Architects of Emortality

by Brian Stableford

  “So it is,” said Charlotte. “Did you know that Michi Urashima was at university with Gabriel King—and, for that matter, with Walter Czastka?” “Not until Michael communicated the fact to me,” he replied calmly. “I had already suggested, if you recall, that the roots of this crime must be deeply buried in the fabric of history. I immediately asked him where this remarkable institution was, and whether Rappaccini was also at the same institution of learning. He told me that it was in Wollongong, Australia, and that there is no record of Jafri Biasiolo ever having been there. If it were Oxford, or the Sorbonne, even Sapporo, it would be far easier to believe that the alma mater might be the crucial connection, of course, but it is difficult to believe that anything of any real significance can ever have occurred in Wollongong. I could believe that Walter, who is an impressively dull man, learned everything he knew in such a place, but I would not have suspected it of Michi—or even of Gabriel King. Even so, it is a very interesting coincidence.” He collected his toast and began to spread the butter, evening it out so carefully that the knife in his hand might have been a sculptor’s.

  “When did Lowenthal tell you about the Wollongong connection?” Charlotte asked, although the answer was obvious. She remembered belatedly that one thing she had forgotten to check up on was the contents of Wilde’s earlier conversation with Lowenthal. Now, it seemed, she had missed a second and even more significant one.

  “We exchanged a few notes last night, after you had retired,” Wilde explained airily.

  “You exchanged a few notes” Charlotte echoed ominously. “It did occur to you, I suppose, that I’m the police officer in charge of this investigation, not Lowenthal.” “Yes, it did,” he admitted, “but you seemed so very intent on following up your hypothesis that I am the man responsible for these murders. Because I know full well that I am not, I felt free to ignore your efforts in order to tease a little more information out of Michael. Unfortunately, he seems to have no interest at all in the most promising line of inquiry, which derives from the interesting coincidence that both King and Rappaccini had invested heavily in Michi’s specialism. Indeed, he was so uninterested in it that I suspected him of deliberately trying to steer me away from it. I presume that one of the reasons the MegaMall decided to monitor this investigation is that they did not like the idea of Hal Watson digging too deeply into the murkier aspects of Gabriel King’s past—which suggests to me that in putting money into brainfeed research Gabriel was a mere delivery boy. Alas, Michael seems intent on trying to build the Wollongong connection into grounds for establishing Walter Czastka as a key suspect. He will be of little help to the investigation, I fear—but I daresay that you will not be too disheartened to hear that.” Charlotte regarded her companion speculatively, wondering how carefully his flippancy was contrived. “What other little nuggets of information did he throw your way?” she asked, keeping her voice scrupulously level, as if in imitation of his own levity.

  “He showed me a copy of the second scene-of-crime tape,” Wilde admitted. He was as scrupulous in distributing his marmalade as he had been with the butter.

  “We’re still trying to figure out where the woman went after she left Urashima,” Charlotte said, to demonstrate that she had not been idle in this particular matter. “Hal’s set up silvers to monitor every security camera in San Francisco.

  If she’s still there, we’ll find her in a matter of hours. If she’s already gone, we ought to be able to pick up her trail by noon. She’s presumably altered her appearance again in order to confuse the standard picture-search programs, but we’ll check every possible match, however tentative. If she moved on quickly enough, though, she might have had time to deliver more packages.” “We must assume that she did move on,” Wilde said, licking a crumb from the corner of his mouth. “You noted, of course, that my name came up in the conversation, as her presentation of the bouquet of amaranths was doubtless intended to ensure. The poem inscribed on the condolence card caused it to be repeated. I do hope that you will not read too much into that.” Charlotte blushed slightly. If he had not caused the card to be placed at the scene of the crime, could he possibly have reacted so calmly? And if he had placed the card there, would he have dared to react so calmly? Reflectively, Wilde quoted in a reverent but rather theatrical whisper: The vilest deeds like poison weeds, Bloom well in prison-air; It is only what is good in Man That wastes and withers there: Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate, And the Warder is Despair.

  “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 Urashima. Perhaps that was why Rappaccini thought the poem particularly apposite.“ “What did you make of the last words he spoke?” Charlotte asked, not wishing 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 Urashima’s murder. She cut to the end.

  “I am,” said Urashima’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 pushing 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 Urashima 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; Urashima 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 Urashima’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 associates 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 associate 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 associate,” the Natural said as he lowered himself into the seat beside Charlotte’s.

  “Paul Kwiatek and Michi Urashima 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 assiduous 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 Urashima 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 Urashima 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 scrappy. 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 identity 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 i
n 2430 or thereabouts, but to discover who the person was who created him in the first place and used him as a secondary identity 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 anticipated 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 Urashima, 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.