Architects of Emortality Part 11

Charlotte was still conscious of the fact that what she was seeing was, according to all the most reliable authorities, quite impossible. No bird could lift an adult human being from the ground, and rumors of eagles of old which had been able to lift children and sheep were confidently judged by historians and naturalists to have been wildly exaggerated. No bird which had ever been shaped by natural selection to fly above the surface of the earth could lift such a weight in addition to its own. But how much did this monstrosity weigh? More than a helicopter, and as much as the aircraft which Rappaccini had provided to fly Charlotte and her two companions to Kauai? Its metabolism must be highly unorthodox, or it would not be able to take off-but it was gliding now, and any man-made glider of similar dimension could have carried several pa.s.sengers. It was possible, because it was happening. Somehow, it was possible.

The bird was already climbing again, soaring on the thermal which rose from the warm morning sea. It beat its fabulous night black wings with extravagant majesty-once, twice, and again-but then it banked and circled around into the dazzling halo of brilliance which surrounded the tropical sun, whence its awesome dive had come. A moment later, as Charlotte s.h.i.+elded her eyes, it flew out of the fire again, like a phoenix reborn.

Charlotte reached up her free hand to take the one which Michael Lowenthal was extending to her, having appeared as if by magic at her side. Her right hand returned the dart gun to its clasp as she was raised to her feet.

"Best get back if we intend to chase it," he said.

He let go of her hand and she had to hurry along behind him, stumbling in the soft surface. The other helicopters were already taking off, the sound of their many blades escalating into a hideous roar.

"She didn't get Czastka!" Lowenthal shouted as he stopped by the copter's landing rail, letting Charlotte pa.s.s him before shoving her from behind to help her into the cabin.

Didn't she? Charlotte wondered, not bothering to speak the words aloud. She did what she came to do-that much is certain.

Once the helicopter was off the ground and its cabin was sealed, the background noise became bearable again-and Oscar Wilde was already clamoring for the attention of the machine's comcon. Charlotte took his call.

"He told us what would happen!" Wilde lamented. "He told us-and I failed to hear it!" "What?" she said. "Who told us?" "Rappaccini! The simulacrum costumed as Herod said, 'This is no coc.o.o.n of hollowed stone; it is my palace. Hear me, Oscar: you will see the finest roc of all before the end.' I heard it as r-o-c-k, but he meant r-o-c all the time. A cheap trick, but when Michael's friends release the tape of Herod's performance, everyone who hears it will wonder why it never occurred to us. We are being made to look foolish, Charlotte-and we have only one opportunity left to redeem ourselves." "She can't get away," Charlotte said grimly. "I don't know how far or fast that thing can fly, but we can fly further, and maybe even faster. She is not going to get away." "I don't think she's even trying," said Wilde, with a sigh. "She's merely leading us to the much-joked-about Island of Dr. Moreau, so that we may cast our wondering eyes upon her father's demiparadise: his Creation." Charlotte's heart was no longer pounding quite so hard, and she forced herself to relax into the seat. She glanced out of the viewport at Walter Czastka's island, already dwindling to a green diamond rimmed with silver and set on a bed of royal blue.

"We've got to warn Czastka," she said. "We have to tell him not to unseal his locks." "That's not necessary," said Oscar Wilde. "He has a TV set. If he's taking any notice of anything, he must have seen the woman release the spores-but he will not fall into the trap that claimed us. He knows, as I think he always knew, what form the final murder was always intended to take." "What do you mean?" Charlotte asked.

"I mean that we failed to antic.i.p.ate the last ironic twist and turn of Rappaccini's plot. It's not Walter those spores are after-it's his ecosphere.

The woman didn't come here to murder Walter, but to murder his world. But what will poor Walter be, when his entire Creation is gone? Or should the question be: What has he become during these last forty years, while it was taking shape? Did you not see, Charlotte? Did you not see what lay beyond the palms fringing the beach?" Charlotte remembered, vaguely, that as her helicopter had come in to land she had looked briefly sideways, scanning the trees which stood guard on the margin of the island's vegetation. She recalled a blurred impression of lush ferny undergrowth nestled about the boles of palmlike trees. She half remembered an extensive patchwork of vivid green, flecked with darker colors: crimsons, purples, and blues deep enough to be almost black-but nothing distinct. She had looked, but she had not observed. Her attention had been fixed on the woman and the rival helicopters; she had not spared a moment's thought for Walter Czastka's exercise in petty G.o.dhood.

"I didn't notice anything in particular," she told Oscar Wilde.

"Nothing can stop them," Oscar said, his voice reduced almost to a whisper.

"Each murderer is one hundred percent specific to its victim. Walter's own body is safe inside the house, but that's not what Walter cares about... it's not what Walter is. What you didn't even notice, in particular, was Walter Czastka. It was all that was left of him, the sum total of his life's achievement.

Rappaccini's instruments will devour and digest his ecosphere-every last molecule of it-and in doing so will devour Walter more absolutely than they could ever have done by transforming his flesh. I doubt that he can or will be thankful for the fact that he's already past caring, and that the spores are carrion-feeders consuming something that had never properly come to life." For the first time, Charlotte realized, Oscar Wilde was genuinely horrified. The infuriating equanimity which had hardly been rippled by his first sight of Gabriel King's hideously embellished skeleton, or anything else they had seen in their travels, had at last been moved to empathetic outrage. The thought that this kind of murder might be visited upon a fellow human being-a fellow Creationist-had finally cracked his composure.

For the first time, Oscar was identifying with one of Rappaccini's victims-ironically enough, with the one who had most aroused his contempt. He was finally seeing Rappaccini as a great criminal as well as a mediocre artist.

"Why do you say that Czastka's miniecosphere had never properly come to life?" Charlotte asked.

"Did you really see nothing?" he countered. "Did you really not see what kind of demi-Eden Walter Czastka had been endeavoring to build? Perhaps that is the most d.a.m.ning indictment of all. Were you to visit my island in Micronesia, even under such stressful circ.u.mstances..." As Wilde left the sentence dangling, Charlotte tried once again to remember what she might have glimpsed-in addition to helicopters-from the corners of her eyes while she confronted the red-haired woman on the beach. There had been trees, bushes, flowers-but no animals. Nothing remarkable. Nothing which had called attention to itself. Even so, given the strength of the compet.i.tion from the items which had grabbed and held her gaze, was that in any way remarkable? While she was trying to remember, Wilde's fingers stabbed at the console in front of him. No sooner had she admitted defeat than the image she could not summon to mind was displayed for her-by courtesy, she supposed, of the cameras attached to one of the hovering helicopters.

There were, as she had vaguely observed, tall palm trees bordering the beach.

Within their picket line was a complex array of broad-leaved bushes, lavishly decorated with brightly colored flowers. Charlotte could not tell a rhododendron from a magnolia, but the flowers seemed to her to be very nicely shaped as well as capacious. The bushes were not gathered into hedges, but they were planted in such a way as to form curving lines, which mapped out a circular maze interrupted by dozens of elliptical gardens, where other flowers grew on pyramidal mounds, their contrasted colors swirling around one another in carefully contrived patterns. It was impossible to see much detail from the camera's vantage point, but the overall effect seemed to Charlotte to be not unpleasing. She actually formed that phrase in her mind before realizing that it concealed a barb.

Walter Czastka's Eden was not unpleasing. Its elements were very nicely shaped.

The whole vast expanse was neat and delicately coordinated, colorful, and clever, but ultimately lifeless. Perhaps, Charlotte thought, Walter Czastka had never seen his work from such a distance and alt.i.tude. Perhaps it all seemed very different at ground level. Perhaps, if one could only see the fine detail, the meticulous workmans.h.i.+p, the delicacy of each individual flower... "I can't judge it," she said to Oscar Wilde. "I'm not qualified." "I am," Wilde told her, with all the a.s.surance of perfect arrogance. "So was Rappaccini. What a miserably enfeebled Arcadia poor Walter had built! Immature and incomplete though it undoubtedly was, its limitations were painfully conspicuous. Had you only had time to stand and stare, you would have seen-and even you, dear Charlotte, would have known that you had seen-the work of a hack.

A hack, admittedly, who was trying to exceed his own potential, but the work of a hack nevertheless. Had you my eyes, you would see plainly enough even in this snapshot the work of a man who had not even the imagination of blind and stupid nature. Skills honed by a hundred years and more of careful practice had been exercised on that isle, but the result was mere kitsch." "That's not fair," Charlotte said. "You don't know what he was trying to achieve, or what he would have achieved, given time." "No," said Oscar, "it's not fair-but neither is artistry. I know now why Walter tried to keep me away. I understand the message which he engraved upon the minuscule soul of his nearest and dearest simulacrum. But Rappaccini had seen it! Rappaccini must have kept careful watch on Walter for more than half a lifetime, ever since his mother took the trouble to tell him what and who he was. How disappointed he must have been in his Creator!" "Creator?" Charlotte queried.

"But of course! What is the subject of this melodrama, if not Creation? Unless Walter cares to tell us, or Rappaccini has left a record, I doubt that we shall ever know the intimate details, but I cannot believe that Maria Inacio's pregnancy was an accident or the result of a rape. Hal blithely a.s.sumed that she could never have known that she was immune to the endemic chiasmatic transformers until she became pregnant, and perhaps he was right-but when did she first become pregnant, and who did she tell? If we suppose that her first pregnancy was surrept.i.tiously terminated, we may also suppose that she might then have come to seem, in the eyes of an ambitious but desperately naive Creationist, a unique resource. Suppose, for a moment, that the plagues which sterilized the human race had never occurred and never forced the universalization of ecto-genesis. Had the chiasmatic transformers not ravaged all the wombs that Mother Nature had provided, what other kinds of transformers might have been sent forth in their stead?" "You're saying that Walter Czastka used Maria Inacio in some kind of clandestine experiment in human genetic engineering-that he used her as an incubator for a modified embryo that he'd never have got permission to grow in an artificial womb?" "It was 2322," Oscar Wilde reminded her, "more than eighty years before the Great Exhibition. The limitations of indwelling nanotech had come to light, but work to put something in its place had hardly begun in earnest. The Green Zealots were in their heyday, and the Robot a.s.sa.s.sins were not yet a spent force. The opportunity for daring was there-but so was the need for secrecy. We know that Jafri Biasiolo had been subjected to considerable genetic manipulation that was idiosyncratic in nature and unusual in extent. Who could or would have done that but Walter? Who else but he could have removed ova from her womb, fertilized them with his own sperm, then set about remaking them? Who else but he could have selected out the best of the transformed embryos and reimplanted it within her womb? "I don't know how the other five were involved, but each of them must have contributed something to the project, even if some or all were ignorant of the contributions made by the others. Perhaps one of them was responsible for Maria Inacio's first pregnancy, while another a.s.sisted in its termination. Perhaps one was Walter's accomplice in the laboratory, while another played some part in having the second embryo removed to a Helier womb. Perhaps one was to have provided safe accommodation for the pregnant mother when she could no longer be seen in public. There are a thousand different scenarios I could imagine... but the one salient point is that Jafri Biasiolo did not think of Walter Czastka as his father. He thought of him as his Creator! In all of this, he has engaged himself with Walter the Creator-and in preparing to obliterate all the products of Walter's Creationist ambition, he also took it upon himself to obliterate all those named by Maria Inacio as accomplices in the exploitation of her unexpectedly fertile womb." "You certainly have an extraordinarily vivid imagination, Dr. Wilde," Charlotte murmured. Her policeman's conscience had already reminded her that there was not a shred of hard evidence to support any of it, but she could see that it had to be true in its essentials.

"Yes, Charlotte, I certainly have," he said, casually accepting the compliment.

"Walter Czastka, alas, has not. He had the seed of the gift, but he lost it-or killed it. He let it shrivel within his soul, out of shame, or guilt, or fear, or petty regret. Though his heart still beats within his withered frame, he has already begun to rot. Rappaccini's worms are feeding on his carca.s.s." "But what was he trying to do with Maria Inacio?" Charlotte asked.

"The one thing worth attempting, at that time and in that context," Wilde said, with a heavy sigh. "Walter must already have known, even though the rest of the world was only just beginning to realize and had not yet openly admitted, that the nanotech escalator had stalled. Human emortality could not be attained by means of nanotech and superficial somatic engineering; it required genetic engineering in embryo. What Walter attempted was a transformation of the kind that was not perfected for a further century and more: a Zaman transformation.

Alas, its effects were purely cosmetic; Jafri Biasiolo retained the appearance of dignified maturity longer than his contemporaries, but he remained as mortal as they. He must have known soon after the Great Exhibition that he was little different from other men." "And that's why Rappaccini decided to kill Czastka and all his accomplices? Because they failed?" Charlotte was incredulous. That seemed to her like monstrous ingrat.i.tude.

"I doubt that it was as simple as that. Rappaccini was too sensible and sensitive a man to condemn a fellow scientist for an experiment that produced a negative result. Perhaps he decided to kill his Creator and all the accomplices in his Creation because, having failed in their bold attempt to be midwives of a new era, they gave up. Perhaps Rappaccini the scientist and Rappaccini the artist could forgive them their failure, but not their repentance. Perhaps he hoped that his Creator might return to the true path, and in the end despaired.

On the other hand, he may simply, have decided that he had been a closely kept secret for far too long, and that he ought to be remembered for what he truly was: a unique man, and a unique artist. Perhaps he became determined to shout from the rooftops that which Walter and his coconspirators were so determined to keep quiet, by way of compensation for his own betrayal. By the time the casters have unraveled the thread of this plot, everyone in the world will know what Jafri Biasiolo was, and what he made of himself." By the time that Gustave Moreau's green-clad island came in view, Charlotte had placed a bubblebug on her forehead in preparation for the landing. Hal Watson would be able to use it as an eye as long as she stayed within a few hundred meters of the copter. Given that Moreau's island was more or less identical in size and shape to Walter Czastka's, it seemed unlikely that she would have to stray beyond that limit.

The flight of the giant bird had now become slightly drunken, although it was still gliding. Every slight adjustment of its wings seemed exaggerated, and it was losing height inexorably. Huge though it was, the weight of an adult human being and the instability induced by her awkward position were making it difficult for the monster to complete its task. Charlotte wondered whether the creature had sufficient strength left to make a successful landfall.

It was clear to Charlotte that the woman's murders must have been planned in such a way as to lay a trail, and that it was Moreau's island, not Czastka's, that had always been the end point of that trail. Thanks to the special provision which Moreau had made for Oscar Wilde, she and Lowenthal had been able to follow the trail's most scenic route and had arrived at the appointed destination ahead of any other actual persons-but every news service in the world must have scrambled every available flying eye by now.

It wasn't every day that the vidveg had the chance to see a police helicopter chase come unstuck because a roc had abducted a beautiful female serial killer.

Nor did Charlotte need Oscar Wilde to tell her that she was about to attend an exhibition: an exhibition which was presumably designed to put the so-called Great Exhibition of 2405 to shame. Most of the exhibits, she suspected, would be illegal-which was one reason why the exhibitor had chosen this peculiarly flamboyant method of issuing invitations. Moreau's roc had already demonstrated that he was a genetic engineer of genius-perhaps the greatest genetic engineer the world had ever known-but its function was merely to attract attention. In her own way, the "daughter" that Moreau had produced by cloning his mother and then modifying her genome in as-yet-unspecified ways was equally astonis.h.i.+ng, and Charlotte a.s.sumed that the island would be abundantly stocked with similar miracles.

Moreau was clearly a man for whom the impossible was merely routine, and the miraculous that which could confidently be scheduled for the week after next. He was also a man whose real work had been kept secret for a century and more, while he had been content to restrict his public dealings to the design and supply of funeral wreaths.

Charlotte watched the bird summon up the last vestiges of its strength for its landing maneuver. It banked to the left, its wings curving to catch the air; then the gargantuan limbs flapped once, twice, and thrice as the creature fell toward the silver strand where the waves were breaking over Dr. Moreau's island.

Charlotte's helicopter followed, then Oscar Wilde's. The five copters from Kauai were still in attendance, but they had already received orders to keep their cabins sealed after landing lest their occupants become vectors of unknown biocontamination. Charlotte had already reconciled herself to the prospect of a period in quarantine.

The copter's safety-minded silver pilot gave the beached roc a wide berth, putting Charlotte and Lowenthal down a full sixty meters from the point where the woman had been dropped. The fugitive had already picked herself up and had disappeared into the trees which fringed the beach.

Charlotte unplugged her beltphone from the helicopter's comCon without bothering to sign off, and put the handset in its holster. Hal would be able to see what was going oh, but she didn't want him babbling in her ear. It had fallen to her to make the final arrest, with the world looking on, and she didn't want it to look as if she were merely a marionette, dancing to New York's tune.

She did not attempt to approach the roc, although she took a long look at the chimerical creature before turning to follow the red-haired woman. The bird peered back at her dolefully from one unnaturally large and bloodily crimson eye; the other was hidden by the bulk of its naked head. It did not look so horrid now that it seemed helpless. It looked mournful, and rather tragic.

Michael Lowenthal came abreast of her as she paused, and Oscar Wilde was already running across the sand to join the two of them.

"You shouldn't have got out," she said to Wilde as lightly as she could. "You'll have to be quarantined now." "You know perfectly well, dear Charlotte," Wilde replied, not quite breathlessly, "that I could not possibly be content to watch the final act of the comedy through an artificial eye mounted on the brow of a police officer." "It's a comedy now, is it?" said Lowenthal sourly. "I can't quite see the joke." "It is," Wilde intoned, puffing himself up with false dignity, "a divine comedy.

If we can read it rightly, all of modern life's metaphysical frame will be shown to us here: our land of darkness, our purgatory, our paradise." Charlotte and her two companions walked side by side to the place where Moreau's murderous agent had disappeared, keeping a wary eye on the roc while they did so. The bird made no move toward them; its wings were still outstretched, and it seemed to be in considerable distress. It must have been created, Charlotte realized, merely in order to make that single flight; it had served its purpose and might never fly again. As she glanced back for the last time before moving into the trees, Charlotte saw the b.l.o.o.d.y eyes eclipsed by wrinkled lids.

"Will it die?" she asked of Oscar Wilde.

"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 gra.s.sy 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 s.h.a.ggy 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. b.u.t.terflies 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 hara.s.s 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 ent.i.tled-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 G.o.ds 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 a.s.sortment of Kings and Uras.h.i.+mas-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 vanis.h.i.+ng 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 a.s.sumed 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 etre 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 echauffer 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 a.s.sume, 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 G.o.ds, from common chromosomal clay." He looked at Michael Lowenthal as he p.r.o.nounced 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 G.o.d, from common chromosomal clay-but Gustave Moreau must have done everything within his power to surpa.s.s 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 s.h.i.+ft to avoid Oscar Wilde's stare, Charlotte moved away from them to make a tour of the ma.s.sive 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 Uras.h.i.+ma had acc.u.mulated on his own skull, but she knew that these must be different. Uras.h.i.+ma 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 b.u.t.tonhole formed by the false collar of his suitskin. He had discarded his green carnation.

Charlotte stooped and reached out to touch the ma.s.s 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 ma.s.s 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 s.h.i.+fted. 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 stewards.h.i.+p 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 Uras.h.i.+ma 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.