Текст книги "Architects of emortality"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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Investigation: Act Three: Across America

By the time she had installed herself in the maglev couchette, Charlotte was exhausted. It had been a long, eventful, and mentally taxing day. Unfortunately, her head was still seething with crowded thoughts in Brownian motion, and she knew that sleep would be out of the question without serious chemical assistance. She knew that her disinclination to avail herself of such assistance would undoubtedly punish her the next day, when she would doubtless need chemical assistance of a different kind to maintain her alertness, but that seemed to her to be the dutiful way to play it. There was plenty of work she could do while she stayed awake, even if her powers of concentration were not at their peak.

The couchette had a screen of its own, but it was situated at the foot of the bed, and Charlotte found it more comfortable by far to plug her beltphone into the bed’s head and set the bookplate on the pillow while lying prone on the mattress.

At first she was content to scan data which had already been collated by Hal’s silvers, but she soon grew bored with that. Now that she had elected to play the detective, she knew that she ought to be doing research of her own. She could hardly compete with Hal’s private army in matters of detail, but even Hal had confessed to her once that the principal defect of his methodology was the danger of losing sight of the wood among the trees. Given that she was a legman, operating in the human world rather than the abstract realm of digitized data, she needed to think holistically, making every effort to grasp the big picture.

To have any chance of doing that, however, she needed more information on the game’s players. Hal had already shown her the near vacuum of data that was supposedly the man behind Rappaccini, but if her suspicions could be trusted, the real key to the mystery must be Oscar Wilde.

She had, of course, to hope that her suspicions could be trusted; if they could not, she was going to look very foolish indeed. Modern police work was conventionally confined to the kind of data sifting at which Hal Watson was a past master. Legmen were at the bottom of the hierarchy, normally confined to the quasi-janitorial labor of looking after crime scenes and making arrests. She was mildly surprised that Hal had actually consented to let her accompany Wilde, because he obviously felt that this trip to San Francisco was a wild-goose chase, and that it was of no relevance whatsoever to the investigation. She wondered whether he would have given her permission if it had not been for Lowenthal. Although he would never be able to say so out loud, Hal would be much happier if the man from MegaMall were chasing distant wild geese instead of looking over his shoulder while he did the real detective work. At any rate, Charlotte knew that she could expect no backup and no encouragement, and that her one chance of avoiding a nasty blot on her record was to prove that her instincts were correct. If she could do that, the outlandishness of her action would be forgiven—and if she were spectacularly successful, her efforts might actually make the UN hierarchy think again about the methodology of modern police work.

It was the work of a few moments to discover that Oscar Wilde was anything but a data vacuum. That did not surprise her—although she was slightly startled by the revelation that there was almost as much data in the Web relating to the nineteenth-century writer after whom the contemporary Oscar had been named as there was to the man himself. It took her a further fifteen minutes fully to absorb the lesson that mere mass was a highly undesirable thing when it came to translating information into understanding. By the time that quarter hour had elapsed, she had cultivated a proper appreciation for the synoptic efforts of compilers of commentaries and encyclopedists.

She tried out half a dozen points of entry into the hypertextual maze, eventually settling for the Condensed Micropaedia of the Modern World. From there she was able to retrieve a reasonably compacted description of the life and works of Oscar Wilde (2362– ) and Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854-1900). When she had inwardly digested that information, she looked up Charles Baudelaire. Then she looked up Walter Czastka, then Gabriel King, and then Michi Urashima. She had been hoping for inspiration, but none came; she felt even more exhausted but even less capable of sleep.

On a whim, she looked up Michael Lowenthal. She found references to a dozen of them, none of whom could possibly be the man in the next-but-one couchette. She keyed in MegaMall, but had to go to the Universal Dictionary to find an entry, which merely recorded that the word was “A colloquial term for the industrial/entertainment complex.” There were no entries even in the Universal Dictionary for the Secret Masters, the Nine Unknown, or the Dominant Shareholders, and the entries on the Gods of Olympus and the Knights of the Round Table were carefully disingenuous. There were, however, entries in both the dictionary and the Condensed Micropaedia on Hardinism, each of which deigned to include a footnote on the Hardinist Cabal.

According to the micropaedia, Hardinism was the name adopted by a loose association of early twenty-first-century businessmen to dignify their assertive defense of the principle of private property against steadily increasing demand that a central planning agency administered by the United Nations should be appointed to supervise the management of the ecosphere. The name had been appropriated from an obscure twentieth-century text called The Tragedy of the Commons, by an agricultural economist named Garrett Hardin. There, Hardin had pointed out that in the days when English grazing land had been available for common use, it had been in the interests of every individual user to maximize his exploitation of the resource by increasing the size of his herds. The inevitable result of this rational pursuit of individual advantage had been the overgrazing and ultimate destruction of the commons. Those former English commons which had been transformed into private property by the Enclosures Act had, by contrast, been carefully protected by their owners from dereliction, because they had been calculated as valuable items of inheritance whose bounty must be guarded.

According to the footnote, the members of the consortium of multinational corporations who had masterminded the so-called Zimmerman coup, which had taken advantage of a financial crisis in the world’s stock markets to obtain a stranglehold on certain key “trading derivatives” relating to staple crops, had justified their actions by citing Hardinist doctrine. Although they had left Adam Zimmerman to acquire the primary notoriety of being “the man who cornered the future” or “the man who stole the world,” they had nevertheless been stuck with the nickname of the Hardinist Cabal.

Neither the dictionary nor the micropaedia had anything to say about the contemporary use of the nickname, but it did not require much imagination to see the implication of its continued currency. Whatever the truth behind the myth of the Zimmerman coup might be, its effects were still in force. If a cartel of big corporations really had acquired effective ownership of the world in the early twenty-first century, they still had it. Even the Crash could not have served to loosen their grip; indeed, the establishment of the New Reproductive System must have helped to insulate it from the main kind of disintegration to which private property had previously been subject: dissipation by distribution among multiple inheritors.

In a sense, this was not news. Everybody “knew” that the United Nations didn’t really run the world, and that the MegaMall did—but the ease with which that ironically cynical doctrine was accepted and bandied about kept the awareness at a superficial level. The idea of the MegaMall was so numinous, so difficult to pin down, that it was easy to forget that in the final analysis, it really was under the control of a relatively small number of Dominant Shareholders, whose names were not generally known. Like the ingenious Rappaccini, they had slipped away into the chaotic sea of Web-held data, forging new apparent identities and abandoning old ones, hiding among the electronic multitudes.

According to Hardinist doctrine, of course, such men were the saviors of the world, who had prevented the ecosphere from falling prey to the tragedy of the commons. Presumably, they were Hardinists still, utterly convinced of the virtue as well as the necessity of their economic power—and the next generation, to whom the reins of that power would be quietly handed over, would have the opportunity to hold it in perpetuity.

Michael Lowenthal had said that he was only a humble employee, like Charlotte, but while she only worked for the World Government, he was a servant of the Secret Masters of the world. Those Secret Masters had thought it necessary to take an interest in the murder of Gabriel King, in case it might be the beginning of a process that might threaten them. Now Michi Urashima was dead too—and to judge by Michael Lowenthal’s reaction, that had been both unexpected and unwelcome. If it had suggested that their initial anxieties had been unfounded, it must also have suggested a few new anxieties to take the place of the originals. With luck, Lowenthal and his associates would be as confused and frustrated at this moment in time as she was.

If Oscar Wilde really was the killer, Charlotte realized, then this whole affair was nothing more than a madman’s fantasy. How grateful the Hardinist Cabal would be if that were indeed the case—or if, indeed, it turned out to be some other madman’s fantasy! The question that still remained, however—the question which was presumably responsible for Michael Lowenthal’s continued presence on the maglev—was whether there was any kind of method within the seeming madness.

If so, she wondered, what kind of method could it possibly be? What could anyone possibly achieve, or even seek to achieve, by the murders of Gabriel King and Michi Urashima? Charlotte rose somewhat earlier than was her habit—the couchette was not the kind of bed which encouraged one to lie in, no matter how little sleep one had had.

She immediately patched through a link to Hal Watson in order to get an update on the state of his investigations, but he wasn’t at his station yet.

She decanted all the messages that he had left in store for her, and took careful note of those which seemed most significant before walking to the dining car in order to obtain a couple of manna croissants and a cup of strong coffee.

She did not doubt that Michael Lowenthal would do the same as soon as he awoke, if he had not done so already; she could only hope that her estimations of significance might prove better than his.

By the time Charlotte had finished her breakfast, the train was only three hours out of San Francisco. Oscar Wilde joined her while she was sipping coffee. He was looking very neat and trim save for the fact that the unrenewed green carnation in his buttonhole was now rather bedraggled. When he saw her looking at it, he assured her that he would be able to obtain a new one soon after arrival, because one of his very first commissions, had been to plan the interior decor of the San Francisco Majestic.

“Such has been the mercy of our timetable,” he observed, peering through the tinted window, “that we have slept through Missouri and Kansas.” She knew what he meant. Missouri and Kansas were distinctly lacking in interesting scenery since the restabilization of the climate had made their great plains prime sites for the establishment of vast tracts of artificial photosynthetics. Nowadays, the greater part of the Midwest looked rather like sections of an infinite undulating sheet of matte black, which could easily cause offense to eyes that had been trained to love color. The SAP fields of Kansas always gave Charlotte the impression of looking at a gigantic piece of frilly and filthy corrugated cardboard. Houses and factories alike had retreated beneath the Stygian canopy, and the parts of the landscape which extended toward the horizon were so blurred as to be almost featureless.

By now, though, the maglev passengers had the more elevating scenery of Colorado to look out upon. Most of the state had been carefully reforested; apart from the city of Denver—another of the Decivilizers’ favorite targets, but one they had not yet claimed—its centers of population had taken advantage of the versatility of modern building techniques to blend in with their surroundings.

Chlorophyll green was infinitely easier on the human eye than SAP black, presumably because millions of years of adaptive natural selection had ensured that it would be, and the Colorado landscape seemed extraordinarily soothing.

Had the hard-core Green Zealots not been so fixated on the grandiose glories of rain forest, they might have nominated this as a corner of Green Heaven. Had it been authentic wilderness, of course, it would have been mostly desert, but no one in the USNA would go so far in the cause of authenticity as to insist upon land remaining desolate; the republics of Gobi and Kalahari had a monopoly on that kind of nostalgia.

While Oscar ordered eggs duchesse for breakfast, Charlotte activated the wallscreen beside their table and summoned up the latest news. The fact of Gabriel King’s death was recorded, as was the fact of Michi Urashima’s, but there was nothing about the exotic circumstances. She was momentarily puzzled by the fact that no one had yet connected the two murders or latched onto the possible biohazard, but she realized that the MegaMall’s interest in the affair had advantages as well as disadvantages. The MegaMall owned the casters, and until the MegaMall decided that discretion was unnecessary, the casters would keep their hoverflies on a tight rein.

“Where’s Lowenthal?” she asked. “Still sleeping the sleep of the just, I suppose.” She wondered briefly whether she ought perhaps to wait for the man from the MegaMall before talking to Wilde about the investigation, but figured that it was up to her, as the early bird, to go after any available worms as quickly and as cleverly as she could. Unfortunately, she wasn’t at all sure how to start.

“My dear Charlotte,” said Oscar, while she dithered, “you have the unmistakable manner of one who woke up far too early after working far too hard the night before.” “I couldn’t sleep,” she told him. “I took a couple of boosters before breakfast—once the croissants get my digestive system in gear they’ll clear my head.” Wilde shook his head. “I am not normally a supporter of nature,” he said. “No one who looks twenty when he is really a hundred and thirty-three can possibly be less than worshipful of the wonders of medical science—but in my experience, maintaining one’s sense of equilibrium with the aid of drugs is a false economy.

We must have sleep in order to dream, and we must dream in order to discharge the chaos from our thoughts, so that we may reason effectively while we are awake. Your namesake, I know, was in the habit of taking cocaine, but I always thought it implausible of Conan Doyle to suggest that it enhanced his powers of ratiocination.” Charlotte had already taken note of Oscar Wilde’s date of birth while researching his background, and the fact that he had mentioned his age offered her an opportunity to ask what seemed to be a natural—if not conspicuously relevant—question. “If you’re only a hundred and thirty-three,” she said, “what on earth possessed you to risk a third rejuvenation? Most people that age are still planning their second.” “The risks of core-tissue rejuvenation mostly derive from the so-called Miller effect,” Wilde observed equably. “In that respect, the number of rejuvenations is less significant than the absolute age of the brain. Given the limitations of cosmetic enhancement, I felt that an increased risk of losing my mind was amply compensated by the certainty of replenishing my apparent youth. I shall certainly attempt a fourth rejuvenation before I turn one hundred and eighty, and if I live to be two hundred and ten I shall probably try for the record. I could not live like Gabriel King, so miserly in mind that I allowed my body to shrivel like the legendary Tithonus.” “He didn’t look so bad, until the flowers got him,” Charlotte observed.

“He looked old,” Wilde insisted. “Worse than that, he looked contentedly old. He had ceased to fight against the ravages of fate. He had accepted the world as it is—perhaps even, if such a horror could be imagined, had actually become grateful for the condition of the world.” Charlotte remembered that Wilde had not yet arrived at the Trebizond Tower when Hal had forwarded King’s last words, which had carried a different implication.

She did not attempt to correct him; he had turned his attention to his eggs duchesse.

It was a pity, Charlotte thought as Colorado flew past, that there was no longer a quicker way to travel between New York and San Francisco. She had an uncomfortable feeling that she might end up chasing a daisy chain of murders all around the globe, always twenty-four hours behind the breaking news—but the maglev was the fastest form of transportation within the bounds of United America, and had been since the last supersonic jet had flown four centuries before. The energy crises of the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries were ancient history now, but the inland airways were so cluttered with private flitterbugs and helicopters, and the zealots of Decivilization so enthusiastic to crusade against large areas of concrete, that the scope of commercial aviation was now reduced to intercontinental flights. Even intercontinental travelers tended to prefer the plush comfort of airships to the hectic pace of supersonics; electronic communication had so completely taken over the lifestyles and folkways of modern society that almost all business was conducted via com-con.

When the silence proved too oppressive, Charlotte began to talk again, although Wilde was still engrossed in his breakfast. “The detail is still piling up by the bucketload,” she said, “but we’ve had no major breakthrough. We still haven’t pinned down the current name and location of the woman who visited the victims or the man who used to be Rappaccini, although Hal thinks that we’re getting close on both counts. Most of the new information concerns the second murder, and possible links between Urashima and King. You knew Urashima at least as well as you knew King, I suppose?” “We met on more than one occasion,” Wilde admitted, laying down his fork for a moment or two, “but it was a long time ago. We were not close friends. He was an artist, and I had the greatest respect for his work. I would have been glad to count him as a friend, had that ridiculous business of house arrest not made it virtually impossible for him to sustain and develop his social relationships.” “He was released from the terms of his house arrest and communications supervision thirteen years ago,” Charlotte observed, watching for any reaction, “but he seems to have been institutionalized by the experience. Although he began to receive visitors, he never went out, and he continued to use a sim to field all his calls. The general opinion was, I believe, that he was lucky to get away with house arrest. If he hadn’t been so famous, he’d have been packed off to the freezer.” “If he hadn’t deserved his fame,” Wilde countered, “he wouldn’t have been able to do the work he did. His imprisonment was an absurd sentence for a nonsensical crime. He and his coworkers placed no one in danger but themselves.” “He was playing about with brainfeed equipment,” Charlotte observed patiently.

“Not just memory boxes or neural stimulators—full-scale mental cyborgization.

And he didn’t just endanger himself and a few close friends—he was pooling information with other illegal experimenters. Some of their experimental results made the worst effects of a screwed-up rejuve look like a slight case of aphasia.” “Of course he was pooling information,” Wilde said, pausing yet again between mouthfuls. “What on earth is the point of hazardous exploration unless one makes every effort to pass on the legacy of one’s discoveries? He was trying to minimize the risks by ensuring that others had no need to repeat failures.” “Have you ever experimented with that kind of equipment, Dr. Wilde?” Charlotte asked. She had to be vague in asking the question because she wasn’t entirely sure what multitude of sins the phrase “that kind of equipment” had to cover.

Like everyone else, she bandied about phrases like “psychedelic synthesizer” and “memory box,” but she had little or no idea of the supposed modes of functioning of such legendary devices. Ever since the first development of artificial synapses capable of linking up human nervous systems to silicon-based electronic systems, numerous schemes had been devised for hooking up the brain to computers or adding smart nanotech to its cytoarchitecture, but almost all the experiments had gone disastrously wrong. The brain was the most complex and sensitive of all organs, and serious disruption of brain function was the one kind of disorder that twenty-fifth-century medical science was impotent to correct. The UN, presumably with the backing of the MegaMall, had forced on its member states a worldwide ban on devices for connecting brains directly to electronic apparatuses, for whatever purpose—but the main effect of the ban had been to drive a good deal of ongoing research underground. Even an expert Webwalker like Hal Watson would not have found it easy to figure out what sort of work might still be in progress and who might be involved. In a way, Charlotte thought, Michi Urashima was a much more interesting—and perhaps much more likely—murder victim than Gabriel King.

“There is nothing I value more than my genius,” Wilde replied, having finished the eggs duchesse and inserted the plate into the recycling slot, “and I would never knowingly risk my clarity and agility of mind. That doesn’t mean, of course, that I disapprove of anything that Michi Urashima and his associates did. They were not infants, in need of protection from themselves. Michi could not rest content with his early fascination with the simulation of experience.

For him, the building of better virtual environments was only a beginning; he wanted to bring about a genuine expansion of the human sensorium, and authentic augmentations of the human intellect and imagination. If we are ever to make a proper interface between natural and artificial intelligence, we will need the genius of men like Michi. I am sorry that he was forced to abandon his quest, and very sorry that he is dead—but that is not what concerns us now. The question is, who killed him—and why?” While completing this speech he refilled his coffee cup, then ordered two rounds of lightly buttered white wholemeal bread, slightly salted Danish butter, and coarse-cut English marmalade.

“So it is,” said Charlotte. “Did you know that Michi Urashima was at university with Gabriel King—and, for that matter, with Walter Czastka?” “Not until Michael communicated the fact to me,” he replied calmly. “I had already suggested, if you recall, that the roots of this crime must be deeply buried in the fabric of history. I immediately asked him where this remarkable institution was, and whether Rappaccini was also at the same institution of learning. He told me that it was in Wollongong, Australia, and that there is no record of Jafri Biasiolo ever having been there. If it were Oxford, or the Sorbonne, even Sapporo, it would be far easier to believe that the alma mater might be the crucial connection, of course, but it is difficult to believe that anything of any real significance can ever have occurred in Wollongong. I could believe that Walter, who is an impressively dull man, learned everything he knew in such a place, but I would not have suspected it of Michi—or even of Gabriel King. Even so, it is a very interesting coincidence.” He collected his toast and began to spread the butter, evening it out so carefully that the knife in his hand might have been a sculptor’s.

“When did Lowenthal tell you about the Wollongong connection?” Charlotte asked, although the answer was obvious. She remembered belatedly that one thing she had forgotten to check up on was the contents of Wilde’s earlier conversation with Lowenthal. Now, it seemed, she had missed a second and even more significant one.

“We exchanged a few notes last night, after you had retired,” Wilde explained airily.

“You exchanged a few notes” Charlotte echoed ominously. “It did occur to you, I suppose, that I’m the police officer in charge of this investigation, not Lowenthal.” “Yes, it did,” he admitted, “but you seemed so very intent on following up your hypothesis that I am the man responsible for these murders. Because I know full well that I am not, I felt free to ignore your efforts in order to tease a little more information out of Michael. Unfortunately, he seems to have no interest at all in the most promising line of inquiry, which derives from the interesting coincidence that both King and Rappaccini had invested heavily in Michi’s specialism. Indeed, he was so uninterested in it that I suspected him of deliberately trying to steer me away from it. I presume that one of the reasons the MegaMall decided to monitor this investigation is that they did not like the idea of Hal Watson digging too deeply into the murkier aspects of Gabriel King’s past—which suggests to me that in putting money into brainfeed research Gabriel was a mere delivery boy. Alas, Michael seems intent on trying to build the Wollongong connection into grounds for establishing Walter Czastka as a key suspect. He will be of little help to the investigation, I fear—but I daresay that you will not be too disheartened to hear that.” Charlotte regarded her companion speculatively, wondering how carefully his flippancy was contrived. “What other little nuggets of information did he throw your way?” she asked, keeping her voice scrupulously level, as if in imitation of his own levity.

“He showed me a copy of the second scene-of-crime tape,” Wilde admitted. He was as scrupulous in distributing his marmalade as he had been with the butter.

“We’re still trying to figure out where the woman went after she left Urashima,” Charlotte said, to demonstrate that she had not been idle in this particular matter. “Hal’s set up silvers to monitor every security camera in San Francisco.

If she’s still there, we’ll find her in a matter of hours. If she’s already gone, we ought to be able to pick up her trail by noon. She’s presumably altered her appearance again in order to confuse the standard picture-search programs, but we’ll check every possible match, however tentative. If she moved on quickly enough, though, she might have had time to deliver more packages.” “We must assume that she did move on,” Wilde said, licking a crumb from the corner of his mouth. “You noted, of course, that my name came up in the conversation, as her presentation of the bouquet of amaranths was doubtless intended to ensure. The poem inscribed on the condolence card caused it to be repeated. I do hope that you will not read too much into that.” Charlotte blushed slightly. If he had not caused the card to be placed at the scene of the crime, could he possibly have reacted so calmly? And if he had placed the card there, would he have dared to react so calmly? Reflectively, Wilde quoted in a reverent but rather theatrical whisper: The vilest deeds like poison weeds, Bloom well in prison-air; It is only what is good in Man That wastes and withers there: Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate, And the Warder is Despair.

“The Ballad of Reading Gaol was, of course, the only thing my poor namesake published after the humiliation of his trial and subsequent imprisonment—which was, of course, far harsher and even more unjust than the punishment visited on Michi Urashima. Perhaps that was why Rappaccini thought the poem particularly apposite.“ “What did you make of the last words he spoke?” Charlotte asked, not wishing to waste any more time in discussing the murderer’s taste in poetry.

“Could you possibly jog my memory by displaying the tape on the wallscreen here?” Wilde countered.

Charlotte shrugged. She punched out a code number to connect the table’s wallscreen to UN headquarters, and sorted through the material that Hal had left for her until she found the tape. Like the one she had displayed for Oscar outside Gabriel King’s apartment, it had been carefully edited from the various spy eyes and bubblebugs which had been witness to Michi Urashima’s murder. She cut to the end.

“I am,” said Urashima’s voice, curiously resonant by virtue of the machine’s enhancement. “I was not what I am, but was not an am, and am not an am even now.

I was and am a man, unless I am a man unmanned, an it both done and undone by I-T.” “Alas,” said Wilde, “I have no idea what it might mean. Could you wind the tape back so that I could take another look at the woman?” Again, Charlotte obliged him, glad of the opportunity to take a more leisurely look herself.

The similarity between the two records was almost eerie. The woman’s hair was silvery blond now, but still abundant. It was arranged in a precipitate cataract of curls. The eyes were the same electric blue, but the cast of the features had been altered subtly, making her face slightly thinner and more angular. The complexion was different too. The changes were, sufficient to deceive a normal picture-search program but because Charlotte knew that it was the same woman she could see that it was the same woman. There was something in the way her eyes looked steadily forward, something in her calm poise that made her seem remote, not quite in contact with the world through which she moved.