Architects of Emortality (7 page)

Given that the data on file was so old and so sparse, and quite probably misleading, Charlotte knew that it might be very difficult to find—or even reliably to identify—the founder of Rappaccini Inc. It was, alas, easy enough in the late twenty-fifth century to establish electronic identities whose telescreen appearances could be wholly maintained by silver-level sims. Virtual individuals could play so full a role in modern society that their puppet masters could easily remain anonymous and hidden, at least until they came under the intense scrutiny of a highly skilled Webwalker. Hal had the authority to get through any conventional information wall, and he was clever enough to work his way through any data maze, but if the man behind Rappaccini Inc. had gone into hiding, it would take time to winkle him out.

Charlotte still had a gut feeling which told her that the real author of this crazy psychodrama was right in front of her, taunting her with his excessively lovely presence, but she didn’t dare say so to Hal. Hal Watson was no respecter of gut feelings.

“Have you traced the call which summoned Dr. Wilde here?” Michael Lowenthal asked Hal Watson. Charlotte heard the hesitation in Hal’s voice and knew that natural discretion must be begging him not to lay all his cards on the table where both Lowenthal and Wilde could see them, but he answered the question.

“It was placed some days ago from a blind unit, time-triggered to arrive when it did,” Hal reported reluctantly. “Effectively untraceable, I fear—the ticket too.

My best surfers are working on it, but they haven’t even been able to track the woman to or from the building. I need the DNA analyses before I can take the next step.” The wall unit buzzed as another caller clamored for attention.

“Hold on,” Charlotte said to Hal, thumbing the relevant key. Rex Carnevon’s face appeared on the screen as the image of the apartment blinked out.

“I have tenants, you know,” said the building supervisor rudely. “As long as your quarantine lasts, half of them are trapped inside their apartments and the other half are locked out. Your forensic team drove off thirty minutes ago.

What’s the holdup?” “Please be patient, Mr. Carnevon,” Charlotte said, painfully aware that she was under observation from all sides. “We’re conducting an investigation here.” “I know,” Carnevon retorted. ”What I want to know is when you’re going to conduct it somewhere else.” “We’ll let you know,” Charlotte said brutally, switching back to Hal without further ado.

Hal’s face didn’t reappear. The tape patched together from the apartment’s eyes was playing again. Now there was somebody in the apartment. This section had been recorded several days before. Gabriel King, alive and well, was talking to a young woman.

“Ah,” said Oscar Wilde softly. “Cherchez la femme! Without a mysterious woman, the puzzle would be lacking its most important piece.” Charlotte studied the woman carefully, although her back was turned to the camera. She seemed to be authentically young—perhaps eighteen or nineteen years of age—with a profusion of lustrous brown hair that she wore unfashionably long.

When the tape switched to a different eye, Charlotte saw that the woman had clear blue eyes like Michael Lowenthal’s. She also had finely chiseled features—but they had not, of course, been molded in recognition of the same ideal of beauty as Lowenthal’s. Psychobiologists had produced seven supposed female archetypes and seven male ones; whereas the woman’s flesh had been sculpted into a variant of the most commonplace female archetype, Lowenthal had been modeled on one of the less fashionable male ideals.

Even in this day and age, when cosmetic engineers could so easily remold superficial flesh, the exceptional beauty of Gabriel King’s visitor was very evident—but it did not seem to Charlotte to be as striking as the beauty of Michael Lowenthal, or of Oscar Wilde. That, presumably, was a matter of taste and sexual orientation; Hal probably saw things differently.

King and his visitor were speaking to one another, but the sound track had not yet been added to the tape. Charlotte watched as the two of them moved toward the bedroom door, and saw the woman stop the gantzer in his tracks, compelling him to turn and kiss her on the lips before proceeding into the room and closing the door behind them.

The kiss did not seem particularly passionate to Charlotte, but it was definitely tender. It might, she thought, as easily have been a polite greeting between people who had some history of intimacy as a prelude to a first erotic encounter, but it certainly did not have the appearance of a transaction between a prostitute and a client.

The tape ended, and Hal’s face returned to the screen.

“She was inside for about half an hour,” said Hal, presumably addressing Oscar Wilde. “King was still perfectly healthy when she left, and it wasn’t until some twelve or thirteen hours later that he felt sufficient discomfort to call up a diagnostic program. He never had a chance to hit his panic button; the progress of the plant was too swift. The woman might have had nothing to do with it, but she was the last person to see him alive. Do you have any idea who she might be?” “I don’t believe that I’ve ever seen her before,” Wilde answered. “I fear that I can only offer the obvious suggestion.” “Which is?” Hal said.

“Rappaccini’s daughter.” Hal had nothing to say in reply to that, and neither did Charlotte. They simply waited for clarification.

“It’s another echo of the nineteenth century,” said Oscar, with a slight sigh.

“Rappaccini borrowed his pseudonym from a story by Nathaniel Hawthorne entitled ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter.’ You don’t know the period, I take it?” “Not very well,” Charlotte said awkwardly, when it became obvious that Hal wasn’t about to reply. “Hardly at all” would have been nearer the truth.

“Then it’s as well that I’m here,” the beautiful man said in a manner that surely must be calculated to infuriate. “Otherwise, this exotic performance might be entirely wasted.” The wall unit’s buzzer sounded again.

Charlotte stabbed at it angrily and didn’t give Carnevon the opportunity to open his moudi. “All right!” she snapped, no longer caring whether she was under observation or not. “We’re going. Apart from King’s apartment, everything’s usable—but you’d better remember what I said about leaks, Carnevon, because if any information gets loose from here that might confuse or impede our investigation, I’ll be back.” Then she ripped the plug of her beltphone from the wall and said, “We’d better continue this conversation in the elevator and the car. It would probably be better if we were all back at base when that DNA data begins to come in. Then Hal can get to work on tracing the woman and Dr. Wilde can get to work on the gentemplate of the killer plant—while you and I, Mr. Lowenthal, can rest our weary feet. With luck, we’ll have the killer in custody in time to make the Breakfast News.” “I fear, dear Charlotte,” murmured Oscar Wilde as they all moved toward the open elevator car, “that this might be the kind of case in which luck will not be of much assistance.”

Magnus Teidemann was exhausted by the time he got back to the tent, but it was a good kind of exhaustion: the kind that resulted from a long walk through resentful undergrowth, carrying a heavy pack loaded with specimen jars.

The specimen jars had been carefully dug out of the humus-littered forest floor, where they had served as pitfall traps to capture wandering insects and arachnids. As the director of the Seventh Biodiversity Survey, Magnus had a legion of assistarits to carry out such work, but he insisted on taking shifts himself. There was no tokenism about the gesture; the reason he had involved himself with the Natural Biodiversity Movement in the first place was to have the opportunity to work at ground level.

Old though he was, Magnus was not ready to be confined to a laboratory, let alone a desk. A man of his age had to be reckoned to be taking a serious risk if he insisted in isolating himself out here, where help might take ten or twelve hours to reach him if he contrived to send an alarm call and ten or twelve days if he did not, but it was a risk he was prepared to take. Indeed, his dearest and most secret wish was to die in some such place as this, in the humid maternal shadow of the forest giants, where his body would decay in a matter of days into the placental humus so that its atoms could be redistributed within the organisms that collaborated in the constitution of one of the world’s new lungs.

Magnus had always worked in the cause of life—the greatest cause there was—and he knew that a man condemned to die, as all men of his misfortunate generation were, ought to make a gift of his body to Mother Earth. He did not want a gaudy funeral in which his coffin would be dragged around the streets of some sterile city, followed by cartloads of Rappaccini flowers purchased from the MegaMall.

He would rather die in the sisterly company of sylphs and dryads, surrounded by the flowers of the forest, donating his flesh to the seething cauldron of benign witchery.

The “tent” in which Magnus was temporarily resident was not, of course, an actual tent. It was a bubble dome made out of Life-Simulating Plastic, of a kind originally designed for use on Mars. It was second cousin to those which currently dotted the airless plains of the moon and those which were anchored to the bedrock beneath the snows and glutinous muds of Titan. It was a high-tech product of the MegaMall, and its presence here confirmed that no matter what Magnus’s dreams and wishes might be, he was a stranger in an alien environment.

Man was an alien invader here, as he was everywhere else in the solar system.

Man was a product of the savanna, a creator of fields and deserts. The forest was its own world, but the entire ecosphere was part of the human empire now.

The forest could not survive without the protection and support of such benevolent invaders as himself, and the LSP dome was the price of his own comfortable survival within it.

The purpose of Magnus’s dome, as of its extraterrestrial cousins, was to secure a miniature alien environment and to keep a natural ecosphere at bay. The only difference was that the primary purpose of his dome was to protect the environment without, rather than the environment within. The biospheric fragment in which the dome was set had to be guarded from contamination because it was, in spite of its relative geographical isolation, too near a neighbor that was the most dangerous and malign of all alien environments: the fin de siecle cities of the twenty-fifth century. The humming hives of the MegaMall’s customers and sales force were far beyond the horizon, but while they shared the same spherical surface and the same atmosphere they had to be reckoned close neighbors. From the forest’s viewpoint, the MegaMall’s minions were the neighbors from hell.

Ultimately, of course, it was the MegaMall that paid Magnus his living wage, just as it paid the wage of every other man and woman living on and beyond Earth, but Magnus always thought of his particular portion of the great capitalist pie as conscience money, or as a tribute to the oldest goddess of them all: the ultimate mother, Gaea the Great.

Tired as he was, Magnus had neither the inclination nor the energy to make an elaborate investigation of his new captives. The most interesting specimens, in any case, would be too small to see without the aid of a magnifying glass, and his eyes, long overdue for replacement, were too weak to take the strain. He took his time decanting the contents of his specimen jars into more economical storage units, and then put the empty jars into the sterilizer, ready to be taken out into the field again tomorrow. They would be alternated with their duplicates for the sixty-third time, with thirty-seven still to go.

When his duty had been adequately done, Magnus used the microwave oven—which had been dutifully storing solar power all day long—to heat up a plastic-wrapped meal. The sole meuniere tasted excellent, as was to be expected of one of the finest products of modern food science, but Magnus hardly noticed. In the wilderness, eating was a utilitarian business, a mere matter of fueling the body.

The tropical night arrived with characteristic swiftness, but Magnus did not reach for the wall panel whose virtual control keys were displayed in patterns of red light. He could have instructed the Life-Simulating Plastic to become opaque, but he did not want to do that. Privacy was not an issue hereabouts, and the fact that the discreetly muted lights inside the bubble dome would attract every moth for miles around did not concern him—except, of course, insofar as the moths themselves might be inconvenienced.

Magnus loved wilderness better than anything else in the world. That is to say, he loved green wilderness: wilderness the color of the world that men had all but lost What he hated most in all the world was wasteland: gray wasteland, the color of the glutinous organic dust which had consumed the first-generation cities left derelict by the Crash, and the color of the second-generation cities that had been gantzed out of that dust to supply the alleged needs of the multitudinous produce of Conrad Helier’s New Reproductive System. Today’s third-generation cities were multicolored, and Magnus knew that the fourth-generation complexes which were no longer to be called cities—out of respect for the current fashionability of the absurd philosophy of Decivilization—would take care to mimic the green which had been banished from the ever-extending jet-black SAP fields; to Magnus, however, the underlying color of the human hive and all its honeycombs would always be gray.