Текст книги "Architects of emortality"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

“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.