Текст книги "Architects of emortality"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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“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.