Architects of Emortality (43 page)

We don’t have to put any substantial amount of spin on the commercial resumes; she’s already the star, and her act only needs a little cleaning up. Wilde will come across as a spokesman for a lunatic and a lunatic himself; the only people who’ll listen to what he says are people who are out on a limb anyway—irrelevant people. The show can’t work against us, in the short run or the long. There’ll be no substantial comeback about the extirpation. The vast majority will thank us, as they always do.” How was it possible, Michael wondered, to be so old and yet so calm? Why were these people immune to the kinds of resentments which Jafri Biasiolo and Oscar Wilde had stored up against the undying inheritors of Earth? It was, he realized, people like Oscar Wilde who made up such disparaging epithets as “MegaMall” It was people like Oscar Wilde who charged the people whose duty and vocation it was to run the world with being hidebound monsters of greed, incapable of any but quantitative reckoning. In fact, only people like those gathered around this conference table could properly understand the quality of life. By virtue of that understanding, they were neither afraid to die nor resentful of their appointed heirs.

“We were right to let it go all the way,” another dutiful soul put in. “It would have been a pity to put a stop to it fifty years ago. The obsessive secrecy of true madmen is a great asset to the sane; it allows us to be discreet and eclectic in releasing the products of their creativity. It would be a terribly dull world if we always had to take the oddballs out before they did their most interesting work, just because the ripples might spread too fast and too far.” “But we’ll have to keep a closer eye on Wilde, from now on,” another and more ominous voice put in.

“It’s hardly worth it, surely,” said Michael, so relaxed by now that he did not even feel that he was taking a risk in issuing the mild contradiction. “He’ll be dead soon enough, won’t he?” In the Green Carnation Suite of the New York Majestic, Oscar Wilde stood before a full-length mirror, carefully inspecting every detail of his face. He caressed the flawless flesh with sensitive fingertips, rejoicing in its gloss.

“Ivory and rose leaves,” he murmured. The sound of his voice, lower in pitch and more musical than he remembered it, gave him an exquisite thrill.

He repeated the phrase reverently, as though it were a magical incantation: “Ivory and rose leaves.” Oscar had never been afraid of vanity. He was a man ready and willing to address his own reflection in the most admiring terms, provided only that it remained full of youth and perfect in its symmetry. Whenever it grew old, as it had three times over, it lost its capacity to inspire admiration and became a mocking reminder of the hazards which he and all men of his obsolescent kind still faced: decay, senescence, decomposition.

“One hundred and thirty-three years old,” he said softly. “One hundred and thirty-three years old, and young again. Age cannot wither, nor custom stale…” He reached out to pluck a green carnation from the wall beside the mirror. It was one of only half a dozen in full bloom, and he twirled it between his delicate fingers, admiring it with as much satisfaction as he admired his own image.

The flower was a trivial creation, only a little more elegant than the variety which the horticulturalists of old had wrought without the aid of genetic engineering, but it had been a necessary endeavor. It was a joke, of course, but a very serious joke. The never-ending games which Oscar played in consequence of his name were no mere matter of public relations. His identification with the ideas and ideals of his alter ego had long ago become a deep-seated obsession as well as a mischievous fetish. He was not afraid to acknowledge that fact, nor to take pride in it. He had always felt that life, if it were to be lived to the full in modern conditions, required a definite style and aesthetic shape: a constant flow of delicate ironies, tensions, and innovations; a cause. Perhaps, as Charlotte Holmes and Michael Lowenthal clearly believed, his own cause was hardly less mad than poor Rappaccini’s—but then again, perhaps all causes that had the power to change the world were bound to be reckoned mad until they bore sweet fruit.

He placed the flower in the mock buttonhole of his neatly tailored SAP black suitskin. Black was, he thought, the perfect background for a green carnation—and a room full of green carnations was the perfect background for a man in black.

Oscar was fully aware of the debt of gratitude which he owed to his wallflowers.

Furnishing hotel interiors was vulgar hackwork unbefitting a real artist, but a real artist had to make a living, and the commonplaceness of such commissions could always be slightly offset by such flourishes of unorthodoxy as having it written into every contract that one suite of rooms should be fitted with green carnations instead of the more fashionable roses and amaranths and should always be available for his exclusive use.

His clients did not mind in the least his making such demands; they were, after all, paying for his fashionability rather than his technical dexterity, and he could not have been nearly so fashionable were it not for his extravagantly extrovert eccentricity. There were now hotels in thirty-six cities which could provide him with a distinctive pied-a-terre, and he felt entirely justified in thinking of the green carnation suites as his homes away from home.

His real home, of course, was the island which he had leased for his experiments in Creation.

Oscar half turned one way and then the other, shrugging his shoulders to make sure that the false jacket extruded by his suitskin hung perfectly upon his remodeled body. He had renewed his entire wardrobe since his rejuvenation; it had been absolutely necessary that he should—how could a man feel a tangible pulse of joy at finding himself full of youth unless he acted the part with total conviction? “Clothes maketh the man,” he murmured, “or, if the man is clever enough to be self-made, must at least refrain from unmaking him.” He did not have to make a note to remember the remark; even in his inner sanctum the bubblebugs were active around the clock. They would stay that way until the first signs of aging began to show again upon his face and in the timbre of his voice.

Oscar felt that he, unlike most men of his age, had conscientiously adapted his ideas to the reality of twenty-fifth-century life. He had discarded outdated notions of privacy in favor of making a perfect record of his beautiful life.

For this reason, if for no other, he was determined to be content with nothing less than sartorial perfection. This evening was, after all, to be the auspicious occasion of his reemergence into the social world. His involvement in the Rappaccini affair, and the quarantine which he had been forced to endure thereafter, had delayed his new debut but had also made certain that it would be even more dazzling than he had ever dared to hope. He was famous now, and would be for at least a quarter of an hour as the clock of history made revolution after revolution. He was profoundly glad that fame had descended upon him at exactly the right moment, while he looked his best for what would almost certainly be the last time.

“It is only shallow people,” he informed his reflection, confident in the knowledge that it would be an appreciative audience, “who do not judge by appearances. Adonis, perfection is thine.” He bathed in the luxury of his own narcissism, admiring his gray eyes, his soft lips, his pearly white teeth. He savored the complexity of his emotions as he contemplated his beauty and his ambitions. There was a warm glow of gratitude and relief—tinged with admiration—for the artistry of the somatic engineers who had restored his body to its excellent state.

“You’re a fool, Oscar,” a friend had said to him when he had confessed his intention to chance a third rejuvenation. “You had twenty years of wear still left in your last body when you turned it in, and you’ve at least twenty left in this one. Only a fool would take the risk.” Oscar had often been called a fool. Most of the people he knew probably thought that his entire lifestyle was nothing but foolishness. He was immune to such criticism. He knew full well that when he was called a fool the people who used the word meant it in its common or garden sense, but he always heard it as a more dignified reference.

“Certainly I am a Fool,” he had replied more than once. “I am an unfettering Feste, court jester to the Bio-technic Aristocracy, the Touchstone which tests the metal of the Golden Age. I am one of those who is privileged to whisper in the ears of the modern multitude the fateful words: ‘Remember that thou art the last of mortal men!’ I am the harbinger of Eternal Youth. I am proud to be a Fool.” Beneath the gratitude and the relief which he felt upon finding himself young again, however, were sterner feelings. He knew well enough that the tissue replenishments had only made a beginning for him. He had been provided with the raw material of youth, but it still remained for him to complete the work of art by dressing his new body, animating it, and providing the soul and the intelligence which would put its youth to work. The genius of medicine had painted a portrait of Adonis, but it would be his own task to be Adonis: to live extravagantly, perfectly, and beautifully. There were deeper regrets too; had he not been so anxious to make the most of his celebrity, he would have been in mourning, not so much for Rappaccini but for Rappaccini’s Creation, condemned by the UN as poisonous and erased from the face of the Pacific.

Oscar did not doubt for a moment, as his greedy eyes devoured the glory of his reflection, that he would be equal to the immediate task before him. He had never been the kind of habit-dominated man who renewed his appearance only to remain confined by a straitjacket which his earlier way of life had made for him. He was no crass businessman, apt to fall back into the same old routines at the first opportunity, wearing a new face as if it were merely a mask laid over the old. Nor was he the kind of man who would go to the opposite extreme, reverting to the habits and follies of first youthfulness, playing the sportsman or the rake as though there were nothing to do with the gift of youth except recycle the same stereotyped errors. He was a man properly equipped, in heart and in mind, for serial rejuvenation. There would be time, later, for him to prove himself equal to the less immediate task of making sure that the example of Rappaccini’s reckless inventiveness did not go entirely to waste. There would even be time for him to become a murderer, if he decided that the cause of Art demanded it.

He closed his eyes for one last lingering moment while he savored the pleasures of anticipation. He pretended that the moment was an infinite one, in which a man might lose himself in the ecstasy of a chosen dream.

Such was the power of his imagination that he did indeed win a moment’s suspension of the oppressive curse of Time: a moment of true and total freedom which promised to last… certainly not forever, and certainly not long enough, but at least for a little while.

He knew that it was up to him to use that little while as fully as he could, not merely here in the great wide world whose eyes were yet upon him and whose ears were eager for his every epigram and aphorism, but also in his private island covert: his garden; his folly; his Creation. Would the world ever see his like again, once he was gone? He was, of course, an imitation, but he was an imitation which had outshone its original. The first Oscar Wilde would have approved of that, just as he would have approved of the fact that in the company of Charlotte Holmes, he had reduced her to the role of a mere Watson, while he himself had played the master of deduction.

If only there were time enough, Oscar thought, to be a thousand men instead of one or two. What a wonder I might have made of myself, had my youth been truly eternal!