Architects of Emortality Part 1

Architects of Emortality.

by Brian Stableford.

Initiations: A King in His Countinghouse

Gabriel King stared out of the window of his thirty-ninth-floor apartment in the TrebizondTower. He was looking at theislandofManhattan, where the apparatus of civilization was being slowly but surely demolished. The old skyline was decaying; the sharp sharks' teeth of the traditional skysc.r.a.pers were collapsing into mere blunted molars. One by one, the oldest buildings in the world were gently folding into themselves, meekly putting themselves away.

The sight made Gabriel feel slightly sad. It should, in theory, have had the opposite effect; he, after all, was the man primarily responsible for the many kinds of rot that had set in and the voracity of their consumption. Every minute diminution of the cla.s.sic silhouette sent a surge of credit into his multifarious bank accounts. The MegaMall was paying him generously for his efforts, as it always did. Those who had served the MegaMall well-as Gabriel always had, in dealings under the counter as well as above it-were always well served in their turn*****.

The squat foundations of the new city were already in place behind and among the decaying edifices, and the shamirs were ready to begin the reshaping. They too were Gabriel's slaves, and their labors would maintain the flow of his capital, but contemplation of the endeavors and rewards to come could not lift his mood.

The simple fact was that New York had always stood, in Gabriel's quintessentially American consciousness, for the world, and he could not see a world the without a slight pang of regret. He had not been born in the USNA-his nominal citizens.h.i.+p was Australian-but he had always been a demolition and construction man, a materialist, and an ardent champion of progress. Those were the core values of the real America: the America that knew no geographical boundaries, because it was a dream. To witness the demolition ofNew Yorkwas, for Gabriel, to witness the end of a historical epoch. He had witnessed the ending of mere eras and felt nothing but joy in the contemplation of progress, but this was different. The new dawn which his shamirs were programmed to break for the MegaMall was the dawn of an epoch: the epoch of the New Human Race. It was not merely Old New York that had been declared redundant; it was the people who had lived in it for the last few hundred years.

The personal shamirs that had seen Gabriel's body through two full rejuvenations and countless cosmetic patch-ups had all but exhausted their resources. With luck he might live for another thirty or forty years, but the chances of his mind surviving a third full rejuve were very slim indeed. For the moment, he was compos mentis, with no more holes in his memory than the average one-hundred-and-ninety-four-year-old, but the integrity of his personality had grown perilously brittle; any sudden jolt might shatter it. The shadow of death was hanging over him, ready to descend upon his person as it was now descending upon Old New York.

When he looked upon the rotting of New York, therefore, Gabriel saw the end of his world, and everything that it had meant. At long last, progress had outstripped him and all of his kind. Progress would go on, but he and others like him could not. Even if he survived another sixty years, or a hundred, he could make no further progress-and nor could any man of his obsolete kind.

He was what he was; for him, the process of becoming was finished. Any sons born after him would be members of a new species, children of the MegaMall and the Architects of Emortality.

The miracle was, he supposed, that he only felt slightly sad. Fortunately, he had led a good and productive life, as a loyal servant of the MegaMall. He had never reached the upper echelons even of its servant cla.s.s, let alone its Inner Circle, but he had been richly rewarded. Nor was wealth the limit of his good fortune, he told himself; although he could not claim a place in the new world that he was helping to build, he still had pleasures in store. There was much in life that could still be savored. Within the hour, he knew, his sadness would be lifted-for a while.

Gabriel brushed the back of his right hand over his lips, wiping away a trace of moisture which had acc.u.mulated in the corner of his mouth. He had no difficulty whatsoever in visualizing the new skyline which would eventually replace the one already decayed. He had seen it often enough in virtual reality, modeled with exquisite care, lit by a sky much brighter than the sullen one which loomed over the city now.

The new edifices would not reach for the heavens in the same thrusting and predatory fas.h.i.+on as the old. Their discreet curves would be the harbingers of a new era of harmony and stability: an era in which the New Human Race would put an end forever to death and its terrible handmaidens, angst and war.

The carefully worded but unvoiced thought brought forth an unexpectedly sour surge of resentment. "The Age of the Human Herbivores," he murmured, speaking loudly enough for the apartment's recorders to catch the words, although he was not entirely sure that he wanted evidence of a childish explosion of envy to remain on the record. "The Cud-Chewing Era." The wave of resentment died quickly enough, and the manufactured contempt with it. Intellectually, Gabriel did not begrudge the New Human Race its dreams, and he was not a man to let his emotions get the better of his intellect. The judgment of his intellect was-as it had to be-that the demolition of New York was work of which a man of his sort should be proud. It was, after all, a fitting culmination of his career.

Long ago, while Gabriel had been a student at Wollongong, someone-probably Magnus Teidemann-had told him that sharks' teeth were not like the teeth of humans. Sharks' teeth were continually renewed, new ones growing in the rear and migrating forward to replace the old as they were worn down by use. New York's skysc.r.a.pers had followed that pattern for more than five hundred years; whenever one had been removed, another had sprung up to take its place, usually brighter, sharper, and more durable. Despite piecemeal change, the whole ensemble had remained essentially the same. No one had ever taken on the entire island before, let alone the entire city. This was the first time that the whole set of shark's teeth had been swept away, along with the implicit shark. From now on, New York would be the mouth of a very different social organism. Gabriel was proud to have been the man appointed to that task. In fact, he was very proud-intellectually speaking, of course.

Gabriel felt perfectly ent.i.tled to think of himself as the man appointed to the task, although a pedant would have insisted that he was merely one of many, and perhaps not the most important. History would give primary credit to the planners who had p.r.o.nounced a sentence of death on the old city and the architects who had designed the new. If the engineers who actually carried out the work were to be remembered at all, they would be seen as mere applicants of a suite of technologies that still bore the name of their ancient founder, Leon Gantz, and a nickname borrowed from the legend of Solomon.

Gabriel knew well enough that when the day finally came for the news tapes to record his obituary and commemorate his life, he would be described as a gantzer and a master of shamirs, as if all he had ever done was to use another man's tools-but he also knew that the description would be misleading and unfair. Leon Gantz had only laid the foundations of biological cementation and deconstruction; it was not until the late twenty-second century that the anonymous nanotechnologists of PicoCon had succeeded in forming the first vital partners.h.i.+p between the organic and the inorganic, and not until the mid-twenty-fourth century that the MegaMall had delivered the full spectrum of modern nanomanipulators into the eager hands of ambitious young men like himself.

Leon Gantz, the PicoCon teamworkers, and the MegaMall's backroom buccaneers had all been scientists, but Gabriel King was a practical man, a materialist through and through. In his own estimation, Gabriel was a maker, and an artist in the truest sense of the word-a truer sense, at any rate, than the sense in which the word was used by certain people he could name.

"Posturing apes in fancy dress," Gabriel murmured, again speaking loudly enough to impress the words upon the microscopic ears with which all the apartment's rooms save one were liberally supplied. Being a practical man, Gabriel did not approve of the "posturing" by means of which certain so-called artists attempted to attract the public eye. Nor did he approve of "apes" who dedicated their lives to making ever more flamboyant versions of ent.i.ties that were useless in the first place. Nor did he approve of "fancy dress"; his own suitskins were always gray or dark blue, always neatly tailored in such a way as to proclaim that they and he were good utilitarians, with no energy to spare for nonsensical display.

Gabriel knew that there were some who thought that the work in which he was now engaged was an a.s.sault on nonsensical display. The would-be prophets of De-civilization had formed a particular hatred for New York and the supposed symbolism of its skyline. It was, in their eyes, the ultimate city, and hence the ultimate symbol of the supposedly decadent past that the De-civilizers desired to obliterate-regardless of the needs and desires of the New Human Race.

Gabriel was prepared to admit that if ever there was a city whose ugliness demanded that it be torn down and built anew, that city was Old New York, but he found talk of "eliminating the display of history" and "shedding the empty cultural heritage of the past" difficult to endure. He had more than a little respect for "the display of history," on the grounds that if mankind's mistakes were not made manifest as well as remembered, they might be repeated, even by a New Human Race engineered in the artificial womb for true emortality. To make this unrepentantly misshapen metropolis a scapegoat for antediluvian folly and greed seemed to him to be foolish and simpleminded.

To Gabriel, as to all Americans in spirit, Manhattan was the last urban wilderness, the last geographically confined s.p.a.ce on Earth where so many people so ardently desired to gather that it had been forced to grow further and further upward, extending its magnificently vicious fangs into gleaming blades of crystal and alloy. Given that the island had to be domesticated and made fit for habitation by the ironically t.i.tled Naturals, Gabriel would not have wanted the labor of its deconstruction to be entrusted to anyone else-but it was hardly surprising that the job had imported a sadness into his soul that he could not shake off and did not really want to.

It was only natural-was it not?-that he should be unable to take as much delight in contemplation of the raising of the tame city as he was from contemplation of the devastation of the wild.

"The devastation of the wild," he repeated, aloud, in order that he could savor the phrase. Some thoughts were too precious to remain unspoken.

Then the door chime sounded, and his sadness vanished like smoke as he turned away from the window. His heart was already beginning to beat a little faster in antic.i.p.ation of delight.

Gabriel checked the viewscreen, although he knew perfectly well who it was. As a conscientious utilitarian, he never received personal visitors in the many temporary homes which business forced him to adopt, except for purposes that were strictly personal. He was of the old school, which held that all professional matters should be consigned to virtual environments, where the full panoply of technical support was available-and he was also of the even older school, which held that the pressures of the flesh were best dealt with in the flesh.

He was certain that the woman waiting to be admitted to the apartment was authentically young, not because he had expertise enough to detect a first-rate rejuve, but because the way she talked and the fact that she was here at all smacked of awesome naivete. At a distance, one might have judged that she looked like thousands of other young women, sculpted to a currently fas.h.i.+onable ideal, but at close quarters her uniqueness became obvious. Her eyes were wonderful, her hair utterly glorious. In an age where only the subtlest nuances could discriminate between the very beautiful and the extremely beautiful, she belonged to the furthest reaches of the extreme category.

"Come in," Gabriel said as he released the locks and slid the door aside.

It seemed that she understood what it meant to belong to a very old school, because she had brought him flowers. "These are for you," she said as she handed them over, smiling broadly. The blooms were like miniature sunflowers, and their densely cl.u.s.tered petals had the color and texture of nascent gold.

"They're beautiful," Gabriel said. "I don't think I've seen their like before." "They're new," she said, still smiling. "An Oscar Wilde original." Gabriel could not help falling prey to the slightest hint of a frown, but he turned his head so that his visitor would not see it, and the phrase he murmured-"That posturing ape!"-was p.r.o.nounced too softly for her merely human ears to discern.

Lest she ask him what he had said, and why, he was quick to add: "I have a vase somewhere. Should I put them in water, or do they require something more nouris.h.i.+ng?" "Oh no," she said. "They're self-sufficient, provided that the atmosphere isn't too dry. You can mount them on the wall if you don't want them cluttering up a table." Her gaze traveled around the walls as she spoke, offering silent comment on the fact that the apartment was unfas.h.i.+onably bare of vegetative decoration.

"That's all right," Gabriel replied, a little more stiffly than he would have liked. He handed them back to her while he went to search for the vase.

When they had first met, in the park, the woman had been delighted to find out who he was and what had brought him to the city. She had been fascinated to hear him talk about himself, and he had talked more freely to her than he had to anyone since the ninth and last of his bond marriages had come to the inevitable parting of the ways.

She had told him almost nothing about herself, but that was probably because she had little or nothing to tell. Given the presumable difference in their ages, it was only natural that she should be content to listen and learn. When Gabriel had told her that he had been twice rejuvenated, and how long ago his second rejuvenation had been, her eyes had grown wide.

"You must be one of the oldest men in the world," she had said. "But you seem much better preserved than most others of your generation." "I suppose so," he had replied. "Many people-men and women alike-seem to come apart quite rapidly once the effects of their second full rejuve wear off, but I've been lucky, at least superficially. Internally, the balance of my organic and inorganic IT is way past critical. If I were to attempt another rejuve I'd very probably end up a vegetable, but if I can stay reasonably fit I can probably keep on getting older for another thirty years, and keep some faint echo of my fading looks until the day I die." "You look wonderful," she had a.s.sured him. "So wonderfully wise." When he came back into the reception room the woman was standing at the window, exactly where he had been standing a few moments before. He hoped that she was admiring his handiwork-and that her admiration was not tainted by the slightest sadness. "Let me take the vase," she said.

Gabriel surrendered his find with a vague gesture of apology for its mere adequacy. He had never believed the die-hard psychobiologists who had insisted that the aesthetic judgments which underlay s.e.xual attractiveness were genetically hardwired so that the idea of beauty and the appearance of youth were inextricably tied together. He had scored too many notable successes in pick-up spots far less promising than Central Park to accept the apologetic argument that the attraction which the very young sometimes manifested for the very old was merely a matter of the momentary fascination of the extraordinary.

"It's a fine view," he said, nodding toward the softening skyline.

"It certainly is," she replied. "The outline of the city is changing day by day, and you're the man responsible." "Only one of many," he said, deeply regretting the duty of false modesty and hoping that she might contradict him.

"Oh no," she said, right on cue. "You're the one who's actually doing it. You're the deconstructor, the De-civilizer." He was determined not to let the final noun distract from the effect of the compliment.

"Would you like a drink?" he asked.

"Oh no," she said again. "I prefer making love without the aid of chemical stimulants-don't you?" He did, but he knew that she would have a.s.sumed as much because of the way he dressed. He knew too that she would never have used a phrase like "making love" when talking to someone of her own generation. For a fleeting moment, he wondered whether she might be making a little too much effort, but then he smiled, realizing that she was only trying to make a good impression. Her eyes were wonderful, and the way she brushed her flowing tresses aside so that she could see him more clearly was nothing short of divine. No VE siren could ever replace the quotidian reality of her presence and the naive insouciance of her gesture. She placed the vase on the table in front of the sofa, carefully spreading the blooms. There had been a card hidden among them, and she plucked it out, standing it on its edge against the vase. There was something written on the card, but Gabriel made no attempt to read it. There would be time for that later.

"A long time ago," Gabriel said, making the most of the phrase, "I wrote a thesis for my doctorate on the twenty-first-century Greenhouse Crisis. The rising sea levels forced New York's citizens to fight a fantastic battle to preserve it from the flood, raising the entire island and remodeling the buildings so that the old streets became flood tunnels. In those days, New York was a symbol of United America's defiance of the forces of nature: an embodiment of the determination of the Hundred States to survive the crisis and remake the world. Sometimes I can't help thinking that it's slightly disrespectful to the efforts of those twenty-first-century heroes to renounce the city's heritage-and whatever motivates my paymasters, that's not the spirit in which I'm working.

I'm trying to do as they did, to save the city and everything it has symbolized." Silently he cursed himself for excessive pomposity, but the young woman seemed to mop it up.

"Yes," she said. "I see. I understand what you're saying-what you're doing." Gabriel felt a sudden moment of dizziness, which had nothing to do with the elevation of the thirty-ninth floor of the undeconstructed Trebizond Tower.

He realized that he could not now remember what complex chain of accidents and decisions had made him a master of demolition. He must have begun adult life as a historian, if he had indeed written the thesis he had glibly recalled, and must have continued it as a businessman enthusiastic for any opportunity.

Deconstruction was the pattern.into which his life had eventually fallen, but he no longer knew exactly how or why. It must have been the trail of profit and loss, not any special interest, which had led him into the specific line of business whose master he now was, but he had developed a pa.s.sion for it nevertheless. He was an engineer, not a scientist, and he still knew next to nothing about the molecular biology of the bacterial agents which were his ultimate minions, but he loved the discretion and the artistry of their work.

Felling by artificial decay was neat as well as economical.

"Wouldn't it be more satisfying, Gabriel," one of his aides had recently asked him, "if you made as much money building things as you do tearing them down?" Would it? he wondered as he stared at his visitor's beautifully guileless eyes.

He honestly didn't know.

He rallied himself, blinking away the momentary hint of vertigo and breaking away from his companion's gaze. On the far side of Central Park the rotting teeth were slowly and politely folding themselves away into their internal cavities. He had to remind himself that he was not at all like them; he was no ugly transient, fading into decrepitude for the last time. The presence of the lovely woman was adequate proof of that fact. She was authentically young, perhaps even a Natural, and yet she was here, ready to embrace him, to savor the thrill of being with a man who had done so much: a complete man.

"What do you love best in all the world?" the young woman asked Gabriel King as she took his hand and drew him away from the table where she had placed the vase.

It was a strange question, but she asked it as if it were serious-and she was, after all, authentically young. She had come to him in the flesh, seeking enlightenment Gabriel had not the slightest idea what he loved best in all the world.

Everything he had done-everything, at least, that he remembered having done-he had done for money, but he had never been an overdevout wors.h.i.+pper at the shrine of Mammon. He had made money because that was what people of his particular tribe had always done. His foster father and his foster grandfather before him had made money, in the crisis and its aftermath, and six or seven generations of woman-born Kings before them had made money even during the Dark Ages of the unextended life span. Kings had always been the most loyal and best-rewarded servants of the forebears of the MegaMall, even in the dark days before the Pharaohs of Capitalism had formed the Hardinist Cabal and brought a precious world order out of primordial chaos.

Gabriel was sure that those primitive Kings had never been ashamed to make money. Even before the days of Leon Gantz and his marvelous shamirs they had probably made it from decadence, devastation, destruction, decay, dereliction, and decivilization... It had been, he had to suppose, their particular version of divine right. But Gabriel, unlike the worst of them, had never loved money. No matter what he had done in the name of progress and the service of the MegaMall, he had severed his connection with that heritage of unalloyed greed, "I've loved many people and many things at different times," he told the woman, knowing that his answer was a little belated. "Too many, I think, for any one person or any one thing to stand out as the best." It might even have been true. You've lived too long, his forefathers might have said. You've had three life-times instead of one, and no true sons to carry forward the family name. You've betrayed our heritage for your own selfish pleasure. And you never even loved the money you made.

The Kings are dead, he said silently, by way of imaginary reply. Long live the King.

He guided the young woman to the door of the bedroom, which was privacy-screened. Given that the apartment building was so relentlessly respectable, he had every faith in the a.s.surance that the bedroom walls contained neither hidden eyes nor hidden ears.

As me door slid open before them Gabriel increased the length of his stride slightly, but the woman reached out to pull him back, forcing him to hesitate on the threshold.

She turned to look briefly at the golden flowers, as if approving her own excellent taste; then she turned back to him, looking up into his face as if to do exactly the same. She reached up, put her hand at the back of his neck, and eased his face forward and down, so that she could kiss him on the lips.

The kiss was deliberately languorous, as if she were savoring a moment that would remain precious in memory for a long time.

Gabriel felt giddy again. He could not help but wonder why the young woman seemed to like him so much. For a moment, he was half-convinced that her presence-indeed, her very existence-was a mere delusion, a siren unnaturally wrenched by some trick of his failing intellect out of some uniquely seductive virtual environment. He was, however, old enough and wise enough not to question his good fortune too closely.

A man of his age-a member of the last generation which had no alternative but to be mortal-owed it both to himself and his vanis.h.i.+ng species to do his utmost to drain the last drop of pleasure from every random whim of happy chance.

Like his as-yet-undiscovered predecessors, Gabriel King did not know that he had already begun to die, and that the murderous shadow would move upon him with remarkable swiftness.

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 a.s.signed 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 a.s.signing 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 unfas.h.i.+onably small man, whose girth suggested that his IT was having difficulty compensating for the effects of his appet.i.tes. 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 h.e.l.l 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 d.a.m.n moon suits. Believe me, Miss Holmes, that wasn't any accidental death-and he was absolutely fine before that wh.o.r.e 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 a.s.sessment 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 fas.h.i.+oned, 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 h.e.l.l are you?" in a petulant fas.h.i.+on, 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.