Текст книги "Architects of emortality"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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“I hope not,” he replied. “It would be unfortunate were such a magnificent creation to lose its life in the interests of a mere coup de theatre. On the other hand, one cannot push back the limits of the possible without sacrifice—and Rappaccini has shown little sign of compunction in that regard.” Together, they moved into the forest.

Charlotte found herself leading the way along a narrow grassy pathway, which had the appearance of an accident of nature but which must in fact have been designed with the utmost care. As Charlotte looked from side to side the whole scene seemed remarkably focused, clear and sharp in every detail. It seemed that every leaf on every tree had been not merely designed but arranged with excessive scrupulousness.

There were no mock palms here. This forest was very different from any that Charlotte had ever seen before. The trunk of every tree had grown into the shape of something else, as finely wrought in bronze-barked wood as any sculpture. No two were exactly alike: here was the image of a dragon rampant, here a mermaid, here a trilobite, and here a shaggy faun. Many were the images of beasts which natural selection had designed to walk on four legs, but all of them stood upright here, rearing back to extend their forelimbs, separately or entwined, high into the air. These upraised forelimbs provided bases for spreading crowns of many different colors: all the greens and coppery browns of Ancient Nature; all the purples, golds, and blues that Ancient Nature had never quite mastered; even the graphite black of Solid Artificial Photosynthetic systems. Some few of the crowns extended from an entire host of limbs rather than a single pair, originating from the maws of krakens or the stalks of hydras.

The animals whose shapes were reproduced by the trunks of the trees all had open eyes, which seemed to look at Charlotte no matter where she was in relation to them. Although she knew that they were all quite blind, she could not help feeling discomfited by their seeming curiosity.

Her own curiosity, however, was more than equal to theirs.

Every tree of the forest was in flower, and every flower was as bizarre as the plant which bore it. All possible colors were manifest in the blossoms, but there was a noticeable preponderance of reds and blacks. Butterflies and hummingbirds moved ceaselessly through the branches, each one wearing its own coat of many colors, and the tips of the branches moved as if stirred by a breeze, reaching out toward these visitors, seemingly yearning to touch their tiny faces.

There was no wind; the branches moved by their own volition, according to their own mute purposes.

Charlotte could see electronic hoverflies mingling with Gustave Moreau’s insects, and ponderous flitter-bugs jostling for position with the tinier hummingbirds. No predators came to harass them, although there were larger birds concealed by the foliage, audible as they moved from branch to branch and occasionally visible in brief flashes of vivid coloration.

Charlotte knew that much of what she saw was manifestly illegal. Creationists were restricted by all manner of arcane regulations in the engineering of insects and birds, lest their inventions should stray to pollute the artwork of other engineers or to intermingle with the more extensive ecosystems of the world at large. Most Creationists undoubtedly took some liberties to which they were not theoretically entitled—even Walter Czastka had probably been guilty of that, no matter how dull his efforts had seemed to Oscar Wilde—but Charlotte had no doubt that when the final accounting of Gustave Moreau’s felonies and misdemeanors was complete, he would turn out to have been the most prolific as well as the most versatile criminal who had ever lived upon the surface of the earth.

All of this would be destroyed, of course—as Moreau must have known when he had planned it and while he built it. He had given birth to an extraordinary fantasy, fully aware that it would be ephemeral; but instead of leaving it to the scrupulously scientific attentions of a UN inspection team—who would have filed their records away and left them moldering in some quiet corner of the Webworld—he had found a way to command that rapt attention be paid to it by every man, woman, and child in the world. Only thus, he must have decided, could due recognition be given to his awesome genius: his talent as an artist and engineer, and his ingenuity as a social commentator.

Had the designer of this alien ecosphere, Charlotte wondered, dared to hope that his contemporaries might recognize and reckon him a true Creationist, to be set as far above the petty laws of humankind as the obsolete gods of old had once been set? Had he dared to believe that even the vidveg might condone what he had done, once they saw it in all its glory? No, she concluded. Even Rappaccini/Moreau could not have credited the vidveg with that much imagination.

Charlotte soon perceived that Moreau’s creative fecundity had not been content with birds and insects. There were monkeys in the trees too: monkeys which did not hide or flee from the invaders of their private paradise, but came instead to peep out at them from the gaudy crowns and stare with patient curiosity at their visitors.

The monkeys were not huge; none was more than a meter from top to toe, and all had the slender bodies of gibbons and lorises—but they had the wizened faces of old men. Nor was that appearance merely the generic resemblance which had once been manifest in the faces of certain long-extinct New World monkeys; these faces were actual human faces, writ small. Charlotte recognized a family of Czastkas, a pair of Teidemanns, an assortment of Kings and Urashimas—but there were dozens to which she could not put names. Perhaps they too had been contemporaries of Walter Czastka at Wollongong, or perhaps their lives had been entangled with his in other ways. Perhaps some were still living—and perhaps the chain of murders would have had far more links had more provisionally selected targets survived to the ripe old age of a hundred and ninety-four.

The eyes set in these surrounding faces, which now increased in number with Charlotte’s every stride, were neither blind nor utterly stupid; nor was she prepared to invoke her habitual notions of impossibility to set a limit on the intelligence which lurked behind them. It seemed entirely likely that they might break out into cacophonous speech at any moment, and just as probable that one appointed spokesman might lower itself to the path ahead of her and offer her a formal welcome.

Posturing apes, she thought, remembering Gabriel King’s verdict.

Charlotte swallowed air, unsuccessfully trying to remove a lump of unease from her throat. She tried to ignore the staring eyes of the monkeys in order to concentrate on the gorgeous blossoms which framed their faces. They all seemed unnaturally large and bright, and every one presented a great fan or bell of petals and sepals, surrounding a complex network of stamens and compound styles.

There was no way that she could begin to take in their awesome profusion and variety. She felt that her senses were quite overloaded—and not merely her sense of sight, for the moist atmosphere was a riot of perfumes, while the murmurous humming of insect wings improvised a subtle symphony.

Is it truly beautiful? Charlotte asked herself as she studied the sculpted trees which stared at her with their myriad illusory eyes, their hectic crowns, and their luminous flowers. Or is it all fabulously mad? She did not need to consult Oscar Wilde; she knew his intellectual methods by now.

It was truly beautiful, she admitted, and fabulously mad too—and having admitted it, she let the tide of her appreciation run riot. It was more beautiful than anything she had ever seen or ever hoped to see. It was more beautiful and more intoxicating than anything anyone had ever seen or hoped to see. It was infinitely more beautiful than the ghostly echoes of Ancient Nature which modern men called wilderness. It was infinitely more beautiful and infinitely less sane than Ancient Nature itself, even in all its pre-Crash glory, could ever have been.

All this, even Charlotte’s unschooled eyes could see, was the work of a young man. However many years Rappaccini/Moreau had lived, however many he had spent in glorious isolation in the midst of all this strange fecundity, he had never grown old and never grown wise. All this was Folly: unashamed and unapologetic Folly. This was not the work of a man grown mournful in forgetfulness, obsessed with the pursuit of a vanishing past; this was the work of a man whose only thought was of the future: of novelty, of ambition, of progress. Perhaps Walter Czastka’s illegal experiment had not been such an abject failure after all; perhaps the transformation it had wrought had merely been subtler than its designer had intended.

This was Moreau’s island—morrow’s island—but the child that had been father to the man who became Moreau had itself been fathered, and created. Perhaps this ought to be reckoned Walter Czastka’s Eden too, at least as much as the one into which he had poured the futile labor of his dotage.

Charlotte no longer needed the advice of Oscar Wilde’s interpretations. Whatever resonances of the distant past might have evaded her youthful ignorance, she felt that she understood the present heart of the little world which surrounded her, and the kind of soul which hovered invisibly in every molecular skein of it all.

Yes, it was truly beautiful, and fabulous and mad—but the truth, the beauty, the fabulousness, and the madness were the work of a true Creationist.

In the heart of Moreau’s island, Charlotte expected to find a house, but there was no house there. Once, no doubt, there had been a dwelling place on the site—a laboratory and a workshop, a palace and a forge, a refuge and a hatchery—but all of that had been banished now, buried underground if not actually dismantled.

Now, there was only a mausoleum.

Charlotte knew that Moreau had died in Honolulu, but she also recalled that his body had been returned to the island, where someone with no official existence must have taken delivery of it and laid it in this tomb. Charlotte assumed that it would not be allowed to remain here, but it was here now: the mortal centerpiece of Moreau’s Creation.

It was a very large tomb, hewn from a white marble whose austerity stood in imperious contrast to the fabulous forest around it. There was nothing overelaborate about its formation, although it was tastefully decorated. It bore neither cross nor carven angel, but on the plain white flank which loomed above its pediment a text was inscribed. It read: SPLEEN Je suis comme le roi d’un pays pluvieux, Riche, mais impuissant, jeune et pourtant tres-vieux, Qui, de ses precepteurs meprisant les courbettes, S’ennuie avec ses chiens comme avec d’autres betes. Rien ne peut 1’egayer, ni gibier, ni faucon, Ni son peuple mourant en face du balcon. Du bouffon favori la grotesque ballade Ne distrait plus le front de ce cruel malade; Son lit fleurdelise se transforme en tombeau, Et les dames d’atour, pour qui tout prince est beau, Ne savent plus trouver d’impudique toilette Pour tirer un souris de ce jeune squelette.

Le savant qui lui fait de 1’or n’a jamais pu De son étre extirper 1’element corrompu, Et dans ces bains de sang qui des Remains nous viennent, Et dont sur leurs vieux jours les puissants se souviennent, II n’a sur échauffer ce cadavre hebete Ou coule au lieu de sang l’eau verte du Lethe.

“Baudelaire?” Charlotte asked of Oscar Wilde. “Of course,” he replied. “Would you like me to translate?” “If you would.” “It runs approximately thus,” he said.

“I am like the monarch of a rain-soaked realm,” “Rich but powerless, young but perhaps too old, “Who, despising the sycophancy of his teachers,” “Is as sick of his dogs as of all other beasts.

“Nothing can enliven him, neither prey, nor predator,” “Nor deaths displayed before his balcony.

“The satirical ballads of his appointed fool” “No longer soothe the frown of his cruel malady; “His flower-decked couch is transformed into a tomb,” “And the courtesans for whom every prince is handsome, “Can no longer find attire sufficiently immodest,” “To force this youthful skeleton to smile.

“The maker of alchemical gold has never contrived” “To extirpate elementary corruption from his own being, “And in those baths of blood which the Romans left to us, “Which powerful men recall in the days of their old age,” “He has failed to renew the warmth of that dazed cadaver “Where runs instead of blood the green water of forgetfulness.” “Spleen, I assume, does not here refer to the common or garden organ of that name?” said Michael Lowenthal.

“It does not,” Wilde confirmed. “Its meaning here is one that was rendered obsolete by the modern medical theories which replaced the ancient lore of bodily humors. Spleen was the aggravated form of the decadents’ ennui: a bitter world-weariness, a sullenly wrathful resentment of the essential dullness of existence.” “Is that, do you suppose, what drove him to make all this?” Charlotte asked.

“I doubt it. This paradise was not born of bitterness or resentment, although the trail of murders that paved our way with bad intentions must have been. The poem is a commentary on the artist’s final approach to death, not on his life as a whole. Spleen was what Moreau fought with all his might to resist, although he knew that he could not live forever, and that it would claim him in the end.

Like us, dear Charlotte, he was delivered by history to the very threshold of true emortality, and yet was fated not to live in the Promised Land. How he must have resented the fading of the faculties which had produced all this! How he must have hated the knowledge that his creative powers were ebbing away! How wrathful he must have become, to see his fate mirrored in the faces and careers of all those who had a hand in his own Creation. While the true emortals emerge from the womb of biotechnical artifice, today and tomorrow—and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow—they can no longer care who their fathers are or might have been, for they are designed by men like gods, from common chromosomal clay.” He looked at Michael Lowenthal as he pronounced the final sentence—but Michael Lowenthal looked away rather than meet the geneticist’s accusing stare.

Charlotte looked around, wondering where the red-haired woman might be—and wondering, now, exactly what the red-haired woman might be. She was a clone of Maria Inacio, and yet not quite a clone. Some of her genes had been modified by engineering while she was still an ovum—just as some of her son/father’s genes had been modified by the young Walter Czastka. She, like her own Creator, had been designed by a man trying to become like a god, from common chromosomal clay—but Gustave Moreau must have done everything within his power to surpass Walter Czastka in that regard. The woman must surely be a Natural, in the limited sense that Michael Lowenthal was, but how much more had Moreau tried to make of her? Charlotte remembered some words that Moreau, as Herod, had quoted at Oscar Wilde, teasing him with the charge that even he could not have encountered them before: “Mortality, Behold and Fear! What a change of flesh is here!” But the woman was a multiple murderess; when the law took its course, her career would surely be subject to a demolition as comprehensive and as brutal as the one to which this exotic demi-Eden would be subject.

Charlotte knew, as she framed that thought, that it might not be quite as simple as that. Oscar Wilde, for one, would fight for the preservation of Moreau’s island—and how many allies would he find among the millions of watchers who were waiting for her to locate and arrest her suspect? How many allies might the lovely murderess find, even in a world where death was regarded with such intense loathing and fascination? While Michael Lowenthal was still making shift to avoid Oscar Wilde’s stare, Charlotte moved away from them to make a tour of the massive mausoleum.

It required only half a dozen steps to bring her quarry into view. The fugitive was sitting on the pediment on the further side of the tomb, facing a crowd of leaping lions and prancing unicorns, vaulting hippogriffs and rearing cobras, all of them hewn in living wood beneath a roof of rainbows. Hundreds of man-faced monkeys were solemnly observing the scene.

The woman was quite still, and her vivid green eyes, which matched the color of the foliage of one particular tree which stood directly before her, were staring vacuously into space. It was as if she could not even see the fantastic host which paraded itself before her. Her arms were slightly spread, the palms of her hands upturned, each balancing a different object—but it was not her hands which drew Charlotte’s gaze.

The woman was quite bald, and her skull was studded with silver contact points.

The hair that the woman had worn throughout her murderous odyssey lay like stranded seaweed upon the white marble between her feet—but its strands were still stirring like stately ripples in a quiet pond, and wherever it caught a shaft of sunlight it glittered, showing all its myriad colors in rapid sequence, from polished silver through amber gold and flaming red to burnt sienna and raven black.

The stars in the hairless skull glistened too, in the reflected light of the sun. Charlotte could hardly help but be reminded of the cruder decorations which Michi Urashima had accumulated on his own skull, but she knew that these must be different. Urashima was a self-made man, who had found his true vocation late in life. This person had been born to her heritage; her brain had been designed to be fed, and not with any ordinary nourishment.

In the woman’s left hand lay a single flower: a gorgeously gilded rose. In her right hand she held a scroll of parchment, neatly rolled and tied with blue ribbon.

Oscar Wilde stepped past Charlotte and picked up the gilded rose. He placed it carefully in the mock buttonhole formed by the false collar of his suitskin. He had discarded his green carnation.

Charlotte stooped and reached out to touch the mass of “hair” which lay upon the marble. It moved in response to her touch, but not to recoil or flee. The ripples in its surface became waves, and its strands coiled like a nest of impossibly slender and improbably numerous snakes. It had more mass than she had thought likely. Quelling her instinctive revulsion, Charlotte picked it up and let its strands wrap themselves around her wrists and fingers, as if in grateful affection. She could not help but marvel at the awesome complexity and vivacity of its myriad threads.

“What is it?” Michael Lowenthal asked, his tone suspended somewhere between fear and fascination.

“I don’t know what to call it,” Charlotte said. “I daresay that the scroll will tell us.” “I can only guess at its nature,” said Oscar Wilde, “but I imagine that we shall discover that it is the murderer’s real accomplice. That, I suspect, is Rappaccini’s daughter, and the woman of flesh and blood is its mere instrument.

Those Medusan locks presumably comprise the virtual individual which has moved this Innocent Eve hither and yon throughout the world, fascinating her appointed victims and luring them to the acceptance of her fatal kisses. Perhaps we should think of it as the ultimate femme fatale: vengeful fury appointed by Rappaccini to settle all his earthly accounts.” Charlotte saw Lowenthal’s face turn suddenly pallid, and wondered why she had not reacted in the same way.

“And we thought the flowers posed a biohazard!” he said—we, in this instance, being a grander company by far than the one comprised by his immediate neighbors. “Imagine what that could do!” “Only to those primed for its convenience,” Wilde observed—and then his own expression shifted. Mindful of the number of the eyes that were watching and the ears that would overhear, he hesitated for a second or more—but he was not a cautious man by nature. “And your ever dutiful employers already know, do they not, exactly what machines like this could do? Is it not part and parcel of their careful stewardship to keep such monstrosities in their place, locked away in the vaults beneath their infinite emporium where everything unfit for the marketplace is stored?” Charlotte observed, however, that Wilde made no reference to the probable ultimate source of the income which had fed the less orthodox researches of Michi Urashima and Paul Kwiatek.

“She’s got away again, hasn’t she?” Charlotte murmured.

“I suspect that when your Court of Judgment eventually sits,” Oscar Wilde agreed, “that cyborg creature you hold in your hand will be the only guilty party that can legitimately be summoned to appear before it. Alas for the justice which requires to be seen in order to be properly done, I doubt that it has any consciousness or conscience that can be sensibly held to account or punished. The evil that Rappaccini did may have lived after him for a little while, but everything that might have been punished for his sins was interred with his bones.” Charlotte let out her breath, unaware that she had been holding it. The exhalation turned into a long, deep sigh that sounded exactly like one of Oscar Wilde’s. She looked up into the little tent of blue sky above the mausoleum, which marked the clearing in which they were standing.

The sky was full of flying eyes which sparkled like crystal dust in the sun’s kindly light.

Charlotte knew that the words which they were speaking could be heard by millions of people all over the world and would in time be relayed to billions.

The real Court of Judgment was here and now, and any verdict which the three of them chose to return would probably stick.

“It’s over,” Charlotte said quietly. “Punishment is neither here nor there. It’s just a matter of counting the cost.” She looked at Michael Lowenthal as she spoke, even though the people he represented were experts on prices rather than costs.

“It was still murder,” was all that Lowenthal could find to say.

“Of course it was,” said Oscar Wilde. “It was a perfect murder—perhaps the only perfect murder the world has seen, as yet.”