Architects of Emortality Part 5

"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 Uras.h.i.+ma. Perhaps that was why Rappaccini thought the poem particularly apposite." "What did you make of the last words he spoke?" Charlotte asked, not wis.h.i.+ng 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 Uras.h.i.+ma's murder. She cut to the end.

"I am," said Uras.h.i.+ma'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.

"She carries herself like an angel," murmured Oscar Wilde, finally pus.h.i.+ng his breakfast plate aside, "or a sphinx-with or without a secret." There was a studied close-up, taken by the door's eye while the woman was waiting to be admitted, then an abrupt cut to an interior anteroom, where the woman's entire body could be seen. She was not tall-perhaps a meter fifty-five-and she was very slim. She was wearing a dark blue suitskin now, whose decorative folds hung comfortably upon her seemingly fragile frame. It was the kind of outfit which would not attract much attention in the street.

Like Gabriel King, Michi Uras.h.i.+ma was visible only from behind; there was no chance to read the expression on his face as he greeted her. As before, the woman said nothing, but moved naturally into a friendly kiss of greeting before preceding her victim into an inner room beyond the reach of conventional security cameras. There was a brief sight of her which must have been obtained by a bubblebug, but it cut out almost immediately; Uras.h.i.+ma had screened the bug. Her departure was similarly recorded by the spy eye. She seemed perfectly composed and serene.

There were more pictures to follow, showing the state of Uras.h.i.+ma's corpse as it had eventually been discovered, and the card bearing the words of the poem penned by the original Oscar Wilde. There were long, lingering close-ups of the fatal flowers. The camera's eye moved into a black corolla as if it were venturing into the interior of a great greedy mouth, hovering around the crux ansata tip of the bloodred style like a moth fascinated by a flame. There was, of course, a layer of monomol film covering the organism, but its presence merely served to give the black petals a weird sheen, adding to their near supernatural quality.

Charlotte let the tape run through without comment and left the link open when it had finished, after repeating the words they had already heard. "What do you see?" she asked.

"I'm not sure. I'd like to have a closer look at the flowers. It's difficult to be sure, but I think they were subtly different from the ones which ornamented poor Gabriel's corpse." "They are. You'll get a gentemplate in due course, but Regina Chai's counterpart in San Francisco has already noted various phenotypical differences, mostly to do with the structure of the flower. It's another modified Celosia, of course." "Of course," Wilde echoed.

"The woman traveled to San Francisco on a scheduled maglev," Charlotte told him.

"The card she used to buy the ticket connects to a credit account held in the name of Jeanne Duval. It's a dummy account, of course, but Hal's tracking down all the transactions that have moved through it. She didn't use the Duval account to reach New York, and she'll presumably use another to leave San Francisco." "It might be worth setting up a search for the names Daubrun and Sabatier," Wilde suggested. "It's probably too obvious, but Jeanne Duval was one of Baudelaire's mistresses, and it's just possible that she's got the others on her list of noms de guerre." Charlotte transmitted this information to await Hal's return. The maglev was taking them down the western side of the Sierra Nevada now, and she had to swallow air to counteract the effects of the falling pressure on her eardrums.

As she did so she saw Michael Lowenthal making his way through the car, looking wide awake and ready for action.

"By the time we get to San Francisco," she said to Oscar Wilde, although she was still looking at Lowenthal, "there probably won't be anything to do except to wait for the next phone call." "Perhaps," said Wilde. "But even if she's long gone, we'll be in the right place to follow in her footsteps. Michael! It's good to see you. We've been catching up on the news-you've doubtless been doing the same." "I think I might be a little ahead of you," Lowenthal said, in a casual manner that had to be fake. "My a.s.sociates and I think that we might have identified a third victim." Charlotte's first reaction to Lowenthal's dramatic statement was to reach out to the comcon beneath the screen, intending to put in an alarm call to Hal, but Lowenthal raised a hand in what was presumably intended as a forbidding gesture.

"There's no need," he said. "Your colleagues in New York have already been informed-they're checking it out. It's possible he's simply not responding. VE addicts are even worse in that respect than Creationists." "Who's not responding?" Charlotte wanted to know.

"Paul Kwiatek." Charlotte had never heard of Paul Kwiatek. VE addicts didn't normally fall within her sphere of concern. She immediately looked at Oscar Wilde to see what his reaction to the name might be.

The geneticist was content to raise a quizzical eyebrow while meeting Lowenthal's eye. "I had no idea that he was still alive," he said-but then he turned to Charlotte and added: "I did not know him well, and I had no reason at all to wish him dead." Then he turned back to Lowenthal and said: "He was an a.s.sociate of Michi's at one time, was he not? Is that why your employers think that his lack of response to their calls may be significant?" "He was more than an a.s.sociate," the Natural said as he lowered himself into the seat beside Charlotte's.

"Paul Kwiatek and Michi Uras.h.i.+ma were at university together, at Wollongong in Australia." "Ah yes!" said Wilde blithely. "The Wollongong connection strikes again. Given that Gabriel and Michi were there at the dawn of modern time, it can't have been too onerous a task for you to obtain the names of everyone still living who was there at the same time. Have the MegaMall's a.s.siduous market researchers tracked down every single one of them? Is Paul Kwiatek the only one who failed to reply?" "No," Lowenthal replied, "but his name stood out, partly because of his one-time connections with Uras.h.i.+ma and partly because we're certain that he's at home. He might, admittedly, be so deeply immersed in some exotic virtual environment that even the most urgent summons can't get through to him-but we'll know soon enough. There are a dozen other people we haven't been able to get a reply from as yet, but there seem to be perfectly good reasons for their being unavailable." "Who is this Kwiatek?" Charlotte demanded. "Apart from being a VE addict, I mean." "A software engineer," Lowenthal told her. "He worked in much the same areas as Michi Uras.h.i.+ma for some years, while they were both involved in education and entertainment. They went their separate ways when their interests diverged, becoming more... esoteric." "Illegal, you mean." "Not necessarily. Not in Kwiatek's case, anyhow. Extreme, perhaps; uncommercial, certainly-but he was never charged with any actual offense." "So the connection between them doesn't suggest any obvious motive?" Charlotte said.

"Not that connection, unless Kwiatek's recent work has implications of which we're unaware. What interests me is the fact that they and King were at Wollongong together. That's the one solid link between all three victims." "When you say together," Wilde put in, "how close a tie do you mean. Did they room together? Did they all take the same courses? Did they even graduate at the same time?" "Well, no," said Lowenthal. "None of those, so far as we can determine-but the data's old and very sc.r.a.ppy. The fact remains that they were all at Wollongong during the years 2321 and 2322. You see the significance of the timing, of course." Charlotte didn't, but dearly wished that she had when Oscar Wilde said: "You mean that Jafri Biasiolo was born in 2323." "Yes," said Lowenthal. Then, after a moment's pregnant pause, he said: "You're a much older and wiser man than I am, Dr. Wilde, and you obviously have all kinds of insights into this affair that I don't have. This is all new to me and I'm completely out of my depth, but I've formed a hypothesis and I'd like to put it to you, if I may. It might be stupid, and I'd like your advice before I relay it to my employers. May I?" Flattery, thought Charlotte, will get you almost anywhere. The cynical thought could not quell the rush of resentment she felt. She, after all, was the policeman. This was her investigation. What monstrous injustice had determined that she had to sit here listening to the self-congratulatory ramblings of two amateurs? Why was Michael Lowenthal, agent of the Secret Masters, sucking up to her chief suspect while ignoring her completely? "Please do," said Oscar Wilde, as smug as a cat in sole possession of a veritable lake of cream.

"Whoever is responsible for this flamboyant display has taken great care to involve you in it," Michael Lowenthal said. "He or she has also gone to some trouble to place Rappaccini's name at the very center of the investigation. You have suggested-and I agree with you-that the roots of this affair must extend into the remote past, and that it may have been more than a century in the planning. When you made the suggestion, what you seemed to have in mind was a scenario in which Jafri Biasiolo, alias Rappaccini, had decided at some point in his career to construct an entirely new ident.i.ty for himself, leaving behind an electronic phantom, and that he had done this in order to prepare the way for this theatrical series of murders.

"The problem with that scenario is that it gives us no clue as to how, why, or even when Biasiolo could have formed a grievance against the two people who are so far definitely numbered among the victims. If Paul Kwiatek is, in fact, the third, that puzzle becomes even more awkward. If Kwiatek is the third, I think we must consider a different scenario, whereby the motive for the crime originated in Wollongong in 2321 or 2322. If that is the case, then it is possible that every record of Jafri Biasiolo's existence and every aspect of his subsequent career as Rappaccini might have been a contrivance aimed toward the eventual execution of this plan. If so, we should not be asking our surfers to discover who Jafri Biasiolo became when he vanished into thin air in 2430 or thereabouts, but to discover who the person was who created him in the first place and used him as a secondary ident.i.ty for the preceding hundred years. Do you see my point, Dr. Wilde?" "I certainly do," Wilde replied with perfect equanimity. "I fear, dear boy, that I have also antic.i.p.ated your punch line-but I would not dream of depriving you of the opportunity to declaim it. There is certainly considerable virtue in your powers of imagination, and not a little in your logic, but I fear that your conclusion will not seem so compelling. Do tell us-who is the person that you suspect of harboring this remarkable grudge against Gabriel and Michi for more than a hundred and seventy years?" Charlotte could see that Wilde's teasing sarcasm had had a far more devastating effect on Lowenthal's confidence than any simple appropriation of the Natural's conclusion could have had. The young man had to swallow his apprehension before saying: "Walter Czastka." Having already heard Wilde's response to the observation that Czastka had been at Wollongong at the same time as King and Uras.h.i.+ma, Charlotte expected another dose of scathing sarcasm-but Wilde seemed to have repented of his cruelty in setting Lowenthal up to deliver a punch line that was bound to fall flat. He leaned back, giving the appearance of a man who was thinking a matter through, reappraising everything he had previously taken for granted.

"I can see the attractions of the hypothesis," Wilde admitted finally. "Walter can be cotemporally linked to both the murdered men, and to one who might have been murdered. As an expert in creative genetics, specializing in flowering plants, he might conceivably have had the expertise necessary to run two careers instead of one, diverting all his flair and eccentricity into the work allocated to the Rappaccini pseudonym while cunningly taking credit for a flood of vulgar commercial hackwork. You have observed that I have a very low opinion of Walter, and you presume that he must have an equally low opinion of me-thus providing a possible motive for the admittedly curious determination of the murderer to involve me in the investigation.

"It would certainly be ironic if I were to insist now that Walter could not possibly be the murderer because he is so utterly dull and unimaginative, if it were to turn out in the fullness of time that he is the murderer, and that I had spent the greater part of my life mistakenly despising him. The possibility is so awful that I am almost moved to caution. Nevertheless, I feel obliged to stand by my earlier judgment. Walter Czastka could not have invented Rappaccini because he does not have the necessary aesthetic resources. He is not the author of this bizarre psychodrama. If I am proved wrong, I shall unhesitatingly admit that he has outplayed me magnificently, but I cannot believe that I will be proved wrong." "Do you have an alternative hypothesis to offer?" Lowenthal demanded, carefully suppressing his ire.

"Not yet," Wilde replied. "I am obliged to wait until I discover what awaits me in San Francisco." Charlotte was just about to say that thanks to the presumably premature discovery of Michi Uras.h.i.+ma's body they already knew what awaited them in San Francisco, when the buzzer on her beltphone sounded. She s.n.a.t.c.hed up the handset, but that was unnecessary; the table's screen was still patched through to UN police headquarters, and it was there that Hal Watson's face appeared.

"One of Rappaccini's bank accounts just became active again," Hal informed them.

"A debit was put through about ten minutes ago. The credit was drawn from another account, which had nothing on deposit but which had a guarantee arrangement with the Rappaccini account." "Never mind the technical details," Charlotte said. "What did the credit buy? Have the police at the contact point managed to get hold of the user?" "I'm afraid not," Watson told her. "The debit was put through by a courier service. They actually got the authorization yesterday, but it's part of the conditions of their service that they guarantee delivery within a certain time and don't collect until they've actually completed the commission. We've got a picture of the woman from their spy eye, looking exactly the same as she did when she went to Uras.h.i.+ma's apartment, but it's almost three days old. It must have been taken before the murder, immediately after she arrived in San Francisco." Charlotte groaned softly. "What did she send, and where did she send it to?" she said.

"It was a sealed package-a broad, shallow cylinder. It was addressed to Oscar Wilde, Green Carnation Suite, Majestic Hotel, San Francisco. It's there now, awaiting his arrival." Even though Charlotte had not quite had time to get her foot into her mouth, she felt a sinking feeling in her stomach. She turned from the screen to stare at Oscar, who shrugged his shoulders insouciantly. "I always stay in my own personalized hotel suites," he said. "Rappaccini would know that." "We don't have the authority to open that package without your permission," Hal put in. "I could get a warrant-but it would be simpler, with your permission, to send an order to the San Francisco police right now, instructing them to inspect it immediately." "Certainly not," Wilde replied without a moment's hesitation. "It would spoil the surprise. We'll be there in less than an hour." Charlotte frowned deeply. "You're inhibiting the investigation," she said. "I don't think you should do that, Dr. Wilde. We need to know what's in that package. It could be a packet of deadly seeds, fine-tuned to your DNA." "I do hope not," said Wilde airily. "I can't believe that it is. If Rappaccini wished to murder me he surely wouldn't treat me less generously than his other victims. If they're ent.i.tled to a fatal kiss, it would be unjust as well as unaesthetic to send my fleurs du mal by mail." "In that case," Charlotte said, "it's probably just another ticket. If we open it now, we might be able to find out where the woman's next destination is in time to stop her making her delivery." "I cannot believe it," said the insultingly beautiful man, in his most infuriating tone. "The delayed debit was almost certainly timed to show up after that event. The third victim-whoever it might have been-is probably already dead. Perhaps the fourth and fifth also. No, I must insist-the package is addressed to me and I shall open it. That is what Rappaccini intended, and I am certain that he has his reasons." "Dr. Wilde," Charlotte said, in utter exasperation, "the reasons of a murderer-or a murderer's accessory-are hardly deserving of respect. You seem to be incapable of taking this matter seriously." "On the contrary," Wilde replied with a sigh. "I believe that I am the only one who is taking it seriously enough. You, dear Charlotte, seem to be unable to look beyond the mere fact that people are being killed. At least Michael has imagination enough to see that if we are to understand this strange business, we must consider hypotheses which are extraordinarily elaborate and frankly bizarre. We must take all the features of this flamboyant display as seriously as they are intended to be taken: the kisses, the flowers, the cards... everything that is calculatedly strange and superfluous. They are, after all, the details that the newscasters will focus on as soon as Michael's careful employers decide to let them off the leash. Those details hold the key to the nature and purpose of the performance.

"At any rate, whatever message is in this mysterious packet is intended for me, and I intend to take receipt of it. We will not reach our next port of call any sooner by having it opened prematurely." "I hope you're right," said Charlotte, grimly and insincerely. She was annoyed by her utter helplessness in the face of what now seemed certain to be a series of murders quite without parallel, in this or any other century-so annoyed, in fact, that she now did not know whether to hope that Oscar Wilde would turn out to be the murderer or Walter Czastka's dupe.

When the three travelers arrived at the Majestic they found, as promised, that the mysterious package had been set upon a polished table in the reception room of the Green Carnation Suite. It was, as Hal had told them, a broad and shallow cylinder, but it was somewhat larger than the vague description had led Charlotte to expect. It was about a hundred centimeters in diameter and twenty deep. The box itself was emerald green, but it was secured by a cross of black ribbon neady knotted in a bow.

Charlotte went straight to the table, but Oscar Wilde paused in the doorway.

Michael Lowenthal, bringing up the rear of the party, had no alternative but to pause with him.

"The walls are not blooming as they should," Wilde said in a vexed tone. "The buds are browning at the edges before they have even opened-there must be a fault in the circulatory system within the walls of the hotel. I've never really trusted the Majestic; its staff have no flair for aesthetic detail." Charlotte stared at him, making every attempt to display her exasperation.

Eventually, he condescended to join her.

Charlotte was taking no chances, in case the box did contain dangerously illegal products of macabre genetic engineering. The policeman stationed at the door of the apartment had pa.s.sed her a spray gun loaded with a polymer which, on discharge, would form itself into a bimolecular membrane and cling to anything it touched. She also had a plastic bladder of solvent ready. Her hands were gloved.

Another officer had followed them in-a uniformed inspector named Reginald Quan, who had been a.s.signed by the local force to the Uras.h.i.+ma murder. "You'd better let me open that with a knife," he volunteered as soon as Oscar Wilde reached out to take hold of the knot in the black ribbon which secured the box.

"It is addressed," said Wilde with heavy dignity, "to me." Charlotte met Quan's eye, raising her own eyebrows as if to say: "What can we do? Let him have his way." Although the local man outranked Charlotte, she was operating under the technical authority of Hal Watson, and Quan had to defer to her. The inspector shrugged his shoulders and took a step back. Michael Lowenthal immediately moved into the gap, craning his neck to get a better view.

Charlotte held the spray gun ready, her finger on the trigger.

The ribbon yielded easily to Wilde's quick fingers, and he drew it away. The lid lifted quite easily, and Wilde laid it to one side while he, Lowenthal, and Charlotte looked down at what was in the box.

It was, as Charlotte had half expected since she had first seen the shape and size of the container, a Rappaccini wreath. Its base was a very intricate tangle of dark green stalks and leaves. The stalks were th.o.r.n.y, the leaves slender and curly. There was an envelope in the middle of the display, and around the perimeter were thirteen black flowers like none she had ever seen before. They looked rather like black daisies-but there was something about them that struck Charlotte as being not quite right.

Oscar Wilde extended an inquisitive forefinger and was just about to touch one of the flowers when it moved.

"Look out!" said Michael Lowenthal and Reginald Quan, in unison.

As if the first movement had been a kind of signal, all the "flowers" began to move. It was a most alarming effect, and Wilde reflexively s.n.a.t.c.hed back his hand as Charlotte pressed the trigger of the spray gun and let fly.

When the polymer hit them, the creatures' movements became suddenly jerky. They had been moving fairly slowly, in random directions, but now they thrashed and squirmed in obvious distress. The limbs which had mimicked sepals struggled vainly for purchase upon the th.o.r.n.y green rings on which they had been mounted.

Now that Charlotte could count them she was able to see that each of the creatures had eight excessively hairy legs. What had seemed to be a cl.u.s.ter of florets was a much embellished thorax.

They were not perfectly camouflaged; it was simply that she had been expecting to see flowers, not spiders, and Charlotte's expectation had enabled them to get away with their masquerade for a few seconds. She was perversely gratified to notice that Michael Lowenthal's eagerness to get in on the act had evaporated; he had taken a big stride backward and now appeared to be awkwardly caught between conflicting desires. Now that the man from the MegaMall had a hypothesis at stake, he was desperately anxious to keep up with the data flow, but he was clearly arachnophobic. Either he had undergone some unfortunate formative experience while in the care of his foster parents or the Zaman transformation had not tidied every last vestige of deficiency from the human genome.

"Poor things," said Oscar Wilde as he watched the spiders writhe in desperate distress. "They'll asphyxiate, you know, with that awful stuff all over them." "I may have just saved your life," observed Charlotte dryly. "Those things are probably poisonous." "My dear Charlotte," said the geneticist tiredly, "the last human being to die of a spider bite did so more than five hundred years ago-and that was the result of a totally unexpected allergic reaction." "It was a perfectly ordinary spider too," Charlotte retorted. "Those aren't. If this murderer can make man-eating plants, he can make deadly spiders." "Perhaps," Wilde conceded. "But this little performance was no attempted murder.

It's a work of art-presumably an exercise in symbolism." "According to you," she said, "the two are not incompatible." "Not even the most reckless of dramatists," said Wilde, affecting a terrible weariness, "would destroy his audience at the end of act two of a play that is clearly intended to extend over twice or three times that number. I am quite certain that I am safe from any direct threat to my well-being, at least until the final curtain falls. I am almost certain that the same immunity will extend to anyone accompanying me on my journey of discovery. Even when the final act is done, I a.s.sume that Rappaccini will want us alive and well. He surely would not take the risk of interrupting a standing ovation and cutting short the cries of Encore!-and he surely will not want my obituary to appear before my review of his work." While the man Gabriel King had described as a "posturing ape" was making this speech, and because he showed no inclination to do so himself, Charlotte reached out a gloved hand to pick up the sticky envelope which still sat on its dark green bed at the center of the ruined display.

The envelope had been splashed by the polymer, but it was not sealed. Although the gloves made her dumsy, Charlotte contrived to open it and to take out the piece of paper which it contained. She took what precautions she could to screen its contents from the inquisitive eyes of Lowenthal and Quan. For once, she wanted to have the advantage, if only for half a minute It was a car-hire receipt. The invoice stated that the car in question was ready and waiting in a bay beneath the hotel, and was stamped with a warning note in garish red ink: ANY ATTEMPT TO INTERROGATE THE PROGRAMMING OF THIS VEHICLE WILL ACTIVATE A VIRUS THAT WILL DESTROY ALL THE DATA IN ITS MEMORY.

It was probably a bluff, but Charlotte had a strong suspicion that Oscar Wilde wasn't about to let her call it-and Hal still didn't have any legal authority to take over the trail of clues. He couldn't commandeer the car unless and until he could get a warrant. By that time, Charlotte suspected, the car would be en route, with Oscar Wilde in it. She had every intention of being in it with him.

While there was a trail to follow, she might as well be on it-and if it transpired that Oscar Wilde was the layer of the trail as well as its follower, she wanted to be the one to arrest him.

Charlotte turned to Reginald Quan, trying hard to give the impression that everything was comfortably under control. The image of the UN police had to be preserved at all costs. "Our forensic team will have to examine these things," she said. "The biotechnics are almost certainly illicit, perhaps dangerous. Hal Watson will sort out the details." Quan shrugged. "Going somewhere?" he inquired innocently, with a nod toward the receipt. Her attempts to screen it from his view had obviously not been entirely successful.

"Yes, we are," she said, pausing only to pa.s.s the relevant details to Hal before handing the doc.u.ment to its rightful owner, "and there's no time to lose." While they took the elevator down to the car park, Hal gave Charlotte a rapid update on his most recent findings. The car-hire company had reported that they had delivered the vehicle three days earlier, and that they had no knowledge of any route or destination which might have been programmed into its systems after dispatch.

"It looks as if we're going on a mystery tour," she said to Oscar Wilde dourly.

"We've been on a mystery tour since yesterday afternoon," he pointed out. "I do hope that our next destination will be a little more interesting than the places we have so far visited." Hal also reported that he'd launched an investigation of the account used to pay for the hire car, although it appeared that it had been set up entirely for that purpose. The initial deposit had been adequate to cover the car's expenses for three days' storage and a journey of two thousand kilometers.

"That could take you as far north as Anchorage or as far south as Guatemala," Hal pointed out unhelpfully. "I can't tell for sure how many more accounts there might be on which Rappaccini and the woman might draw, but the transfers made so far have allowed me to trace several that are held under other names; it's possible that one of them is his current name." "What are they?" Oscar Wilde inquired.

"Samuel Cramer, Gustave Moreau, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, and Thomas De Quincey." Wilde sighed. "Samuel Cramer is the hero of a novella by Baudelaire," he said.

"Gustave Moreau was a French painter a.s.sociated with the French decadent movement. Thomas Griffiths Wainewright was a critic and murderer who was the subject of an essay by my namesake called 'Pen, Pencil and Poison'-an exercise partly inspired by Thomas De Quincey's more celebrated essay 'Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.' I fear that these aliases are little more than a series of jokes-decorative embellishments of the unfolding plot." "The names don't matter," said Hal. "What matters is where the money that fed the accounts originated, and where it goes when it makes its exits. I already have surfers going through the books of Rappaccini Inc. with a fine-toothed comb. At present, the money trail seems more likely to deliver the goods than the picture searches. With luck, I'll eventually be able to find out where the man who used to use the Rappaccini name and our mysterious nonexistent woman have their basic supplies delivered-food, equipment, and so on-and when I know that, I'll know where they are, and what names they use when they're not using silly pseudonyms. Then we can pick them both up and charge them." "What about this brainwave of Lowenthal's?" Charlotte asked-having reported the conjecture while the maglev was pulling into the San Francisco station. "Have you found any evidence to suggest that Czastka might have set up the Biasiolo ident.i.ty?" "Not yet," said Hal noncommittally. Charlotte guessed that Hal wasn't taking Lowenthal's hypothesis any more seriously than Wilde was. Although he was reluctant to say so, Hal was presumably still beavering away at the brainfeed link-which could easily extend from King, Uras.h.i.+ma, and Rappaccini to Kwiatek, but not to Czastka. Or to Wilde, for that matter, Charlotte admitted to herself.

Despite her aggressive question about whether he had ever used brainfeed equipment, she had found not the slightest shred of evidence that he had ever had a substantial financial or practical interest in the field.

The car which awaited them in the underground garage was roomy and powerful.

Once it was free of the city's traffic-control computers it would be able to zip along the transcontinental at two hundred kilometers per hour. If they were headed for Alaska, Charlotte thought, they'd be there sometime around midnight They'd need a couple of thermal suits.

Michael Lowenthal opened the door to the seat which faced the driver's control panel and politely stood aside, offering it to her-but she remembered their journey across Manhattan only too well. She shook her head, leaving him no alternative but to take the front himself while Charlotte got into the rear with Oscar Wilde.

As soon as they were all settled, Wilde activated the car's program. The car slid smoothly up the ramp and into the street.

Michael Lowenthal, who had skipped breakfast on the maglev in order to lay his beautiful hypothesis before the stern gaze of Oscar Wilde, called up a menu from the car's synthesizer and looked it over unappreciatively.

"I fear," said Wilde as he scanned the duplicate which had appeared in the panel on the back of the seat in front of him, "that we are in for a rather Spartan trip." Most hire cars only stocked manna with a choice of artificial flavorings; this one was a deluxe model, but it didn't have anything else to offer.

"The time to worry about that," Charlotte said tersely, "is when we reach Guadalajara." She had taken note of the fact that the car had turned southeast, heading for intersection nine of the transcontinental instead of eight. Wherever they were headed, it was not Alaska.

Lowenthal was obviously used to better fare than the car had to offer; he decided not to bother with breakfast after all.

Charlotte plugged her beltphone into the screen mounted in the back of the drive compartment and began scrolling through more data that Hal's silvers had collated while she had been otherwise occupied. The artificial geniuses had found a great many links between Gabriel King and Michi Uras.h.i.+ma to add to the coincidence of their possible attendance at the same university-more links, in fact, than anyone could reasonably have expected, even allowing for the fact that they had been acquainted for more than a hundred and seventy years. There was, however, no clear evidence as yet that King's funding of Uras.h.i.+ma's various exploits had been compensated by slightly larger sums paid to him by third parties who did not wish to be seen funding brain-feed research themselves.

Charlotte could see that the AI searches had only just begun to get down to the real dirt. No one whose career was as long as King's was likely to be completely clean, especially if he'd been in business, but a man in his position could keep secrets even in today's world, just as long as no one with state-of-the-art equipment actually had a reason to probe. It was only to be expected that his murder would expose a certain amount of dirty linen, but to Charlotte's admittedly naive eyes King's laundry basket seemed fuller than anyone could have expected. She began to wonder whether Lowenthal had made a mistake in starting at the beginning of the King/Uras.h.i.+ma relations.h.i.+p rather than the end. Even when Michi Uras.h.i.+ma had landed in deep trouble, it seemed, his connections with King had remained intact, but they had been hidden. King had not only funded Uras.h.i.+ma but had helped to establish all kinds of s.h.i.+elds to hide his work and its spin-off. Hal's silvers had only just begun to build Paul Kwiatek into the picture, but they had already uncovered some commercial links between King and Kwiatek that were as surprising in their way as the links between King and Uras.h.i.+ma. Rappaccini's involvement with Uras.h.i.+ma was, by contrast, beginning to seem perfectly straightforward.

Maybe all this flimflam with Wilde, Czastka, and Rappaccini is just a smoke screen, Charlotte thought. Maybe its sole purpose is to blind the silvers with superfluity, to distract us from the real pattern. But what could that pattern possibly be? As the data tying Gabriel King to Paul Kwiatek's allegedly esoteric and uncommercial research continued to acc.u.mulate, Charlotte saw that Gabriel King had not been quite as colorless a character as Oscar Wilde had implied. Perhaps no one was who had lived a hundred and ninety-four years and had learned along the way to despise the affectations and showmans.h.i.+p of men like Wilde. But if King, Uras.h.i.+ma, and Kwiatek had been murdered for business reasons, what could those reasons be? And who was the mysterious female a.s.sa.s.sin? Charlotte broke in on the data stream and said: "Hal-is there any news of Kwiatek yet?" "Any time now," he said. "They're executing the entry warrant as we speak, although the building supervisor's doing his level best to obstruct them.

Protecting the privacy of his tenants, he says. What he's paid for. Any idea where you're headed yet?" Charlotte glanced out of the window, but there was nothing to be seen now except the eight lanes of the superhighway. "Mexico City, for now," she said. "Exactly how far toward it we'll go-or how much further beyond it-is anyone's guess. Is there any sign of the woman traveling south out of San Francisco?" "No match yet," Hal admitted. "As I said, the money trail's looking better than the picture trail, for the moment. Hold on... they're in Kwiatek's apartment now.

No sign of him, unless he's in the cradle..." Charlotte looked up. Michael Lowenthal was peering through the gap between the headrest of his seat and the drive compartment. Oscar Wilde seemed equally rapt, although his posture was as languid as ever.

"Yes," said Hal, evidently dividing himself between two conversations. "In the cradle. That's confirmed. Kwiatek's dead-same method. We already have a fourth name that may have to be added to the list, but it's going to take time to get investigators out to the place where he's supposed to be. Same pattern-no response even to top-priority calls." "Who?" said Lowenthal.

"Magnus Teidemann-the ecologist. Graduated from the University of Wollongong in 2322, with Czastka-a year ahead of King, Uras.h.i.+ma, and Kwiatek. He's in the field, working on some kind of biodiversity project; he hasn't checked in with his base for a week. Not particularly unusual, they say, but..." "If he's dead too," Lowenthal opined, "Wollongong has got to be the crucial link." "If he's dead," Charlotte echoed. "There are other links binding King to Uras.h.i.+ma and to Kwiatek. If it's just the three of them, the motive might have arisen a lot later than 2322. Let's face it, no one but a madman would formulate a murder plan that would take so long to come to fruition. If you have a powerful desire to kill someone, you don't wait a hundred and seventy years, until they're practically at death's door, before you implement it." "Czastka called in his report on the first murder weapon," Hal put in. "It confirms Wilde's in every respect but one." "Which one?" Charlotte wanted to know.

"He can't see any evidence of a link to Rappaccini." "That fault is in Walter's sight, not in the evidence," Wilde was quick to say.

"Even so," said Hal, "the only name mentioned in Czastka's report is Wilde's-because he's the only one known to have worked with the basic Celosia gentemplate. Czastka's still on standby. I'll send him the data on Uras.h.i.+ma's killer-and Kwiatek's when we have it." "Did you ask him about being at Wollongong with King and Uras.h.i.+ma?" Charlotte wanted to know.

"Of course I did. He says that he doesn't remember anything about events that long ago. He supposes that he must have known King, given that some of their courses overlapped, but he has no memory of ever having met Michi Uras.h.i.+ma." "He would say that, wouldn't he?" murmured Michael Lowenthal.

"Got to go," said Hal, breaking the connection.

Oscar Wilde immediately began tapping out a phone number on the comcon set in the back of Lowenthal's seat.

"Who are you calling?" Charlotte demanded.

"Walter Czastka, of course," Oscar replied with his customary equanimity.

"You can't do that!" Lowenthal exclaimed. Charlotte was glad that he'd beaten her to it, because she knew exactly what Wilde's reply would be.

"Of course I can," said Wilde. "We're old acquaintances, after all. If he's involved with this business, I'm the best person to find out how and why-I know his little ways." By the time he had finished speaking, it was a dead issue. The call had gone through and had been answered.

Charlotte could see the image on Wilde's screen even though she was invisible to the camera that was relaying Wilde's image to Czastka. She knew immediately that the face must be that of the flesh-and-blood Czastka, not his dutiful sloth. No one would ever have programmed so much wizened world-weariness into a simulacrum.

"h.e.l.lo, Walter," said Wilde.

Czastka peered at the caller without the least flicker of recognition. He looked very old-far older than King or Uras.h.i.+ma-and distinctly unwell. His skin was discolored and taut about the facial muscles. Charlotte could not imagine that he had ever been a handsome man, and he had obviously decided that it was unnecessary to compromise with the expectations of others by having his face touched up by cosmetic engineers. In a world where almost everyone was good-looking, unmarked by the worst ravages of time and circ.u.mstance, Walter Czastka was an obvious anomaly. There was nothing actually ugly or monstrous about him, however. To Charlotte, he simply seemed ancient and depressed. His eyes were a curious faded yellow color, and his stare had a rather disconcerting quality.

"Yes?" he said.

"Don't you know me, Walter?" asked Wilde, in genuine surprise.

For a moment, Czastka simply looked exasperated, but then his stare changed as enlightenment dawned.

"Oscar Wilde!" he said, his tone redolent with awe. "My G.o.d, you look well. I didn't look like that after my second rejuvenation... but you already had... how could you need a third so soon?" Oddly enough, Oscar Wilde did not swell with pride in reaction to this display of naked envy. It seemed to Charlotte that Wilde's anxiety about Czastka's condition outweighed his pride in his own. This surprised her a little, and she wondered what motives Wilde might have for feigning such a response.

"Need," Wilde murmured, "is a relative thing. I'm sorry, Walter-I didn't mean to startle you. In my mind's eye, you see, I always look like this." "You'll have to be brief, Oscar," said Czastka curtly. "I'm expecting the UN police to call back-ever since they got past my AI defenses they've been relentless. Someone's using flowers to murder people. I've given them one report, but they want more. People like that always want more. I should have known better than to respond to the first call, I suppose. Terrible nuisance." Charlotte noticed that Czastka had dutifully avoided mentioning to Oscar Wilde the fact that he'd been obliged to mention Wilde's name in his report on the lethal flowers. Czastka did not seem to relish the idea of a long conversation with his old acquaintance.

"The police can break in on us if they want to, Walter," said Oscar gently.

"They showed the Celosia gentemplate to me too. I came to one conclusion that you apparently failed to reach." "And what was that?" Czastka asked sharply. Charlotte knew that Hal Watson wouldn't want Wilde putting ideas into Czastka's head, but she was powerless to prevent it.

"It seemed obvious to me that Rappaccini had designed them," said Oscar. "Do you remember Rappaccini?" "Of course I remember him," snapped Czastka. "I'm not senile, you know.

Specialized in funeral wreaths-a silly affectation, I always thought. Haven't heard of him in years, though-I thought he'd retired on the proceeds. I daresay you know him much better than I do. You were birds of a feather, I always thought. It was your Celosia, wasn't it? What makes you think that Rappaccini had anything to do with it?" Charlotte didn't need to make a mental note of the fact that Czastka considered Wilde and Rappaccini to be birds of a feather.

"How's your ecosphere coming along, Walter?" asked Oscar softly. Charlotte frowned at the change of subject Czastka didn't answer the question. "What do you want, Oscar?" he asked rudely.

"I'm busy. If you want to slander Rappaccini to the UN police, go ahead, but don't involve me. I told them all I know-about the plant, about everything. I just want to be left alone. If this is going to carry on, I'm going to disconnect permanently. If anyone wants to talk to me, they can get the boat from Kauai." Charlotte wondered when Czastka had last been rejuvenated. He looked as if his second rejuvenation had somehow failed to take-as if he were degenerating rapidly. He looked as if he couldn't possibly have long to live, and he looked as if he knew it.

"I'm sorry, Walter," said Oscar soothingly, "but I do need to talk to you. We have a problem here, and it affects us both. It affects us generally, and specifically. Genetic art may have come a long way since the protests at the Great Exhibition, but there's still a lot of latent animosity to the kind of work we do, and the Green Zealots won't need much encouragement to put us back on their hate list. Neither of us wants to go back to the days when we had to argue about our licenses, and had petty officials demanding to look over our shoulders while we worked. When the police release the full details of this case there's going to be a lot of adverse publicity, and it's going to hurt us.

That's the general issue. More specifically, there's a great deal of confusion about who planned these murders and why. I'm in a car with Sergeant Charlotte Holmes of the UN police and a man named Michael Lowenthal, who represents certain commercial interests. We all have our various theories about the affair, and I think you're ent.i.tled to be copied in on them. To be brutally frank, I think Rappaccini is behind the murders, Charlotte thinks I'm behind them, and Michael thinks you're the guilty party-so it really is in your interest to help us sort things out." "Me!" said Czastka. If his outrage wasn't genuine, it was the best imitation Charlotte had ever seen. She only wished that Michael Lowenthal could see it "Why on earth would I want to kill Gabriel King or Michi Uras.h.i.+ma?" "And Paul Kwiatek," Wilde added. "Maybe Magnus Teidemann too. n.o.body knows, Walter-but if this goes on, you might soon be the only survivor of that select band of famous men who graduated from Wollongong University in the early 2320s." Czastka's face had a curious ocherous pallor as he stared at his interlocutor.

Charlotte noted that Czastka's eyes had narrowed, but she couldn't tell whether he was alarmed, suspicious, or merely impatient.