“Every woman nowadays aspires to one or other of the conventional ideals of beauty, Inspector, and every one has access to the technologies which allow her to secure it. As a university administrator, I’ve been in contact with young people all my life, and I must have known thousands of young women who sculpted their faces along those general lines. This is a small island, and there can only be a few hundred authentically young women residents here, but at least half of them could pass for one of these three if she put her mind and cosmetic skills to work on the problem. The same is true of any woman who’s just undergone a first rejuve.” Watson had tried to assure him that it wasn’t true, and that if he would only look carefully enough he would be able to discern certain distinguishing features, but Stuart hadn’t had the time to waste. As a university administrator, he’d long grown used to seeing young people in quantity, as a kind of undifferentiated mass. Their academic records varied, but in person they were merely segments of an infinite crowd. Things were different now, of course; since retiring from administrative work to concentrate on research he no longer saw young people at all, except for Julia—but that only proved the point. Julia could have made herself look like the woman in Watson’s pictures with no difficulty at all, and there was nothing unusual about Julia.
Even so, he had looked up the four victims named by the policeman, to jog his memory as to who they were and what their accomplishments had been. He had also taken a second look at the pictures, just in case he could discern something meaningful therein.
There wasn’t anything meaningful. They could have been anyone. They could even have been Julia.
Stuart knew that he had to put the whole matter out of his mind now and concentrate his mind on the sea, and on infinity—but it wasn’t easy. The puzzle was too intriguing. What could possibly link Gabriel King the demolition man, Michi Urashima the brainfeed buccaneer, Magnus Teidemann the econut, and Paul Kwiatek the software engineer turned VE veg? Stuart had known them all by reputation, although he hadn’t previously realized that they had all been at Wollongong at the same time, and he’d needed the encyclopedia to remind him of exactly what they were famous for. He must, presumably, have been aware of their simultaneous presence at the university way back in the 2320s, but the memory of the coincidence had faded long ago. Their subsequent careers had diverged as widely as those of any four individuals picked at random, and it was difficult to imagine why anyone might want all four of them dead—especially when one considered that Urashima and Kwiatek were half-dead already. There was, it seemed, a young woman involved—perhaps more than one, if Inspector Watson was incorrect in his estimation that the three pictures were all representations of the same woman—but that didn’t offer any clue as to the connection. It was difficult to imagine a crime of passion involving Urashima or Kwiatek, and it seemed that the only thing about which Teidemann was capable of being passionate was his hypothetical Mother Goddess.
King was surely the only one who had it in him to attract the wrath of a jealous lover, if one could believe in a lover jealous enough to kill.
Stuart could believe in a lover jealous enough to kill, because he knew that jealousy—like claustrophobia—was one of those soul afflictions with which nanotechnology had never quite come to grips. He could not, however, believe in a lover jealous enough to kill four times over, picking out victims who were all approaching two hundred years old. Who in the world could possibly be jealous of a man whose brain had exploded in a chaotic mess of superfluous neural connections? Or a man who had almost lost contact even with simulations of the real world, preferring expeditions into the remoter reaches of perverted perception? “I knew I’d find you here.” The voice cut through Stuart’s ruminations like a knife, and he felt his heart lurch as he started—but by the time he turned, he was in control of himself.
“Julia!” he said. “You shouldn’t creep up on a man when he’s just been told that he might be about to be murdered. Not a man of my age, at any rate. I’m fragile.” Her vivid green eyes seemed to be laughing, although her beautiful mouth was only slightly curved into a quizzical smile. The sultry breeze drifting from the sea was barely sufficient to stir her red-gold hair, but the hairs were so fine that her tresses shifted like the surface of the patient sea. Her hair had always seemed to Stuart to have a life of its own. “Murdered?” she echoed. “Why would anyone want to murder you?” “They wouldn’t,” he answered. “They couldn’t possibly. But someone, it seems, has a grudge against selected Wollongong alumni of my particular vintage. The UN police are actually calling everyone who was there at that time, fishing for a motive. And you needn’t feel complacent about it—they’re circulating a description of a murder suspect who’s almost as beautiful as you. If you were to change the color of your hair and eyes, and apply a little synthetic flesh to the contours of your cheeks… you should be grateful that I know you so well and that I’m not in the least paranoid. A lesser man might have given your name to the police, and you’d be under arrest by now.” “I doubt that,” Julia said, coming forward to take him by the arm and turning him so that he could walk back to the house with her. “They’d have to find me first, then catch me.” “It’s a small island,” he pointed out, “and there’s nowhere to run or hide.” “It’s big enough,” she assured him. “I brought you some flowers, by the way. I put them in your living room. It’s a new design, by Oscar Wilde.” “I can’t quite understand your fondness for that man’s work,” Stuart confessed.
“He’s a nineteenth-century man, insofar as he’s a historian at all. Not one of us.” By us he meant specialists in the twenty-second century: the most eventful era in human history, when history itself had trembled on the brink of extinction; the era of the great plague, the Crash, the New Reproductive System, and the nanotech revolution.
“He designs beautiful flowers,” Julia said. “He’s an artist. There are very few true artists in the world.” “But he’s not original,” Stuart said. “It’s all recapitulation and recomplication.” “All human life is recapitulation and recomplication,” she said, with the casual confidence of unfalsified youth.
“No, it’s not,” he assured her. “There are genuine ends and authentic beginnings. Conrad Helier was a true artist. He put an end to the old world and forged a new one. He designed the womb which ultimately gave birth to the New Human Race. He, not Eveline Hywood, was the original designer of the fundamental fabric of the alternative ecosphere—the stuff she tried to pass off as alien life after his death. You can’t compare a mere flower designer to a man like that.” “According to the best evidence available,” Julia said gently, “Conrad Helier only designed one of the chiasmatic transformers, and his was only the first artificial womb to be mass-produced—at best, a tiny recomplication of designs that were being produced in some profusion. The time had come to put an end to so-called natural childbirth, and it would have ended anyhow. When historians put the bloody knife in Helier’s hand, it’s as much a matter of scapegoating as anything else. He’s the heroic villain appointed to the role, but he was just an instrument of causal process. As for Hywood’s fake alien life, it was her foster son who actually worked out most of the key applications: LSP, SAP systems, shamirs, and so on. In any case, you can’t call that kind of utilitarian endeavor Art. Art is essentially superfluous, and that’s why it’s so necessary to human existence.” “Nothing is historically superfluous,” Stuart told her sternly. “Nothing is outside the causal process by which the world is made and remade. Art is merely an expression of that process, no matter what individual artists may think.” It was a serious argument, but not in the sense that their disagreement might come between them as a hurdle or a moat. He and Julia had an understanding which allowed them to debate points of intellectual nicety without being divided.
That, in Stuart’s view, was what friendship amounted to—and in spite of the difference in their ages, he and Julia were the firmest of friends. The rapport between them went far beyond their common interest in the st
udy of history.
“Even the art of murder?” Julia asked lightly.
“If murder were not an expression of historical causality,” Stuart insisted, “it would have to be considered devoid of artistry, even by the most daring interpreter.” Stuart had always considered himself a daring interpreter. His ambition had always been to understand the whole of human history and the whole of the human world: to hold it entirely in his mind’s eye, as if it were a vast panorama in which every element stood in its proper relation to every other element, a huge seamless whole whose horizons held the promise of infinity. In a way, he had to reckon himself a failure, because he knew well enough that there was a great deal which he did not understand, and never would understand, but he could forgive himself that inadequacy—which was, of course, an inadequacy which he shared with all other living men—because he had at least made the effort. He had never allowed himself to be intellectually confined in the way that men like Urashima and Teidemann had. “You must understand that you too will fail to grasp the whole,” he had told Julia when she had first come to him as his pupil.
“Everyone fails, but there is no shame in failure, provided that you have set your sights widely enough. The human condition has its limitations, and always will have. Even if the genetic engineers are right in claiming that they have at last brought the human race to the very threshold of emortality, and even if the prophets of man/machine symbiosis are right in saying that the fallibility of human memory can be compensated by appropriate augmentation of the brain, there will still be limitations of understanding. A man may live forever, and remember everything, and still understand hardly anything. It is as easy—perhaps easier—to breed a race of immortal fools as a race of mental giants. The majority of men have always made fools of themselves, and the vidveg will undoubtedly continue to do so, however long they live and whatever ingenious devices may one day be connected by artificial synapses to the substance of their souls.” Julia had listened to such speeches very dutifully, in the beginning, and that had pleased him immensely—but their friendship was not based in anything as shallow as adulation. He was not in love with her; erotic orthodoxy had long ago begun to bore him, and he had never felt the least impulse to reinvest in it when the many and various unorthodoxies with which he had briefly experimented had similarly begun to pall. In fact, since becoming young for the third time Stuart had experienced a dramatic loss of libido which he had not the slightest interest in repairing. He felt—he understood— that there might be advantages in being old, to one who was as cerebrally inclined as he. Nor was he particularly flattered by Julia’s attentiveness; he had been an educator for so very many years that he drank up the respect of pupils by sheer force of habit, not tasting it at all. If she had been more to him than a mere sounding board, which reflected his thoughts in a pleasing manner, he could not have felt as close to her as he did. He valued her disagreement as much as her agreement now; he loved to exchange ideas with her. He needed someone like her, who would not merely listen to his ideas but challenge them, playing white to his black in an endless game of intellectual chess.
Ideas were healthier when they were challenged; kept inside, in the dark and secret theater of the mind, protected from exposure, they did not nourish half so well. If ideas were to grow—and thus give birth to understanding—they must be let out, and tested.
“Will you stay for dinner?” he asked his companion. “We can eat on the veranda, if you wish. It’s going to be a beautiful evening.” “Of course,” she said. “But I don’t know how long I can stay afterward. There’s something I have to do—I have to go to one of the other islands.” “Which one?” he asked reflexively.
“One of the new ones. I have to visit a Creationist.” “Why? I didn’t think they encouraged visitors.” When it became clear that she did not intend to answer the question, he carried on. “You’ll have to be careful—you must have heard the rumors about dinosaurs and giant spiders, and the jokes about the Island of Dr. Moreau. How long will you be away?” “I don’t know,” she said. “It depends.” It occurred to Stuart that Walter Czastka was a Creationist, and that Walter Czastka had been at the University of Wollongong in 2322—and that he had once walked on a beach with him, much as he was walking with Julia now, discussing some project that Walter had dreamed up. Walter had wanted his help… but Stuart could no longer remember exactly what it was that Walter had wanted from him, or whether or not he had obliged.
It was on the tip of his tongue to ask Julia whether it was Walter Czastka that she intended to visit, and what she could possibly want with a man like him, but he suppressed the impulse. It would probably seem like prying motivated by jealousy.
“I’m glad that I retired here,” he said, glancing briefly upward in the direction of the blazing sun, then more languorously downward at the glints that its light imparted to the crests of the lazy waves. “The heat suits me, now that I’m growing old for the final time, and I can’t see the twenty-sixth century creeping up on me. There was never any but the most rudimentary agriculture here, you know, not even in the Colonial Era. The volcanoes are tame now, of course, and the bigger islands in the group were badly affected by the population movements following the plague wars, but Kauai’s seen less change than almost any other place on the earth’s surface since the beginning of the twenty-second century.” “But it’s not the same, even so,” Julia pointed out. “Every time you step, indoors, it must be obvious that you’re living in the present—and you’re entirely a product of the present. There were no men of your antiquity in the twenty-second century.” “Granted,” he said. “But still, I’d far rather live beside the blue sea than the green, and I could never be content in a valley between SAP black hills. I can still remember the days before the green seas and black hills, you know; I think my memory has held up better than most, in spite of the unease of illusory deja vu. Sometimes I’m half-convinced that I’ve known you before, in the long-gone days of my first youth… but I understand how these tricks of the mind work. In these days of cosmetic engineering, when everyone is beautiful, it’s easy to recognize in the woman one sees today some or all of the women one knew many years before, who are simply phantoms imprinted on the vanishing horizon of remembrance…” He trailed off because they had reached the threshold of his home: a place at which he always hesitated.
Although he could not bring himself to entertain the thought, let alone believe it, Stuart McCandless was fated to die very soon.
It was likely that nothing could have saved him—certainly not a better memory.
What he took for an illusion of similarity was indeed an illusion, because he had recently been shown a better likeness of his darling Julia than ancient memory could possibly have preserved, and had not recognized it.
Sometimes victims collaborate in their own murders, even when they have been warned of danger—and why should they not, if they believe that murder and art are mere expressions of historical process, deft feints, and thrusts of causality? If idiosyncrasy, madness, and genius are no more than tiny waves on a great sullen tide of irresistible causality, even a man forewarned can hardly be expected to defy their force. Stuart McCandless certainly did nothing to avoid his fate, even when the second and far more explicit warning arrived. He simply could not imagine that his pupil could be anything but what she seemed or anyone but who she pretended to be. He was old, and he was complacent. He knew that he was fated to die, but he carried in his consciousness that remarkable will to survive that refuses to recognize death even while it stares death in the face.
Nor was he a fool; he was probably as knowledgeable a historian as there was in the world, and as wise a lover.
If those who tried to warn him had been able to explain to him exactly why he was being murdered, he would have laughed aloud in flagrant disbelief. Like the vidveg he affected to despise, and in spite of his claustrophobia, he was a man whose imaginative horizons were narrower than he knew or could ever have admitted to himself.
The sun was setting by the time Charlotte and her companions emerged into the open; it remained visible solely because its decline had taken it into the cleft of a gap between two spiry crags.
The car had gone.
Charlotte felt her hand tighten around the bubblebugs which she had carefully removed from their stations above her eyebrows. She had been holding them at the ready, anxious to plug them into the car’s systems so that their data could be decanted and relayed back to Hal Watson.
She murmured a curse. Michael Lowenthal’s exclamation of distress was even louder—and the man from the MegaMall immediately reached for his handset, moving to one side to call for assistance.
Charlotte took out her beltphone and tried to send a signal, although the charge indicator suggested that the battery no longer had enough muscle to reach a relay station or a convenient comsat. Nothing happened. She muttered another curse beneath her breath, and then she turned back to Oscar Wilde.
“I should have…” she began—but she trailed off when she realized that she didn’t know exactly what she should have done, or even what she might have done.
“Don’t worry,” said Wilde. “I doubt that Rappaccini brought us up here simply to abandon us. I suspect that a vehicle of some kind will be along very shortly to carry us on our way.” “Where to?” she asked, unable to keep the asperity out of her voice.
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