Architects of Emortality (33 page)

It’s happening now, she thought, before our very eyes. She’s going to kill him within the next few minutes, if she hasn’t already. And we can’t do a thing to stop her—but we can surely stop her before she gets to Walter Czastka. This is the last.

“Professor McCandless,” she said. “I have reason to believe that you’re in mortal danger. I have to advise you to isolate yourself completely—and I mean completely. Please send Miss Herold away—and do it now. Whatever you believe or don’t believe, I beg you not to have any further physical contact with her. I have no doubt at all that your life is at stake.” “Oh, don’t be so stupid,” McCandless retorted testily. “I know how the mind of a policeman works, but I have a far better understanding of my present situation than you do, Sergeant Holmes. I can give you my absolute assurance that I’m in no danger whatsoever. Now, please may I get on with the work which your colleague asked me to do?” “Yes,” she said numbly. “I’m sorry.” She let him break the connection; she didn’t feel that she could do it herself She found the futility of her attempted intervention appalling.

When the screen went blank, Charlotte turned to Oscar Wilde and said: “He’s already dead, isn’t he? He doesn’t know it yet, but he’s infected. Nothing we could have done would have stopped it.” “The seeds may well be taking root in his flesh as we speak,” Wilde agreed. “If Julia Herold is the Inacio clone—and I say if, because it is still conceivable that she is not, although neither of us dares to believe it—then Professor McCandless had secured his own doom before you or Hal Watson had any reason to contact him.” “What was it that he started to say, I wonder?” she whispered. “Why did he stop and blank it out?” “Something that came to mind in spite of his resistance,” Wilde said. “Something he didn’t really want to remember. Something, perhaps, that Walter remembers too, if only he dared admit it…” “ ‘There was a time with Walter at the beach,’ ” Michael Lowenthal quoted speculatively. “Assuming that he didn’t mean a tree, he must have been referring to something that happened at a beach. Maybe that’s where Czastka met Maria Inacio—maybe it’s where they all met Maria Inacio. A party, do you think? Six drunken students, who hardly knew one another…?” “That might make sense,” Oscar Wilde conceded thoughtfully. “If Rappaccini had reason to think that any one of them might have been his biological father, and that Walter was merely the unlucky one…” Charlotte felt that duty required more urgent action from her than joining in with speculative games. She called Hal. “Julia Herold,” she said shortly. “Have you tied her in with Moreau yet? She has to be the killer.” “I’ve no proof yet,” Hal replied impatiently. “The records say that she’s a student at the University of Hawaii. She lives on Kauai. Although McCandless is retired from administration, he still does research—he’s a historian, specializing in the twenty-second century. That’s Herold’s main area of interest too. According to the official record, Herold’s been on Kauai all along—but I’m double-checking everything, and there’s a distinct possibility that the woman is a masquerader, not really Herold at all. If there’s disinformation in there, the seams will come apart in a matter of minutes, but it’ll be too late to save McCandless.” “She’s the one,” said Charlotte. “Whatever the superficial data flow says, she’s been halfway around the world in the last few days, killing people all the way.

It’s all in place, Hal—everything except the reason. You’ve got to stop her from leaving the island. Whatever else happens, you mustn’t let her get to Czastka.” “I’ve already taken care of that,” said Hal. “Even if she’s exactly who she says she is, she’s going nowhere tonight. Every exit is blocked, right down to the last rowboat—I can assure you of that.” “Who’s Julia Herold’s father?” Oscar Wilde put in. “Whose child is she supposed to be?” “Both egg and sperm were taken from the banks, according to the records,” said Hal. “Both donors are long dead. I can give you a list of the coparents who filed the application to foster, if you like—there are six names on the form. I haven’t had time to talk to any of them, but I’m still checking to make sure that their Julia Herold and the woman with McCandless are the same. It might all be irrelevant.” “Who are the biological parents supposed to have been?” “The sperm was logged in the name of Lothar Kjeldsen, born 2225, died 2317. The ovum is annotated ‘Deposited c.2100, Mother Unregistered.’ That’s not surprising—when the sterility plague hit hard, scientists were stripping healthy ova from every uninfected womb they could locate, including embryos. No duplicate pairing registered, no other posthumous offspring registered to either parent. Nothing significant.” “You’re right,” Wilde conceded readily. “If the killer is merely masquerading as Julia Herold for the sake of temporary convenience, we should return our attention to her origins. If my memory serves me right, Dr. Chai’s original report concerning the DNA traces recovered from Gabriel King’s apartment implied that the evidence of somatic engineering was unusual—idiosyncratic was the word she used, I think.” “Regina was being typically cautious,” Hal said. “DNA traces recovered from crime scenes always show some effects of somatic engineering, but it’s usually straightforwardly cosmetic. The Inacio clone has had orthodox cosmetic treatment, but that’s by no means all. After due consideration, Regina now thinks that the engineering was more fundamental than somatic tinkering. She also says that no matter how unlikely it sounds, the differences obscuring the Biasiolo/Czastka consanguinity almost certainly resulted from embryonic engineering, not from subsequent somatic modification.” “That was something that bothered me before,” Wilde said. “I couldn’t believe that there’d been any considerable somatic modification to a child born in 2323—but the alternative is even more astonishing. How did Maria Inacio die?” “She drowned, in Honolulu. The records say that it was presumed accidental, which means that whoever conducted the inquest thought there was a possibility that it was suicide. I’m not sure where this is taking us, Dr. Wilde, and I have whole panels lighting up on me here—I’ll have to cut you off.” The screen immediately went blank yet again.

“In the story, Rappaccini’s daughter was raised among poisons,” Wilde murmured.

“She acquired her immunities—but we do things differently nowadays. Rappaccini worked on her embryo to provide her immunities, whatever they are. If he’d duplicated a Zaman transformation, Regina Chai would have spotted the rip-off, but if it was his own variation on the theme, inspired by a different basal template if not actually developed from it…” “It won’t help her when we catch her,” Charlotte put in ominously. “And we will catch her—she can’t get away from Kauai. With Biasiolo dead, she’ll have to stand alone in court. Even if she pleads insanity, she’s likely to go into the freezer for a very long time. Even the most rabid antisusanists are unlikely to rally to her defense. At the end of the day, there are some people who simply can’t be allowed to pollute the world the rest of us live in. If Biasiolo did build the corruption into her genes, that makes her all the more dangerous.” “That’s the weakest point of the whole argument,” Wilde said. “Rappaccini would never have let this happen if he thought that his mother-daughter would have to bear the full weight of the law’s vengeance. And you’re wrong about her not being able to get away from Kauai. She will get to Walter. I don’t know how, but she will—even if she has to swim.“ The “condolence card” among the flowers that had been found in Paul Kwiatek’s apartment read: Cette vie est un h’opital ou chaque malade est poss’ede du desir de changer de lit. Cette d’voudrait souffir en face du poek, et celm-la croit qu’il querirait a cote de la fenetre.

“This life is a hospital,” Oscar Wilde translated, squinting slightly at the words displayed on the screen, “where each sick man is possessed by the desire to change his bed. This one yearns to suffer by the stove, that one believes that he would get better by the window.” “What’s that supposed to mean?” Charlotte demanded. Hal Watson’s computers had already identified the text as the opening passage of a prose poem by Baudelaire entitled—in English—“Anywhere out of the World.” “It means,” said Wilde, “that everyone in the world is ill at ease, or believes himself to be misfortunate. It means that no man can help thinking that if only he were in someone else’s situation, he would feel much better. If I remember correctly, the piece extends as a hypothetical dialogue between the poet and his uncommunicative soul, in which the poet interrogates his inner being as to where, exactly, he might find his own fulfillment. The soul replies, at long last, with the words which supply the poem with its title.” Charlotte scrolled down a little way. “It says here,” she remarked, “that the title was taken from the works of Edgar Allan Poe, which Charles Baudelaire had translated into French.” “What exceedingly dutiful programs your colleague has!” said Wilde sarcastically. “Does it, perhaps, also observe that ‘Anywhere out of the World’ was Jean Des Esseintes’s favorite among Baudelaire’s prose poems?” “No,” she said. “But I can get a readout on this Jean Des Esseintes if it would help.” “It wouldn’t,” Oscar assured her.

“Look,” said Charlotte, carefully letting her annoyance show. “Does all of this stuff mean something, or not? Because if it doesn’t, I think I’d like to get some sleep. We’re still a long way from Hawaii, but it’s midsummer and dawn will probably break before we get to Czastka’s island—and I really don’t see the point in waiting up for news of Stuart McCandless. The fool wouldn’t listen…” “So fate will doubtless take its course,” Wilde finished for her. “And yes, all of this means something, if only to Rappaccini. Whether it will help us to discover what it means is a different matter. If your interest is confined to the possibility of interrupting the unfolding tragedy before it reaches its end, and the probability of making an arrest, I fear that any tentative explanation I can offer will seem irrelevant.” Charlotte felt that she was being subtly insulted, or at least cunningly challenged. Despite the fact that she had done little for the last thirty-six hours but sit in vehicles, she felt physically exhausted and direly in need of rest. On the other hand, she hated to think that Wilde might be treating her with thinly veiled contempt.

“If you have any kind of explanation,” she said, “I really would be glad to hear it.” “So would I,” said Michael Lowenthal. “The other one seems even weirder than that one, even though it’s in English.” He meant the legend on the condolence card found in Magnus Teidemann’s tent—which they had inspected first, because it had been in English.

Oscar Wilde nodded, with a faint smile which somehow contrived to suggest that he had intended both of them to reply in exactly that fashion.

“As the UN’s dutiful silver observed,” Wilde said, “the card left with Teidemann’s body carried lines abstracted from a poem called ‘Adianasia,’ which is one of my namesake’s finest. The poem as a whole speaks—symbolically, of course—of the discovery of a seed closed ‘in the wasted hollow’ of the hand of a mummy exhumed from an Egyptian pyramid. The seed, when sown, produces ‘a wondrous snow of starry blossoms’ which outshines all other flowers in the eyes of the insects and the birds. Unlike ourselves, who ‘live beneath Time’s wasting sovereignty’ the miraculous plant is ‘a child of eternity.’ “I think we must look for that text’s significance in terms of a series of inversions. Rappaccini’s flowers are, of course, more often black than white, and their function is to emphasize that the wasting sovereignty of time still extends over those who once hoped to find themselves ranked among the first fragile children of eternity. When the victims of this crime were born, you see, the great majority of people were only just awakening to the fact that the nanotech escalator had stalled: that serial rejuvenation could not and would not preserve human life forever, and that the extra years bought by any future suite were extremely unlikely to carry its users into an era when further extensions would be routinely available. By the time that Rappaccini was born, it was virtually taken for granted that the quest for human emortality would have to make a new beginning. It was necessary to go back to the drawing board, in more ways than one.” “We don’t know for sure, as yet, that the Zaman transformation will be any more effective in beating the Miller effect than core-tissue rejuve,” Michael Lowenthal modestly pointed out. “We hope—” “That’s precisely my point,” said Oscar Wilde. “You hope. The generations of the twenty-second and twenty-third centuries hoped. Even men born at the very dawn of the twenty-fourth, in 2301, still hoped, although they became aware eventually that their hopes had been ill-founded because their nanotech idols couldn’t beat the Miller effect. Rappaccini and I, on the other hand, belonged to generations whose members knew from the beginning—as the men of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had known—that eventual extinction of the personality was inevitable. We grew up knowing that our own makers, and their makers before them, had made a mistake. They had contentedly put all their eggs into the basket of nanotechnology, trusting that even if the escalator effect did not carry them all the way to true emortality it would surely carry their children. That unwarranted trust, Michael, could easily be seen as a kind of betrayal. I have forgiven my own foster parents, although I think that Charlotte may one day find it a great deal more difficult to forgive hers—and however paradoxical it may sound, it may be that Jafri Biasiolo might have found it even more difficult to forgive the still-mysterious circumstances of his own conception.” “That’s nonsense,” said Lowenthal sharply. “Even if Maria Inacio was raped by Walter Czastka and five others—” “Actually,” Wilde interrupted him, “I prefer your earlier hypothesis to the gang-rape scenario—the one you formed when you still presumed that Biasiolo had been conceived in the orthodox manner, and were thinking in terms of dares, challenges, and initiations to student secret societies. Until we have better reason to do so, however, I think we should resist the temptation to jump to conclusions which are nasty or silly. I can assure you that what I have said is not nonsense. There was a point in history when it was abruptly realized that our whole approach to the problem of emortality had been seriously misled, and that the commercial monopoly established by the men who had begun to think of themselves as the Gods of Olympus had cost us dear. Professor McCandless, if he is still alive, would doubtless be able to tell you that the Ahasuerus Foundation continued to plough a lone furrow throughout the era of PicoCon’s economic dominance, refusing to admit that nanotechnological techniques of rejuvenation were ever anything more than superficial. If others had followed the example of their funding policies, the Zaman transformation—or something very like it—might have been available at least a century before your conception.” “A hundred and thirty-four years ago,” Charlotte murmured. Oscar Wilde ignored her.