Текст книги "Architects of emortality"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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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.