Текст книги "Architects of emortality"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

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.