Architects of Emortality (24 page)

The words read: Yet each man kills the thing he loves, By each let this be heard, Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word.

The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword!” Why on earth, Michi wondered, had the woman selected such a peculiar message? Was she suggesting that he had killed the things he loved? If so, she was more closely in tune with his morbid mood than any indication she had given in word or gesture. Had it been so obvious, the first time he accepted her kiss, that he was a coward? Had she known all along that she would find him impotent? Had the few flattering words he had contrived to produce, in poor recompense for hers, wounded her with their feebleness? He replaced the card, cursing himself for his folly in searching for hidden meanings. It was, he vaguely recalled, a very old poem; she must have chosen it because it was a time-honored classic, more beautiful in its antiquity than in its sentiment.

“Who wrote these words?” he asked his dutiful sloth, reciting them for the benefit of the machine. The sloth had no answer in its own memory, of course, but it had wit enough to consult the reference sources available on the Web.

“Oscar Wilde,” it replied, after a few moments’ pause.

Michi was astonished until he remembered that there had been more Oscar Wildes in the world than one. The coincidence of names must have been what inspired the young woman to pick this particular card.

A whole bouquet of Oscar Wildes! he thought. Well, better that than a whole bouquet of Walter Czastkas. He remembered that he had known Walter Czastka when the old bore was still in the full flush of youth, although Kwiatek had known him better. They had all been pioneers in those days, but they had all been as stupid as sloths, too young by far to realize that one cannot be a pioneer until one has mastered what has gone before. That had not stopped them hatching all manner of mad schemes, of course. Even Czastka! What was it that he had found which had seemed to him the making of a new era? He had sucked Kwiatek into it, and others too.

Why, Michi thought, with sudden astonishment, that must have been the very first time that I became an outlaw, and I cannot even remember what I did, or why. Who would have thought it? Paul was an outlaw through and through, even then—and that rascal King too, already well on his way to becoming a sly lackey of the MegaMall. But what on earth can stolid Walter Czastka have found that turned him around so completely, if only for a moment? What was it that he tried to do, that seemed so daring and so desperate? For a moment, as he touched the petals of the golden flowers, Michi almost remembered—but it had all taken place too long ago. He was a different man now, or a different half-man.

“I am,” he murmured. “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 IT.” He spelled out the final acronym, pronouncing it “eye tee.” Then he laughed. What could it possibly matter now what deliciously illicit assistance he and Kwiatek had rendered to Walter Czastka at the dawn of all their histories? He could not know, of course, that he had already begun to die because of it.

It may be just coincidence, of course,” Hal Watson said, referring to the possible connection between Walter Czastka and Rappaccini that had been exposed by his indefatigable silver surfers. “The supplies could have been delivered to a different island—the boatmaster doesn’t keep electronically available records—so they may have been intended for a rival exercise in Creationism. Even if we could prove that Czastka is more intimately linked to Rappaccini than other appearances suggest, the only hard evidence linking Rappaccini to the murders is the fact that the woman is drawing money from bank accounts fed by income generated by the corporations which seem to be his. She’s the one we have to identify and locate before we can proceed any further.” “I disagree,” said Oscar Wilde, before Charlotte could reply. “Given that the flowers are victim-specific, their designer must be regarded as the actual murderer. The woman is delivering them, but she may not have been aware that they were lethal until news broke of Gabriel King’s death—and even now she may not be certain that she was responsible, unless the news tapes have publicized the manner of his death.” “They haven’t,” Michael Lowenthal put in. “Those dogs won’t be let off the leash until the early evening news. After that, it’ll be a free-for-all.” “I’m sure the UN will be very grateful for your employers’ discretion,” Charlotte said sourly. She turned away slightly as she said it, embarrassed by her own temerity.

There was nothing visible through the window but a concrete blur speckled with racing vehicles. She had to squint slightly in order to refocus her eyes on the rim of jet-black SAP systems that topped the superhighway’s sound-muffling walls. It was an inner sensation of deceleration rather than any visual cue which told her that the hire car’s driver was responding to an instruction in its secret programming. It was changing lanes, moving to the inside. As the vehicle slowed and Charlotte’s eyes adjusted, the blur of uncertainty began to resolve itself into a much clearer image. The road markings appeared out of the sun-blazed chaos of the surface, and the other cars on the road became discrete and distinct.

If only the case could be clarified as easily, she thought, peering into the distance in the hope of seeing a road sign that would tell her which intersection they were approaching. Belatedly, she regretted having left the driver’s monitor to Lowenthal. Had he not been turned around, maintaining his position as best he could within the four-way conversation, he would have been able to obtain the car’s exact location at the stab of a button.

“The person we have to identify and locate with all possible expedition,” Oscar Wilde went on, overriding the comments which had interrupted his flow, “is the man behind Rappaccini Inc.—and with all due respect to Michael’s reasoning and the evidential fruit provided by its pursuit, I still can’t believe that Walter Czastka is that man. If Jafri Biasiolo never actually Existed, who was the man who appeared at the Great Exhibition and discussed matters of technique and aesthetics with such evident authority? Whose face appears in the records dutifully assembled by Hal’s inquisitive silvers?” “A well-briefed actor,” said Michael Lowenthal. “Hired to secure the illusion that Rappaccini had a real existence—and then removed from the scene, having done his work. You shouldn’t have told Czastka that he was a suspect, Dr. Wilde.

Until you did that, he must have thought that his plan was working perfectly. He must have assumed that he was the only expert witness the police had called upon.” “Even though he had summoned me to the Trebizond Tower and simultaneously made himself unavailable for immediate consultation?” Wilde queried. “I think not.

The real Rappaccini may be involving Walter in his affair with the same scrupulous ingenuity that he is applying to my own involvement—but if so, he clearly cannot expect that either of us will actually be arrested and charged.

My part is that of an interested witness. Walter’s—” “Czastka has a much stronger link to the victims,” Lowenthal insisted stubbornly. “He has to be reckoned the most likely suspect.” “Not at all,” Wilde insisted. “If this matter of the supplies is not a red herring, the most likely hypothesis is that the elusive Rappaccini is hiding out in exactly the location one would expect of a genetic engineer: in the Creationist archipelago.” “It doesn’t matter who the most likely suspect is,” Hal Watson informed them both sharply. “We have to pursue all the relevant lines of inquiry, and we have to intercept the woman before she does any more damage, even if she’s only a dupe. The boatmaster will be questioned as soon as we can get through to him, and I’ll be sure to check the leases on all the islands south and west of Kauai.

It’s just a matter of time. We still have a better than even chance of putting the whole jigsaw together before the early evening news turns the inquiry into a circus.” Charlotte winced as the car suddenly lurched, throwing her sideways to jostle Oscar Wilde. They had left the transcontinental superhighway at the intersection—she still did not know which one—and had already made a second turn, taking it off the subsidiary highway. The car was now climbing steeply into the hills, along a road which did not seem to have been properly maintained.

Having missed the sign at the intersection, Charlotte’s first response to this realization was to crane her neck to look back at the valley they were leaving behind, trying to figure out where they might be. The nature of the terrain suggested that they must have passed the Los Angeles junction, but she couldn’t tell whether they were south of the Salton Sea. She had only the vaguest knowledge of the West Coast, and wasn’t even sure what state they were in.

This had been a densely populated region in the distant past, but southern California had suffered worse than any other region of the old USA during the ancient plague wars. The so-called Second Plague War—whose obsolete title still lingered, even though modern historians no longer recognized the distinctions made by near-contemporary commentators—had made its grisly debut in Hollywood, which had been widely perceived as the ultimate symbol of twenty-first-century vanity, privilege, and conspicuous consumption. The rumor had been put about that the terrorists who had launched that particular team of viruses had been seeking revenge on the supposed beneficiaries of the “First Plague War,” who had allegedly launched it with the aim of wiping out the economic underclasses of the developed world.

If any of that was true, the “second war” had misfired badly. As in all wars, and plague wars more than any other kind, the poor had sustained far more casualties than the rich. Although the proximity of medical resources and the relative efficiency of emergency measures had helped to keep death rates down in the cities, the response in many rural areas to the emergence of the first cases had been a mass exodus of refugees. Most of those who had survived had never returned, preferring to relocate to more promising land. Three-quarters of the ghost towns of the Sierra Madre were ghost towns still, even after three hundred years.

Charlotte knew that the car hadn’t been on the road long enough to have got to the Sierra Madre, but these lesser hills seemed just as bleak, and the same pattern of response to the plague wars must have been duplicated here. Now that Hal had removed his image from the screen in order to concentrate on his Herculean labors, Charlotte took the opportunity to call up an annotated map of the region onto the screen in front of her. She summoned a blinking light to show her the car’s position, but the datum provided no obvious clue as to where it might be headed or why. The names of several small towns—all flagged as uninhabited—were scattered along their present route, but Charlotte wasn’t surprised that she was unable to recognize any of them.

“The region up ahead seems to be wasteland,” she told Lowenthal and Wilde, vaguely hoping that one of them might be better able to guess where they were being taken.

“She’s right,” Lowenthal confirmed, addressing himself to Wilde yet again, as if she were merely a hanger-on. “Nobody lives up here—and I mean nobody. The work of repairing the effects of the ecocatastrophe hasn’t even begun, even though we’re practically in LA’s backyard. Nothing grows here except lichens and the odd stalk of grass. The land’s never been officially reclaimed, not even for wilderness. It’s just rock and dust. The names on the map are just distant memories.” “Something must be up there,” Wilde said, shifting uncomfortably as the car took another corner with unreasonable haste. “Rappaccini wouldn’t bring us up here if there were nothing to see. If there were no real reason for this expedition he might as well have left us kicking our heels at the Majestic, or your headquarters in New York. Perhaps it’s the fact that no one ever comes here which recommended it to him as one of the bases of his secret operations.” “But none of these ghost towns is cable-connected to the Web,” Charlotte objected, drawing her finger across the screen in an arc.

“Which might be reckoned a considerable advantage by anyone intent on hiding,” Wilde pointed out.

It was easy enough for Charlotte to follow the line of thought. Land as derelict as this might be a very good place to hide. A man living up here would not be entirely deaf and blind, provided that he had equipment to receive information broadcast by comsat, but he could be effectively invisible as long as he made no longdistance purchases or person-to-person contacts. If he always kept a roof over his head during daylight hours he would go unnoticed even by surveillance satellites.

The hire car had been designed for highway travel, and its speed had slowed considerably when it first began to follow the winding road up into the foothills of the mountain range, but its AI did not seem to have mastered the art of mountain climbing. Although the road surface was getting worse and the bends were becoming sharper and more frequent, the car still seemed to be making haste. As she was forced to sway yet again Charlotte cursed the AI driver for not being sloth enough, although it could not have had wit enough to qualify as a silver, but she assumed that she was being oversensitive. A driver’s prime directive was to ensure the safety of its passengers.

The map disappeared from Charlotte’s screen, replaced by a list which Hal Watson had posted there.

“There are twenty-seven names here,” Hal said. “So far as we can ascertain, it’s a complete list of living men and women who attended the University of Wollongong while King, Urashima, Kwiatek, and Czastka were also in attendance.