a moment, Czastka simply looked exasperated, but then his stare changed as

 enlightenment dawned.

 “Oscar Wilde!” he said, his tone redolent with awe. “My God, you look well. I

 didn’t look like that after my second rejuvenation… but you already had… how

 could you need a third so soon?”

 Oddly enough, Oscar Wilde did not swell with pride in reaction to this display

 of naked envy. It seemed to Charlotte that Wilde’s anxiety about Czastka’s

 condition outweighed his pride in his own. This surprised her a little, and she

 wondered what motives Wilde might have for feigning such a response.

 “Need,” Wilde murmured, “is a relative thing. I’m sorry, Walter—I didn’t mean to

 startle you. In my mind’s eye, you see, I always look like this.”

 “You’ll have to be brief, Oscar,” said Czastka curtly. “I’m expecting the UN

 police to call back—ever since they got past my AI defenses they’ve been

 relentless. Someone’s using flowers to murder people. I’ve given them one

 report, but they want more. People like that always want more. I should have

 known better than to respond to the first call, I suppose. Terrible nuisance.”

 Charlotte noticed that Czastka had dutifully avoided mentioning to Oscar Wilde

 the fact that he’d been obliged to mention Wilde’s name in his report on the

 lethal flowers. Czastka did not seem to relish the idea of a long conversation

 with his old acquaintance.

 “The police can break in on us if they want to, Walter,” said Oscar gently.

 “They showed the Celosia gentemplate to me too. I came to one conclusion that

 you apparently failed to reach.”

 “And what was that?” Czastka asked sharply. Charlotte knew that Hal Watson

 wouldn’t want Wilde putting ideas into Czastka’s head, but she was powerless to

 prevent it.

 “It seemed obvious to me that Rappaccini had designed them,” said Oscar. “Do you

 remember Rappaccini?”

 “Of course I remember him,” snapped Czastka. “I’m not senile, you know.

 Specialized in funeral wreaths—a silly affectation, I always thought. Haven’t

 heard of him in years, though—I thought he’d retired on the proceeds. I daresay

 you know him much better than I do. You were birds of a feather, I always

 thought. It was your Celosia, wasn’t it? What makes you think that Rappaccini

 had anything to do with it?”

 Charlotte didn’t need to make a mental note of the fact that Czastka considered

 Wilde and Rappaccini to be birds of a feather.

 “How’s your ecosphere coming along, Walter?” asked Oscar softly. Charlotte

 frowned at the change of subject

 Czastka didn’t answer the question. “What do you want, Oscar?” he asked rudely.

 “I’m busy. If you want to slander Rappaccini to the UN police, go ahead, but

 don’t involve me. I told them all I know—about the plant, about everything. I

 just want to be left alone. If this is going to carry on, I’m going to

 disconnect permanently. If anyone wants to talk to me, they can get the boat

 from Kauai.”

 Charlotte wondered when Czastka had last been rejuvenated. He looked as if his

 second rejuvenation had somehow failed to take—as if he were degenerating

 rapidly. He looked as if he couldn’t possibly have long to live, and he looked

 as if he knew it.

 “I’m sorry, Walter,” said Oscar soothingly, “but I do need to talk to you. We

 have a problem here, and it affects us both. It affects us generally, and

 specifically. Genetic art may have come a long way since the protests at the

 Great Exhibition, but there’s still a lot of latent animosity to the kind of

 work we do, and the Green Zealots won’t need much encouragement to put us back

 on their hate list. Neither of us wants to go back to the days when we had to

 argue about our licenses, and had petty officials demanding to look over our

 shoulders while we worked. When the police release the full details of this case

 there’s going to be a lot of adverse publicity, and it’s going to hurt us.

 That’s the general issue. More specifically, there’s a great deal of confusion

 about who planned these murders and why. I’m in a car with Sergeant Charlotte

 Holmes of the UN police and a man named Michael Lowenthal, who represents

 certain commercial interests. We all have our various theories about the affair,

 and I think you’re entitled to be copied in on them. To be brutally frank, I

 think Rappaccini is behind the murders, Charlotte thinks I’m behind them, and

 Michael thinks you’re the guilty party—so it really is in your interest to help

 us sort things out.”

 “Me!” said Czastka. If his outrage wasn’t genuine, it was the best imitation

 Charlotte had ever seen. She only wished that Michael Lowenthal could see it

 “Why on earth would I want to kill Gabriel King or Michi Urashima?”

 “And Paul Kwiatek,” Wilde added. “Maybe Magnus Teidemann too. Nobody knows,

 Walter—but if this goes on, you might soon be the only survivor of that select

 band of famous men who graduated from Wollongong University in the early 2320s.”

 Czastka’s face had a curious ocherous pallor as he stared at his interlocutor.

 Charlotte noted that Czastka’s eyes had narrowed, but she couldn’t tell whether

 he was alarmed, suspicious, or merely impatient.

 “I don’t remember anything about those days,” Czastka said stubbornly. “Nobody

 does. It was too long ago. I hardly knew Kwiatek. I never knew any of them,

 really—not even King. I’ve had some dealings with his companies, just as I’ve

 had some dealings with Rappaccini Inc., but I haven’t set eyes on King for fifty

 years, and I haven’t seen Rappaccini since the Great Exhibition. I’ve seen

 Urashima’s work and I heard about the wireheading scandals, but that’s all.

 Leave me alone, Oscar, and tell the police to leave me alone too. You know

 perfectly well that I couldn’t kill anyone—and I don’t know anything about

 Rappaccini that you don’t already know.”

 “What about his daughter?” said Wilde quickly.

 If he intended to catch the other man by surprise it didn’t work. Czastka’s

 stare was stony and speculative, with more than a hint of melancholy. “What

 daughter?” he said. “I never met a daughter. Not that I remember. It was all a

 long time ago. I can’t remember anything at all. Leave me alone, Oscar, please.”

 So saying, the old man cut the connection.

 Charlotte could see that Oscar Wilde was both puzzled and disappointed by the

 other man’s reaction.

 “That was a mistake, wasn’t it?” she said, unable to resist the temptation to

 take him down a peg. “Did you really think he’d rather talk to you than to us?

 He doesn’t even like you. You should have left him to Hal—you’ve upset him now,

 maybe so badly that he won’t even take Hal’s calls, and you didn’t learn

 anything at all.”

 “Perhaps not,” Oscar agreed. “I certainly didn’t expect him to freeze up like

 that. On the other hand…” He trailed off, evidently uncertain as to what kind of

 balancing factor he ought to add.

 “Have you changed your mind about the possibility of Czastka having set up the

 Biasiolo/Rappaccini identity?” Charlotte asked Michael Lowenthal.

 “I don’t know,” said Lowenthal guardedly. “But I do wish you hadn’t told him

 about my suspicions, Dr. Wilde, however absurd you may think them.”

 “I’m sorry,” Wilde said, still taken aback by the nature of Czastka’s response

 to his call. “But if he were our stylish murderer, why would he react so

 churlishly to my inquiries? Surely he’d have made better preparation than that.”

 “Would he?” Lowenthal parried.

 Hal’s face reappeared on Charlotte’s screen. “I just got notification of your

 little conversation, Dr. Wilde,” he said. “What on earth do you think you’re

 playing at? I tried to ring Czastka, and I got that bloody sloth again, telling

 me that he’s unavailable, even though I know he’s sitting right there at his

 antique desk!”

 “I couldn’t stop him!” Charlotte complained.

 “It wasn’t Charlotte’s fault,” Wilde obligingly added—although she could see

 that the intervention didn’t improve Hal’s mood at all.

 “Well,” Hal said, “you’d better pray that this won’t cost us time and effort.

 You might care to know that the money trail is getting clearer by the minute.

 Some of Rappaccini’s pseudonymous bank accounts have been used over the years to

 purchase massive quantities of materials that were delivered for collection to

 the island of Kauai—that’s in Hawaii.”

 “So the man behind Rappaccini must live on Kauai,” Charlotte deduced, trying to

 remember the context in which she had heard the place name mentioned not ten

 minutes before. She could tell from the way that Michael Lowenthal had reacted

 to the name that he remembered—and as soon as she had mentally reviewed that

 observation, she remembered too. It was too late to say anything; Hal was

 already speaking again.

 “Not necessarily,” he was saying. “The supplies were collected by boat. There

 are fifty or sixty islets west and south of Kauai, some natural but most

 artificial. Over half of them are leased to Creationists for experiments in the

 construction of artificial ecosystems. Oscar Wilde’s private island is half an

 ocean away in Micronesia.”

 “But Walter Czastka’s isn’t,” said Michael Lowenthal with evident satisfaction.

 “That’s right,” said Hal. “All the supplies that Czastka purchases in his own

 name are forwarded from Kauai, by the same boat that forwarded the equipment

 purchased by the pseudonymous accounts we’ve just connected to Rappaccini Inc.

 Perhaps, Mr. Lowenthal, your wild hypothesis isn’t as wild as it first seemed.”

 Intermission Three

 A Mind at the End of Its Tether

 « ^ »

 Michi Urashima was having trouble with time again. He had lost all sense of it

 and couldn’t remember what day it was, or what year, or how many times he had

 grown young and then old again. None of that would have been of much

 significance had he not had the vague impression that there was something he

 ought to be doing, some important project that needed attention. He could not

 remember whether or not he was still forbidden to leave his house, or whether or

 not there was anywhere else he might want to be.

 When he asked what year it was, the silken voice of his household sloth

 dutifully informed him that it was 2495, but Michi could not remember whether

 2495 was the present or the past, so he could not tell whether or not he had

 suffered an existential slippage. There was no point in asking the sloth whether

 or not he had lost his mind, because the sloth was too stupid to know.

 Although he had lost touch with himself, Michi still had command of vast

 treasures of factual information. He knew, for instance, that sloths were called

 sloths because the Tupi word for the three-toed sloth was ai, and AI had stood

 for artificial idiot or artificial imbecile ever since the concept of artificial

 intelligence had been subdivided. A sloth could not possibly judge whether or

 not he had lost his mind; for that he would have needed a silver. Silvers were

 called silver because the chemical symbol for silver was Ag, which stood for

 artificial genius. There was no popular shorthand for “artificial individual of

 average intelligence” because the obvious acronym sounded like a strangled

 scream. Because AP had been claimed by artificial photosynthesis—LAP for liquid,

 SAP for solid—there was no such thing as a mere artificial person, and an

 acronymic rendering of artificial mind would have been too confusing by half.

 Actually, Michi thought, the attempt to possess an artificial mind of his very

 own had indeed led him into dire confusion.

 “I am,” he said, and giggled. “I am an AM, or am not an AM, or am caught like a

 half-living cat between the two. Perhaps I was an AM, and am no longer, or was

 not but now am, or would be if only I could think straight, like an AM. Perhaps,

 on the other hand, I am no longer an AM, and am no longer, but am merely an it,

 held together by IT.”

 He sat in his armchair and breathed deeply: in, out; in, out; in, out. Slowly

 but surely, his sense of self came together again, and his sense of temporal

 location returned. His IT was probably stretched to the limit, but he was not

 yet an it. Precarious though his grip on reality was, the Miller effect still

 had not obliterated him from the community of human minds.

 Morgan Miller must have been a kindred spirit, he thought. The first man ever to

 beat the Hayflick limit and discover a viable technology of longevity, and his

 reward for taking such infinite pains over the project had been two bullets in

 the back. Unfortunately—as Miller had understood, although his assassins had

 not—the method had worked far too well. It was so utterly irresistible in

 renewing the body that it wiped out the mind. Even internal nanotech did that

 eventually, but at least it gave a man time to breathe, time to play, time to

 work, time to be… and time, in the end, to lose himself.

 “I am,” he said again. “I am Michi still, at least for a little while. Do I have

 any appointments today?”

 “Yes,” said the sloth. Before Michi could rephrase the question, he remembered.

 Yes, indeed—today, he had an appointment.

 “Oh yes,” he said aloud. “I am, I am, I definitely am.”

 He reached up his hand to caress his skull, running his fingertips over the

 numerous sockets which sat above the main sites of his implanted electrodes. He

 wondered whether he ought to put on a wig, or a hooded suitskin. Did she wear a

 wig, or a hooded suit-skin? Could that luscious hair really be rooted in her

 skull? Maybe, maybe not. He would find out. But in the meantime—to obscure or

 not to obscure?

 He decided not. She was fascinated by what he was, what he had been; why try to

 hide it? A martyr should wear his stigmata proudly, unafraid to display them.

 They were, alas, mere relics of the past, but they were the remnants of a

 glorious endeavor.

 Michi still wondered, sometimes, whether he ought to make one more attempt to

 break through to the unknown. If he were to flush out all his IT and douse the

 sockets so as to flood the underlying electrodes with neurostimulators, the

 neurons further beneath would resume the business of forging new connections,

 further extending the synaptic tangles which already bound the contacts to every

 part of his brain. The removal of his IT would condemn him to death, of course,

 but he was dying anyway. Suppose he could trade a few months of not knowing what

 day it was for just one moment of enlightenment, one flash of inspiration, one

 revelatory proof that everything he had tried to achieve was possible, was

 within the grasp of contemporary humankind, if only people were willing to try,

 to take the risk.

 Just suppose…

 It would be his triumph, and his alone. Official sources of finance had bailed

 out on him a hundred years ago, and he had been forbidden to call for further

 volunteers. The funds channeled from the Pharaohs of Capitalism by way of

 Gabriel King and his fellow buccaneers had dried up fifty years ago. The private

 backers had held out a little longer, but the law had built walls around him to

 keep their funds out. Like Kwiatek, he had been left high and dry—but Kwiatek

 had at least avoided the indignity of a show trial and subsequent house arrest.

 If Kwiatek eventually ended up in susan, it wouldn’t be the law that had put him

 there; he would go of his own accord, unbranded and uncondemned.

 “I was the only one prepared to go all the way,” Michi said aloud. “If they

 hadn’t abandoned me, I might even have got to where I wanted to be. Do you hear

 me?”

 “Yes,” said the sloth, as pedantically terse as ever.

 “How long is it before my visitor’s due?” Michi demanded, determined to make the

 stupid machine do a little work to justify its keep.

 “Thirty seconds,” replied the conscientious machine. Doubtless, in some abstract

 and ideal sense, it was absolutely right—but even as it spoke, the door chime

 sounded.

 The woman was early.

 “Let her in,” said Michi, levering himself up from his armchair, hoping as he

 did so that he would not lose himself again before she left.

 “I’m sorry,” Michi said to the young woman as they lay in bed together. “I’ve

 grown unused to visitors of any kind, let alone lovers. All the old skills…”

 “I understand,” the woman said very gently. “Fifty years of solitary confinement

 is a very harsh penalty to pay for trying to push back the frontiers of human

 understanding.”

 “Most people thought of it as getting off lightly,” Michi said morosely. “They

 don’t realize. There are millions of people in the world who spend days on

 end—weeks on end if they’re VE addicts—cocooned in their apartments, and there

 are millions who routinely protect their privacy by filtering all their

 electronic communications through clever sims. They don’t know the true value of

 the power of choice, which allows them to break the pattern anytime they wish.

 They don’t understand how demeaning it is to be forbidden the use of credit, of

 the most elementary privacy screening. Everybody nowadays thinks that they’re

 under observation, but they don’t really know what it means to have ever

 attentive eyes trained so intensively on the minutiae of one’s everyday life.”

 “I can’t pretend to know how it feels to be withdrawn from human society for

 fifty years, after having lived in it for over a hundred,” the young woman told

 him as she eased herself from his embrace and reached for her suitskin, “but I

 have spent a good deal of my own brief life in enforced solitude. I’ve learned

 very quickly to appreciate the worth of being in the world.”

 “Part of the problem,” Michi observed, grateful for the opportunity to mumble

 on, hoping thereby to cover his embarrassment, “is the ongoing debate about the

 susan long-termers. They’re the ones whose punishments attract all the public

 attention. Everybody carps about the unreasonableness of the jurists of the

 past, who just wanted to get supposedly dangerous individuals off the streets

 during their own lifetimes and didn’t care about the ethical problems they were

 handing down to their descendants. House arrest is seen as a more reasonable

 alternative—but communication control ensures that the victims don’t have a

 voice. When the sentence ended… I was a hundred and eighty-three years old, and

 I hadn’t talked face-to-face with anyone for fifty years. Most of my former

 acquaintances were dead, and most of the rest had forgotten me. Even the ones

 who had stood by me and helped me as best they could, had to impersonalize the

 communication process. The ones who wanted to carry forward my work—the ones who

 did carry it forward, insofar as the law allowed them to, had to do so without

 any input from me—I wasn’t even allowed to help. By the time it ended, it was

 impossible to pick up the fifty-year-old threads, and there was no hope of

 changing everything back again. The only real relationships I’ve been able to

 form in the last thirteen years have been new ones, but so many of the

 authentically young seem to think of me as some kind of monster or demon…

 sometimes I feel like the Minotaur made by Daedalus, lost in the labyrinth of

 Minos.”

 Michi knew that he should not be running on and on in this ridiculous manner,

 but he couldn’t help himself. He had lost the knack of conversation as well as

 the knack of making love. His social skills had atrophied.

 Had he gone to the freezer he’d have emerged into an altered world, but this

 wasn’t the twentieth century; the pace of technological change was much less

 fierce than it had been at its peak. He could have adapted readily enough—but

 actually having to live the fifty years of his sentence, aging at a normal rate,

 had turned him into an old man in every sense of the word: a social and sexual

 incompetent, hovering on the brink of mental incompetence.

 It would probably be best for everyone, he thought, if he were to flush out his

 IT and stick his head into a bath of neurostimulators—or perhaps to attempt a

 third rejuve, disregarding the 90 percent probability that the Miller effect

 would wipe his mental slate clean.

 “The time will come,” the young woman assured him as she adjusted her suitskin

 and ran her fingers lightly through her hair, “when you will be recognized as a

 great man. When brain-cyborgization technology is finally perfected, you’ll be

 remembered as a bold pioneer, tragically frustrated by the enemies of progress.

 You are a great man, and there are people in the world who know it now.”

 “I’m not a great man,” he told her uncomfortably. “I never pretended to be. I

 never did anything for the benefit of future generations. It was all for my own

 self-gratification. The people whose brains were wrecked were the victims of my

 ambition. No matter how resentful I may become about my punishment, I have to

 remember that I was guilty.”

 As he spoke, reflex lifted his wrinkled hand and passed it over the hairless

 dome of his skull, the gnarled fingers dancing on the sockets embedded in the

 bone as if they were dancing on a keyboard. The continued presence of the

 sockets was oddly reassuring, despite their uselessness. While they were there,

 he could never entirely forget who and what he was. Those who had set out to

 punish him had not dared to remove the apparatus lest they kill him in the

 process. His neurons had forged too many synapses with the compound electrodes;

 it was no longer possible to say with any exactitude where he ended and the

 brainfeed apparatus began.

 “You are a great man,” the woman insisted, her eyes flashing with uncanny

 brilliance. Michi lowered his hand. “One day, we will be able to make productive

 use of encephalic augmentation. Then, no matter how long each of us may live,

 there will be no limit to what we might become. Evolution will be the

 prerogative of the individual.”

 If only, Michi thought.

 When the cruel sentence had first been passed upon him, revoking the prerogative

 of future individual evolution, Michi had thought that the sockets would be his

 greatest asset. He knew a thousand combinations whose stimulation created

 pleasure—and he did think of it as a primal process of creation—and a thousand

 patterns of varying intensity which made inner music of the ebb and flow of

 elemental ecstasy. He had been a connoisseur of fundamental self-stimulation,

 then. The superficial mock experiences available in commercial virtual

 environments had been of no interest to him at all, and he had taken leave to

 despise them. What arguments he and Kwiatek had had! He had been arrogant enough

 to think that nothing that the people of the real world could do to him could

 hurt him so long as he had power over his own inner being. He had thought

 himself complete as well as competent.

 Fifty years had been more than long enough to reduce pleasure and ecstasy to

 tedium and mechanism, and to inform him how woefully incomplete he was. Long

 before the further growth of his new synapses had spoiled the messages with

 noise, they had lost their intrinsic existential value.

 That had been the worst punishment of all.

 Once, Michi had thought that the fear of robotization by cyborgization was a

 mere phantom of the frightened imagination, a grotesque bugbear unworthy of the

 anxiety of serious men. In those days, he had been convinced that the so-called

 Robot Assassins were mere lunatics. Now, he was not so sure… and yet, the

 flatteries heaped upon him by this remarkable young woman were anything but

 unwelcome. The knowledge that there were still a precious few among the newest

 generation who counted him a hero was very precious.

 The woman was probably not a Natural; in two hundred years’ time she would run

 into the crucial limitation of nanotechnological repair exactly as his own

 generation had. There must, however, be Naturals who thought as she did, who

 would carry his memory into the fourth millennium—perhaps even to the fifth if

 the limited research in encephalic augmentation that was still permitted

 eventually solved the problem of forgetfulness without eroding the capacity for

 empathy…

 “I don’t have much time, Michi,” the woman told him. “I’ll have to go.”

 “Of course,” he said, hauling himself from the bed into an upright position,

 ignoring her pantomimed protest.

 “Don’t get up,” she said when she realized how determined he was. “Please—stay

 where you are. I’ll let myself out.”

 “Will you come again?” he asked, although he wasn’t entirely sure that he wanted

 to risk another possible humiliation.

 “Yes,” she said. “I promise.”

 For some reason, he couldn’t even begin to believe her—and it was that, rather

 than the mere instruction, which made him sink back onto the bed and wait,

 supine, until he was sure that she had left the house.

 When he finally managed to rouse himself, Michi went back into the outer room,

 without bothering to put his own suitskin on. He slumped upon the settee,

 drained and dejected, staring at the golden flowers that the woman had brought

 for him and mounted in his wall. They were garden flowers, but they were

 products of modern genetic art rather than ancient selective breeding. According

 to the young woman, they were one of Oscar Wilde’s designs—but for some reason

 he could not quite fathom, they reminded Michi of the kind of flowers one might

 put in a funeral wreath.

 He wished that he had not lost his grip on the artistry of actual life. Like the

 soft caresses of data suits and the visual illusions of virtual reality, the

 rewards of ordinary “sensation” now seemed to him so remote from authentic

 intimacy as to be utterly worthless. In his first youth, which had all but

 disappeared into the oblivion of forgetfulness, he had devoted a great deal of

 time to the enhancement of the visual illusions deployed by VE technology. Even

 in his second youth, he had contrived to devote a certain amount of attention to

 the lucrative businesses of VE education and VE entertainment, but by then he

 had been determined to become a pioneer of experiential augmentation, and he had

 succeeded in that mission to the extent of becoming an outlaw. In doing so, he

 had lost his appetite for the ordinary. Perhaps that was why he seemed to be

 perpetually on the brink of losing his unfortunately ordinary mind.

 The young woman was right, of course—all true pioneers so far outstripped the

 ambitions of their contemporaries that they were condemned to perdition for

 their bravery—but she could not know the true cost of his abandonment of the

 phenomenal world, any more than she could know the real effect of his long

 imprisonment.

 “One day,” Michi had actually said to the judge who had pronounced sentence upon

 him from the conventional safety of a virtual courtroom, “the world will despise

 the kind of cowardice whose representative you are. Michi Urashima, the men of

 the future will say, was demonized by those too dull to see that he was the seed

 of the Afterman. Those future men will not be prisoners within their own skulls,

 rotting in the dungeons of their incompetent wetware. The crude paths which I

 have hacked out will be built by future generations into the roads of freedom.

 Our children’s children will live forever, and they will wear the crowns of

 Emperors of Experience: crowns of silicon which will give them the memories they

 will need, the calculative capacities they will need, and all the ecstasies that

 they will not be ashamed to demand. Our children’s children will be properly

 equipped for eternal life.”

 Even now, he was certain that he had been right—but still he was forced to count

 the cost of his martyrdom.

 Michi was wise enough to understand the kinds of fear which his experiments had

 inspired in those who condemned him. He knew now that there was real cause for

 anxiety in their nightmarish visions of people made into robotic puppets by

 external brainfeed equipment, either by operant conditioning or straightforward

 usurpation of the command links to the nervous system. He had responded to those

 fears in the same speech, appropriating the defense offered by the pioneers of

 the Genetic Revolution. “All technologies can be used for evil ends as well as

 good ones,” he had said, “but willful ignorance is no protection. Biotechnology

 provided the means for hideous wars, but it also provided the defenses which

 prevented their devastations from becoming permanent and freed humankind from

 the oppressions of the Old Reproductive System. What we require, as we face a

 future of limitless opportunity, is not blind fear and denial but a

 clear-sighted sense of responsibility, and the means to undo all the evils of

 oppression—including the oppressions of our imperfect evolutionary heritage.”

 That too had been true—but it had not been sufficient then to lay the fears of

 others to rest, and it was not sufficient now to quell his own anxieties.

 The simple fact was that he had not, in the end, succeeded in freeing himself

 from the oppressions of his imperfect evolutionary heritage. His purpose had

 been to add to the sum of human freedom by increasing the power which individual

 consciousness had over its own recalcitrant wetware, and he had indeed added to

 that sum, but his own freedom had been lost, and not merely by imprisonment. He

 had never been intimidated by the fears of those who believed that brainfeed

 equipment would provide new technologies of enslavement and new technologies of

 punishment, preferring to concentrate his own efforts on the pursuit of

 empowerment and pleasure—but in the end, he had lost more than he had expected,

 and gained less than he had hoped.

 Whatever the woman said, and whatever she believed, he was what he was, and it

 was not enough.

 In the hope of shaking himself out of his lachrymose mood, Michi stood up and

 went to the wall fitting in which the young woman had placed the golden flowers.

 He noticed for the first time that there was a card nestling within the

 bouquet—and the observation reminded him yet again of the vague impression he

 had formed of the bouquet’s kinship to a funeral wreath.

 Michi reached out to read what was written on the card, and saw with a slight

 shock that it bore the “signature” of Rappaccini Inc.—but it did not seem to be

 a condolence card. The legend on the card was a poem, or part of a poem. The

 corporation was evidently attempting to broaden its commercial scope, albeit

 somewhat enigmatically.

 The words read:

 Yet each man kills the thing he loves, By each let this be heard, Some do it

 with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word.

 The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword!”

 Why on earth, Michi wondered, had the woman selected such a peculiar message?

 Was she suggesting that he had killed the things he loved? If so, she was more

 closely in tune with his morbid mood than any indication she had given in word

 or gesture. Had it been so obvious, the first time he accepted her kiss, that he

 was a coward? Had she known all along that she would find him impotent? Had the

 few flattering words he had contrived to produce, in poor recompense for hers,

 wounded her with their feebleness?

 He replaced the card, cursing himself for his folly in searching for hidden

 meanings. It was, he vaguely recalled, a very old poem; she must have chosen it

 because it was a time-honored classic, more beautiful in its antiquity than in

 its sentiment.

 “Who wrote these words?” he asked his dutiful sloth, reciting them for the

 benefit of the machine. The sloth had no answer in its own memory, of course,

 but it had wit enough to consult the reference sources available on the Web.

 “Oscar Wilde,” it replied, after a few moments’ pause.

 Michi was astonished until he remembered that there had been more Oscar Wildes

 in the world than one. The coincidence of names must have been what inspired the

 young woman to pick this particular card.

 A whole bouquet of Oscar Wildes! he thought. Well, better that than a whole

 bouquet of Walter Czastkas. He remembered that he had known Walter Czastka when

 the old bore was still in the full flush of youth, although Kwiatek had known

 him better. They had all been pioneers in those days, but they had all been as

 stupid as sloths, too young by far to realize that one cannot be a pioneer until

 one has mastered what has gone before. That had not stopped them hatching all

 manner of mad schemes, of course. Even Czastka! What was it that he had found

 which had seemed to him the making of a new era? He had sucked Kwiatek into it,

 and others too.

 Why, Michi thought, with sudden astonishment, that must have been the very first

 time that I became an outlaw, and I cannot even remember what I did, or why. Who

 would have thought it? Paul was an outlaw through and through, even then—and

 that rascal King too, already well on his way to becoming a sly lackey of the

 MegaMall. But what on earth can stolid Walter Czastka have found that turned him

 around so completely, if only for a moment? What was it that he tried to do,

 that seemed so daring and so desperate?

 For a moment, as he touched the petals of the golden flowers, Michi almost

 remembered—but it had all taken place too long ago. He was a different man now,

 or a different half-man.

 “I am,” he murmured. “I was not what I am, but was not an am, and am not an am

 even now. I was and am a man, unless I am a man unmanned, an it both done and

 undone by IT.” He spelled out the final acronym, pronouncing it “eye tee.”

 Then he laughed. What could it possibly matter now what deliciously illicit

 assistance he and Kwiatek had rendered to Walter Czastka at the dawn of all

 their histories?

 He could not know, of course, that he had already begun to die because of it.

 Investigation: Act Four

 The Heights and the Depths

 « ^ »

 It may be just coincidence, of course,” Hal Watson said, referring to the

 possible connection between Walter Czastka and Rappaccini that had been exposed

 by his indefatigable silver surfers. “The supplies could have been delivered to

 a different island—the boatmaster doesn’t keep electronically available

 records—so they may have been intended for a rival exercise in Creationism. Even

 if we could prove that Czastka is more intimately linked to Rappaccini than

 other appearances suggest, the only hard evidence linking Rappaccini to the

 murders is the fact that the woman is drawing money from bank accounts fed by

 income generated by the corporations which seem to be his. She’s the one we have

 to identify and locate before we can proceed any further.”

 “I disagree,” said Oscar Wilde, before Charlotte could reply. “Given that the

 flowers are victim-specific, their designer must be regarded as the actual

 murderer. The woman is delivering them, but she may not have been aware that

 they were lethal until news broke of Gabriel King’s death—and even now she may

 not be certain that she was responsible, unless the news tapes have publicized

 the manner of his death.”

 “They haven’t,” Michael Lowenthal put in. “Those dogs won’t be let off the leash

 until the early evening news. After that, it’ll be a free-for-all.”

 “I’m sure the UN will be very grateful for your employers’ discretion,”

 Charlotte said sourly. She turned away slightly as she said it, embarrassed by

 her own temerity.

 There was nothing visible through the window but a concrete blur speckled with

 racing vehicles. She had to squint slightly in order to refocus her eyes on the

 rim of jet-black SAP systems that topped the superhighway’s sound-muffling

 walls. It was an inner sensation of deceleration rather than any visual cue

 which told her that the hire car’s driver was responding to an instruction in

 its secret programming. It was changing lanes, moving to the inside. As the

 vehicle slowed and Charlotte’s eyes adjusted, the blur of uncertainty began to

 resolve itself into a much clearer image. The road markings appeared out of the

 sun-blazed chaos of the surface, and the other cars on the road became discrete

 and distinct.

 If only the case could be clarified as easily, she thought, peering into the

 distance in the hope of seeing a road sign that would tell her which

 intersection they were approaching. Belatedly, she regretted having left the

 driver’s monitor to Lowenthal. Had he not been turned around, maintaining his

 position as best he could within the four-way conversation, he would have been

 able to obtain the car’s exact location at the stab of a button.

 “The person we have to identify and locate with all possible expedition,” Oscar

 Wilde went on, overriding the comments which had interrupted his flow, “is the

 man behind Rappaccini Inc.—and with all due respect to Michael’s reasoning and

 the evidential fruit provided by its pursuit, I still can’t believe that Walter

 Czastka is that man. If Jafri Biasiolo never actually Existed, who was the man

 who appeared at the Great Exhibition and discussed matters of technique and

 aesthetics with such evident authority? Whose face appears in the records

 dutifully assembled by Hal’s inquisitive silvers?”

 “A well-briefed actor,” said Michael Lowenthal. “Hired to secure the illusion

 that Rappaccini had a real existence—and then removed from the scene, having

 done his work. You shouldn’t have told Czastka that he was a suspect, Dr. Wilde.

 Until you did that, he must have thought that his plan was working perfectly. He

 must have assumed that he was the only expert witness the police had called

 upon.”

 “Even though he had summoned me to the Trebizond Tower and simultaneously made

 himself unavailable for immediate consultation?” Wilde queried. “I think not.

 The real Rappaccini may be involving Walter in his affair with the same

 scrupulous ingenuity that he is applying to my own involvement—but if so, he

 clearly cannot expect that either of us will actually be arrested and charged.

 My part is that of an interested witness. Walter’s—”

 “Czastka has a much stronger link to the victims,” Lowenthal insisted

 stubbornly. “He has to be reckoned the most likely suspect.”

 “Not at all,” Wilde insisted. “If this matter of the supplies is not a red

 herring, the most likely hypothesis is that the elusive Rappaccini is hiding out

 in exactly the location one would expect of a genetic engineer: in the

 Creationist archipelago.”

 “It doesn’t matter who the most likely suspect is,” Hal Watson informed them

 both sharply. “We have to pursue all the relevant lines of inquiry, and we have

 to intercept the woman before she does any more damage, even if she’s only a

 dupe. The boatmaster will be questioned as soon as we can get through to him,

 and I’ll be sure to check the leases on all the islands south and west of Kauai.

 It’s just a matter of time. We still have a better than even chance of putting

 the whole jigsaw together before the early evening news turns the inquiry into a

 circus.”

 Charlotte winced as the car suddenly lurched, throwing her sideways to jostle

 Oscar Wilde. They had left the transcontinental superhighway at the

 intersection—she still did not know which one—and had already made a second

 turn, taking it off the subsidiary highway. The car was now climbing steeply

 into the hills, along a road which did not seem to have been properly

 maintained.

 Having missed the sign at the intersection, Charlotte’s first response to this

 realization was to crane her neck to look back at the valley they were leaving

 behind, trying to figure out where they might be. The nature of the terrain

 suggested that they must have passed the Los Angeles junction, but she couldn’t

 tell whether they were south of the Salton Sea. She had only the vaguest

 knowledge of the West Coast, and wasn’t even sure what state they were in.

 This had been a densely populated region in the distant past, but southern

 California had suffered worse than any other region of the old USA during the

 ancient plague wars. The so-called Second Plague War—whose obsolete title still

 lingered, even though modern historians no longer recognized the distinctions

 made by near-contemporary commentators—had made its grisly debut in Hollywood,

 which had been widely perceived as the ultimate symbol of twenty-first-century

 vanity, privilege, and conspicuous consumption. The rumor had been put about

 that the terrorists who had launched that particular team of viruses had been

 seeking revenge on the supposed beneficiaries of the “First Plague War,” who had

 allegedly launched it with the aim of wiping out the economic underclasses of

 the developed world.

 If any of that was true, the “second war” had misfired badly. As in all wars,

 and plague wars more than any other kind, the poor had sustained far more

 casualties than the rich. Although the proximity of medical resources and the

 relative efficiency of emergency measures had helped to keep death rates down in

 the cities, the response in many rural areas to the emergence of the first cases

 had been a mass exodus of refugees. Most of those who had survived had never

 returned, preferring to relocate to more promising land. Three-quarters of the

 ghost towns of the Sierra Madre were ghost towns still, even after three hundred

 years.

 Charlotte knew that the car hadn’t been on the road long enough to have got to

 the Sierra Madre, but these lesser hills seemed just as bleak, and the same

 pattern of response to the plague wars must have been duplicated here. Now that

 Hal had removed his image from the screen in order to concentrate on his

 Herculean labors, Charlotte took the opportunity to call up an annotated map of

 the region onto the screen in front of her. She summoned a blinking light to

 show her the car’s position, but the datum provided no obvious clue as to where

 it might be headed or why. The names of several small towns—all flagged as

 uninhabited—were scattered along their present route, but Charlotte wasn’t

 surprised that she was unable to recognize any of them.

 “The region up ahead seems to be wasteland,” she told Lowenthal and Wilde,

 vaguely hoping that one of them might be better able to guess where they were

 being taken.

 “She’s right,” Lowenthal confirmed, addressing himself to Wilde yet again, as if

 she were merely a hanger-on. “Nobody lives up here—and I mean nobody. The work

 of repairing the effects of the ecocatastrophe hasn’t even begun, even though

 we’re practically in LA’s backyard. Nothing grows here except lichens and the

 odd stalk of grass. The land’s never been officially reclaimed, not even for

 wilderness. It’s just rock and dust. The names on the map are just distant

 memories.”

 “Something must be up there,” Wilde said, shifting uncomfortably as the car took

 another corner with unreasonable haste. “Rappaccini wouldn’t bring us up here if

 there were nothing to see. If there were no real reason for this expedition he

 might as well have left us kicking our heels at the Majestic, or your

 headquarters in New York. Perhaps it’s the fact that no one ever comes here

 which recommended it to him as one of the bases of his secret operations.”

 “But none of these ghost towns is cable-connected to the Web,” Charlotte

 objected, drawing her finger across the screen in an arc.

 “Which might be reckoned a considerable advantage by anyone intent on hiding,”

 Wilde pointed out.

 It was easy enough for Charlotte to follow the line of thought. Land as derelict

 as this might be a very good place to hide. A man living up here would not be

 entirely deaf and blind, provided that he had equipment to receive information

 broadcast by comsat, but he could be effectively invisible as long as he made no

 longdistance purchases or person-to-person contacts. If he always kept a roof

 over his head during daylight hours he would go unnoticed even by surveillance

 satellites.

 The hire car had been designed for highway travel, and its speed had slowed

 considerably when it first began to follow the winding road up into the

 foothills of the mountain range, but its AI did not seem to have mastered the

 art of mountain climbing. Although the road surface was getting worse and the

 bends were becoming sharper and more frequent, the car still seemed to be making

 haste. As she was forced to sway yet again

 Charlotte cursed the AI driver for not being sloth enough, although it could not

 have had wit enough to qualify as a silver, but she assumed that she was being

 oversensitive. A driver’s prime directive was to ensure the safety of its

 passengers.

 The map disappeared from Charlotte’s screen, replaced by a list which Hal Watson

 had posted there.

 “There are twenty-seven names here,” Hal said. “So far as we can ascertain, it’s

 a complete list of living men and women who attended the University of

 Wollongong while King, Urashima, Kwiatek, and Czastka were also in attendance.

 We’ve now contacted all of them but one—Magnus Teidemann—so we’re fairly certain

 that any other bodies that turn up will break the pattern.”

 Michael Lowenthal patched the list through to his own screen, but no sooner had

 he set it up than his beltphone buzzed. Rather than displace the list, he picked

 up his handset and put the mike to his ear.

 “What!” he said—not very loudly, but with sufficient emphasis to command the

 attention of his companions.

 “What is it?” Charlotte asked—but she had to wait until Lowenthal had lowered

 the handset again. When he turned in his seat, it was Oscar Wilde that he

 transfixed with his triumphant gaze.

 “I asked my employers to check the record of Jafri Biasiolo’s DNA against Walter

 Czastka’s,” Michael Lowenthal said proudly, peering back through the gap between

 the headrests.

 “And were they identical?” asked Oscar Wilde, raising a quizzical eyebrow.

 “No,” said Lowenthal, “they weren’t identical.” Charlotte wondered why, in that

 case, he looked so immensely pleased with himself—but he had only paused for

 effect. “The comparison gave much the same initial estimate of similarity as the

 comparison between Biasiolo’s and the woman’s—forty-some percent. Closer

 analysis of key subsections, however, suggests a consanguinity of fifty percent,

 blurred by substantial deep-somatic engineering.”

 “I’m not sure that lends any support to your hypothesis,” said Wilde. “Indeed,

 it suggests—”

 Lowenthal didn’t let him finish. “That’s not all,” he said. “When they uncovered

 the link between Czastka and Biasiolo, they immediately compared Walter

 Czastka’s DNA profile with the record Regina Chai obtained from Gabriel King’s

 bedroom. The overlap’s no better than random. Consanguinity zero!”

 “But how can that be?” Charlotte complained. “If Czastka and Biasiolo are close

 relatives, and the woman is Biasiolo’s daughter…”

 “She’s not!” Lowenthal was quick to say triumphantly. “The only way that Czastka

 and the woman could each have fifty percent of Biasiolo’s genes without being

 significantly consanguineous themselves is by being his parents. She’s not

 Rappaccini’s daughter at all: she’s his mother!—and Walter Czastka’s his

 father!”

 “Congratulations,” said Oscar Wilde dryly. “You seem to have found me guilty of

 an illegitimate inference—and you doubtless feel that if one of my inferences is

 defective, the rest might be equally mistaken. But you seem to be overlooking

 the true significance of the finding—”

 “Wait a second,” Charlotte interrupted. “This doesn’t make sense. It’s perfectly

 plausible that Walter Czastka had made a sperm deposit while he was still in his

 teens, but he certainly couldn’t have applied for a withdrawal only two or three

 years later! We’re not talking about the Dark Ages here, or the aftermath of the

 Crash. People of his generation never exercised their right of reproduction when

 they were in their twenties—it’s only in very special circumstances that they

 exercise them even now, while they’re still alive.”

 “If Czastka had made any formal application,” Lowenthal agreed, not in the least

 confounded by her argument, “then his name would be included in Biasiolo’s

 record. Obviously, he didn’t—but he was training as a geneticist, and he must

 have had privileged access to a Helier hatchery. He must have substituted his

 own sperm for a donation which had been legitimately drawn from the bank. He

 wouldn’t have been the first hatchery tech to do that, nor the first to have got

 away with it.”

 “But it doesn’t help your hypothesis that Czastka is the designer behind

 Rappaccini Inc.,” Charlotte pointed out. “Your original contention was that

 Biasiolo was a mere phantom, invented by Czastka for the purpose of establishing

 a separate identity under which he could undertake various clandestine

 endeavors.”

 “That’s true,” Lowenthal agreed. “It’s now established that Biasiolo is a real

 person, not a ghost—but he’s Walter Czastka’s son. Doesn’t that put Czastka

 behind Rappaccini Inc.?”

 “But if your scenario is accurate,” Charlotte objected, constructing the

 argument as she spoke, “he’d never know it—Biasiolo, I mean. I suppose Czastka

 might have kept track of a substitute donation, if he’d made one, but he could

 hardly tell the foster parents about it, could he? What he did—according to

 you—was a criminal offense. He could never tell Biasiolo that he was his

 biological father.”

 “You’re still missing—,” Oscar Wilde said.

 Michael Lowenthal didn’t let him finish; for once, he was fully engaged with

 Charlotte. “He could never tell anyone,” the man from the MegaMall said, in

 answer to her quibble, “but that doesn’t mean that nobody knew what he’d done.

 Maybe it wasn’t his own idea.

 Maybe it was some kind of challenge, some kind of initiation into a secret

 society. He was a student, after all—and so were Gabriel King, Michi Urashima,

 and Paul Kwiatek. Maybe they all knew. Maybe—“

 “I fear that your flair for melodrama is getting out of hand, Michael,” said

 Wilde impatiently, firmly reclaiming center stage. “As Charlotte says, we’re not

 talking about the Dark Ages—but we are talking about the past. It isn’t in the

 least surprising that an authentically young woman might have undergone

 sufficient genetic engineering to reduce an actual consanguinity of fifty

 percent to an apparent overlap of forty-one, but it’s not plausible that two

 closely related old men should be that much less similar, unless something very

 odd had happened. As for this secret-society initiation, it’s the stuff of

 ancient romance—and it provides no explanation of the timing of the murders. If

 Walter were Biasiolo’s father, how could the revelation hurt Walter now? Even if

 everyone who knew it then still remembered it nearly a hundred and seventy years

 later, why should any of them attach any importance to it?”

 The list of names that Hal had posted on Charlotte’s screen disappeared, to be

 replaced by his face. He didn’t look pleased—presumably because he felt that he

 ought to have been the one to discover the link between Biasiolo and Walter

 Czastka.

 “I hate to break in on such a fevered discussion,” he said, “but I just checked

 the DNA trace Regina Chai recovered against the record of one Maria Inacio,

 listed in Jafri Biasiolo’s birth record as his biological mother. The same

 record says, ‘Father Unknown’—a statement whose significance has only just

 become apparent to me. The trace recovered from King’s apartment is indeed

 similar to Inacio’s, and might have been identical were it not for the

 differentiating effect of the younger woman’s genetic engineering. As I told you

 before, though, it doesn’t match the record of any living person. According to

 the register, Maria Inacio was born in 2303 and she died in 2342.”

 “So she can’t be our murderer,” Charlotte said.

 “Nor can she be Jafri Biasiolo’s mother,” Oscar Wilde was quick to put in. “Not,

 at least, if Michael’s new version of events is correct. If Walter or anyone

 else had merely substituted his own sperm for a donation drawn from the bank, it

 would have been used to fertilize an ovum which had come from the same bank,

 which could not—at least under normal circumstances—have been freshly deposited

 there by an eighteen-year-old girl.”

 “If Jafri Biasiolo had been conceived in a Helier hatchery,” Hal Watson said,

 completing his own revelatory bombshell with evident satisfaction, “the record

 would have said, ‘Father Unrecorded.’ Perhaps my silver should have picked the

 discrepancy up on first inspection, but it had no reason to attribute any

 significance to the datum. Jafri Biasiolo was the product of a late abortion; he

 wasn’t introduced to a Helier womb until he was three months short of delivery.

 Maria Inacio must have been immune to the endemic chiasmatic transformers—and

 probably never knew it, until her doctor told her that the strange growth in her

 abdomen wasn’t a tumor. Her own fosterers must have belonged to an antinanotech

 cult of some kind; there was one active in Australia at the time whose members

 called themselves Naturals; had they not selected themselves for rapid

 extinction, we might have needed a different label for the likes of Mr.

 Lowenthal.”

 “So all this stuff about substitute donations is rubbish,” Charlotte said, to

 make sure she had it straight. “You’re saying that Walter Czastka impregnated

 the girl by means of everyday sexual intercourse—intercourse which neither he

 nor she had the slightest reason to think capable of producing a pregnancy.”

 “Given that the record says, ‘Father Unknown,’ ” Hal said, “we can probably

 assume that neither Czastka nor Biasiolo ever knew of the relationship Mr.

 Lowenthal’s eager investigators have now brought to light. Given that it has

 been brought to light, I suppose someone ought to tell Walter Czastka—except, of

 course, that he’s not answering his phone just now because Dr. Wilde offended

 him. I’m not entirely happy about merely reporting it to his sim.”

 “But they must know!” Lowenthal protested. “How else can we begin to make sense

 of all these connections?”

 “One of them must know,” Oscar Wilde agreed, his voice animated by a sudden

 fervor. “I owe you an apology, Michael—your hypothesis, although mistaken in

 detail, has indeed paved the way to the crucial enlightenment. Walter can know

 nothing of all this—but Rappaccini must know everything. We have had the vital

 connection set before us for several hours, but have not realized its

 significance! Walter is… am I mistaken, or is the sloth driving this vehicle

 becoming extremely reckless in its speed around these bends?”

 Charlotte had not bothered to look out of the windows for some time, having

 become accustomed to the swaying of the vehicle. Now that she did, it seemed to

 her that Oscar Wilde was understating the case.

 Because AI drivers were programmed to the highest safety standards, everyone

 fell into the habit of trusting them absolutely, but the road on which they were

 traveling was undoubtedly far too rough and curvaceous to warrant progress at

 their present velocity. There was no guardrail on their right-hand side, and the

 scree slope fell away precipitously.

 Charlotte remembered the message warning them not to interrogate the driver’s

 programming. Like Lowenthal and Wilde, she had automatically assumed that this

 was merely a device to protect the secrecy of their destination—but what if it

 were not? What if such an interrogation would have revealed that the driver’s

 safety programming had been carefully and illegally stripped away? She banished

 Hal’s image from her screen and flicked the switch connecting the comcon to the

 driver. She typed a rapid instruction to the machine, ordering it to moderate

 the vehicle’s speed.

 There was no immediate response.

 She slid her swipecard into the comcon’s confirmation slot and invoked the full

 authority of the United Nations to back up her instruction. The only effect was

 that a printed message appeared on the screen: INCREASED SPEED NECESSITATED BY

 PROXIMITY OF PURSUING VEHICLE.

 Charlotte blinked, then tapped in an instruction to open a viewpoint in the rear

 of the cabin. She and Oscar Wilde turned together to look through it, their

 heads almost touching as they converged.

 The vehicle behind them was not an ordinary car. It was smaller, squarer, and

 looked as if it were heavily armored. It appeared, in fact, to be some kind of

 military vehicle. It was also far closer to their rear end than safety

 regulations permitted. Charlotte knew that it must have an AI driver, because

 its windscreen was quite opaque, but the sloth in question had obviously been

 programmed in frank defiance of the law.

 “It’s trying to force us off the road!” said Charlotte, hardly able to believe

 her eyes. In all her years in the police force she had never encountered

 anything so outrageous.

 Her beltphone buzzed, and she lifted it from its holster reflexively, her eyes

 still fixed on the pursuing vehicle and her cheek less than a centimeter away

 from Oscar Wilde’s uncannily beautiful face.

 “Hal!” she cried. “Someone’s trying to kill us!”

 “What?” said Hal, his voice as incredulous as her own.

 “There’s some kind of jeep trying to smash into us from behind!”

 The car carrying Charlotte and Wilde swept around a bend, and the resultant

 lurch bounced their heads together. It was not a bad bump, but the combination

 of surprise and pain made Charlotte cry out.

 “Charlotte!” said Hal, his incredulity replaced by alarm. “What’s happening?”

 Charlotte had to make an effort to force her train of thought onward through the

 barrier that pain had erected. She wanted to shout instructions to the people

 who would by now be monitoring their situation through the car’s sensors.

 “Scramble a helicopter!” she wanted to scream. “Send a software bomb! Get us the

 hell out of here!”

 As she straightened up again she looked out of the side window at the drop which

 awaited them if their driver were to be careless enough to let a wheel slide

 over the edge.

 It was a very long drop.

 Michael Lowenthal let loose an inarticulate cry of anguish, as befit a potential

 emortal who was staring death in the face for the first time.

 Charlotte gave voice to a wordless cry of her own as they soared around another

 bend, even sharper than its predecessors. She turned back to the rear viewport,

 clutching her throbbing head as she did so. She felt a sudden instinctive pulse

 of hope that the pursuing vehicle might not make it around the bend.

 Alas, the jeep did make it. It fell back eight or ten meters in so doing, and

 Charlotte felt her heart surge as she wondered whether some preventative signal

 had got through—but then there was a curious rattling noise at the rear end of

 their own vehicle.

 “Hal!” she cried again. “They’re shooting at us, Hal! They’ve got a gun!”

 “Charlotte!” came the reply. “I’ve got visual patched through from a sat! I’ve

 got… corruption and corrosion!”

 Charlotte had never heard Hal use such words before, except in their uninflected

 and strictly literal forms. Had she been able to find words herself she would

 have delved even deeper in search of more profound expletives.

 They had just taken yet another bend. This time, the pursuing vehicle failed to

 make the turn—in fact, it seemed to keep going straight ahead: straight over the

 edge and into empty air.

 For almost a second it seemed to hang there, like some absurd toon character in

 a synthemovie, who would not start to feel the effects of gravity until he

 became conscious of being unsupported.

 Then, with a peculiar gracefulness, the jeep began to fall.

 It tumbled over and over as it fell, and when it finally hit the rocky slope two

 hundred meters below, it exploded like a bomb, sending shards in all directions.

 The sloth driving the hire car had applied the brakes the instant that the

 threat of a damaging collision was removed from the viewport, but it had done so

 judiciously so as to minimize the risk of skidding.

 “Hal,” said Charlotte tremulously, “I think you just got another data trail to

 follow.” It was, she felt, a very feeble attempt at humor. By now—assuming that

 this absurdly tilted patch of crumpled wasteland lay within their

 jurisdiction—the California Highway Patrol’s best silvers would have identified

 the rogue vehicle, and they would already be tracking down its owner and

 programmer.

 Charlotte shut her eyes and breathed deeply, while the pain in her head ebbed

 slowly away.

 When she opened her eyes again, Oscar Wilde had converted his side window into a

 mirror, and he was inspecting his own head very carefully. There was a

 noticeable bluish bump just above the right eyebrow. She could not find it in

 her heart to regret the temporary damage done to his outrageous good looks,

 although he obviously felt differently about it.

 “What do you make of that?” she asked him.

 “I can only hope that it was simply another vignette in the unfolding

 psychodrama,” he said grimly. “Perhaps Rappaccini feared that the journey might

 be a trifle boring, and laid on a measured dose of excitement.”

 She stared at him for a few seconds. “You mean,” she said slowly, “that the

 person who hired this car also hired that one—as a practical joke?”

 Oscar shrugged his shoulders, turning back again to his pained inspection of the

 damage done to his temple.

 “He might be right,” said Hal, over the phone link. “The information’s coming

 through now. The jeep was hired at the same time as the car, although the fee

 came from an account I hadn’t yet connected to Rappaccini. The local police have

 no reason to think that anyone was aboard, although they’ll send a crew out to

 check the debris. It wasn’t carrying a gun—that rattling sound you heard was

 produced by your own car’s AI.”

 Charlotte was speechless.

 “Are you all okay?” Hal inquired solicitously.

 “Physically, we’re fine,” Michael Lowenthal replied. Given that he had not

 bruised his own head, his entitlement to speak on behalf of his companions

 seemed a trifle dubious to Charlotte.

 “That’s good,” said Hal, his voice reverting instantly to its normal

 businesslike tone. “I’ve just got some more data in from Bologna, if you want to

 look at any of it.”

 “Bologna?” said Charlotte.

 “It’s where Kwiatek was killed,” Lowenthal informed her.

 “We’ve got another picture of the woman,” Hal said. “We’re fairly certain that

 she flew to New York on an intercontinental flight from Rome. Do you want to see

 the tape?”

 “Not really,” said Charlotte, who was still profoundly shaken by the fake

 attack—although she was quick enough to add: “Not yet, I mean. Where was she

 before Bologna?”

 “Darkest Africa, we think—visiting Magnus Teidemann. His death is still to be

 confirmed, but we’re not optimistic. Are you sure you don’t want the Kwiatek

 data?”

 “Was there a calling card with Kwiatek’s body?” Oscar Wilde put in, shutting his

 own eyes as if to blank out the image of the bruise.

 “I’ll check the tapes,” Hal said. “Give me a couple of minutes.”

 “There’s no hurry, Inspector,” Lowenthal said, exchanging a sympathetic glance

 with the shaken Charlotte. “I think we’d all benefit from a moment’s pause.”

 “Did you look at the list I put up?” Hal asked, evidently seeing no necessity

 for any such pause. It wasn’t entirely clear whether he was addressing Lowenthal

 or Charlotte.

 “I saw it,” Charlotte said wearily. “Was there something significant I should

 have taken note of?” She knew that she ought not to end sentences with

 prepositions, but thought that the stress of the situation made the infelicity

 forgivable.

 “Maybe not,” Hal replied. “But I thought Mr. Lowenthal’s eye might have been

 caught by one of the addresses.”

 The list reappeared yet again, on all three of the seatscreens. Hal had

 obviously decided that he would follow his agenda no matter what. This time,

 Charlotte’s eye was immediately drawn to the word Kami. One Stuart McCandless,

 ex-chancellor of the University of Oceania, had retired to the island. He had

 graduated from the University of Wollongong in 2322.

 “Can you connect him to Czastka or Biasiolo?” Lowenthal said.

 “Is he answering his phone?” asked Charlotte. “If so, it might be helpful to

 find out what he remembers about his student days.”

 “He’s alive and well,” Hal said. “He says that he still meets up with Czastka

 occasionally, when Czastka’s on Kauai, but not for some months. He never met

 Biasiolo and he doesn’t know anything about Rappaccini. He doesn’t remember

 anything significant about Walter Czastka’s university career.”

 While this catalogue of negatives was in transmission, Charlotte glanced out of

 the side window again as the car swung—slowly and carefully—around a bend.

 The road was no longer poised above the sheer slope, and she realized that they

 were coming into one of the ghost towns whose names were still recorded on the

 map, in spite of the fact that no one had lived in them for centuries.

 The car came to a standstill.

 The ancient stone buildings that were all that now remained of the town had been

 weathered by dust storms, but they still retained the sharp angles which proudly

 proclaimed their status as human artifacts. The land around them was quite dead,

 seemingly incapable of growing so much as a blade of grass. It was every bit as

 desolate as an unspoiled lunar landscape, but the shadowy scars of human

 habitation still lay upon it.

 The sun was reddening against the peacock blue background, and the shadows it

 cast were lengthening toward the east.

 “What now?” Charlotte said to Oscar Wilde. “Do we start looking for another

 body?”

 Before they had time to get out of the car, the screens in front of them blanked

 out. While Charlotte was still wondering what the interruption signified, the

 car’s sloth relayed a message in flamboyant red letters.

 It said: WELCOME, OSCAR: THE PLAY WILL COMMENCE IN TEN MINUTES. THE PLAYHOUSE IS

 BENEATH THE BUILDING TO YOUR RIGHT.

 “Play?” said Charlotte bitterly. “Have we come all this way just to see a play?

 Hal was right—I should never have left New York.”

 “I’m sorry that your decision has caused you some inconvenience,” said Wilde as

 he opened the door and climbed out into the sultry heat of the deepening

 evening, “but I will confess that I’m glad you both decided to come with me. In

 spite of the entertainment laid on for us as we climbed the mountainside, the

 journey would have been infinitely more tedious had I been forced to take it

 alone. I suspect that whatever experience awaits us will benefit from being

 shared. Do you carry a supply of transmitter eyes in that belt you’re wearing,

 Charlotte?”

 “Of course I do,” she said as she moved to the rear of the car to inspect the

 place where bullets had seemed to strike it. Hal was, inevitably, absolutely

 right. There were no marks at all. The sound of the shots had been manufactured

 by the hire car’s sloth, to intensify the fear its passengers felt. The sloth

 was, of course, far too stupid to be held responsible, but Charlotte cursed it

 anyway, along with its still-mysterious programmer.

 All very amusing for you, she thought, but we could have been killed if we’d

 gone off the road, and we could have died of fright. When we catch up with you…

 “I suggest that you place a few transmitters about your person,” Wilde said to

 her, his own equanimity seemingly restored. “You too, Michael. I only have a

 bubblebug, incapable of live transmission—but I’ll mount it on my forehead, so

 that I may preserve the moment for my own future reference.”

 Charlotte turned to stare at the building to their right. It did not look in the

 least like a theater. To judge by its display window—empty now of glass, and

 shutterless—it must once have been a primitive general store. It was roofless

 now and seemed to be nothing more than a gutted shell.

 “Why bring us out here to the middle of nowhere?” she demanded angrily. “If it’s

 just a tape, why didn’t he just run it in a theater in San Francisco—or New

 York?” As she spoke, she planted two electronic eyes on her own head, one above

 each eyebrow. One of them had power enough to transmit a signal to the car,

 provided that nothing substantial got in the way, and the car’s power system

 would hopefully boost the signal sufficiently for it to be picked up by a relay

 sat and copied all the way to Hal Watson’s lair. Whether Hal would bother to

 watch the transmission as it came in she had no idea, but she took the trouble

 to give him notice of its imminent arrival.

 The notice proved to be premature. Oscar Wilde had already located a

 downward-leading flight of stone steps inside the derelict building. It was

 obvious almost as soon as they had begun the descent—with Charlotte planting

 head-high nanolights every six or seven steps to illuminate their passage—that

 it had been hollowed out using bacterial deconstructors far more modern than the

 building itself. By the time they reached the foot of the flight, Charlotte knew

 that there must be several meters of solid rock separating her from the car. Her

 transmitter eye was useless, except as a recording device; no signal could reach

 the car’s sloth.

 At the bottom of the stairway there was a very solid door made from some kind of

 synthetic organic material. It had neither handle nor visible lock, but as soon

 as Wilde touched it with his fingertips it swung inward.

 “All doors in the world of theater open to Oscar Wilde,” Michael Lowenthal

 muttered sarcastically.

 Beyond the doorway was a well of impenetrable shadow. Charlotte automatically

 reached up to the wall inside the doorway, placing another nanolight there, but

 the darkness seemed to soak up its luminance quite effortlessly, and it showed

 her nothing but a few square centimeters of matte black wall. The moment Wilde

 took a tentative step forward, however, a small spotlight winked on, picking out

 a two-seater sofa upholstered in black, set a few feet away from them.

 “Very considerate,” said Oscar dryly. “Had you not been here, dear Charlotte, I

 would have been obliged to distribute myself in a conspicuously languid fashion.

 As things are, one of us will be obliged to stand.”

 “I’ll stand,” said Lowenthal. “I’ve been sitting down too long.” Charlotte had

 to imagine the expression that must have been on his face as he looked at the

 sofa. There was no dust on it, but it was conspicuously cheap as well as very

 old. No modern MegaMall outlet would have stocked anything so tawdry.

 “Shall we?” said Wilde. He invited Charlotte to move ahead of him, and she did,

 although she moved a little hesitantly through the darkness, unable to see the

 floor beneath her feet. There was an interval of five or six seconds after they

 were seated, and then the spotlight winked out.

 Charlotte could not suppress a small gasp of alarm as they were plunged into a

 darkness which would have been absolute had it not been for the single nanolight

 she had set beside the door, which now shone like a single distant star in an

 infinite void.

 When light returned, it was very cleverly directed away from them; Charlotte

 quickly realized that she could not make out Oscar Wilde’s form, nor the

 contours of her own body. It was as if she had become a disembodied viewpoint,

 like a tiny bubblebug, looking out upon a world from which her physical presence

 had been erased.

 She seemed to be ten or twelve meters away from the event which unfolded before

 her eyes, but she knew well enough that the distance—like the event itself—was

 an illusion. Cinematic holograms of the kind to which Michi Urashima had devoted

 his skills before turning to more dangerous toys were adepts in the seductive

 art of sensory deception.

 The illusory event did not seem to be a “play” at all, according to Charlotte’s

 reckoning, but merely a dance, performed solo. The hologrammatic dancer was a

 young woman. Charlotte had no difficulty at all in recognizing her, because her

 bronzed features were made up to duplicate the appearance that the image’s

 living model had presented to Michi Urashima’s spy eyes. Her hair was different,

 though; it was now long, straight, and jet-black. Her costume was different too

 and did not seem to be the conventional artifice of a suitskin. The dancer’s

 bare flesh was ungenerously draped with soft, sleek, and translucent chiffons of

 many colors, secured at various strategic points of her lissome form by

 glittering gem-faced catches.

 The music to which she danced—lithely and lasciviously—was raw and primitive,

 generated by virtual drums and reedy pipes.

 “Salome,” whispered Oscar Wilde.

 “What?” said Lowenthal uncomprehendingly. “I don’t—”

 “Later!” was Wilde’s swift response to that. “Hush now—watch!”

 Two days ago the name would have meant absolutely nothing to Charlotte, but

 thanks to the background reading she had done in the maglev couchette, she now

 knew that Oscar Wilde—the original Oscar Wilde—had written a play called Salome.

 She had taken sufficient note of it to recall that he had written it in French,

 because it had been too calculatedly lewd to be licensed for the

 nineteenth-century English stage. She had also pressed the support key which had

 informed her that Salome was the name attached by legend to the daughter of

 Herodias, wife of King Herod of Judea, who was mentioned in two of the gospels

 of the New Testament, the holy book of the Christian religion.

 Forearmed by this knowledge, Charlotte thought that she understood what it was

 that she was to watch—and now assumed that the dance would indeed turn into a

 play of sorts.

 Her ready understanding made her feel rather smug, even though she still had no

 idea what the purpose of this display could possibly be. For the first time

 since leaving New York, Charlotte did not feel that she was trailing hopelessly

 in the wake of the better-informed counterpart dispatched by the Secret Masters

 to keep track of her investigation. She assumed that she was at least as well

 prepared as Michael Lowenthal for whatever coups de theatre were to follow.

 As the nonexistent woman, isolated in an apparently infinite cage of darkness,

 swayed and gyrated to the beat of ancient drums, the first impression Charlotte

 received was one of utter artlessness and a pitiful lack of sophistication.

 Modern dance, which had all the artifice of contemporary biotechnology as a key

 resource, was infinitely smoother and more complicated. But this performance,

 she knew, was three times an artifact. The image of the dancer was produced by

 the technology of the twenty-fifth century, but what was being offered to her

 eyes was a nineteenth-century vision of the first century before the

 conventional calendrical century count began. This was a half-primitive

 representation of the genuinely primitive: an ancient fantasy recapitulated as a

 fantasy of a different kind, contained by a medium which was no less fantastic,

 in its own marvelous fashion.

 In the nineteenth century, Charlotte knew—and thought that she had at least

 begun to grasp—there had been something called pornography, which had to be

 distinguished from art, although there had been some people who considered that

 much art was merely pornography with pretensions and others who felt that at

 least some pornography was art which dared not speak its name. Nowadays, in a

 world where most sexual intercourse took place between individuals and clever

 machinery, while most of the remainder was consciencelessly promiscuous, the

 idea of pornography had become quaint and antique. To nineteenth-century eyes,

 the programming of any modern person’s intimate technology would have been bound

 to seem pornographic, but everyone—in spite of what Oscar Wilde had said about a

 sense of sin being somehow necessary to sexual pleasure—now accepted that in the

 realm of private fantasy nothing was perverse and nothing was taboo.

 Charlotte understood, therefore—and was proud of herself for being able to

 understand—that part of the point of this performance was that one had to try to

 see it from several different viewpoints: from the viewpoint of some legendary

 petty ruler of the early Iron Age; from the viewpoint of would-be aesthetes and

 their rival moralists of the late Iron Age; and from the viewpoint of a double

 rejuvenate of the middle period of the Genetic Revolution.

 After a moment’s hesitation, she added two more hypothetical viewpoints: the

 viewpoint of an authentically young citizen of the late-twenty-fifth-century

 United States of North America; and the viewpoint of a nano-tech recording

 device whose function was to preserve for future reference the sensory

 experiences of lives which were continually outstripping the resources of

 inbuilt memory.

 With all this to take into account, she thought, the sight of Salome dancing

 should have been far more interesting that it actually was. In spite of all that

 she knew, Charlotte simply could not place herself, imaginatively, in the shoes

 of one of Herod’s courtiers, nor the shoes of one of the original Oscar Wilde’s

 gentleman friends, nor even the shoes of whatever strange individual had

 manufactured the mercurially virtual Rappaccini. She doubted that anyone of her

 era could have done better—not even the flesh-and-blood Oscar Wilde who sat

 invisibly but not quite intangibly beside her.

 Charlotte found the steps of the dance trite and inexpressive; to her it seemed

 neither stimulating nor instructive, nor even quaintly amusing. The gradual

 removal of the dancer’s seven veils was merely a laborious way of counting down

 to a climax that was already expected. And still there was nothing to suggest a

 purpose for the charade—unless, as she had earlier suspected, all of this was

 mere distraction, intended to divert attention away from the true substance of

 the crime and to confuse the investigations being carried out by Hal’s silvers.

 If this is mere mockery, she thought, Wilde might soon change his mind about

 being glad that Lowenthal and I chose to accompany him. If all this is just

 another joke intended to tease him, he might prefer to have kept it to himself.

 As soon as Lowenthal and I decant our bubblebugs, this will be public

 property—and when the MegaMall gives the go-ahead to the casters, it will be all

 over the news.

 No sooner had she formulated the thought, however, than she realized that she

 might have got it backward. Perhaps the whole point of the summons to Gabriel

 King’s appointment, the wreath at the San Francisco Majestic, and the car chase

 through the mountains had been to make Wilde’s involvement in this matter

 newsworthy. Perhaps the mystery and melodrama were intended solely to create

 audience interest in a rough-and-ready artwork which had little enough interest

 of its own. Perhaps the real intended audience of this play was the vidveg, who

 would need Wilde as an interpreter. Under ordinary circumstances, the vidveg

 would not have found it at all interesting, but if it were aired on the news, as

 an appendix to the tale of three—perhaps four—lurid murders, it would command an

 eager audience of billions.

 Was that what its author craved? Was it conceivable that all of this, including

 the murders, was a publicity stunt?

 Salome was almost naked now, and the few encrustations she preserved upon her

 body were intended to heighten rather than to conceal, but Charlotte could

 summon up neither any vestige of emotional response nor any twinge of moral

 panic. All she could sense within herself was a precautionary tension, because

 she knew that at any moment Salome was likely to acquire a mute partner for her

 mesmerized capering.

 The dancer did look as if she were mesmerized, Charlotte noted. She looked as if

 she were lost in some kind of dream, not really aware of who she was or what she

 was doing. Charlotte remembered that the young woman had given a similar

 impression during the brief glimpse of her which Gabriel King’s cameras had

 caught. Was that significant—and if so, of what?

 The dance slowed and finally stopped.

 Without speaking, Salome stood with bowed head for a few moments—and then she

 reached out into the shadows which crowded around her, and brought out of the

 darkness a silver platter, on which there rested the decapitated head of a man.

 She plucked the head from its resting place, entwining her delicate fingers in

 its hair.

 The salver disappeared, dissolved into the shadow.

 Charlotte was not in the least surprised. She was quite ready for the move.

 Nevertheless, she flinched. The virtual head—which she knew to be a synthesized

 illusion—looked more startlingly horrid than a real head would have done, by

 virtue of the artistry which had gone into the design of its agonized expression

 and the bloodiness of the crudely severed neck.

 She recognized the face which the virtual head wore: it was Gabriel King’s.

 The dance began again.

 How differently, Charlotte wondered, was Oscar Wilde seeing this ridiculous

 scene? Could he see it as something daring, something monstrous, something

 clever? Would he be able to sigh with satisfaction, in that irritating way of

 his, when the performance was over, and claim that Rappaccini was a genius of

 many disparate talents? If he could, she thought, it would surely be pure

 affectation: an assertion of the virtual reality which he wore as a costume, by

 courtesy of the genius of cosmetic engineers. She felt certain that Michael

 Lowenthal would have as low an opinion of this vulgar theatricality as she had,

 even though he would not have anticipated the arrival of the severed head and

 probably would not know even now that it was supposed to be the head of Christ’s

 precursor, John the Baptist.

 The macabre dance began to seem even more mechanical. The woman appeared to be

 unaware—or at least uncaring—of the fact that she was supposedly brandishing a

 severed head. She moved its face close to her own and then extended her arms

 again, all the while maintaining the same distant and dreamy expression.

 Charlotte began to grow impatient—but then her attention was caught again.

 Subtly, almost imperceptibly, the features of the severed head had changed. Now

 it was no longer the head of Gabriel King; it had acquired an Oriental cast.

 Charlotte recognized Michi Urashima and suddenly became interested again, eager

 for any hint of further change. She was fully aware of the necessity of

 capturing every detail of the sequence—if it were indeed to be a sequence—with

 her recording devices, so she fixed her own gaze steadfastly upon the horrid

 head.

 She had seen no picture of Paul Kwiatek as yet, so she could only infer that the

 third appearance presented by the luckless Baptist was his, and she became even

 more intent when the third set of features began to blur and shift. This, she

 thought, was a countdown of a rather different kind, in which the number and

 nature of the steps might well be crucial to the development of her

 investigation.

 She felt a surge of triumph as she realized that this revelation, if nothing

 else, might vindicate her determination to accompany Oscar Wilde on his strange

 expedition.

 She did not recognize the fourth face, but she was confident that the bubblebug

 set above her right eye would record it well enough for computer-aided

 recognition. If Hal’s investigations could be trusted, it was almost certainly

 the ecologist Magnus Teidemann.

 How many more, she wondered, would there be?

 The fifth face was darker than the fourth—naturally dark, she thought, not

 cosmetically melanized. Men of King and Urashima’s generation rarely played

 games with skin color, even when they had recourse to cosmetic engineers to make

 them handsomer. She did not recognize this man either.

 She recognized the sixth face, though. She had seen it on a screen within the

 last few hours, looking considerably older and more ragged than its

 manifestation here but unmistakably the same.

 It was Walter Czastka.

 Charlotte remembered belatedly that Oscar Wilde had been about to say something

 about Czastka’s role in this affair when he had been interrupted by sudden

 anxiety about the speed of the hire car. Had he been about to confound Michael

 Lowenthal with the judgment that Czastka, far from being the murderer, must have

 been marked down as a victim? Could this be taken as proof that Czastka was not,

 after all, the man behind Rappaccini, but merely one more of Rappaccini’s chosen

 victims? Or might it simply be one more joke, one more bluff?

 She tried to pull herself together. The real significance of this revelation,

 surely, was that if Walter Czastka had been marked down as a victim, he might

 yet be saved—as might the mysterious fifth man. Czastka, at least, had been

 alive not much more than an hour ago, even though he had stopped answering his

 phone as soon as Oscar Wilde had talked to him.

 There was no seventh face. Salome slowed in her paces, faced the sofa where

 Oscar and Charlotte sat watching, and took her bow.

 Then the lights came on.

 Charlotte had assumed that the performance was over, and its object attained,

 but she was wrong. What she had so far witnessed was merely a prelude.

 The lights which sprang into dazzling life brought a new illusion, infinitely

 more spectacular than the last Charlotte had attended numerous theatrical

 displays employing clever holographic techniques, and knew well enough how a

 black-walled space which comprised in reality no more than a few hundred cubic

 meters could be made to seem far greater, but she had never seen a virtual space

 as vast and as ornate as this.

 Here was the palace in which Salome had danced, transfigured by the

 phantasmagoric imagination of some later artist: a crazily vaulted ceiling

 higher than that in any reconstructed medieval cathedral, with elaborate

 stained-glass windows in mad profusion, offering all manner of fantastic scenes.

 Here was a polished floor three times the size of a sports field, with a crowd

 of onlookers that must have numbered tens of thousands. There was no sense at

 all of this being an actual place: it was an edifice born of nightmarish dreams,

 whose awesome and impossible dimensions weighed down upon a mere observer,

 reducing Charlotte in her own mind’s eye to horrific insignificance.

 Men like Gabriel King called their quasi-organic nanotech constructors shamirs,

 after the magical entity which had helped Solomon build his temple when his

 laborers had been forbidden the use of conventional tools, but this was the

 first time Charlotte had seen an edifice worthy of the labor of fabulous

 mythical creatures.

 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.

 Intermission Four

 A Teacher and His Pupil

 « ^ »

 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.

 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.

 “Everyone fails, but there is no shame in failure, provided that you have set

 your sights widely enough. The human condition has its limitations, and always

 will have. Even if the genetic engineers are right in claiming that they have at

 last brought the human race to the very threshold of emortality, and even if the

 prophets of man/machine symbiosis are right in saying that the fallibility of

 human memory can be compensated by appropriate augmentation of the brain, there

 will still be limitations of understanding. A man may live forever, and remember

 everything, and still understand hardly anything. It is as easy—perhaps

 easier—to breed a race of immortal fools as a race of mental giants. The

 majority of men have always made fools of themselves, and the vidveg will

 undoubtedly continue to do so, however long they live and whatever ingenious

 devices may one day be connected by artificial synapses to the substance of

 their souls.”

 Julia had listened to such speeches very dutifully, in the beginning, and that

 had pleased him immensely—but their friendship was not based in anything as

 shallow as adulation. He was not in love with her; erotic orthodoxy had long ago

 begun to bore him, and he had never felt the least impulse to reinvest in it

 when the many and various unorthodoxies with which he had briefly experimented

 had similarly begun to pall. In fact, since becoming young for the third time

 Stuart had experienced a dramatic loss of libido which he had not the slightest

 interest in repairing. He felt—he understood— that there might be advantages in

 being old, to one who was as cerebrally inclined as he. Nor was he particularly

 flattered by Julia’s attentiveness; he had been an educator for so very many

 years that he drank up the respect of pupils by sheer force of habit, not

 tasting it at all. If she had been more to him than a mere sounding board, which

 reflected his thoughts in a pleasing manner, he could not have felt as close to

 her as he did. He valued her disagreement as much as her agreement now; he loved

 to exchange ideas with her. He needed someone like her, who would not merely

 listen to his ideas but challenge them, playing white to his black in an endless

 game of intellectual chess.

 Ideas were healthier when they were challenged; kept inside, in the dark and

 secret theater of the mind, protected from exposure, they did not nourish half

 so well. If ideas were to grow—and thus give birth to understanding—they must be

 let out, and tested.

 “Will you stay for dinner?” he asked his companion. “We can eat on the veranda,

 if you wish. It’s going to be a beautiful evening.”

 “Of course,” she said. “But I don’t know how long I can stay afterward. There’s

 something I have to do—I have to go to one of the other islands.”

 “Which one?” he asked reflexively.

 “One of the new ones. I have to visit a Creationist.”

 “Why? I didn’t think they encouraged visitors.” When it became clear that she

 did not intend to answer the question, he carried on. “You’ll have to be

 careful—you must have heard the rumors about dinosaurs and giant spiders, and

 the jokes about the Island of Dr. Moreau. How long will you be away?”

 “I don’t know,” she said. “It depends.”

 It occurred to Stuart that Walter Czastka was a Creationist, and that Walter

 Czastka had been at the University of Wollongong in 2322—and that he had once

 walked on a beach with him, much as he was walking with Julia now, discussing

 some project that Walter had dreamed up. Walter had wanted his help… but Stuart

 could no longer remember exactly what it was that Walter had wanted from him, or

 whether or not he had obliged.

 It was on the tip of his tongue to ask Julia whether it was Walter Czastka that

 she intended to visit, and what she could possibly want with a man like him, but

 he suppressed the impulse. It would probably seem like prying motivated by

 jealousy.

 “I’m glad that I retired here,” he said, glancing briefly upward in the

 direction of the blazing sun, then more languorously downward at the glints that

 its light imparted to the crests of the lazy waves. “The heat suits me, now that

 I’m growing old for the final time, and I can’t see the twenty-sixth century

 creeping up on me. There was never any but the most rudimentary agriculture

 here, you know, not even in the Colonial Era. The volcanoes are tame now, of

 course, and the bigger islands in the group were badly affected by the

 population movements following the plague wars, but Kauai’s seen less change

 than almost any other place on the earth’s surface since the beginning of the

 twenty-second century.”

 “But it’s not the same, even so,” Julia pointed out. “Every time you step,

 indoors, it must be obvious that you’re living in the present—and you’re

 entirely a product of the present. There were no men of your antiquity in the

 twenty-second century.”

 “Granted,” he said. “But still, I’d far rather live beside the blue sea than the

 green, and I could never be content in a valley between SAP black hills. I can

 still remember the days before the green seas and black hills, you know; I think

 my memory has held up better than most, in spite of the unease of illusory deja

 vu. Sometimes I’m half-convinced that I’ve known you before, in the long-gone

 days of my first youth… but I understand how these tricks of the mind work. In

 these days of cosmetic engineering, when everyone is beautiful, it’s easy to

 recognize in the woman one sees today some or all of the women one knew many

 years before, who are simply phantoms imprinted on the vanishing horizon of

 remembrance…”

 He trailed off because they had reached the threshold of his home: a place at

 which he always hesitated.

 Although he could not bring himself to entertain the thought, let alone believe

 it, Stuart McCandless was fated to die very soon.

 It was likely that nothing could have saved him—certainly not a better memory.

 What he took for an illusion of similarity was indeed an illusion, because he

 had recently been shown a better likeness of his darling Julia than ancient

 memory could possibly have preserved, and had not recognized it.

 Sometimes victims collaborate in their own murders, even when they have been

 warned of danger—and why should they not, if they believe that murder and art

 are mere expressions of historical process, deft feints, and thrusts of

 causality?

 If idiosyncrasy, madness, and genius are no more than tiny waves on a great

 sullen tide of irresistible causality, even a man forewarned can hardly be

 expected to defy their force. Stuart McCandless certainly did nothing to avoid

 his fate, even when the second and far more explicit warning arrived. He simply

 could not imagine that his pupil could be anything but what she seemed or anyone

 but who she pretended to be. He was old, and he was complacent. He knew that he

 was fated to die, but he carried in his consciousness that remarkable will to

 survive that refuses to recognize death even while it stares death in the face.

 Nor was he a fool; he was probably as knowledgeable a historian as there was in

 the world, and as wise a lover.

 If those who tried to warn him had been able to explain to him exactly why he

 was being murdered, he would have laughed aloud in flagrant disbelief. Like the

 vidveg he affected to despise, and in spite of his claustrophobia, he was a man

 whose imaginative horizons were narrower than he knew or could ever have

 admitted to himself.

 Investigation: Act Five

 From Land to Sea

 « ^ »

 The sun was setting by the time Charlotte and her companions emerged into the

 open; it remained visible solely because its decline had taken it into the cleft

 of a gap between two spiry crags.

 The car had gone.

 Charlotte felt her hand tighten around the bubblebugs which she had carefully

 removed from their stations above her eyebrows. She had been holding them at the

 ready, anxious to plug them into the car’s systems so that their data could be

 decanted and relayed back to Hal Watson.

 She murmured a curse. Michael Lowenthal’s exclamation of distress was even

 louder—and the man from the MegaMall immediately reached for his handset, moving

 to one side to call for assistance.

 Charlotte took out her beltphone and tried to send a signal, although the charge

 indicator suggested that the battery no longer had enough muscle to reach a

 relay station or a convenient comsat. Nothing happened. She muttered another

 curse beneath her breath, and then she turned back to Oscar Wilde.

 “I should have…” she began—but she trailed off when she realized that she didn’t

 know exactly what she should have done, or even what she might have done.

 “Don’t worry,” said Wilde. “I doubt that Rappaccini brought us up here simply to

 abandon us. I suspect that a vehicle of some kind will be along very shortly to

 carry us on our way.”

 “Where to?” she asked, unable to keep the asperity out of her voice.

 “I don’t know for certain,” he said, “but I would hazard a guess that our route

 will be westward. We might have one more port of call en route, but our final

 destination will surely be the island where Walter Czastka is playing God. He is

 to be the final victim, and his death is presumably intended to form the

 climactic scene of this perfervid drama.”

 “We have to warn him,” said Charlotte. “And we have to identify the fifth man

 too. If the car were here…”

 “Walter has already had a warning of sorts,” said Oscar ruminatively. “If Hal

 has been able to contact him with the news that he may be Rappaccini’s father…”

 He left the sentence dangling.

 “Let’s hope it’s not too late to tell him that we now have clear evidence of

 Rappaccini’s intention to kill him,” said Charlotte, “and let’s hope the fifth

 man is still alive when we get a chance to find out who he is. He may be dead

 already, of course, like Kwiatek and Teidemann. Your ghoulish friend displayed

 his victims in the order in which their bodies were discovered, not the order in

 which they were killed.”

 “He was never my friend,” Oscar objected, seemingly more than a little disturbed

 by what he had just witnessed, “and I am not at all sure that I can approve of

 his determination to involve me in all this.”

 “You should have challenged him about Czastka.” Michael Lowenthal put in, having

 despaired of making his own call heard. “You should have told him that we’ve

 discovered that Czastka’s his father.”

 “It was only a sim,” Wilde reminded him. “It could not have been startled or

 tricked into telling us anything it was not primed to tell us. In any case, if

 the DNA evidence can be trusted, Rappaccini must already know that Walter is his

 father, even if Walter has not the slightest idea that Rappaccini is his son. As

 Charlotte pointed out, Rappaccini knew enough to create a modified clone of his

 mother—a very special stepdaughter—and he must have done so with his present

 purpose in mind. We must concentrate our attention on the questions I did ask,

 especially the one to which I received two different but equally enigmatic

 answers.”

 “Timing,” said Charlotte, to show that she was now able to keep up. “The sim

 said that it is your birthday—by which it must mean your third rejuvenation. Is

 that what triggered this bizarre charade?”

 “That was the second response,” Wilde pointed out. “It required a repetition of

 the cue to elicit it, it was markedly different in tone from the other speeches

 delivered by the sim, and it was the last thing it said before shutting down.

 The comment had all the hallmarks of an afterthought—a belated addition to the

 program. Rappaccini must have known for years approximately when I would attempt

 my third rejuve, but he can only have known the exact date of my release from

 the hospital for eight or ten weeks—three months at the most. The real answer to

 the question must somehow be contained in the earlier and much more circuitous

 speech.”

 “How much of that did you actually understand?” she asked him. “I recognized the

 characters, but a lot of what the Herod effigy said went over my head.”

 “I understood most of the references,” Oscar said, “if only because so many of

 them were to works by my ancient namesake—but the meaning hidden between the

 lines was by no means obvious even to me. There was meaning in it,

 though—meaning that I am intended to divine, given time. The setting was, of

 course, an elaboration of one of Gustave Moreau’s paintings of Salome’s dance,

 and Rappaccini’s Herod made several oblique references to Wilde’s essays,

 including ‘The Decay of Lying’ and ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison.’ ”

 Charlotte knew that she had heard the second title before, and was very eager to

 show that she was still at least one step ahead of Michael Lowenthal. “That’s

 the one which refers to the Wainewright character Hal listed among Rappaccini’s

 other pseudonyms,” she said.

 “That’s right. My namesake argued there, not without a certain macabre levity,

 that the fact that Wainewright had been a forger and a murderer should not blind

 critics to the virtues of his work as a literary scholar. Indeed, the essay

 suggests that Wainewright’s fondness for subtle murder—he was apparently a

 poisoner of some dexterity and skill—might be regarded as evidence of his

 wholeness as a person, and might provide better grounds for critical praise than

 his admittedly second-rate writings. The argument is not as original as it may

 seem—as I mentioned when the name first came up, De Quincey had earlier written

 an essay called ‘Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.’ The relevance of

 the argument to the present case is abundantly clear, I think; Rappaccini

 obviously regards his murders as phases in the construction of a work of art and

 considers them at least as estimable as his ingenious funeral wreaths. He is

 asking me—although I doubt that he can seriously expect me to comply—to look at

 them admiringly, in the same light.”

 Charlotte was tempted to observe that Wilde had seemed hitherto to be complying

 with some enthusiasm, but she could see that there was more to come and felt

 obliged to give explanation priority over sarcasm. “What else?” she asked,

 instead.

 “In ‘The Decay of Lying,’ my namesake laments the dominance of realism in the

 artwork of his own day. He argues—again, rather flippantly—that there is no

 virtue at all in fidelity of representation, and that the glory of art lies in

 its unfettered inventiveness. Art, he argues, should not endeavor to be truthful

 or useful, nor should it limit itself to the kinds of petty deception which are

 committed by vulgar everyday liars—salesmen and politicians. He proposes that

 art should lie with all the extravagance and grandiosity of which the human

 imagination is capable. That is why Rappaccini asked me to judge him as a true

 liar. But the word decay is also very significant, and you will doubtless recall

 that the simulation said that I, of all people, should understand the world’s

 decadence. That, I think, is a subtler—”

 He broke off as Charlotte suddenly turned away, looking up into the sky. While

 Oscar had been speaking, his words had gradually been overlaid by another sound,

 whose clamor was by now too insistent to be ignored. Its monotonous drone

 threatened to drown him out entirely.

 “There!” she said, pointing at a dark blur only half-emerged from the dazzling

 face of the sun. It was descending rapidly toward them, growing hugely as it did

 so.

 The approaching craft was a light aircraft, whose engines were even now

 switching to the vertical mode so that it could land helicopter-fashion.

 Charlotte followed Wilde and Lowenthal as they hurried into the shelter of the

 building from which they had come, in order to give the machine space to land.

 The plane was, of course, pilotless—and the first thing Charlotte saw as she

 hurried to the passenger cabin was a message displayed on its one and only

 screen which said: ANY ATTEMPT TO INTERROGATE THE PROGRAMMING OF THIS VEHICLE

 WILL ACTIVATE A VIRUS THAT WILL DESTROY THE DATA IN QUESTION.

 She had expected that and was sufficiently glad to have access to an adequately

 powerful comcon. For the moment she did not care exactly where the machine might

 be headed. While Oscar Wilde and Michael Lowenthal climbed in behind her she

 plugged her beltphone into the comcon and deposited her bubblebugs in the

 decoder.

 As soon as the doors were closed, the plane began to rise into the air.

 “Hal,” said Charlotte as soon as the connection was made. “Sorry to be out of

 touch. Vital data coming in—crazy message from Biasiolo, alias Rappaccini,

 delivered by sim. It’s conclusive proof of Rappaccini’s involvement. Pick out

 the face of the fifth victim and identify it for me. Send an urgent warning to

 Walter Czastka. And tell us what course this damn plane is following, if you can

 track it from orbit.”

 Hal Watson acknowledged the incoming information, but paused only briefly before

 saying: “I’m sure all this is very interesting, but I’ve closed the file on

 Jafri Biasiolo, alias Rappaccini, alias Gustave Moreau. We’re now concentrating

 all our efforts on the woman. We assume that she’s a modified clone of Maria

 Inacio, illegally and secretly created by Biasiolo before his death.”

 “Death!” Charlotte echoed, dumbfounded by the news. “When? How?”

 Unfortunately, Hal was busy decanting the data from her bubblebug and didn’t

 reply immediately. There was a long, frustrating pause. Wilde and Lowenthal were

 waiting just as raptly as she was.

 Charlotte filled in time by looking around the cabin. The airplane was a small

 one, built to carry a maximum of four passengers. Again, Lowenthal had been left

 to play odd man out. Behind the second row of seats there was a curtained

 section, but the curtains were drawn back, allowing her to see the four bunks it

 contained. That implied that they were in for a long flight—and the plane’s

 engine seemed distinctly fainthearted. They were traveling no faster than they

 had on the maglev or the transcontinental superhighway.

 “Hal!” she said as soon as her colleague’s image appeared on the inset screen.

 “What do you mean, you’ve closed the file? The tape is proof of Rappaccini’s

 involvement.”

 “He’s dead, Charlotte,” Hal repeated, calmly emphasizing the crucial word. “He’s

 been dead all along. I found the new identity he took up after his rejuvenation,

 with the aid of a much-changed appearance, as soon as I’d cut through the

 obfuscations in the leases pertaining to the artificial islands in the vicinity

 of Kauai. Actually, he’d established half a dozen fake identities under various

 pseudonyms, but the one he appears to have used for everyday purposes is the

 late Gustave Moreau. As Moreau, Biasiolo leased an islet west of Kauai; he’s

 been Walter Czastka’s nearest neighbor for the last forty years. He’s spent most

 of the last quarter century on the islet, never leaving it for more than three

 or four weeks at a time. According to the official records, he was alone there,

 but we now presume that he was taking advantage of the quarantine gifted to all

 Creationists in order to bring up his mother’s clone. All of this was carefully

 obscured, of course, but it was just a matter of digging down. We’ve touched

 bottom now—everything’s in place except the location and arrest of the woman.”

 “The late Gustave Moreau,” Charlotte repeated, glancing sideways at Oscar Wilde.

 It had been Wilde, she remembered, who had said that the Moreau name was just

 part of a series of jokes, not worth taking seriously—but that was before they

 had seen the “play” whose stage set was based on a painting by the original

 Gustave Moreau. Was it possible, she wondered, that Biasiolo/Rappaccini/Moreau

 had gone out of his way to involve Wilde in this comedy simply because he, like

 Wilde, had taken the name of a nineteenth-century artist fascinated by the

 legend of Salome?

 “That’s right,” Hal replied patiently. “Gustave Moreau, alias Rappaccini, alias

 Jafri Biasiolo, died six weeks ago in Honolulu. The precise details of his

 conception might be lost in the mists of obscurity, but every detail of his

 death was scrupulously recorded before the body was released. According to the

 boatmaster who handled Moreau’s supplies, the corpse was shipped back to the

 islet—where the mysterious foster daughter presumably took delivery of it.

 There’s no doubt that the dead man was Biasiolo; I’d have found the DNA match if

 I’d only thought to check Biasiolo’s record against the register of the dead as

 well as the living. It was the same error of omission I initially made with the

 woman’s DNA, delaying her identification as an Inacio clone.”

 “The comcon links to Moreau’s island haven’t been closed down, but there’s no

 one answering at present. The boatmaster says that he’s been shipping equipment

 and bales of collapsed LSP from the islet to Kauai for over a year, every time

 he’s made a supply drop. According to him, there’s virtually nothing left on the

 islet except for the ecosystem which Moreau built—and, presumably, his grave.

 The UN will send a team in to examine and record the ecosystem. Under normal

 circumstances it would probably take three months or so to put the people

 together and another three before they finished the job, but in view of the

 biohazard aspect of the case I’ve put Regina Chai in charge and I’ve asked her

 to make all possible speed. She and her team will be there before the end of the

 week.”

 “But Biasiolo’s still responsible for all this, isn’t he?” Charlotte protested,

 again glancing sideways at Oscar Wilde. Wilde was staring upward with an

 expression of annoyance on his face which strongly implied that he was mentally

 kicking himself for failing to deduce that it was Rappaccini’s death which had

 determined the timing of this remarkable posthumous crime. “He must have set it

 all up before he died. The woman is obviously implicated, but what we just saw

 in that cellar must have been put in place years ago—and it must have taken

 years to build up, if what you say about Biasiolo never leaving the islet for

 more than a month at a time is true.”

 “Agreed,” said Hal. “But we can’t charge a dead man. She’s the one we want—the

 one we need. The evening news broke the full story of the sequence of

 murders—the story so far, at any rate. I don’t know how much the MegaMall will

 hold back, but now that they know for sure that this isn’t aimed at them,

 however obliquely, I suspect they’ll just sit back and enjoy the show along with

 everybody else. The news tapes haven’t identified the killer, of course, but

 they know what’s going on. By now there’ll be a whole swarm of hoverflies

 heading for Kauai and Biasiolo’s island.”

 Charlotte turned to look at Michael Lowenthal, who did indeed have the air of a

 man who had decided to sit back, even if the remainder of the show afforded him

 little enjoyment. His face was a picture of misery—presumably because even he

 had now been forced to accept that Walter Czastka was not the guilty party.

 Given that the assassination of Gabriel King had not been aimed at the MegaMall

 he must now be regretting that he had ever become involved in the investigation

 at all.

 “You haven’t picked her up yet,” Charlotte said, slowly realizing that it wasn’t

 over yet. “You don’t even know where she is.”

 “We think we know where she’s going,” Hal replied. “She’s headed for Walter

 Czastka’s island.”

 “Not directly!” Charlotte said, her voice suddenly insistent. “Look at the tape,

 Hal! There’s a fifth intended victim—one she’s set out to hit before she gets to

 Czastka. His face is on the tape!”

 “If the tape has any significance,” Hal replied with reflexive skepticism. “It

 looks to me like a shoddy version of the dance of the seven veils!” He obviously

 had it set up on one of his screens, and he was playing it through.

 Charlotte didn’t bother to congratulate him on his perspicacity. “Fast-forward

 to the severed head!” she said urgently. “Track the changes!”

 “I don’t think he’ll be able to reach her before we do,” Oscar Wilde said

 softly. “As slow as this glorified giant hoverfly is, I suspect that we’ve been

 given the fastest available track to the climax of the psychodrama. That’s the

 way it’s been planned, at any rate. Whoever the fifth man is, he’s probably

 already dead—perhaps for some time. I understand now why the simulacrum said

 that we might have difficulty identifying the true name among the false, for

 reasons which I would understand. He must have thought of Moreau as his true

 name, by then—but he knew that the coincidence would make me assume that it was

 a mere pseudonym. There must be more hints hidden in the tape. I must talk to

 Walter again, if I can only get through.”

 “The fifth face is Stuart McCandless,” said Hal suddenly. “We already had him in

 the frame as a possible victim. We’ve spoken to him once and shown him pictures

 of the woman, so he’s been warned already. I’m trying to get through to him

 again now—his house AI says that he’s out walking. It’s sent out a summoner. Oh,

 and your plane’s heading is a few degrees south of due west—dead on course for

 Kauai.”

 This, at least, was one datum of which Charlotte was already aware; the blood

 red sun was slipping inexorably toward the horizon almost dead ahead of them,

 and its last rays would soon be teasing the surface of the ocean.

 “I’ll try to get through to McCandless again,” Hal said. “I’ll alert the local

 police as well—and I’ll picture-search everyone who’s arrived on the island

 since our busy murderess left San Francisco.”

 Charlotte’s fingers were still resting on the rim of the keyboard, claiming it

 for her own, but Oscar Wilde put his hand on top of hers, gently insistent “I

 have to call Walter,” he said. “Hal will take care of McCandless.”

 Charlotte let Wilde take control of the comcon, although she felt,

 uncomfortably, that she should not be allowing her authority to slip away so

 easily. She, after all, was still the investigating officer. Oscar Wilde was

 only a witness. She no longer thought he was a murderer, but that didn’t affect

 the fact that he was the one who should only be along for the ride, if he had

 any entitlement to be here at all.

 Wilde’s call was fielded by a sim, which looked considerably healthier than the

 real Walter Czastka.

 “This is Oscar Wilde,” said the geneticist. “I need to talk to Walter. It’s

 extremely urgent.”

 “I’m not taking any calls at present,” said the simulacrum flatly.

 “Don’t be ridiculous, Walter,” said Wilde impatiently. “I know you’re listening

 in. I know that the police have told you exactly what’s going on, even if you

 haven’t had the courtesy to acknowledge it. This is no time to go into a sulk.

 We have to talk.”

 The sim flickered, and its image was replaced by Czastka’s actual face. “What do

 you want, Oscar?” he said, his voice taut with aggravation. “This is nothing to

 do with you.”

 “I’m afraid that you’re a player in this game whether you like it or not,

 Walter,” Wilde said soothingly. “I know it’s a nuisance, but we really do have

 to try to figure out why your natural son and next-door neighbor intends to kill

 you.”

 “I’m not in any danger and I don’t need protection,” said Walter in a monotone

 that was as replete with stubbornness as it was with weariness. “There’s no one

 else on the island, and no one has been here. No one can land here without the

 house systems knowing about it. I can seal all the doors and windows if I need

 to. I’m perfectly safe and I don’t need any assistance. I never heard of anyone

 called Jafri Biasiolo and I never had the slightest suspicion that I had

 fathered a child, let alone the lunatic on the next island over. I can’t think

 of any reason why he or anyone else should want to murder me.” It sounded to

 Charlotte like a rehearsed speech—one that he had probably recited more than

 once to the UN police. It also sounded to Charlotte like a pack of lies: a

 refusal to cooperate, or even to acknowledge the problem, whose pigheadedness

 would not have been out of place in the fake personality of a low-grade sloth.

 “I don’t think Rappaccini’s motive is conventional, Walter,” said Wilde, “but

 the six intended victims of his murderous sequence certainly weren’t chosen at

 random. There must be some kind of connection linking you to King, Urashima,

 Kwiatek, Teidemann, and McCandless, and it must be something that happened when

 you were all at Wollongong. It must have to do with the circumstances in which

 you fathered a child with Maria Inacio.”

 Charlotte noted that Walter Czastka looked astonishingly pale. His eyes were

 unblinking, his features set firm.

 “As I told your friends, Oscar,” Czastka said in a voice devoid of all emotion,

 “I don’t remember. Nobody remembers what they were doing a hundred and seventy

 years ago. Nobody. I have no memory of ever having met Maria Inacio. None.”

 Lies, thought Charlotte. He knows everything—but he’s determined not to let us

 in on the secret. It won’t work. Everything will come out, and everyone will

 know. Now that Rappaccini has recruited the vidveg as well as Wilde, everyone

 will be interested. That’s what Rappaccini intended.

 “I’m not sure that I can believe that, Walter,” said Wilde, treading very softly

 indeed. “We forget almost everything, but we can always remember the things

 which matter most, if we try hard enough. This is something which matters,

 Walter. It matters now, and it mattered then. Are you certain that you don’t

 know the woman whose picture they showed you—the Inacio clone? The others all

 seemed to know her—perhaps you’ve met her too? She seems to have been born and

 raised on the island next to yours—perhaps you met her in Kauai.”

 “I can’t.” The word was delivered with such sudden bitterness and flaring

 anguish that Charlotte flinched.

 Wilde didn’t react to the unexpected outburst. “What about you and Gustave

 Moreau, Walter?” he asked soothingly. “You obviously didn’t know that Moreau was

 Rappaccini, let alone that he was your son, but how did you get on with him as a

 neighbor? Was there some special hostility between you? Why did you describe him

 as a lunatic just now?”

 “I’ve hardly ever seen Moreau,” said Czastka, his annoyance almost incandescent.

 “His island may be nearer to mine than any other, but it’s still way over the

 horizon. I may have bumped into him on Kauai a couple of times, but I never said

 more than half a dozen words to him. He has a reputation for eccentricity among

 the islanders, but so does every Creationist. I shouldn’t have echoed the

 opinion of the ignorant by calling him a lunatic just because I’ve got sick of

 hearing the jokes—you’d probably appreciate the humor in them, but I never have.

 The Island of Dr. Moreau—get it? You’ve probably even read the damn thing. We

 all keep ourselves to ourselves out here—surely you understand that. All I want

 to do is to keep myself to myself. Do you get the message, Oscar? I don’t want

 protection from the UN police and I certainly don’t want you interfering in my

 business. I just want to be left alone.”

 There was a brief silence while Oscar Wilde paused for thought.

 “Do you want to die, Walter?” he asked finally. It was not an aggressive

 question, and the inflection suggested that it was not rhetorical.

 “No,” said Czastka sourly. “I want to live forever, like you. I want to be young

 again, like you. But if I do die, I don’t want flowers by Rappaccini at my

 funeral, and I don’t want anything of yours. If I do die, I want all the flowers

 to be mine. Is that clear?”

 “Given that he must have known for a long time what you never did—that he was

 your biological son—why should Rappaccini have hated you?” Wilde asked, trying

 as hard as he could to make the question seem innocuous, although it was

 obviously anything but.

 “I don’t know,” Walter Czastka said resentfully. “I don’t hate anyone. It’s not

 in my nature to hate. It’s not supposed to be in anyone’s nature anymore, is it?

 Didn’t we leave the era of hatred behind after the Crash, when Conrad Helier and

 PicoCon saved the world with the New Reproductive System and dirt-cheap

 longevity? We don’t hate one another anymore because we don’t expect other

 people to love us, and we don’t feel slighted when they don’t. This is the Era

 of Courtesy, the Era of Common Sense, when all emotion is mere histrionic

 display. I was born a little too early to adapt myself fully to its

 requirements, but you and Rappaccini always seemed to me to have mastered the

 art completely. I don’t even hate you, Oscar. I don’t hate you, I don’t hate

 Rappaccini, I don’t hate Gustave Moreau, and I certainly don’t expect any of you

 to hate me. You don’t hate me, do you, Oscar? You might despise me, but you

 don’t hate me. You wouldn’t want to kill me—why should you take the trouble,

 when you think I’m hardly alive to begin with? Why should anyone take the

 trouble?”

 The heat of Czastka’s bitterness had faded while he spoke, its near

 incandescence cooling into ashen SAP black, but Charlotte couldn’t begin to

 figure out why the Creationist had felt the need to say all that.

 “I think we’re on our way to see you, Walter,” said Oscar Wilde placidly. “I

 don’t know how long it will take us to get there—quite some time, I expect,

 given the stately progress we’re making at present. I hope everything will be

 all right when we get there. We can talk then.”

 “Damn you, Oscar Wilde,” said the old man. “I don’t want you on my island. You

 stay away, do you hear? I don’t want to talk to you. I’ve said everything I have

 to say. You stay away from me. Stay away!” He broke the connection without

 waiting for any response.

 Oscar turned sideways to look at Charlotte. His face looked slightly sinister in

 the dim light of the helicopter’s cabin.

 “He knows,” he said. “He may not understand exactly why Rappaccini wants to kill

 him, but he knows what’s behind it. The strange thing is that although he

 doesn’t care at all about the possibility of being murdered, there’s still

 something he does care about. I think I understand, now, what Rappaccini has

 done, and maybe even why he’s done it—but only in broad terms. There’s still a

 devil somewhere in the detail. Maybe if I can talk to McCandless. He lives on

 Kauai; he must know Walter and Rappaccini, alias Moreau. He may even have made

 up some of the jokes that Walter found so strangely objectionable—after all,

 there can’t be many people on Kauai familiar with the work of H. G. Wells.”

 “Why don’t you let me do this one?” Charlotte asked as politely as she could. “I

 am supposed to be the detective, after all.”

 Wilde’s answering smile was very faint. The cabin lights had come up

 automatically as darkness had fallen, but they seemed somewhat lacking in power,

 like the plane itself.

 “Please do,” he said as infuriatingly as ever. Despite what Walter Czastka had

 said about the Era of Courtesy and the obsolescence of hatred, it wasn’t too

 difficult for Charlotte to imagine that a man like Oscar Wilde might be hated—or

 that a man like Oscar Wilde might be capable of hate.

 It didn’t take as long as Charlotte had expected to get through to the

 ex-vice-chancellor. Hal had obviously been at his most brisk and businesslike.

 As she had also expected, Stuart McCandless was not answering his phone in

 person, but this time there was no need for begging or blustering. She simply

 fed his sim her authority codes and it summoned him to the comcon without delay.

 “Yes?” he said, his dark face peering at her with slightly peevish surprise. He

 would be able to see that she was in a vehicle of some kind, but he wouldn’t

 necessarily be able to identify it as a plane. “I’m still going through the data

 you people dumped into my system, although I’m sure that it’s quite unnecessary.

 It’s going to take some time to look at it all. I promised that I’d get back to

 you as soon as I could—this isn’t helping.”

 “I’m Sergeant Charlotte Holmes, UN police, Professor McCandless,” she said. “I’m

 in an airplane which has apparently been programmed by Gustave Moreau, alias

 Rappaccini. He seems intent on providing my companion, Oscar Wilde, with a good

 seat from which to observe this unfolding melodrama. We’re heading out into the

 ocean from the American coast. We don’t know what destination has been filed,

 but we may well be heading your way, and I’m afraid that the killer might get

 there ahead of us. Have you ever met Moreau?”

 “Once or twice. I know very little about him, except for the jokes that people

 tell. To the best of my knowledge, I’ve never seen his alleged foster daughter

 on Kauai, and I certainly can’t imagine that he or she could have anything

 against me.” McCandless’s voice was by no means as bitter as Walter Czastka’s,

 but he did seem petulantly resentful. He plainly did not believe that anyone

 might be trying to kill him, in spite of the fact that the only thing the four

 known victims had in common was an item of biography that he shared.

 “Have you remembered anything about your time at Wollongong that might link you

 to the four dead men and Walter Czastka?” Charlotte demanded, desperate to get

 something from the interview to justify the fact that she had placed the call in

 Wilde’s stead. “Anything at all?”

 McCandless shook his head reflexively but vigorously. “I’ve already answered

 these questions,” he said irritably. “I’ve tried—”

 “But you’ve looked at the tapes of the girl who visited Gabriel King and Michi

 Urashima, haven’t you? Are you certain that you’d be able to recognize her if

 she altered her disguise yet again?”

 “I’d be able to study your tapes more closely if you’d allow me time to do it,

 Sergeant Holmes,” McCandless snapped back. “I’m looking at them now, but quite

 frankly, in these days of ever-changing appearances it’s almost impossible to

 recognize anyone except people one knows intimately. I don’t know whether the

 person in those pictures is twenty years old or a hundred. I’ve had dozens of

 students who were similar enough to be able to duplicate her appearance with a

 little effort—perhaps hundreds. I’ve a guest here with me now who would only

 need a little elementary remodeling to resemble any one of a hundred people I

 see on TV every day—and your suspect could do exactly the same.”

 For the second time within a quarter of an hour Charlotte felt Oscar Wilde’s

 hand fall upon hers, exercising significant pressure. This time it was quite

 unnecessary. The moment the meaning of McCandless’s words had become clear she

 had felt a veritable chill in her blood. She was already trying to work out how

 best to phrase the next statement in such a way as not to seem crazy.

 “How well do you know this visitor, Professor McCandless?” she asked, astonished

 by the evenness of her tone.

 “Oh, there’s not the slightest need to worry,” McCandless replied airily. “I’ve

 known her for years. Her name is Julia Herold. I’ve just told your colleague in

 New York all about her—I’m sure he’s checking her out, and equally sure that

 he’ll find everything in perfect order.”

 “Could you ask her to come to the phone?” asked Charlotte. She looked sideways

 at Oscar Wilde, certain that he would share the agony of her helplessness. Even

 Michael Lowenthal was paying attention again, leaning avidly between the seats

 so that he could see the image on the screen.

 “Yes, of course—she’s here now,” McCandless replied. He turned away, saying,

 “Julia?” Moments later he moved aside, surrendering his place in front of the

 camera to a young woman, apparently in her early twenties. The young woman

 stared into the camera with beguiling frankness. As McCandless had said, she

 could have altered her face, with the aid of subtle cosmetic resculpturing, to

 duplicate the features of any of a hundred female newscasters and show hosts.

 She could also be the woman Charlotte had seen in the tapes—but there was no

 single point of absolute similarity, and nothing that would have tipped off a

 superficial scan search. Her abundant hair was golden red and very carefully

 sculptured; it could easily have been a wig. Her eyes were a vivid green, but

 the color could easily have been a bimolecular overlay. Charlotte knew that Hal

 must be moving heaven and earth in the hope of finding one point of absolute

 proof that he could take back to the smug idiot who could not comprehend what

 danger he was in—but she knew too that Hal must know that he was already too

 late to save McCandless. The local police must be on their way to the house, but

 Charlotte had no idea how long it would take them to arrive, and there was no

 way to protect McCandless from infection.

 “I’m sorry to disturb you, Miss Herold,” said Charlotte slowly. “As you

 presumably know, we’re investigating a series of rather bizarre murders, and

 it’s very difficult to determine what information may be relevant.”

 “I understand,” said the woman calmly. She seemed utterly unperturbed by the

 situation, and Charlotte couldn’t help remembering Wilde’s suggestion that she

 might not have the slightest idea of the effect that her kisses were having on

 her victims.

 Charlotte felt a strange pricking sensation at the back of her neck. It’s her,

 she thought. I’m actually talking to the killer—so what on earth do I say? She

 remembered, uncomfortably, how she had felt very nearly the same about Oscar

 Wilde, in eerily similar circumstances.

 “Have you seen the news this evening?” Charlotte asked.

 “Yes, I have,” Julia Herold replied. “But as I told your colleague, I never met

 Gabriel King or Michi Urashima, and I’ve never been to New York or San

 Francisco, let alone Italy or central Africa.”

 She’s playing with us, Charlotte thought. She’s deliberately tantalizing us. She

 has McCandless in the palm of her hand and there’s no way we can save him—but

 she’ll never get away with it. Not this time. She can’t make another move

 without our knowing about it.

 “May I talk to Dr. McCandless again?” she asked dully.

 They switched places again. Charlotte wanted to say, “Whatever you do, don’t

 kiss her!” but she knew how very stupid it would sound.

 “Professor McCandless,” she said uncomfortably, “we think that something might

 have happened when you were a student yourself. Something that links you,

 however tenuously, with Gabriel King, Michi Urashima, Paul Kwiatek, Magnus

 Teidemann, and Walter Czastka. We need to know what it was. We understand how

 difficult it is to remember, but…”

 “I didn’t know them all,” McCandless said, controlling his irritation. “I’ve set

 a silver to check back through my own records, trying to turn something up. I’ve

 always kept good records—if there’s anything at all, it will be there. I hardly

 know Walter, even though he lives less than a couple of hundred kilometers away

 across the water. He keeps himself to himself, as Moreau does. The others I know

 only by repute. I didn’t even remember that I was contemporary with Urashima or

 Teidemann until your people jogged my memory. There were thousands of students

 at the university, even then. We didn’t even graduate in the same year—I’ve

 established that much. We were never, together, unless…”

 “Unless what, Dr. McCandless?” said Charlotte quickly.

 The dark brow was furrowed and the eyes were glazed as the man reached for some

 fleeting, fugitive memory. “There was a time with Walter… at the beach…” Then,

 instantly, the face became hard and stern again. “No,” he said firmly. “I really

 can’t remember anything solid. If you want my help, you must let me go back to

 the documents—but I’m certain that it’s just a coincidence that I was at

 Wollongong at the same time as the men who’ve been murdered.”

 Charlotte saw a slender hand descend reassuringly upon Stuart McCandless’s

 shoulder, and she saw him take it in his own, thankfully. She knew that there

 was no point in asking what it was that he had half remembered. He couldn’t

 believe that it was important, and he couldn’t remember exactly what had taken

 place. He was shutting her out.

 It’s happening now, she thought, before our very eyes. She’s going to kill him

 within the next few minutes, if she hasn’t already. And we can’t do a thing to

 stop her—but we can surely stop her before she gets to Walter Czastka. This is

 the last.

 “Professor McCandless,” she said. “I have reason to believe that you’re in

 mortal danger. I have to advise you to isolate yourself completely—and I mean

 completely. Please send Miss Herold away—and do it now. Whatever you believe or

 don’t believe, I beg you not to have any further physical contact with her. I

 have no doubt at all that your life is at stake.”

 “Oh, don’t be so stupid,” McCandless retorted testily. “I know how the mind of a

 policeman works, but I have a far better understanding of my present situation

 than you do, Sergeant Holmes. I can give you my absolute assurance that I’m in

 no danger whatsoever. Now, please may I get on with the work which your

 colleague asked me to do?”

 “Yes,” she said numbly. “I’m sorry.” She let him break the connection; she

 didn’t feel that she could do it herself She found the futility of her attempted

 intervention appalling.

 When the screen went blank, Charlotte turned to Oscar Wilde and said: “He’s

 already dead, isn’t he? He doesn’t know it yet, but he’s infected. Nothing we

 could have done would have stopped it.”

 “The seeds may well be taking root in his flesh as we speak,” Wilde agreed. “If

 Julia Herold is the Inacio clone—and I say if, because it is still conceivable

 that she is not, although neither of us dares to believe it—then Professor

 McCandless had secured his own doom before you or Hal Watson had any reason to

 contact him.”

 “What was it that he started to say, I wonder?” she whispered. “Why did he stop

 and blank it out?”

 “Something that came to mind in spite of his resistance,” Wilde said. “Something

 he didn’t really want to remember. Something, perhaps, that Walter remembers

 too, if only he dared admit it…”

 “ ‘There was a time with Walter at the beach,’ ” Michael Lowenthal quoted

 speculatively. “Assuming that he didn’t mean a tree, he must have been referring

 to something that happened at a beach. Maybe that’s where Czastka met Maria

 Inacio—maybe it’s where they all met Maria Inacio. A party, do you think? Six

 drunken students, who hardly knew one another…?”

 “That might make sense,” Oscar Wilde conceded thoughtfully. “If Rappaccini had

 reason to think that any one of them might have been his biological father, and

 that Walter was merely the unlucky one…”

 Charlotte felt that duty required more urgent action from her than joining in

 with speculative games. She called Hal. “Julia Herold,” she said shortly. “Have

 you tied her in with Moreau yet? She has to be the killer.”

 “I’ve no proof yet,” Hal replied impatiently. “The records say that she’s a

 student at the University of Hawaii. She lives on Kauai. Although McCandless is

 retired from administration, he still does research—he’s a historian,

 specializing in the twenty-second century. That’s Herold’s main area of interest

 too. According to the official record, Herold’s been on Kauai all along—but I’m

 double-checking everything, and there’s a distinct possibility that the woman is

 a masquerader, not really Herold at all. If there’s disinformation in there, the

 seams will come apart in a matter of minutes, but it’ll be too late to save

 McCandless.”

 “She’s the one,” said Charlotte. “Whatever the superficial data flow says, she’s

 been halfway around the world in the last few days, killing people all the way.

 It’s all in place, Hal—everything except the reason. You’ve got to stop her from

 leaving the island. Whatever else happens, you mustn’t let her get to Czastka.”

 “I’ve already taken care of that,” said Hal. “Even if she’s exactly who she says

 she is, she’s going nowhere tonight. Every exit is blocked, right down to the

 last rowboat—I can assure you of that.”

 “Who’s Julia Herold’s father?” Oscar Wilde put in. “Whose child is she supposed

 to be?”

 “Both egg and sperm were taken from the banks, according to the records,” said

 Hal. “Both donors are long dead. I can give you a list of the coparents who

 filed the application to foster, if you like—there are six names on the form. I

 haven’t had time to talk to any of them, but I’m still checking to make sure

 that their Julia Herold and the woman with McCandless are the same. It might all

 be irrelevant.”

 “Who are the biological parents supposed to have been?”

 “The sperm was logged in the name of Lothar Kjeldsen, born 2225, died 2317. The

 ovum is annotated ‘Deposited c.2100, Mother Unregistered.’ That’s not

 surprising—when the sterility plague hit hard, scientists were stripping healthy

 ova from every uninfected womb they could locate, including embryos. No

 duplicate pairing registered, no other posthumous offspring registered to either

 parent. Nothing significant.”

 “You’re right,” Wilde conceded readily. “If the killer is merely masquerading as

 Julia Herold for the sake of temporary convenience, we should return our

 attention to her origins. If my memory serves me right, Dr. Chai’s original

 report concerning the DNA traces recovered from Gabriel King’s apartment implied

 that the evidence of somatic engineering was unusual—idiosyncratic was the word

 she used, I think.”

 “Regina was being typically cautious,” Hal said. “DNA traces recovered from

 crime scenes always show some effects of somatic engineering, but it’s usually

 straightforwardly cosmetic. The Inacio clone has had orthodox cosmetic

 treatment, but that’s by no means all. After due consideration, Regina now

 thinks that the engineering was more fundamental than somatic tinkering. She

 also says that no matter how unlikely it sounds, the differences obscuring the

 Biasiolo/Czastka consanguinity almost certainly resulted from embryonic

 engineering, not from subsequent somatic modification.”

 “That was something that bothered me before,” Wilde said. “I couldn’t believe

 that there’d been any considerable somatic modification to a child born in

 2323—but the alternative is even more astonishing. How did Maria Inacio die?”

 “She drowned, in Honolulu. The records say that it was presumed accidental,

 which means that whoever conducted the inquest thought there was a possibility

 that it was suicide. I’m not sure where this is taking us, Dr. Wilde, and I have

 whole panels lighting up on me here—I’ll have to cut you off.”

 The screen immediately went blank yet again.

 “In the story, Rappaccini’s daughter was raised among poisons,” Wilde murmured.

 “She acquired her immunities—but we do things differently nowadays. Rappaccini

 worked on her embryo to provide her immunities, whatever they are. If he’d

 duplicated a Zaman transformation, Regina Chai would have spotted the rip-off,

 but if it was his own variation on the theme, inspired by a different basal

 template if not actually developed from it…”

 “It won’t help her when we catch her,” Charlotte put in ominously. “And we will

 catch her—she can’t get away from Kauai. With Biasiolo dead, she’ll have to

 stand alone in court. Even if she pleads insanity, she’s likely to go into the

 freezer for a very long time. Even the most rabid antisusanists are unlikely to

 rally to her defense. At the end of the day, there are some people who simply

 can’t be allowed to pollute the world the rest of us live in. If Biasiolo did

 build the corruption into her genes, that makes her all the more dangerous.”

 “That’s the weakest point of the whole argument,” Wilde said. “Rappaccini would

 never have let this happen if he thought that his mother-daughter would have to

 bear the full weight of the law’s vengeance. And you’re wrong about her not

 being able to get away from Kauai. She will get to Walter. I don’t know how, but

 she will—even if she has to swim.“

 The “condolence card” among the flowers that had been found in Paul Kwiatek’s

 apartment read:

 Cette vie est un h’opital ou chaque malade est poss’ede du desir de changer de

 lit. Cette d’voudrait souffir en face du poek, et celm-la croit qu’il querirait

 a cote de la fenetre.

 “This life is a hospital,” Oscar Wilde translated, squinting slightly at the

 words displayed on the screen, “where each sick man is possessed by the desire

 to change his bed. This one yearns to suffer by the stove, that one believes

 that he would get better by the window.”

 “What’s that supposed to mean?” Charlotte demanded. Hal Watson’s computers had

 already identified the text as the opening passage of a prose poem by Baudelaire

 entitled—in English—“Anywhere out of the World.”

 “It means,” said Wilde, “that everyone in the world is ill at ease, or believes

 himself to be misfortunate. It means that no man can help thinking that if only

 he were in someone else’s situation, he would feel much better. If I remember

 correctly, the piece extends as a hypothetical dialogue between the poet and his

 uncommunicative soul, in which the poet interrogates his inner being as to

 where, exactly, he might find his own fulfillment. The soul replies, at long

 last, with the words which supply the poem with its title.”

 Charlotte scrolled down a little way. “It says here,” she remarked, “that the

 title was taken from the works of Edgar Allan Poe, which Charles Baudelaire had

 translated into French.”

 “What exceedingly dutiful programs your colleague has!” said Wilde

 sarcastically. “Does it, perhaps, also observe that ‘Anywhere out of the World’

 was Jean Des Esseintes’s favorite among Baudelaire’s prose poems?”

 “No,” she said. “But I can get a readout on this Jean Des Esseintes if it would

 help.”

 “It wouldn’t,” Oscar assured her.

 “Look,” said Charlotte, carefully letting her annoyance show. “Does all of this

 stuff mean something, or not? Because if it doesn’t, I think I’d like to get

 some sleep. We’re still a long way from Hawaii, but it’s midsummer and dawn will

 probably break before we get to Czastka’s island—and I really don’t see the

 point in waiting up for news of Stuart McCandless. The fool wouldn’t listen…”

 “So fate will doubtless take its course,” Wilde finished for her. “And yes, all

 of this means something, if only to Rappaccini. Whether it will help us to

 discover what it means is a different matter. If your interest is confined to

 the possibility of interrupting the unfolding tragedy before it reaches its end,

 and the probability of making an arrest, I fear that any tentative explanation I

 can offer will seem irrelevant.”

 Charlotte felt that she was being subtly insulted, or at least cunningly

 challenged. Despite the fact that she had done little for the last thirty-six

 hours but sit in vehicles, she felt physically exhausted and direly in need of

 rest. On the other hand, she hated to think that Wilde might be treating her

 with thinly veiled contempt.

 “If you have any kind of explanation,” she said, “I really would be glad to hear

 it.”

 “So would I,” said Michael Lowenthal. “The other one seems even weirder than

 that one, even though it’s in English.” He meant the legend on the condolence

 card found in Magnus Teidemann’s tent—which they had inspected first, because it

 had been in English.

 Oscar Wilde nodded, with a faint smile which somehow contrived to suggest that

 he had intended both of them to reply in exactly that fashion.

 “As the UN’s dutiful silver observed,” Wilde said, “the card left with

 Teidemann’s body carried lines abstracted from a poem called ‘Adianasia,’ which

 is one of my namesake’s finest. The poem as a whole speaks—symbolically, of

 course—of the discovery of a seed closed ‘in the wasted hollow’ of the hand of a

 mummy exhumed from an Egyptian pyramid. The seed, when sown, produces ‘a

 wondrous snow of starry blossoms’ which outshines all other flowers in the eyes

 of the insects and the birds. Unlike ourselves, who ‘live beneath Time’s wasting

 sovereignty’ the miraculous plant is ‘a child of eternity.’

 “I think we must look for that text’s significance in terms of a series of

 inversions. Rappaccini’s flowers are, of course, more often black than white,

 and their function is to emphasize that the wasting sovereignty of time still

 extends over those who once hoped to find themselves ranked among the first

 fragile children of eternity. When the victims of this crime were born, you see,

 the great majority of people were only just awakening to the fact that the

 nanotech escalator had stalled: that serial rejuvenation could not and would not

 preserve human life forever, and that the extra years bought by any future suite

 were extremely unlikely to carry its users into an era when further extensions

 would be routinely available. By the time that Rappaccini was born, it was

 virtually taken for granted that the quest for human emortality would have to

 make a new beginning. It was necessary to go back to the drawing board, in more

 ways than one.”

 “We don’t know for sure, as yet, that the Zaman transformation will be any more

 effective in beating the Miller effect than core-tissue rejuve,” Michael

 Lowenthal modestly pointed out. “We hope—”

 “That’s precisely my point,” said Oscar Wilde. “You hope. The generations of the

 twenty-second and twenty-third centuries hoped. Even men born at the very dawn

 of the twenty-fourth, in 2301, still hoped, although they became aware

 eventually that their hopes had been ill-founded because their nanotech idols

 couldn’t beat the Miller effect. Rappaccini and I, on the other hand, belonged

 to generations whose members knew from the beginning—as the men of the

 nineteenth and twentieth centuries had known—that eventual extinction of the

 personality was inevitable. We grew up knowing that our own makers, and their

 makers before them, had made a mistake. They had contentedly put all their eggs

 into the basket of nanotechnology, trusting that even if the escalator effect

 did not carry them all the way to true emortality it would surely carry their

 children. That unwarranted trust, Michael, could easily be seen as a kind of

 betrayal. I have forgiven my own foster parents, although I think that Charlotte

 may one day find it a great deal more difficult to forgive hers—and however

 paradoxical it may sound, it may be that Jafri Biasiolo might have found it even

 more difficult to forgive the still-mysterious circumstances of his own

 conception.”

 “That’s nonsense,” said Lowenthal sharply. “Even if Maria Inacio was raped by

 Walter Czastka and five others—”

 “Actually,” Wilde interrupted him, “I prefer your earlier hypothesis to the

 gang-rape scenario—the one you formed when you still presumed that Biasiolo had

 been conceived in the orthodox manner, and were thinking in terms of dares,

 challenges, and initiations to student secret societies. Until we have better

 reason to do so, however, I think we should resist the temptation to jump to

 conclusions which are nasty or silly. I can assure you that what I have said is

 not nonsense. There was a point in history when it was abruptly realized that

 our whole approach to the problem of emortality had been seriously misled, and

 that the commercial monopoly established by the men who had begun to think of

 themselves as the Gods of Olympus had cost us dear. Professor McCandless, if he

 is still alive, would doubtless be able to tell you that the Ahasuerus

 Foundation continued to plough a lone furrow throughout the era of PicoCon’s

 economic dominance, refusing to admit that nanotechnological techniques of

 rejuvenation were ever anything more than superficial. If others had followed

 the example of their funding policies, the Zaman transformation—or something

 very like it—might have been available at least a century before your

 conception.”

 “A hundred and thirty-four years ago,” Charlotte murmured. Oscar Wilde ignored

 her.

 “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.

 “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.

 Intermission Five

 A Failed God and His Creation

 « ^ »

 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.

 Walter remembered the Great Exhibition held in Sydney in 2405, when he had seen

 the work exhibited by Oscar Wilde and Rappaccini and said to himself: These idle

 egotists can only play; they have not the capacity for real work. They are

 vulgar showmen whose only real talent is for attracting attention. Even their

 names are jokes. They are the froth on the great tide of biotechnics, whose

 gleam and glitter will adorn the moment while the real power of the surge will

 come from honest, clear-sighted laborers like myself. I am the one who has the

 intelligence and the foresight to play the game of God as it was meant to be

 played.

 In the ninety years that had passed since the days of the Great Exhibition,

 Walter had gradually come to understand the frailty of that hope. Here, on his

 Pacific atoll, he was the unchallenged lord of all he surveyed, with none to

 stay his hand or resist his edict, and yet…

 He had set out to build a Garden of Eden, but the Tree of Knowledge was not

 here, nor even the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. When he was

 dead—which would presumably be fairly soon, whether or not Gustave Moreau’s

 murderous scheme could be interrupted—people would be able to visit his island,

 and say: “Yes, this is Walter’s work.”

 If they were generous of spirit, they might say: “Look at the sense of order,

 the cleanness of line, the careful simplicity. No wild extravagance for Walter,

 no illusions. Method, neatness, economy—those were always Walter’s watchwords.”

 And if they were not so generous?

 “Dull, dull, dull.”

 In the quiet arena of his mind, Walter could almost hear the voices which would

 deliver that deadly verdict. Oscar Wilde would state it much more elaborately,

 of course, while waving his pale left hand in a dismissive arc. Few people would

 pay any attention to Oscar—people never did pay attention to mere

 caricatures—and no one would ever believe for a second that he, dear Walter,

 would care a fig what Oscar Wilde might think of his work, but the majority

 opinion was not the important one.

 “What do I think?” Walter asked himself, knowing that that was the real heart of

 the matter. “Now that it’s all coming out, now that it can’t be kept inside

 anymore, what do I think? What have I made of my life and my work, and how does

 it compare with what I might have made? That’s the thing that has to be

 decided.”

 It sounded so simple, but it wasn’t. There were far too many awkward questions,

 and far too little time to hunt for the answers he should have found a hundred

 and seventy years before.

 The hour of Rappaccini’s judgment—the judgment of the reckless father by the

 resentful son—was at hand. Whether he were here or elsewhere, Walter thought,

 there was nowhere left for him to run. If fools like Oscar Wilde were not so

 foolish after all, there was nowhere left where he might even stand and fight.

 Finale

 Eden Approached from the East

 « ^ »

 Charlotte woke with a start, jolted out of a fugitive dream by a sudden flash of

 light. Behind the tiny plane, in the east, the dawn was breaking; a fleeting

 sequence of reflections had diverted a ray of golden light from the tip of the

 wing to the viewport beside her head and then to the strip of chrome around the

 forward port.

 Ahead of her, in the west, the sky was still dark blue and ominous, but the

 stars were already fading into the backcloth of the day. Charlotte roused

 herself and craned her neck to look out of the viewport at her side. Beneath the

 plane, the sea was becoming visible as fugitive rays of silvery light caught the

 tops of lazy waves.

 In these latitudes, the sea was relatively unpolluted by the vast amount of

 synthetic photosynthetic substances pumped out from such artificial islands as

 those which crowded the Timor Sea. By day it was stubbornly blue, although its

 eventual conquest by the Stygian darkness of Liquid Artificial Photosynthesis

 was probably inevitable. Even now, this region of the ocean could not be thought

 of as an authentic marine wilderness; the post-Crash restocking of the waters

 had been too careful and too selective. The so-called seven seas were really a

 single vast system, which was already half-gentled by the hand of man. The

 continental engineers, despite the implications of their name, had better

 control of evolution’s womb than extinction’s rack.

 Even the wrathful volcanoes that had created the Hawaiian islands were now quite

 tame, sufficiently manipulable that they could be forced to yield upon demand

 the little virgin territories which the likes of Walter Czastka and Gustave

 Moreau had rented for their experiments in Creation.

 Charlotte felt her eyes growing heavy again; although she had slept, she still

 felt drained by the efforts and displacements of the previous day. She found,

 somewhat to her distress, that her memory of the rambling arguments which Oscar

 Wilde had laid before her was already becoming vague. She knew that she had to

 pull herself together in order to be ready for the final act of the drama, and

 she tried to do it. Reflexively, she rubbed the surface of her suitskin, her

 hand traveling from her shoulder to her thigh by way of her ribs. The smart

 fabric needed no such stimulation in order to continue its patient work of

 absorption and renewal, but the touch had some psychological utility. When she

 had stretched the muscles in her arms and legs she could imagine her internal

 technology springing back to life, priming her metabolism for the long day to

 come.

 She turned to the seat in which Oscar Wilde had placed himself when they boarded

 the plane, but it was empty. So was the seat that Michael Lowenthal had

 occupied. They had both retired to the bunks to make themselves more comfortable

 while they rested.

 She saw that her beltphone was still plugged into the aircraft’s comcon, and

 that text was parading across the screen, presumably at the command of Hal

 Watson’s fingertips.

 “Hal?” she said. I’m awake.”

 “Good morning, Sergeant,” came the prompt reply. “I was about to wake you.

 You’ve certainly taken your time about it, but you’re only twenty minutes from

 Kauai now, and your autopilot has requested a landing slot—although there’s

 nothing for you to do there.”

 Because she was slightly befuddled by sleep, it took Charlotte a second or two

 to work out what he meant by the last remark.

 “McCandless is dead!” she said finally.

 “Quite dead,” Hal replied. “The local police—who were, of course, on standby all

 night while a host of spy eyes kept watch on him—had him removed to an intensive

 care unit as soon as he showed signs of illness, but there was absolutely

 nothing to be done for him. The biotechnologists inspecting the organisms which

 killed the previous victims haven’t yet come up with the kind of general

 antidote that Wilde talked about, although they’ve promised it by noon. That

 leaves us with no chance at all of getting it out to you in time to save Walter

 Czastka, if he is indeed the next intended victim.”

 Charlotte was much quicker to see the implications of that remark.

 “They didn’t get her, did they?” she said.

 “No, they didn’t.”

 Charlotte knew that she ought at least to feign astonishment and outrage, but

 all she actually felt was a sense of bitter resignation.

 “How?” she asked dully. “How could they possibly fail to intercept her?”

 “She’d already left the house when the local police first got there,” said Hal

 dispiritedly. “That was long before McCandless began to show signs of distress.

 He told them she’d gone for a moonlight swim, and still refused to believe that

 she wasn’t exactly what she seemed to be. There were mechanical eyes set to

 follow her, of course, mounted on hoverflies and flitterbugs—but as soon as they

 entered the water they were mopped up by a shoal of electronic fish. By the time

 they were replaced by more robust entities she was beyond the scope of their

 location faculties. The flying eyes watching avidly for her to surface couldn’t

 possibly have missed her, so we must infer that she had a breathing apparatus

 secreted offshore and some kind of mechanized transport.”

 “A submarine?” said Charlotte incredulously.

 “We’d have detected anything as big as that,” said Hal. “More likely a simple

 towing device of some kind.”

 “But we know where she’s going, don’t we?” Charlotte said. “When she comes out

 of the water again on Walter Czastka’s island, we should be able to stop her

 from reaching him. In any case, he knows how dangerous she is, even if

 McCandless didn’t.”

 “He certainly knows,” Hal agreed. “The thing is—does he care? I can’t get a peep

 out of him. His sim is stonewalling all communications. If he knows why she’s

 after him, he certainly isn’t going to tell us—and I’ve trawled every remaining

 record relating to Maria Inacio, however obliquely. There’s no clue as to what

 might have happened to her. She probably never said a word to anyone—except, we

 must presume, Jafri Biasiolo. The Kauai police have dispatched four helicopters

 to wait for her, but Czastka’s sim has forbidden them permission to land.

 They’re prepared to remain airborne until they actually catch sight of her—at

 which point his permission becomes irrelevant, because they’ll be pursuing a

 fugitive.”

 “What about me?” Charlotte asked urgently. “Can I get there in time?”

 “Who can tell? There’ll be a helicopter ready for you and Lowenthal when you

 land, and there’s also a machine awaiting Oscar Wilde, although he may prefer to

 make use of the police vehicle if you and Lowenthal are willing to take him

 along. Notionally, the whole operation is under my command—which, in effect,

 puts you in immediate control as my proxy. I’m hoping that if Biasiolo really

 has set things up to provide a ringside seat for Wilde, the woman won’t proceed

 to stage six until you and he arrive. In theory, of course, Wilde will be unable

 to land unless Czastka relents and gives him permission, but he’s probably not

 as enthusiastic to stick to the letter of the law as the commander at Kauai.

 “In case you haven’t noticed, by the way, you’re surrounded by caster flies. So

 are the copters from Kauai. For every flitterbug we’ve got on Czastka’s island,

 the news tapes probably have a dozen. The whole of the morning news, bar fifteen

 seconds of other headlines, was given over to the five murders, described in the

 minutest detail. Having identified the text on the first condolence card,

 they’re headlining it Flowers of Evil—except for that crank French station which

 is still trying to maintain the purity of the native tongue. As soon as we

 failed to apprehend the woman on Kauai the MegaMall took the gloves off—however

 this works out, we’re not going to look good. In fact, we’re going to look very,

 very bad. If she were to succeed in killing Czastka too…”

 “Have you considered evacuating him?”

 “Of course I have—but I can’t do it against his will. He’s sealed himself in. If

 I ordered the helicopters to land and seize him, I’d look even more stupid than

 I already do if they couldn’t actually get to him to execute the order. He

 really does seem to be intent on securing his own destruction. He may not

 actually want to die, but he’s perversely determined not to be saved.”

 “As he said before, all he actually needs to do is to keep the house sealed,”

 Charlotte pointed out. “If we can’t get in, neither can she. He must know

 that—he’s perfectly safe, as long as he doesn’t open the door to her, unless she

 has an atom bomb as well as a submarine. If all she has is nanotech, it’s his

 against hers—and his ought to win, given that they have the home-ground

 advantage.”

 “It all sounds so simple, put like that,” Hal agreed. Charlotte could tell that

 he had no more confidence in the calculation than she had. All the evidence said

 that the woman had no chance at all of getting to Czastka, but even Hal couldn’t

 quite believe that Rappaccini’s grand plan was going to fizzle out into a soggy

 anticlimax.

 “We located the real Julia Herold, by the way,” Hal continued. “She’s a dead

 ringer for the fake. She really was on Kauai while the Inacio clone was making

 her way around the world—and, for that matter, while her double was carefully

 forging a relationship with Stuart McCandless in her name. She spends a lot of

 time in VE, and she’s rather careless about security of her sims and systems. If

 you want more details, I’ve downloaded everything to the copter that’s waiting

 on Kauai—and to the machine in front of you, although you won’t have time to

 look at it before you land. It’s all in place: every detail of the woman’s

 journey; every dollar of the money trail. It’s a magnificent job of case

 building, although no one will ever believe that, given that we failed to

 apprehend the killer on Kauai.”

 Charlotte wished that she were capable of feeling more sympathy for Hal’s

 plight, but she still had her own to worry about—and she was distracted by the

 fact that Michael Lowenthal had just risen from his bunk. The emissary from

 Olympus climbed into the seat formerly occupied by Oscar Wilde and said: “What’s

 new?”

 Charlotte took a deep breath and began to tell him.

 * * *

 “This is the text on the condolence card the woman left at McCandless’s house,”

 Charlotte told Michael Lowenthal, displaying the words on the screen.

 Farewell, happy fields,

 Where joy forever dwells! Hail, horrors! hail, Infernal world! and thou,

 profoundest Hell, Receive thy new possessor, one who brings A mind not to be

 changed by place or time. The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a

 Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.

 “Very apt,” said Lowenthal dryly. “Should we wake Dr. Wilde, do you think, and

 plead with him for an interpretation?” It was a rhetorical question.

 “It’s from Paradise Lost,” Charlotte said.

 “John Milton,” Lowenthal was quick to say, avid to seize a rarely accessible

 corner of the intellectual high ground. “Not the nineteenth century. Earlier.”

 “The seventeenth,” said a muffled voice from the rear. “Written then, allegedly,

 to ‘justify the ways of God to men’—but by the nineteenth, some had begun to

 adjudge that Milton had been of the Devil’s party without knowing it and had

 made a hero of Satan and a villain of God in spite of his own intention. Which

 passage is it, exactly, that Rappaccini has taken the trouble to quote?”

 Charlotte was tempted to tell Wilde to come forward and read it for himself, but

 did not want to be churlish. She read it aloud.

 “It hardly needs interpretation,” Wilde observed—not altogether accurately, if

 Michael Lowenthal’s expression could be taken as a guide. Charlotte understood

 what Wilde meant, though. The words could be read as a valedictory speech by

 Rappaccini/Moreau: a warning, a threat, and a statement of intent.

 “When this is all over,” Lowenthal said to the still-invisible Wilde, “you can

 write a book about it—and then we’ll see how many of the world’s busy citizens

 have the time and inclination to download it to their screens.”

 “Soon,” said Wilde, “all the world’s children will have the time—and I hope that

 they will also have the inclination. I suspect that their fascination with the

 artistry of death will be all the greater because death will be, for them, a

 matter of aesthetic choice. When everyone has the opportunity to extend life

 indefinitely, the determination to cling onto it for the sake of stubbornness

 alone will inevitably come to seem absurd. Some will choose to die; those who do

 not will feel obliged to make something of their lives. I hope, Michael, that

 you will take your place in the latter company.”

 By the time he had finished his speech, Wilde had slipped into the seat behind

 Lowenthal—the one which the man from the MegaMall had occupied the previous

 evening. Glancing back and forth from one to the other, Charlotte decided that

 although there was nothing to choose between them on the grounds of physical

 perfection, Wilde had emerged more rapidly from sleep to claim the fullest

 advantage of his brightness and beauty. The authentically young man who now sat

 beside her was still afflicted by the temporary stigmata of frustration and

 mental weariness.

 “You seem to have slept well, Oscar,” Charlotte said.

 “I usually do, my dear,” he said. “You’ll probably find, as you get

 older—especially at those times when you replenish your youth without losing the

 wisdom of maturity—that deep sleep will come more easily.”

 “We’ve all had the biofeedback training,” Lowenthal said dismissively. “We all

 know the drill.”

 Charlotte felt a sudden surge of anxiety about the appearance of her own face.

 She altered the lateral viewport to full reflection and studied her lax features

 and bleary eyes with considerable alarm. The face she wore was not entirely the

 gift of nature; she had had all the conventional manipulations in infancy, but

 she had always refused to be excessively pernickety about matters of beauty,

 preferring to retain a hint of naturalness on the grounds that it gave her

 character and individuality. Oscar Wilde had all of that and phenomenal beauty,

 and he was a hundred and thirty-three years old. Somehow, it didn’t seem quite

 fair. She worked her facial muscles feverishly, recalling the elementary

 exercises that everyone learned at school and almost everyone neglected

 thereafter. Then she straightened her hair.

 Oscar Wilde looked politely away as she did so, tutting over the condition of

 the fading green carnation which still protruded from the false collar of his

 suitskin.

 As Charlotte took stock of the reward of her efforts she noticed the faint

 wrinkles which were just becoming apparent in the corners of her eyes. She knew

 that they could be removed easily enough by the most elementary tissue

 manipulation, and she would not have given them a second thought two days

 before, but now they served as a reminder of the biological clock that was

 ticking away inside her: the clock that would need to be reset when she was

 eighty or ninety years old, and again when she turned a hundred and fifty… and

 then would wind down forever, because her brain would be unable to renew itself

 a third time without wiping clean the mind within.

 For Michael Lowenthal, she knew, it would be different. No one, least of all

 Lowenthal himself, knew as yet exactly how different it would be, but there was

 reason to believe that he might live for three or four hundred years without

 needing any kind of nanotech restructuring, and reason to hope that he might go

 on for a further half-millennium, and on and on…

 Barring accidents, suicide, and murder.

 But who would be the suicides and murderers, in a world of beautiful ancients?

 Who would kill or choose to die, if they could live forever?

 “The mind is its own place,” Charlotte quoted silently, “and in itself can make

 a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” She passed a hand across her face, as if to

 wipe away the tried laxity of the muscles and the embryonic wrinkles. Fifty or

 sixty years to rejuve number one, she told herself, and no point yet in

 counting.

 By the time she switched the viewport back to transparency, the island toward

 which they had been headed was below them, and their plane was descending toward

 the trees, preparing to alter the orientation of its engines so that it could

 complete its descent in helicopter fashion.

 Like all the Hawaiian islands, Kauai had been blighted by the ecocatastrophes of

 the twenty-first century and the fallout from the plague wars. Most of its

 ecosystems had been stripped down almost to the prokaryot level, but it was

 small enough to have been comprehensively rehabilitated. The biodiversity loss

 had been enormous, and the current genetic variety of the island was probably

 only a few percent of what it had been in pre-Crash days, but the painstaking

 work done by natural selection in the cause of diversification was beginning to

 bear fruit on a prolific scale. The trees over which the aircraft passed while

 making for the landing field almost qualified as authentic wilderness.

 Charlotte checked the equipment in her belt, making dutiful preparations for the

 dash from one vehicle to another. She had already invited Oscar Wilde to

 accompany her rather than taking the helicopter chartered by the late Gustave

 Moreau, but he had declined the offer. She was not displeased by the thought of

 putting a little distance between herself and one of her annoying

 companions—although, had she been given a choice, she would have kept Wilde and

 banished Lowenthal.

 As soon as they had set down at the heliport, Charlotte opened the cockpit door

 and leapt down to the blue plastic apron. Michael Lowenthal made haste to follow

 her, but Wilde had perforce to take his time. Uniformed officers hurried toward

 her, directing her to a police helicopter that was waiting less than a hundred

 meters away. Its official markings were a delight to Charlotte’s eyes, holding

 as they did the impression of authority. From now on, she told herself, she

 would no longer be a passenger but a determined pursuer: an active instrument of

 justice.

 One of the local men tried to tell her that there was no need for her to join

 the dragnet, and that she could watch it all on screens, but there was no way

 she was going to be turned aside now. She strode toward the police helicopter

 very purposefully, brushing off the attentions of the Kauai men as if they were

 buzzing flies, and Michael Lowenthal trotted along in her wake, barely keeping

 pace with her in spite of the fact that his stride was longer.

 “You can strand him here if you want to,” Lowenthal said, jerking his head in

 the direction of Oscar Wilde, who was walking to another, somewhat smaller,

 machine. “He needs clearance for takeoff. You could ground him for the

 duration.”

 “Hal could,” Charlotte corrected him as she climbed into the helicopter, taking

 note of the numerous flitter-bugs clinging to the hull. “I’m just a sergeant. In

 any case, he might come in useful. Why don’t you take the opportunity to drop

 out? Your employers surely can’t think that they have any particular cause for

 concern—and they can watch the whole thing through the flying eyes.”

 “I talked to them last night,” Lowenthal told her. “They want me to stay with

 it. They’re still anxious—and that’s as much your fault as anyone’s. All that

 stuff about advertising for a new generation of Eliminators. They’ve probably

 had their own PR teams working through the night, figuring out the best way to

 spin the story once the final shot’s been fired.”

 The helicopter lifted as soon as they were both strapped in. The automatic pilot

 had been programmed to take them to Czastka’s island without delay. Charlotte

 reached into the equipment locker under the seat and brought forth a handgun.

 She loaded it and checked the mechanism before clipping it to her belt.

 “Do you think you’ll have a chance to use that?” Lowenthal asked. Charlotte

 noticed that the interpolation of the words a chance put a distinct spin on the

 question.

 “It would be within the regulations,” Charlotte answered tautly. “I couldn’t

 even be rude to her when I spoke to her at McCandless’s house, but now the

 proofs in place I’m entitled to employ any practical measure which may be

 necessary to apprehend her. Don’t worry—the bullets are certified nonlethal.

 They’re loaded with knock-out drops. We’re the police, remember.”

 “Have you ever fired one before?” he asked curiously. “Outside a VE, I mean.”

 She chose to ignore the question rather than answer it—as honesty would have

 forced her to do—in the negative.

 The copter was traveling at a speed which was only a little greater than that

 attained by their previous conveyance, but they remained so low that their

 progress seemed far more rapid. The sea was the deep sapphire blue color

 renowned in ancient tradition, modestly reflecting the clarity of the cloudless

 morning sky. The waves, aided by the onrushing downdraft of their blades, carved

 the roiling water into all manner of curious shapes.

 High in the sky above them a silver airship was making its stately progress from

 Honolulu to Yokohama, but the other police helicopters, dispatched before their

 arrival on Kauai, were out of sight beyond the horizon. Oscar Wilde’s charter

 craft was half a kilometer behind them, but it was keeping pace.

 Like their previous craft, the helicopter had only one comcon. Charlotte tuned

 in to a broadcast news report. There were pictures of Gabriel King’s skeleton,

 neatly entwined with winding stems bearing black flowers in horrid profusion.

 They had not come from Rex Carnevon—they were obviously taken from Regina Chai’s

 footage. Given that Hal would not have released them, they must have been

 forwarded by somebody he had been obliged to copy in on the investigation:

 Michael Lowenthal’s employers. The tape had been reedited so that the camera

 lingered lasciviously over its appreciation of the horrid spectacle.

 The King tape was swiftly followed by footage of Michi Urashima’s similarly

 embellished skeleton. The AI voice-over was already speculating, in that

 irritatingly insinuating fashion that AI voice-overs always had, that the UN

 police had been caught napping by the murderous tourist. The word negligence was

 not actually mentioned, but the tone of the coverage suggested that it would not

 be long delayed in the wings. Charlotte was tempted to purge the skin of the

 craft of the news-tape eyes that had hitched a ride thereon, but there was no

 point. There would be hundreds more flying under their own power.

 Charlotte knew that although the information which had passed back and forth

 between Hal and herself would have been routinely cloaked, it could be uncloaked

 easily enough if anyone cared to take the trouble. Although the conversation

 she, Wilde, and Lowenthal had conducted in the restaurant at the UN complex was

 probably safe from retrospective eavesdroppers, very little they had said to one

 another since boarding the maglev would be irrecoverable. Their conversational

 exchanges after they had quit the car in the hills near the Mexican border would

 all be contained on the bubblebug tapes she had relayed back to Hal Watson—and,

 of course, to Michael Lowenthal’s employers.

 It was anyone’s guess, now, what the casters might think, worth broadcasting if

 the climax of the chase proved to be sufficiently melodramatic to pull in a big

 audience. By now, even skyballs might be turning their inquisitive downward gaze

 in the direction of Walter Czastka’s proto-Eden; the privacy which the genetic

 engineer so passionately desired to conserve was about to be rudely shattered.

 But then what? How would the tentative attention of the vidveg be captured—and

 how would it be secured?

 She wondered whether it would be necessary to use the gun—and what effect it

 would have on her career, her image, and her self-regard if the entire world

 were to watch her shoot down an uncommonly beautiful unarmed woman, albeit with

 a certified nonlethal dart.

 The newscast flickered as the comcon signaled that a call was incoming from the

 helicopter trailing in their wake.

 “What is it, Oscar?” Charlotte said.

 “I tried to call Walter,” said Wilde. “This is what I got.” His own face was

 immediately replaced by that of Walter Czastka’s silver-animated sim.

 “Damn you, Oscar Wilde,” the sim said, apparently without having bothered with

 any conventional identification or polite preliminary. “Damn you and Rappaccini

 to the darkest oblivion imaginable.”

 “That’s not very nice, Walter,” Wilde’s voice countered, although the image on

 screen was still the sim’s. “We have a responsibility to our AI slaves not to

 use them in this tawdry way. They can be pleasant on our behalf, but we

 shouldn’t require them to be insulting. It isn’t worthy of us.”

 “Damn you, Oscar Wilde,” the sim repeated. “Damn you and Rappaccini to the

 darkest oblivion imaginable.”

 “Nor should we lock the poor things into tight loops,” the Wildean voice-over

 added. “It’s a particularly cruel form of imprisonment.”

 “Damn you, Oscar Wilde,” said the sim yet again. “Damn you and Rappaccini to the

 darkest oblivion imaginable.”

 It was obviously programmed to make that response to anything and everything

 that Wilde might say. Charlotte cut off the tape and punched out Czastka’s phone

 code herself.

 “Dr. Czastka,” she said when the sim appeared, “this is Sergeant Charlotte

 Holmes of the UN police. I need to speak to you urgently.”

 “Damn you, Oscar Wilde,” replied the sim stubbornly. “Damn you and Rappaccini to

 the darkest oblivion imaginable.”

 Charlotte restored the link to Wilde’s helicopter. His face had creased into an

 anxious frown. “I have a horrible suspicion,” Wilde said, “that we might already

 be too late.”

 Charlotte looked at the comcon’s timer. They were still thirteen minutes away

 from their estimated time of arrival at the island. She punched in another code,

 connecting herself to the commander of the task force whose hovering copters had

 surrounded the island.

 “What’s happening?” she demanded.

 “No sign of her yet,” the answer came back. “She can’t possibly have landed

 without being seen. If anything happens, Sergeant, you’ll be the first to know,

 as per New York’s orders.” The local man did not seem particularly pleased by

 the fact that he had orders to check all his moves with a mere sergeant. The

 fact that she was from New York probably added an extra hint of insult to the

 tacit injury.

 “What do you mean, too late?” she said to Wilde, having cut back to him yet

 again. “If he were dead, it could only be suicide. His phone sim may be the

 stupidest obsolete sloth still in use, but there must be silver-level smarts

 somewhere in his systems. If he were actually dead, they’d override the sloth.

 We’ve put the whole island on full alert!”

 “Even if he is not dead,” Wilde said stubbornly, “we may still be too late. That

 is what Rappaccini intends.”

 There was nothing to do but wait and see, so Charlotte sat back in her seat and

 stared down at the agitated waves, letting the minutes tick by. Michael

 Lowenthal did not attempt to engage her in conversation.

 They were still two minutes short of their ETA when the voice of the local

 commander came back on-line. “We have visual contact with the woman,” he said.

 “Relaying now.”

 When the picture on the copter’s screen cleared, it showed a female figure in a

 humpbacked suitskin walking out of the sea, looking for all the world as if she

 were enjoying a leisurely stroll after a few minutes in the water.

 “We’re going in,” said the commander.

 “Not yet!” said Charlotte. “We’re coming in now! Don’t set down until I do.

 Leave her to me.” She was not entirely sure why she had told him to wait, but

 she was acutely aware of the responsibility of enacting Hal Watson’s

 authority—and it was, after all, her investigation too.

 Charlotte watched raptly as the woman who looked like Julia Herold paused at the

 high-tide line and began detaching the hump on her suitskin, which presumably

 contained a built-in paralung. The camera eye zoomed in, not because it was

 refocusing but because the helicopter carrying it was moving closer. Obedient to

 Charlotte’s order, however, the machine did not complete its touchdown, hovering

 a meter or so above the sand. Over the voice link, Charlotte could hear the

 sound of loudhailer-magnified voices instructing the woman to stand still.

 The woman did not seem to see the slowly settling helicopters or hear the

 loudhailers. She pushed back the hood of her suitskin and shook loose her long

 tresses. Her hair had changed color again; it was now a gloriously full

 red-gold, which seemed luminously alive as it caught the rays of the rising sun.

 The assassin knelt beside the discarded augmentation of her suitskin, removing

 something from a pocket. She made no attempt to move from the spot where she had

 been instructed to remain, but she swiftly unwrapped whatever it was that had

 been bound up with the paralung in the bi-molecular membrane.

 “What’s she doing?” Charlotte murmured as her own copter nudged its way into a

 gap in the surrounding ring.

 “I don’t know,” Michael Lowenthal answered.

 Over the voice link they could still hear the officer who had spoken to them. He

 was instructing her to desist from whatever she was doing and raise her hands

 above her head.

 Charlotte’s copter settled on the sand, thirty meters closer to the woman’s

 position than any of the others, and Charlotte threw open the door. She stepped

 down onto the beach, conscious of the fact that hundreds of flying eyes would

 now be focused on her.

 Suddenly the air around the red-haired woman was filled by a haze of what looked

 like smoke. As she came back to an erect position, the haze dispersed.

 “Artificial spores,” Michael Lowenthal guessed. He was still in the copter, but

 he had moved to Charlotte’s seat in order to get a better view. “Millions of

 them—she knew she’d never get to kiss Czastka, so she’s casting them adrift on

 the wind.”

 “Where’s Czastka?” Charlotte shouted, turning up the mike on her beltphone in

 the hope that the task-force commander might still be able to hear her—but the

 thrum of the slowing helicopter blades was still too loud to allow her to be

 heard. She hoped that the Creationist was still inside, his walls sealed tight

 against any form of biological invasion.

 Charlotte took three steps toward the young woman, then raised her gun, holding

 it in both hands, and pointed it. The noise of the copters was fading fast, and

 she was certain that she would be heard if she shouted.

 “Raise your hands!” she yelled.

 The woman was standing perfectly still now, but she had to turn through ninety

 degrees to face Charlotte. The expression on her face was unreadable, and

 Charlotte was not at all sure that the woman could see her, let alone hear

 her—but as she turned she meekly raised her hands high above her head. By the

 time her bright green eyes met Charlotte’s, she was still, impassive, and

 seemingly harmless.

 Charlotte felt a wave of thankfulness sweep through her tense frame. She took

 her left hand off the stock of the gun and beckoned to the woman.

 “Come to me!” she instructed. “Slowly, now.”

 From the corners of her eyes Charlotte could see uniformed men dismounting from

 the other helicopters, but they simply stepped down to the ground, watching and

 waiting. The sound of the copter blades was a mere hum by now, but Charlotte’s

 ears had been numbed by the cacophony, and she was not sure how loud the sound

 was. She could hear the distant whine of Oscar Wilde’s copter, though. It had

 turned to circle the beach rather than coming in to land.

 The woman showed not the slightest sign of obeying Charlotte’s last order. She

 stood where she was, un-moving. Her arms were still upraised in a gesture of

 surrender, but the gesture suddenly seemed to Charlotte to be slightly mocking.

 The murderess had apparently done what she came to do, and had accepted that it

 was all over—but she did not seem to be in any hurry to place herself in custody

 and climb aboard the helicopter that would ferry her to judgment.

 “Come this way!” Charlotte repeated, shouting in case the woman had not been

 able to hear the first command. “Walk toward the helicopter, slowly.” She lifted

 the handset from her beltphone and spoke into it. “Better get your men back into

 the copters,” she said to the task-force commander. “The stuff she’s released is

 probably harmless to anyone but Czastka, but there’s no point in taking risks.

 When we get back to Kauai, everyone goes through decontamination.”

 “As you wish, Sergeant,” said the officer sourly.

 The woman still had not moved. She stood statue-still, looking up into the

 brilliant blue sky. It seemed that Charlotte had no alternative but to go to

 her.

 Charlotte replaced the handset of her beltphone and took two steps forward,

 saying: “My name is Detective Sergeant Charlotte Holmes of the UN police. I’m

 arresting you on suspicion—”

 She was interrupted by a cry of alarm from the helicopter that had settled on

 the far side of the woman’s position. The uniformed men had been obediently

 climbing back aboard, but the last one had paused and turned—and now he was

 pointing, apparently at the two women.

 “Look out!” he cried.

 Charlotte’s right hand tensed about the handle of the gun, and her left moved

 back to support it. Her forefinger curled around the trigger—but the red-haired

 woman hadn’t moved a muscle, and there was no evident threat. Charlotte heard a

 strange squawking sound emanating from the region of her hip and realized that

 someone was trying to attract her attention by shouting over the voice link to

 her handset. She lowered her left hand again, rather uncertainly, and plucked

 the handset from its holster. “It’s okay,” she said impatiently. “She has no

 weapon. It’s all under control.”

 “Look behind you!” screeched the unrecognizable voice, still trying to shout at

 her although the volume control on the beltphone was automatically compensating.

 “Corruption and corrosion, woman, look behind you!”

 Uncomprehendingly, Charlotte looked behind her.

 Gliding toward her from the vivid brightness of the climbing sun was a broad

 black shadow. At first she could judge neither its breadth nor its exact shape,

 but as it swooped down upon her the truth became abundantly and monstrously

 clear.

 She could not believe the evidence of her eyes. She knew full well that what she

 was seeing was impossible, and her mind stubbornly refused to accept the truth

 of what she saw. She understood, as her unbelief stupefied and froze her, why

 the voice had been trying so hard to achieve an appropriate level of

 amplification. In addition to the need to warn her that she was in danger, there

 had been a need to express shock, horror, and sheer terror.

 It was a bird—but it was a bird like none which had ever taken to the skies of

 Earth in the entire evolutionary history of flight. Its wingspan was larger than

 the reach of the helicopter blades that were already spinning again as the

 automatic pilots prepared for flight. Its vast wings were black, but they

 glinted like the wings of starlings; their pinion feathers somehow reminded

 Charlotte of scimitars and samurai swords. Its enormous and horrible head was

 naked, like a vulture’s, and its eyes were the size of basketballs; they were

 crimson in color, but as they caught the sunlight it seemed that they were all

 aglow with a sulphurous inner light.

 The creature’s raptorial beak was fully agape, and it cried out as it swept over

 her head. Its call was a terrible inhuman shriek, which put Charlotte in mind of

 the wailing of the damned in some ancient mythical hell. She felt as if she had

 been frozen in place, like a pillar of salt, to await her doom as that terrible

 beak closed upon her tender flesh—but the beak passed her by, and the huge claws

 too. Their talons were aimed at the other woman: Rappaccini’s unnatural

 daughter.

 Charlotte’s momentary petrifaction came to an end. Even as she perceived that

 she was not the target of the monster’s dive, panic took hold of her and threw

 her aside like a rag doll. She had no time to realign and fire her gun, nor even

 to think about realigning and firing it. Her reflexes rudely cast her down,

 tumbling her ignominiously onto the silvery sand.

 Rappaccini’s daughter, if that were indeed what she deemed herself to be, did

 not change her position in the slightest. Her hands were still lifted high into

 the air. Her eyes were unconcerned, apparently entranced.

 Charlotte understood now—how obvious it was, now!— that the meek raising of

 those arms had not been a gesture of surrender at all; the woman had merely been

 making preparations for the arrival of her appalling rescuer. Charlotte twisted

 her body so that she could watch, but her limbs still hugged the ground, as if

 they were trying to bury into the warm and welcoming sand.

 And this is going out live to half the population of the world! Charlotte

 thought. What a way to win a ratings war!

 As though with an ease induced by long and patient practice, the woman who had

 been Rappaccini’s murderous instrument interlaced the fingers of both her hands

 with the reaching talons of the huge bird and was lifted instantly from her

 feet.

 Charlotte was still conscious of the fact that what she was seeing was,

 according to all the most reliable authorities, quite impossible. No bird could

 lift an adult human being from the ground, and rumors of eagles of old which had

 been able to lift children and sheep were confidently judged by historians and

 naturalists to have been wildly exaggerated. No bird which had ever been shaped

 by natural selection to fly above the surface of the earth could lift such a

 weight in addition to its own. But how much did this monstrosity weigh? More

 than a helicopter, and as much as the aircraft which Rappaccini had provided to

 fly Charlotte and her two companions to Kauai? Its metabolism must be highly

 unorthodox, or it would not be able to take off—but it was gliding now, and any

 man-made glider of similar dimension could have carried several passengers. It

 was possible, because it was happening. Somehow, it was possible.

 The bird was already climbing again, soaring on the thermal which rose from the

 warm morning sea. It beat its fabulous night black wings with extravagant

 majesty—once, twice, and again—but then it banked and circled around into the

 dazzling halo of brilliance which surrounded the tropical sun, whence its

 awesome dive had come. A moment later, as Charlotte shielded her eyes, it flew

 out of the fire again, like a phoenix reborn.

 Charlotte reached up her free hand to take the one which Michael Lowenthal was

 extending to her, having appeared as if by magic at her side. Her right hand

 returned the dart gun to its clasp as she was raised to her feet.

 “Best get back if we intend to chase it,” he said.

 He let go of her hand and she had to hurry along behind him, stumbling in the

 soft surface. The other helicopters were already taking off, the sound of their

 many blades escalating into a hideous roar.

 “She didn’t get Czastka!” Lowenthal shouted as he stopped by the copter’s

 landing rail, letting Charlotte pass him before shoving her from behind to help

 her into the cabin.

 Didn’t she? Charlotte wondered, not bothering to speak the words aloud. She did

 what she came to do—that much is certain.

 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.

 The flight of the giant bird had now become slightly drunken, although it was

 still gliding. Every slight adjustment of its wings seemed exaggerated, and it

 was losing height inexorably. Huge though it was, the weight of an adult human

 being and the instability induced by her awkward position were making it

 difficult for the monster to complete its task. Charlotte wondered whether the

 creature had sufficient strength left to make a successful landfall.

 It was clear to Charlotte that the woman’s murders must have been planned in

 such a way as to lay a trail, and that it was Moreau’s island, not Czastka’s,

 that had always been the end point of that trail. Thanks to the special

 provision which Moreau had made for Oscar Wilde, she and Lowenthal had been able

 to follow the trail’s most scenic route and had arrived at the appointed

 destination ahead of any other actual persons—but every news service in the

 world must have scrambled every available flying eye by now.

 It wasn’t every day that the vidveg had the chance to see a police helicopter

 chase come unstuck because a roc had abducted a beautiful female serial killer.

 Nor did Charlotte need Oscar Wilde to tell her that she was about to attend an

 exhibition: an exhibition which was presumably designed to put the so-called

 Great Exhibition of 2405 to shame. Most of the exhibits, she suspected, would be

 illegal—which was one reason why the exhibitor had chosen this peculiarly

 flamboyant method of issuing invitations. Moreau’s roc had already demonstrated

 that he was a genetic engineer of genius—perhaps the greatest genetic engineer

 the world had ever known—but its function was merely to attract attention. In

 her own way, the “daughter” that Moreau had produced by cloning his mother and

 then modifying her genome in as-yet-unspecified ways was equally astonishing,

 and Charlotte assumed that the island would be abundantly stocked with similar

 miracles.

 Moreau was clearly a man for whom the impossible was merely routine, and the

 miraculous that which could confidently be scheduled for the week after next. He

 was also a man whose real work had been kept secret for a century and more,

 while he had been content to restrict his public dealings to the design and

 supply of funeral wreaths.

 Charlotte watched the bird summon up the last vestiges of its strength for its

 landing maneuver. It banked to the left, its wings curving to catch the air;

 then the gargantuan limbs flapped once, twice, and thrice as the creature fell

 toward the silver strand where the waves were breaking over Dr. Moreau’s island.

 Charlotte’s helicopter followed, then Oscar Wilde’s. The five copters from Kauai

 were still in attendance, but they had already received orders to keep their

 cabins sealed after landing lest their occupants become vectors of unknown

 biocontamination. Charlotte had already reconciled herself to the prospect of a

 period in quarantine.

 The copter’s safety-minded silver pilot gave the beached roc a wide berth,

 putting Charlotte and Lowenthal down a full sixty meters from the point where

 the woman had been dropped. The fugitive had already picked herself up and had

 disappeared into the trees which fringed the beach.

 Charlotte unplugged her beltphone from the helicopter’s comCon without bothering

 to sign off, and put the handset in its holster. Hal would be able to see what

 was going oh, but she didn’t want him babbling in her ear. It had fallen to her

 to make the final arrest, with the world looking on, and she didn’t want it to

 look as if she were merely a marionette, dancing to New York’s tune.

 She did not attempt to approach the roc, although she took a long look at the

 chimerical creature before turning to follow the red-haired woman. The bird

 peered back at her dolefully from one unnaturally large and bloodily crimson

 eye; the other was hidden by the bulk of its naked head. It did not look so

 horrid now that it seemed helpless. It looked mournful, and rather tragic.

 Michael Lowenthal came abreast of her as she paused, and Oscar Wilde was already

 running across the sand to join the two of them.

 “You shouldn’t have got out,” she said to Wilde as lightly as she could. “You’ll

 have to be quarantined now.”

 “You know perfectly well, dear Charlotte,” Wilde replied, not quite

 breathlessly, “that I could not possibly be content to watch the final act of

 the comedy through an artificial eye mounted on the brow of a police officer.”

 “It’s a comedy now, is it?” said Lowenthal sourly. “I can’t quite see the joke.”

 “It is,” Wilde intoned, puffing himself up with false dignity, “a divine comedy.

 If we can read it rightly, all of modern life’s metaphysical frame will be shown

 to us here: our land of darkness, our purgatory, our paradise.”

 Charlotte and her two companions walked side by side to the place where Moreau’s

 murderous agent had disappeared, keeping a wary eye on the roc while they did

 so. The bird made no move toward them; its wings were still outstretched, and it

 seemed to be in considerable distress. It must have been created, Charlotte

 realized, merely in order to make that single flight; it had served its purpose

 and might never fly again. As she glanced back for the last time before moving

 into the trees, Charlotte saw the bloody eyes eclipsed by wrinkled lids.

 “Will it die?” she asked of Oscar Wilde.

 “I hope not,” he replied. “It would be unfortunate were such a magnificent

 creation to lose its life in the interests of a mere coup de theatre. On the

 other hand, one cannot push back the limits of the possible without

 sacrifice—and Rappaccini has shown little sign of compunction in that regard.”

 Together, they moved into the forest.

 Charlotte found herself leading the way along a narrow grassy pathway, which had

 the appearance of an accident of nature but which must in fact have been

 designed with the utmost care. As Charlotte looked from side to side the whole

 scene seemed remarkably focused, clear and sharp in every detail. It seemed that

 every leaf on every tree had been not merely designed but arranged with

 excessive scrupulousness.

 There were no mock palms here. This forest was very different from any that

 Charlotte had ever seen before. The trunk of every tree had grown into the shape

 of something else, as finely wrought in bronze-barked wood as any sculpture. No

 two were exactly alike: here was the image of a dragon rampant, here a mermaid,

 here a trilobite, and here a shaggy faun. Many were the images of beasts which

 natural selection had designed to walk on four legs, but all of them stood

 upright here, rearing back to extend their forelimbs, separately or entwined,

 high into the air. These upraised forelimbs provided bases for spreading crowns

 of many different colors: all the greens and coppery browns of Ancient Nature;

 all the purples, golds, and blues that Ancient Nature had never quite mastered;

 even the graphite black of Solid Artificial Photosynthetic systems. Some few of

 the crowns extended from an entire host of limbs rather than a single pair,

 originating from the maws of krakens or the stalks of hydras.

 The animals whose shapes were reproduced by the trunks of the trees all had open

 eyes, which seemed to look at Charlotte no matter where she was in relation to

 them. Although she knew that they were all quite blind, she could not help

 feeling discomfited by their seeming curiosity.

 Her own curiosity, however, was more than equal to theirs.

 Every tree of the forest was in flower, and every flower was as bizarre as the

 plant which bore it. All possible colors were manifest in the blossoms, but

 there was a noticeable preponderance of reds and blacks. Butterflies and

 hummingbirds moved ceaselessly through the branches, each one wearing its own

 coat of many colors, and the tips of the branches moved as if stirred by a

 breeze, reaching out toward these visitors, seemingly yearning to touch their

 tiny faces.

 There was no wind; the branches moved by their own volition, according to their

 own mute purposes.

 Charlotte could see electronic hoverflies mingling with Gustave Moreau’s

 insects, and ponderous flitter-bugs jostling for position with the tinier

 hummingbirds. No predators came to harass them, although there were larger birds

 concealed by the foliage, audible as they moved from branch to branch and

 occasionally visible in brief flashes of vivid coloration.

 Charlotte knew that much of what she saw was manifestly illegal. Creationists

 were restricted by all manner of arcane regulations in the engineering of

 insects and birds, lest their inventions should stray to pollute the artwork of

 other engineers or to intermingle with the more extensive ecosystems of the

 world at large. Most Creationists undoubtedly took some liberties to which they

 were not theoretically entitled—even Walter Czastka had probably been guilty of

 that, no matter how dull his efforts had seemed to Oscar Wilde—but Charlotte had

 no doubt that when the final accounting of Gustave Moreau’s felonies and

 misdemeanors was complete, he would turn out to have been the most prolific as

 well as the most versatile criminal who had ever lived upon the surface of the

 earth.

 All of this would be destroyed, of course—as Moreau must have known when he had

 planned it and while he built it. He had given birth to an extraordinary

 fantasy, fully aware that it would be ephemeral; but instead of leaving it to

 the scrupulously scientific attentions of a UN inspection team—who would have

 filed their records away and left them moldering in some quiet corner of the

 Webworld—he had found a way to command that rapt attention be paid to it by

 every man, woman, and child in the world. Only thus, he must have decided, could

 due recognition be given to his awesome genius: his talent as an artist and

 engineer, and his ingenuity as a social commentator.

 Had the designer of this alien ecosphere, Charlotte wondered, dared to hope that

 his contemporaries might recognize and reckon him a true Creationist, to be set

 as far above the petty laws of humankind as the obsolete gods of old had once

 been set? Had he dared to believe that even the vidveg might condone what he had

 done, once they saw it in all its glory?

 No, she concluded. Even Rappaccini/Moreau could not have credited the vidveg

 with that much imagination.

 Charlotte soon perceived that Moreau’s creative fecundity had not been content

 with birds and insects. There were monkeys in the trees too: monkeys which did

 not hide or flee from the invaders of their private paradise, but came instead

 to peep out at them from the gaudy crowns and stare with patient curiosity at

 their visitors.

 The monkeys were not huge; none was more than a meter from top to toe, and all

 had the slender bodies of gibbons and lorises—but they had the wizened faces of

 old men. Nor was that appearance merely the generic resemblance which had once

 been manifest in the faces of certain long-extinct New World monkeys; these

 faces were actual human faces, writ small. Charlotte recognized a family of

 Czastkas, a pair of Teidemanns, an assortment of Kings and Urashimas—but there

 were dozens to which she could not put names. Perhaps they too had been

 contemporaries of Walter Czastka at Wollongong, or perhaps their lives had been

 entangled with his in other ways. Perhaps some were still living—and perhaps the

 chain of murders would have had far more links had more provisionally selected

 targets survived to the ripe old age of a hundred and ninety-four.

 The eyes set in these surrounding faces, which now increased in number with

 Charlotte’s every stride, were neither blind nor utterly stupid; nor was she

 prepared to invoke her habitual notions of impossibility to set a limit on the

 intelligence which lurked behind them. It seemed entirely likely that they might

 break out into cacophonous speech at any moment, and just as probable that one

 appointed spokesman might lower itself to the path ahead of her and offer her a

 formal welcome.

 Posturing apes, she thought, remembering Gabriel King’s verdict.

 Charlotte swallowed air, unsuccessfully trying to remove a lump of unease from

 her throat. She tried to ignore the staring eyes of the monkeys in order to

 concentrate on the gorgeous blossoms which framed their faces. They all seemed

 unnaturally large and bright, and every one presented a great fan or bell of

 petals and sepals, surrounding a complex network of stamens and compound styles.

 There was no way that she could begin to take in their awesome profusion and

 variety. She felt that her senses were quite overloaded—and not merely her sense

 of sight, for the moist atmosphere was a riot of perfumes, while the murmurous

 humming of insect wings improvised a subtle symphony.

 Is it truly beautiful? Charlotte asked herself as she studied the sculpted trees

 which stared at her with their myriad illusory eyes, their hectic crowns, and

 their luminous flowers. Or is it all fabulously mad?

 She did not need to consult Oscar Wilde; she knew his intellectual methods by

 now.

 It was truly beautiful, she admitted, and fabulously mad too—and having admitted

 it, she let the tide of her appreciation run riot. It was more beautiful than

 anything she had ever seen or ever hoped to see. It was more beautiful and more

 intoxicating than anything anyone had ever seen or hoped to see. It was

 infinitely more beautiful than the ghostly echoes of Ancient Nature which modern

 men called wilderness. It was infinitely more beautiful and infinitely less sane

 than Ancient Nature itself, even in all its pre-Crash glory, could ever have

 been.

 All this, even Charlotte’s unschooled eyes could see, was the work of a young

 man. However many years Rappaccini/Moreau had lived, however many he had spent

 in glorious isolation in the midst of all this strange fecundity, he had never

 grown old and never grown wise. All this was Folly: unashamed and unapologetic

 Folly. This was not the work of a man grown mournful in forgetfulness, obsessed

 with the pursuit of a vanishing past; this was the work of a man whose only

 thought was of the future: of novelty, of ambition, of progress. Perhaps Walter

 Czastka’s illegal experiment had not been such an abject failure after all;

 perhaps the transformation it had wrought had merely been subtler than its

 designer had intended.

 This was Moreau’s island—morrow’s island—but the child that had been father to

 the man who became Moreau had itself been fathered, and created. Perhaps this

 ought to be reckoned Walter Czastka’s Eden too, at least as much as the one into

 which he had poured the futile labor of his dotage.

 Charlotte no longer needed the advice of Oscar Wilde’s interpretations. Whatever

 resonances of the distant past might have evaded her youthful ignorance, she

 felt that she understood the present heart of the little world which surrounded

 her, and the kind of soul which hovered invisibly in every molecular skein of it

 all.

 Yes, it was truly beautiful, and fabulous and mad—but the truth, the beauty, the

 fabulousness, and the madness were the work of a true Creationist.

 In the heart of Moreau’s island, Charlotte expected to find a house, but there

 was no house there. Once, no doubt, there had been a dwelling place on the

 site—a laboratory and a workshop, a palace and a forge, a refuge and a

 hatchery—but all of that had been banished now, buried underground if not

 actually dismantled.

 Now, there was only a mausoleum.

 Charlotte knew that Moreau had died in Honolulu, but she also recalled that his

 body had been returned to the island, where someone with no official existence

 must have taken delivery of it and laid it in this tomb. Charlotte assumed that

 it would not be allowed to remain here, but it was here now: the mortal

 centerpiece of Moreau’s Creation.

 It was a very large tomb, hewn from a white marble whose austerity stood in

 imperious contrast to the fabulous forest around it. There was nothing

 overelaborate about its formation, although it was tastefully decorated. It bore

 neither cross nor carven angel, but on the plain white flank which loomed above

 its pediment a text was inscribed. It read:

 SPLEEN

 Je suis comme le roi d’un pays pluvieux, Riche, mais impuissant, jeune et

 pourtant tres-vieux, Qui, de ses precepteurs meprisant les courbettes, S’ennuie

 avec ses chiens comme avec d’autres betes. Rien ne peut 1’egayer, ni gibier, ni

 faucon, Ni son peuple mourant en face du balcon. Du bouffon favori la grotesque

 ballade Ne distrait plus le front de ce cruel malade; Son lit fleurdelise se

 transforme en tombeau,

 Et les dames d’atour, pour qui tout prince est beau,

 Ne savent plus trouver d’impudique toilette

 Pour tirer un souris de ce jeune squelette.

 Le savant qui lui fait de 1’or n’a jamais pu

 De son étre extirper 1’element corrompu,

 Et dans ces bains de sang qui des Remains nous viennent, Et dont sur leurs vieux

 jours les puissants se souviennent,

 II n’a sur échauffer ce cadavre hebete Ou coule au lieu de sang l’eau verte du

 Lethe.

 “Baudelaire?” Charlotte asked of Oscar Wilde. “Of course,” he replied. “Would

 you like me to translate?”

 “If you would.”

 “It runs approximately thus,” he said.

 “I am like the monarch of a rain-soaked realm,”

 “Rich but powerless, young but perhaps too old,

 “Who, despising the sycophancy of his teachers,”

 “Is as sick of his dogs as of all other beasts.

 “Nothing can enliven him, neither prey, nor predator,”

 “Nor deaths displayed before his balcony.

 “The satirical ballads of his appointed fool”

 “No longer soothe the frown of his cruel malady;

 “His flower-decked couch is transformed into a tomb,”

 “And the courtesans for whom every prince is handsome,

 “Can no longer find attire sufficiently immodest,”

 “To force this youthful skeleton to smile.

 “The maker of alchemical gold has never contrived”

 “To extirpate elementary corruption from his own being,

 “And in those baths of blood which the Romans left to us,

 “Which powerful men recall in the days of their old age,”

 “He has failed to renew the warmth of that dazed cadaver

 “Where runs instead of blood the green water of forgetfulness.”

 “Spleen, I assume, does not here refer to the common or garden organ of that

 name?” said Michael Lowenthal.

 “It does not,” Wilde confirmed. “Its meaning here is one that was rendered

 obsolete by the modern medical theories which replaced the ancient lore of

 bodily humors. Spleen was the aggravated form of the decadents’ ennui: a bitter

 world-weariness, a sullenly wrathful resentment of the essential dullness of

 existence.”

 “Is that, do you suppose, what drove him to make all this?” Charlotte asked.

 “I doubt it. This paradise was not born of bitterness or resentment, although

 the trail of murders that paved our way with bad intentions must have been. The

 poem is a commentary on the artist’s final approach to death, not on his life as

 a whole. Spleen was what Moreau fought with all his might to resist, although he

 knew that he could not live forever, and that it would claim him in the end.

 Like us, dear Charlotte, he was delivered by history to the very threshold of

 true emortality, and yet was fated not to live in the Promised Land. How he must

 have resented the fading of the faculties which had produced all this! How he

 must have hated the knowledge that his creative powers were ebbing away! How

 wrathful he must have become, to see his fate mirrored in the faces and careers

 of all those who had a hand in his own Creation. While the true emortals emerge

 from the womb of biotechnical artifice, today and tomorrow—and tomorrow and

 tomorrow and tomorrow—they can no longer care who their fathers are or might

 have been, for they are designed by men like gods, from common chromosomal

 clay.” He looked at Michael Lowenthal as he pronounced the final sentence—but

 Michael Lowenthal looked away rather than meet the geneticist’s accusing stare.

 Charlotte looked around, wondering where the red-haired woman might be—and

 wondering, now, exactly what the red-haired woman might be. She was a clone of

 Maria Inacio, and yet not quite a clone. Some of her genes had been modified by

 engineering while she was still an ovum—just as some of her son/father’s genes

 had been modified by the young Walter Czastka. She, like her own Creator, had

 been designed by a man trying to become like a god, from common chromosomal

 clay—but Gustave Moreau must have done everything within his power to surpass

 Walter Czastka in that regard. The woman must surely be a Natural, in the

 limited sense that Michael Lowenthal was, but how much more had Moreau tried to

 make of her?

 Charlotte remembered some words that Moreau, as Herod, had quoted at Oscar

 Wilde, teasing him with the charge that even he could not have encountered them

 before: “Mortality, Behold and Fear! What a change of flesh is here!” But the

 woman was a multiple murderess; when the law took its course, her career would

 surely be subject to a demolition as comprehensive and as brutal as the one to

 which this exotic demi-Eden would be subject.

 Charlotte knew, as she framed that thought, that it might not be quite as simple

 as that. Oscar Wilde, for one, would fight for the preservation of Moreau’s

 island—and how many allies would he find among the millions of watchers who were

 waiting for her to locate and arrest her suspect? How many allies might the

 lovely murderess find, even in a world where death was regarded with such

 intense loathing and fascination?

 While Michael Lowenthal was still making shift to avoid Oscar Wilde’s stare,

 Charlotte moved away from them to make a tour of the massive mausoleum.

 It required only half a dozen steps to bring her quarry into view. The fugitive

 was sitting on the pediment on the further side of the tomb, facing a crowd of

 leaping lions and prancing unicorns, vaulting hippogriffs and rearing cobras,

 all of them hewn in living wood beneath a roof of rainbows. Hundreds of

 man-faced monkeys were solemnly observing the scene.

 The woman was quite still, and her vivid green eyes, which matched the color of

 the foliage of one particular tree which stood directly before her, were staring

 vacuously into space. It was as if she could not even see the fantastic host

 which paraded itself before her. Her arms were slightly spread, the palms of her

 hands upturned, each balancing a different object—but it was not her hands which

 drew Charlotte’s gaze.

 The woman was quite bald, and her skull was studded with silver contact points.

 The hair that the woman had worn throughout her murderous odyssey lay like

 stranded seaweed upon the white marble between her feet—but its strands were

 still stirring like stately ripples in a quiet pond, and wherever it caught a

 shaft of sunlight it glittered, showing all its myriad colors in rapid sequence,

 from polished silver through amber gold and flaming red to burnt sienna and

 raven black.

 The stars in the hairless skull glistened too, in the reflected light of the

 sun. Charlotte could hardly help but be reminded of the cruder decorations which

 Michi Urashima had accumulated on his own skull, but she knew that these must be

 different. Urashima was a self-made man, who had found his true vocation late in

 life. This person had been born to her heritage; her brain had been designed to

 be fed, and not with any ordinary nourishment.

 In the woman’s left hand lay a single flower: a gorgeously gilded rose. In her

 right hand she held a scroll of parchment, neatly rolled and tied with blue

 ribbon.

 Oscar Wilde stepped past Charlotte and picked up the gilded rose. He placed it

 carefully in the mock buttonhole formed by the false collar of his suitskin. He

 had discarded his green carnation.

 Charlotte stooped and reached out to touch the mass of “hair” which lay upon the

 marble. It moved in response to her touch, but not to recoil or flee. The

 ripples in its surface became waves, and its strands coiled like a nest of

 impossibly slender and improbably numerous snakes. It had more mass than she had

 thought likely. Quelling her instinctive revulsion, Charlotte picked it up and

 let its strands wrap themselves around her wrists and fingers, as if in grateful

 affection. She could not help but marvel at the awesome complexity and vivacity

 of its myriad threads.

 “What is it?” Michael Lowenthal asked, his tone suspended somewhere between fear

 and fascination.

 “I don’t know what to call it,” Charlotte said. “I daresay that the scroll will

 tell us.”

 “I can only guess at its nature,” said Oscar Wilde, “but I imagine that we shall

 discover that it is the murderer’s real accomplice. That, I suspect, is

 Rappaccini’s daughter, and the woman of flesh and blood is its mere instrument.

 Those Medusan locks presumably comprise the virtual individual which has moved

 this Innocent Eve hither and yon throughout the world, fascinating her appointed

 victims and luring them to the acceptance of her fatal kisses. Perhaps we should

 think of it as the ultimate femme fatale: vengeful fury appointed by Rappaccini

 to settle all his earthly accounts.”

 Charlotte saw Lowenthal’s face turn suddenly pallid, and wondered why she had

 not reacted in the same way.

 “And we thought the flowers posed a biohazard!” he said—we, in this instance,

 being a grander company by far than the one comprised by his immediate

 neighbors. “Imagine what that could do!”

 “Only to those primed for its convenience,” Wilde observed—and then his own

 expression shifted. Mindful of the number of the eyes that were watching and the

 ears that would overhear, he hesitated for a second or more—but he was not a

 cautious man by nature. “And your ever dutiful employers already know, do they

 not, exactly what machines like this could do? Is it not part and parcel of

 their careful stewardship to keep such monstrosities in their place, locked away

 in the vaults beneath their infinite emporium where everything unfit for the

 marketplace is stored?”

 Charlotte observed, however, that Wilde made no reference to the probable

 ultimate source of the income which had fed the less orthodox researches of

 Michi Urashima and Paul Kwiatek.

 “She’s got away again, hasn’t she?” Charlotte murmured.

 “I suspect that when your Court of Judgment eventually sits,” Oscar Wilde

 agreed, “that cyborg creature you hold in your hand will be the only guilty

 party that can legitimately be summoned to appear before it. Alas for the

 justice which requires to be seen in order to be properly done, I doubt that it

 has any consciousness or conscience that can be sensibly held to account or

 punished. The evil that Rappaccini did may have lived after him for a little

 while, but everything that might have been punished for his sins was interred

 with his bones.”

 Charlotte let out her breath, unaware that she had been holding it. The

 exhalation turned into a long, deep sigh that sounded exactly like one of Oscar

 Wilde’s. She looked up into the little tent of blue sky above the mausoleum,

 which marked the clearing in which they were standing.

 The sky was full of flying eyes which sparkled like crystal dust in the sun’s

 kindly light.

 Charlotte knew that the words which they were speaking could be heard by

 millions of people all over the world and would in time be relayed to billions.

 The real Court of Judgment was here and now, and any verdict which the three of

 them chose to return would probably stick.

 “It’s over,” Charlotte said quietly. “Punishment is neither here nor there. It’s

 just a matter of counting the cost.” She looked at Michael Lowenthal as she

 spoke, even though the people he represented were experts on prices rather than

 costs.

 “It was still murder,” was all that Lowenthal could find to say.

 “Of course it was,” said Oscar Wilde. “It was a perfect murder—perhaps the only

 perfect murder the world has seen, as yet.”

 Epilogue

 Happily Ever After

 « ^

 In Hal Watson’s crowded workroom in the bowels of the UN building in New

 York—whose upper stories were already decaying to ash and dust—Sergeant

 Charlotte Holmes faced her superior officer with all the calm and confidence she

 could muster.

 “Walter Czastka died of natural causes,” Hal told her. “The death certificate

 makes conventional reference to general neuronal failure, which usually means

 that the nanotech patchwork holding the hindbrain together couldn’t maintain the

 feedback loops necessary to sustain motor function.”

 “Usually?” Charlotte queried.

 “Regina says that the wastage in Czastka’s brain was more extensive than usual,

 and more evident in the cerebrum.”

 “What does that imply?”

 “In Regina’s words: ‘If you set aside all the jargon, he just gave up on himself

 and faded out.’ There’s no hard evidence in his own files to prove that in 2322

 he carried out a series of illegal genetic manipulations on egg cells which had

 been taken from Maria Inacio’s unexpectedly active womb and fertilized by his

 own spermatozoa, but I’ve dipped into the private files of those officers of

 Wollongong University who could have been involved in hushing it up. There’s

 more than enough buried there to support Wilde’s conjectures. I’m still

 excavating it, but all bureaucrats tend to be careful in the maintenance of

 their private records, however fast and loose they play with official documents.

 Given that Czastka’s death wasn’t suspicious, there’s no need for us to publish

 our findings, but I’ve found sufficient confirmation of the factual allegations

 contained in Moreau’s scroll to be sure that they’re true.”

 “Information which, being good bureaucrats, we’ll naturally commit to our own

 records, for the edification of future excavators,” Charlotte said.

 Hal didn’t rise to that. “I have hard evidence of the peripheral involvement of

 at least twelve others in Czastka’s experiment. All of them, including the

 murder victims, are commemorated in the faces of the monkeys on Moreau’s island;

 none are still alive. That’s not to say that it was an organized conspiracy;

 Czastka appears to have recruited them as and when he needed them, and it’s

 probable that none of them knew exactly how many others were involved, or how.

 The scroll left behind by Gustave Moreau is based on hearsay, of course, but it

 confirms that Maria Inacio knew more than anyone else—except Walter

 himself—about the progress of the experiment and the subsequent cover-up.

 Moreau’s account of what she told him confirms the private notes made by the

 dean of Walter’s faculty and the assistant registrar who arranged the transfer

 of the embryo from her womb to the artificial one.

 “There’s no detailed map of the transformations that Walter carried out on the

 embryo formed from the ovum he took from Inacio’s womb and combined with his own

 sperm, but he was definitely trying to engineer it for longevity. It’s

 explicitly stated that he worked at several of the key loci to which Zaman later

 applied his own transformations. We’ll never know how close he came to

 succeeding, but he would have been extremely lucky to hit on the right

 substitutions first time out, without the benefit of the preparatory animal work

 that Zaman and his peers were able to do.”

 “If he’d succeeded,” Charlotte observed, “we might now be attributing the New

 Human Race to the Czastka transformation.”

 “But he didn’t.”

 “The photographs of Jafri Biasiolo in different phases of his career as

 Rappaccini that you showed Wilde when I first brought him in suggest that what

 Czastka did must have had some effect,” Charlotte reminded him. “If he’d carried

 on—if he’d kept track of Biasiolo and tried again—it would have been hard going;

 but he might have given us the New Human Race fifty or sixty years earlier than

 Ali Zaman.”

 “If he’d carried on in the 2320s,” Hal opined, “he’d have ended up like Michi

 Urashima: a sacrifice to the forces of convention. He’d have ended up in the

 freezer, while the masters of the MegaMall divided the work up into manageable

 packets and made sure the transformations were properly tested on animals before

 they started work on dismantling the legal restraints. They’d have been right to

 do it. These things have to be properly managed. We’re not living in the

 twentieth century.”

 “The spin-off from Michi Urashima’s pioneering efforts wasn’t properly managed,

 though,” Charlotte pointed out. “Not the bits that Rappaccini took it upon

 himself to carry forward, at any rate.”

 “From now on,” Hal judged, “they will be.”

 “Does the scroll explain why Moreau did it?” Charlotte asked curiously. She was

 still harboring the faint hope that Oscar Wilde might have got it completely

 wrong and that Moreau’s madness had not been quite as divine as Wilde insisted.

 “It does include some teasing comments about the ethics of scientific research,

 and a slighting reference to the quality of Walter Czastka’s artistry, but

 there’s no detailed explanation of Moreau’s motives. He seems to have decided to

 carry the final solution to the mystery to his grave—unless, of course, he had

 such perfect trust in Wilde’s skills as a detective that he was content to leave

 that side of the matter to him. Fortunately, I’m not required to include

 speculations as to motive in my own report.”

 “The news tapes won’t be content with that,” Charlotte observed wryly. “The

 vidveg always want to know Why?

 “The news-tape mongers won’t give a damn what we say or don’t say, so long as

 they have the charismatic Dr. Wilde to supply all the lurid fantasies they need,

 and a few more besides.”

 “What about the court?” Charlotte asked.

 “It won’t get to court,” Hal told her. “Once the psychologists and

 neurophysiologists have completed their reports, all charges against the woman

 will be dropped. There’s no doubt that she wasn’t in control of her own actions;

 she doesn’t even have any memory of what happened. She’s the Robot Assassins’

 worst nightmare—but however reckless Moreau may have been in other respects, he

 certainly did his best to make sure that his chief pawn came through it all. It

 seems that she’ll make a full recovery.”

 “She’ll simply walk free, then?”

 “Not exactly. She’ll be quietly given into the custody of the Secret Masters of

 the MegaMall. Not as a prisoner, of course, but as a valued employee. They’ll

 pay her whatever salary she requires in exchange for her full cooperation.

 There’s a great deal they can learn from her, or so they hope. It’s dangerous

 knowledge—but it’ll be even more dangerous if others decide to follow in

 Moreau’s footsteps and we don’t have the means to prevent them.”

 Charlotte thought about that for a few moments. In the long run, the entire

 Moreau affair might come to be seen as mere window dressing for the proof that

 it was possible to make brainfeed equipment that would turn humans into mere

 robots. That knowledge would now be entrusted to the Hardinist Cabal—but were

 they safe custodians? And if not them, then who? She realized that the

 repercussions of this remarkable series of incidents would extend over

 centuries—and that she, Charlotte Holmes, had been privileged to see the whole

 drama unfold from the best seat in the house.

 If only she had been able to play a more active part…

 “Walter Czastka could have offered his talent and his enterprise to the

 Ahasuerus Foundation,” Charlotte pointed out when she had decided that she

 needed more time to mull over the other matter. “If he didn’t want to set

 himself so far outside the mainstream of scientific research, he could at least

 have given them what he had and pointed their people in the right direction.

 Instead, he decided to cultivate his and everyone else’s gardens: not merely to

 make flowers, but to make flowers to make money. Not only did he refuse to

 become an Ali Zaman, he even refused to become an Oscar Wilde. Not, apparently,

 the kind of role model that young Jafri was looking for when Maria Inacio turned

 up on his doorstep claiming to be his mother and volunteering to tell him

 everything.”

 “We don’t have to speculate,” Hal reminded her.

 “No,” she admitted, “but it’s difficult to avoid it, isn’t it? The fact that his

 mother went and drowned herself—deliberately or not—can’t have helped young

 Jafri to come to terms with his inheritance. It did make him unique, though.

 From that moment on, he must have been very conscious of the fact that there was

 nobody else in the world quite like him. I can imagine how it might have preyed

 on his mind. Whom the gods destroy, they first make mad, according to

 Euripides.”

 “That’s a terrible habit you’ve picked up from Wilde,” Hal complained, referring

 to her use of the classical quotation.

 “If, by the gods, one means the vicissitudes of chance and circumstance,”

 Charlotte went on unrepentantly, “then we all stand on the brink of destruction:

 every one of us who is not a Natural. Some of us are two hundred years old,

 others merely twenty, but we’re all doomed. Oscar Wilde thinks I ought to be

 even more fiercely resentful of that fact than he is, because my foster parents

 actually had the choice of going for the more expensive option and paying for my

 admission to the New Human Race. Wilde’s parents didn’t—and whatever Jafri

 Biasiolo chose to think, neither did his. Perhaps it’s just youth that prevents

 me from plumbing the depths of disappointment that claimed both Wilde and his

 good friend Rappaccini. Perhaps, in due course, the news of my destruction will

 actually come home to me. Tell me, Hal—how mad are you? And how long will your

 sanity last, while we two grow old in a world where the gradually increasing

 majority of our contemporaries stay young?”

 “We’re policemen,” Hal reminded her. “We’re the ones who are supposed to help

 keep the mad ones in check. Rappaccini and Wilde haven’t done us any favors

 there.”

 “We’re policemen,” Charlotte agreed. “We’re the ones who are supposed to make

 sure that the Gustave Moreaus and Michi Urashimas of this world keep their

 follies at home and their sins in virtual reality. But are we doing the world

 any favors?”

 “I think so,” Hal answered without hesitation.

 “It’s a living, I suppose,” she conceded. “It’ll keep us occupied until we die,

 if we want it to. But Oscar Wilde was right about something else too. I won’t

 want to be a policeman all my life. Life’s too short, you see, for the likes of

 us.”

 “You can’t win them all,” said Hal philosophically, “no matter how closely you

 rub shoulders with the biggest winners there are. You have to play the hand

 you’re dealt by fate, as cleverly as you can.”

 “That’s exactly what Jafri Biasiolo must have thought,” said Charlotte,

 determined to have the last word, “and I suppose that’s exactly what he did, in

 his own peculiar fashion.”

 Having completed his report, Michael Lowenthal looked anxiously around the

 virtual conference room, trying to measure the response. There were thirteen men

 and women whose representative sims were arranged about the illusory table,

 seven of whom he did not yet know by name. Their images were as obsessively

 minimalist as the “room” in which they were gathered; they looked perfectly

 human and perfectly ordinary, except for a slight gloss that might have been a

 reflection of the light that bounced up at them from the polished tabletop.

 According to those elements of the Hidden Archive which had so far been opened

 to Michael’s inquiries, there had been a time when the Secret Masters had donned

 all manner of gaudy raiment in order to conduct their board meetings. They had

 delighted in appearing to one another as gods and demons, monsters and

 mirror-men, and they had met at the summits of virtual peaks higher by far than

 the meager mountains of Earth’s crumpled crust—but that had been in the early

 days of their power. Now they dressed more fittingly, not out of humility but to

 emphasize that their assemblies were straightforwardly utilitarian, merely a

 matter of business.

 Virtual environments were now the arena of all the most cherished dreams of

 humankind—every impossible adventure, every bizarre fetish, every body of

 knowledge, every shameful desire—but the Dominant Shareholders liked to remember

 that virtual space was first and foremost the repository of the world’s wealth.

 It was where money was, and it was where stewardship of the earth was exercised

 with scrupulous care. Michael knew that this imagistic room was more securely

 cloaked than any other in all the world, whether bedded in the hardware of the

 UN police or the so-called World Government. Whatever was said here remained

 here, consigned to the abyssal core of the Hidden Archive—but those who met here

 did not think of it as the conference chamber of the Secret Masters, the Gods of

 Olympus, or the Hardinist Cabal. It was merely a place where businessmen could

 meet and consider matters of mutual concern. It was just a room with bare walls

 and a rectangular table, devoid of all unnecessary ostentation, except a little

 extra polish.

 “Thank you, Michael,” said the chairman. “All things considered, you did a good

 job. If you hadn’t taken the decision to follow Wilde, the police would

 certainly have tried—and might have contrived—to keep a little more from us than

 they actually did. It would have been annoying, to say the least, if we hadn’t

 been able to secure the equipment in that ingenious theater for our exclusive

 use. There are tricks we can actually use in that setup. They’re trivial tricks

 by comparison with what we’ll eventually learn from the girl and her lovely

 hair, but trivial tricks are often the most rewarding, in purely commercial

 terms.”

 “I wish the distractions had worked a little better,” Michael said, feeling that

 it was safe, in view of the chairman’s generosity, to indulge in a little

 judicious self-criticism. “I can’t help feeling that if only I’d framed my

 reckless hypotheses a little more cleverly, I might have persuaded Wilde to fall

 for one or other of them. He is a sucker for a good story, and it might have

 been better if he hadn’t been quite so accurate in his subsequent guesses.”

 “Wilde’s a fool,” opined a white-haired man who must have been two hundred and

 twenty if he were a day. “It doesn’t matter how accurate he is—no one will ever

 take his opinions seriously.”

 “Rightly so, Mr. Hart,” observed a female of equal apparent antiquity. “People

 know full well that it’s men like him who invent disparaging terms like vidveg,

 and they’re absolutely right to feel insulted. They’re correct in their

 estimation of him as a vain, patronizing poseur. Nobody watching the final act

 of that farce live identified with him—they all identified with the policewoman.

 We don’t have to put any substantial amount of spin on the commercial resumes;

 she’s already the star, and her act only needs a little cleaning up. Wilde will

 come across as a spokesman for a lunatic and a lunatic himself; the only people

 who’ll listen to what he says are people who are out on a limb anyway—irrelevant

 people. The show can’t work against us, in the short run or the long. There’ll

 be no substantial comeback about the extirpation. The vast majority will thank

 us, as they always do.”

 How was it possible, Michael wondered, to be so old and yet so calm? Why were

 these people immune to the kinds of resentments which Jafri Biasiolo and Oscar

 Wilde had stored up against the undying inheritors of Earth?

 It was, he realized, people like Oscar Wilde who made up such disparaging

 epithets as “MegaMall” It was people like Oscar Wilde who charged the people

 whose duty and vocation it was to run the world with being hidebound monsters of

 greed, incapable of any but quantitative reckoning. In fact, only people like

 those gathered around this conference table could properly understand the

 quality of life. By virtue of that understanding, they were neither afraid to

 die nor resentful of their appointed heirs.

 “We were right to let it go all the way,” another dutiful soul put in. “It would

 have been a pity to put a stop to it fifty years ago. The obsessive secrecy of

 true madmen is a great asset to the sane; it allows us to be discreet and

 eclectic in releasing the products of their creativity. It would be a terribly

 dull world if we always had to take the oddballs out before they did their most

 interesting work, just because the ripples might spread too fast and too far.”

 “But we’ll have to keep a closer eye on Wilde, from now on,” another and more

 ominous voice put in.

 “It’s hardly worth it, surely,” said Michael, so relaxed by now that he did not

 even feel that he was taking a risk in issuing the mild contradiction. “He’ll be

 dead soon enough, won’t he?”

 In the Green Carnation Suite of the New York Majestic, Oscar Wilde stood before

 a full-length mirror, carefully inspecting every detail of his face. He caressed

 the flawless flesh with sensitive fingertips, rejoicing in its gloss.

 “Ivory and rose leaves,” he murmured. The sound of his voice, lower in pitch and

 more musical than he remembered it, gave him an exquisite thrill.

 He repeated the phrase reverently, as though it were a magical incantation:

 “Ivory and rose leaves.”

 Oscar had never been afraid of vanity. He was a man ready and willing to address

 his own reflection in the most admiring terms, provided only that it remained

 full of youth and perfect in its symmetry. Whenever it grew old, as it had three

 times over, it lost its capacity to inspire admiration and became a mocking

 reminder of the hazards which he and all men of his obsolescent kind still

 faced: decay, senescence, decomposition.

 “One hundred and thirty-three years old,” he said softly. “One hundred and

 thirty-three years old, and young again. Age cannot wither, nor custom stale…”

 He reached out to pluck a green carnation from the wall beside the mirror. It

 was one of only half a dozen in full bloom, and he twirled it between his

 delicate fingers, admiring it with as much satisfaction as he admired his own

 image.

 The flower was a trivial creation, only a little more elegant than the variety

 which the horticulturalists of old had wrought without the aid of genetic

 engineering, but it had been a necessary endeavor. It was a joke, of course, but

 a very serious joke. The never-ending games which Oscar played in consequence of

 his name were no mere matter of public relations. His identification with the

 ideas and ideals of his alter ego had long ago become a deep-seated obsession as

 well as a mischievous fetish. He was not afraid to acknowledge that fact, nor to

 take pride in it. He had always felt that life, if it were to be lived to the

 full in modern conditions, required a definite style and aesthetic shape: a

 constant flow of delicate ironies, tensions, and innovations; a cause. Perhaps,

 as Charlotte Holmes and Michael Lowenthal clearly believed, his own cause was

 hardly less mad than poor Rappaccini’s—but then again, perhaps all causes that

 had the power to change the world were bound to be reckoned mad until they bore

 sweet fruit.

 He placed the flower in the mock buttonhole of his neatly tailored SAP black

 suitskin. Black was, he thought, the perfect background for a green

 carnation—and a room full of green carnations was the perfect background for a

 man in black.

 Oscar was fully aware of the debt of gratitude which he owed to his wallflowers.

 Furnishing hotel interiors was vulgar hackwork unbefitting a real artist, but a

 real artist had to make a living, and the commonplaceness of such commissions

 could always be slightly offset by such flourishes of unorthodoxy as having it

 written into every contract that one suite of rooms should be fitted with green

 carnations instead of the more fashionable roses and amaranths and should always

 be available for his exclusive use.

 His clients did not mind in the least his making such demands; they were, after

 all, paying for his fashionability rather than his technical dexterity, and he

 could not have been nearly so fashionable were it not for his extravagantly

 extrovert eccentricity. There were now hotels in thirty-six cities which could

 provide him with a distinctive pied-a-terre, and he felt entirely justified in

 thinking of the green carnation suites as his homes away from home.

 His real home, of course, was the island which he had leased for his experiments

 in Creation.

 Oscar half turned one way and then the other, shrugging his shoulders to make

 sure that the false jacket extruded by his suitskin hung perfectly upon his

 remodeled body. He had renewed his entire wardrobe since his rejuvenation; it

 had been absolutely necessary that he should—how could a man feel a tangible

 pulse of joy at finding himself full of youth unless he acted the part with

 total conviction?

 “Clothes maketh the man,” he murmured, “or, if the man is clever enough to be

 self-made, must at least refrain from unmaking him.” He did not have to make a

 note to remember the remark; even in his inner sanctum the bubblebugs were

 active around the clock. They would stay that way until the first signs of aging

 began to show again upon his face and in the timbre of his voice.

 Oscar felt that he, unlike most men of his age, had conscientiously adapted his

 ideas to the reality of twenty-fifth-century life. He had discarded outdated

 notions of privacy in favor of making a perfect record of his beautiful life.

 For this reason, if for no other, he was determined to be content with nothing

 less than sartorial perfection. This evening was, after all, to be the

 auspicious occasion of his reemergence into the social world. His involvement in

 the Rappaccini affair, and the quarantine which he had been forced to endure

 thereafter, had delayed his new debut but had also made certain that it would be

 even more dazzling than he had ever dared to hope. He was famous now, and would

 be for at least a quarter of an hour as the clock of history made revolution

 after revolution. He was profoundly glad that fame had descended upon him at

 exactly the right moment, while he looked his best for what would almost

 certainly be the last time.

 “It is only shallow people,” he informed his reflection, confident in the

 knowledge that it would be an appreciative audience, “who do not judge by

 appearances. Adonis, perfection is thine.”

 He bathed in the luxury of his own narcissism, admiring his gray eyes, his soft

 lips, his pearly white teeth. He savored the complexity of his emotions as he

 contemplated his beauty and his ambitions. There was a warm glow of gratitude

 and relief—tinged with admiration—for the artistry of the somatic engineers who

 had restored his body to its excellent state.

 “You’re a fool, Oscar,” a friend had said to him when he had confessed his

 intention to chance a third rejuvenation. “You had twenty years of wear still

 left in your last body when you turned it in, and you’ve at least twenty left in

 this one. Only a fool would take the risk.”

 Oscar had often been called a fool. Most of the people he knew probably thought

 that his entire lifestyle was nothing but foolishness. He was immune to such

 criticism. He knew full well that when he was called a fool the people who used

 the word meant it in its common or garden sense, but he always heard it as a

 more dignified reference.

 “Certainly I am a Fool,” he had replied more than once. “I am an unfettering

 Feste, court jester to the Bio-technic Aristocracy, the Touchstone which tests

 the metal of the Golden Age. I am one of those who is privileged to whisper in

 the ears of the modern multitude the fateful words: ‘Remember that thou art the

 last of mortal men!’ I am the harbinger of Eternal Youth. I am proud to be a

 Fool.”

 Beneath the gratitude and the relief which he felt upon finding himself young

 again, however, were sterner feelings. He knew well enough that the tissue

 replenishments had only made a beginning for him. He had been provided with the

 raw material of youth, but it still remained for him to complete the work of art

 by dressing his new body, animating it, and providing the soul and the

 intelligence which would put its youth to work. The genius of medicine had

 painted a portrait of Adonis, but it would be his own task to be Adonis: to live

 extravagantly, perfectly, and beautifully. There were deeper regrets too; had he

 not been so anxious to make the most of his celebrity, he would have been in

 mourning, not so much for Rappaccini but for Rappaccini’s Creation, condemned by

 the UN as poisonous and erased from the face of the Pacific.

 Oscar did not doubt for a moment, as his greedy eyes devoured the glory of his

 reflection, that he would be equal to the immediate task before him. He had

 never been the kind of habit-dominated man who renewed his appearance only to

 remain confined by a straitjacket which his earlier way of life had made for

 him. He was no crass businessman, apt to fall back into the same old routines at

 the first opportunity, wearing a new face as if it were merely a mask laid over

 the old. Nor was he the kind of man who would go to the opposite extreme,

 reverting to the habits and follies of first youthfulness, playing the sportsman

 or the rake as though there were nothing to do with the gift of youth except

 recycle the same stereotyped errors. He was a man properly equipped, in heart

 and in mind, for serial rejuvenation. There would be time, later, for him to

 prove himself equal to the less immediate task of making sure that the example

 of Rappaccini’s reckless inventiveness did not go entirely to waste. There would

 even be time for him to become a murderer, if he decided that the cause of Art

 demanded it.

 He closed his eyes for one last lingering moment while he savored the pleasures

 of anticipation. He pretended that the moment was an infinite one, in which a

 man might lose himself in the ecstasy of a chosen dream.

 Such was the power of his imagination that he did indeed win a moment’s

 suspension of the oppressive curse of Time: a moment of true and total freedom

 which promised to last… certainly not forever, and certainly not long enough,

 but at least for a little while.

 He knew that it was up to him to use that little while as fully as he could, not

 merely here in the great wide world whose eyes were yet upon him and whose ears

 were eager for his every epigram and aphorism, but also in his private island

 covert: his garden; his folly; his Creation. Would the world ever see his like

 again, once he was gone? He was, of course, an imitation, but he was an

 imitation which had outshone its original. The first Oscar Wilde would have

 approved of that, just as he would have approved of the fact that in the company

 of Charlotte Holmes, he had reduced her to the role of a mere Watson, while he

 himself had played the master of deduction.

 If only there were time enough, Oscar thought, to be a thousand men instead of

 one or two. What a wonder I might have made of myself, had my youth been truly

 eternal!