Architects of Emortality

by Brian Stableford

  The woman showed not the slightest sign of obeying Charlotte’s last order. She stood where she was, un-moving. Her arms were still upraised in a gesture of surrender, but the gesture suddenly seemed to Charlotte to be slightly mocking.

  The murderess had apparently done what she came to do, and had accepted that it was all over—but she did not seem to be in any hurry to place herself in custody and climb aboard the helicopter that would ferry her to judgment.

  “Come this way!” Charlotte repeated, shouting in case the woman had not been able to hear the first command. “Walk toward the helicopter, slowly.” She lifted the handset from her beltphone and spoke into it. “Better get your men back into the copters,” she said to the task-force commander. “The stuff she’s released is probably harmless to anyone but Czastka, but there’s no point in taking risks.

  When we get back to Kauai, everyone goes through decontamination.” “As you wish, Sergeant,” said the officer sourly.

  The woman still had not moved. She stood statue-still, looking up into the brilliant blue sky. It seemed that Charlotte had no alternative but to go to her.

  Charlotte replaced the handset of her beltphone and took two steps forward, saying: “My name is Detective Sergeant Charlotte Holmes of the UN police. I’m arresting you on suspicion—” She was interrupted by a cry of alarm from the helicopter that had settled on the far side of the woman’s position. The uniformed men had been obediently climbing back aboard, but the last one had paused and turned—and now he was pointing, apparently at the two women.

  “Look out!” he cried.

  Charlotte’s right hand tensed about the handle of the gun, and her left moved back to support it. Her forefinger curled around the trigger—but the red-haired woman hadn’t moved a muscle, and there was no evident threat. Charlotte heard a strange squawking sound emanating from the region of her hip and realized that someone was trying to attract her attention by shouting over the voice link to her handset. She lowered her left hand again, rather uncertainly, and plucked the handset from its holster. “It’s okay,” she said impatiently. “She has no weapon. It’s all under control.” “Look behind you!” screeched the unrecognizable voice, still trying to shout at her although the volume control on the beltphone was automatically compensating.

  “Corruption and corrosion, woman, look behind you!” Uncomprehendingly, Charlotte looked behind her.

  Gliding toward her from the vivid brightness of the climbing sun was a broad black shadow. At first she could judge neither its breadth nor its exact shape, but as it swooped down upon her the truth became abundantly and monstrously clear.

  She could not believe the evidence of her eyes. She knew full well that what she was seeing was impossible, and her mind stubbornly refused to accept the truth of what she saw. She understood, as her unbelief stupefied and froze her, why the voice had been trying so hard to achieve an appropriate level of amplification. In addition to the need to warn her that she was in danger, there had been a need to express shock, horror, and sheer terror.

  It was a bird—but it was a bird like none which had ever taken to the skies of Earth in the entire evolutionary history of flight. Its wingspan was larger than the reach of the helicopter blades that were already spinning again as the automatic pilots prepared for flight. Its vast wings were black, but they glinted like the wings of starlings; their pinion feathers somehow reminded Charlotte of scimitars and samurai swords. Its enormous and horrible head was naked, like a vulture’s, and its eyes were the size of basketballs; they were crimson in color, but as they caught the sunlight it seemed that they were all aglow with a sulphurous inner light.

  The creature’s raptorial beak was fully agape, and it cried out as it swept over her head. Its call was a terrible inhuman shriek, which put Charlotte in mind of the wailing of the damned in some ancient mythical hell. She felt as if she had been frozen in place, like a pillar of salt, to await her doom as that terrible beak closed upon her tender flesh—but the beak passed her by, and the huge claws too. Their talons were aimed at the other woman: Rappaccini’s unnatural daughter.

  Charlotte’s momentary petrifaction came to an end. Even as she perceived that she was not the target of the monster’s dive, panic took hold of her and threw her aside like a rag doll. She had no time to realign and fire her gun, nor even to think about realigning and firing it. Her reflexes rudely cast her down, tumbling her ignominiously onto the silvery sand.

  Rappaccini’s daughter, if that were indeed what she deemed herself to be, did not change her position in the slightest. Her hands were still lifted high into the air. Her eyes were unconcerned, apparently entranced.

  Charlotte understood now—how obvious it was, now!— that the meek raising of those arms had not been a gesture of surrender at all; the woman had merely been making preparations for the arrival of her appalling rescuer. Charlotte twisted her body so that she could watch, but her limbs still hugged the ground, as if they were trying to bury into the warm and welcoming sand.

  And this is going out live to half the population of the world! Charlotte thought. What a way to win a ratings war! As though with an ease induced by long and patient practice, the woman who had been Rappaccini’s murderous instrument interlaced the fingers of both her hands with the reaching talons of the huge bird and was lifted instantly from her feet.

  Charlotte was still conscious of the fact that what she was seeing was, according to all the most reliable authorities, quite impossible. No bird could lift an adult human being from the ground, and rumors of eagles of old which had been able to lift children and sheep were confidently judged by historians and naturalists to have been wildly exaggerated. No bird which had ever been shaped by natural selection to fly above the surface of the earth could lift such a weight in addition to its own. But how much did this monstrosity weigh? More than a helicopter, and as much as the aircraft which Rappaccini had provided to fly Charlotte and her two companions to Kauai? Its metabolism must be highly unorthodox, or it would not be able to take off—but it was gliding now, and any man-made glider of similar dimension could have carried several passengers. It was possible, because it was happening. Somehow, it was possible.

  The bird was already climbing again, soaring on the thermal which rose from the warm morning sea. It beat its fabulous night black wings with extravagant majesty—once, twice, and again—but then it banked and circled around into the dazzling halo of brilliance which surrounded the tropical sun, whence its awesome dive had come. A moment later, as Charlotte shielded her eyes, it flew out of the fire again, like a phoenix reborn.

  Charlotte reached up her free hand to take the one which Michael Lowenthal was extending to her, having appeared as if by magic at her side. Her right hand returned the dart gun to its clasp as she was raised to her feet.

  “Best get back if we intend to chase it,” he said.

  He let go of her hand and she had to hurry along behind him, stumbling in the soft surface. The other helicopters were already taking off, the sound of their many blades escalating into a hideous roar.

  “She didn’t get Czastka!” Lowenthal shouted as he stopped by the copter’s landing rail, letting Charlotte pass him before shoving her from behind to help her into the cabin.

  Didn’t she? Charlotte wondered, not bothering to speak the words aloud. She did what she came to do—that much is certain.

  Once the helicopter was off the ground and its cabin was sealed, the background noise became bearable again—and Oscar Wilde was already clamoring for the attention of the machine’s comcon. Charlotte took his call.

  “He told us what would happen!” Wilde lamented. “He told us—and I failed to hear it!” “What?” she said. “Who told us?” “Rappaccini! The simulacrum costumed as Herod said, ‘This is no cocoon of hollowed stone; it is my palace. Hear me, Oscar: you will see the finest roc of all before the end.’ I heard it as r-o-c-k, but he meant r-o-c all the time. A cheap trick, but when Michael’s friends release the tape of Herod’
s performance, everyone who hears it will wonder why it never occurred to us. We are being made to look foolish, Charlotte—and we have only one opportunity left to redeem ourselves.” “She can’t get away,” Charlotte said grimly. “I don’t know how far or fast that thing can fly, but we can fly further, and maybe even faster. She is not going to get away.” “I don’t think she’s even trying,” said Wilde, with a sigh. “She’s merely leading us to the much-joked-about Island of Dr. Moreau, so that we may cast our wondering eyes upon her father’s demiparadise: his Creation.” Charlotte’s heart was no longer pounding quite so hard, and she forced herself to relax into the seat. She glanced out of the viewport at Walter Czastka’s island, already dwindling to a green diamond rimmed with silver and set on a bed of royal blue.

  “We’ve got to warn Czastka,” she said. “We have to tell him not to unseal his locks.” “That’s not necessary,” said Oscar Wilde. “He has a TV set. If he’s taking any notice of anything, he must have seen the woman release the spores—but he will not fall into the trap that claimed us. He knows, as I think he always knew, what form the final murder was always intended to take.” “What do you mean?” Charlotte asked.

  “I mean that we failed to anticipate the last ironic twist and turn of Rappaccini’s plot. It’s not Walter those spores are after—it’s his ecosphere.

  The woman didn’t come here to murder Walter, but to murder his world. But what will poor Walter be, when his entire Creation is gone? Or should the question be: What has he become during these last forty years, while it was taking shape? Did you not see, Charlotte? Did you not see what lay beyond the palms fringing the beach?” Charlotte remembered, vaguely, that as her helicopter had come in to land she had looked briefly sideways, scanning the trees which stood guard on the margin of the island’s vegetation. She recalled a blurred impression of lush ferny undergrowth nestled about the boles of palmlike trees. She half remembered an extensive patchwork of vivid green, flecked with darker colors: crimsons, purples, and blues deep enough to be almost black—but nothing distinct. She had looked, but she had not observed. Her attention had been fixed on the woman and the rival helicopters; she had not spared a moment’s thought for Walter Czastka’s exercise in petty godhood.

  “I didn’t notice anything in particular,” she told Oscar Wilde.

  “Nothing can stop them,” Oscar said, his voice reduced almost to a whisper.

  “Each murderer is one hundred percent specific to its victim. Walter’s own body is safe inside the house, but that’s not what Walter cares about… it’s not what Walter is. What you didn’t even notice, in particular, was Walter Czastka. It was all that was left of him, the sum total of his life’s achievement.

  Rappaccini’s instruments will devour and digest his ecosphere—every last molecule of it—and in doing so will devour Walter more absolutely than they could ever have done by transforming his flesh. I doubt that he can or will be thankful for the fact that he’s already past caring, and that the spores are carrion-feeders consuming something that had never properly come to life.” For the first time, Charlotte realized, Oscar Wilde was genuinely horrified. The infuriating equanimity which had hardly been rippled by his first sight of Gabriel King’s hideously embellished skeleton, or anything else they had seen in their travels, had at last been moved to empathetic outrage. The thought that this kind of murder might be visited upon a fellow human being—a fellow Creationist—had finally cracked his composure.

  For the first time, Oscar was identifying with one of Rappaccini’s victims—ironically enough, with the one who had most aroused his contempt. He was finally seeing Rappaccini as a great criminal as well as a mediocre artist.

  “Why do you say that Czastka’s miniecosphere had never properly come to life?” Charlotte asked.

  “Did you really see nothing?” he countered. “Did you really not see what kind of demi-Eden Walter Czastka had been endeavoring to build? Perhaps that is the most damning indictment of all. Were you to visit my island in Micronesia, even under such stressful circumstances…” As Wilde left the sentence dangling, Charlotte tried once again to remember what she might have glimpsed—in addition to helicopters—from the corners of her eyes while she confronted the red-haired woman on the beach. There had been trees, bushes, flowers—but no animals. Nothing remarkable. Nothing which had called attention to itself. Even so, given the strength of the competition from the items which had grabbed and held her gaze, was that in any way remarkable? While she was trying to remember, Wilde’s fingers stabbed at the console in front of him. No sooner had she admitted defeat than the image she could not summon to mind was displayed for her—by courtesy, she supposed, of the cameras attached to one of the hovering helicopters.

  There were, as she had vaguely observed, tall palm trees bordering the beach.

  Within their picket line was a complex array of broad-leaved bushes, lavishly decorated with brightly colored flowers. Charlotte could not tell a rhododendron from a magnolia, but the flowers seemed to her to be very nicely shaped as well as capacious. The bushes were not gathered into hedges, but they were planted in such a way as to form curving lines, which mapped out a circular maze interrupted by dozens of elliptical gardens, where other flowers grew on pyramidal mounds, their contrasted colors swirling around one another in carefully contrived patterns. It was impossible to see much detail from the camera’s vantage point, but the overall effect seemed to Charlotte to be not unpleasing. She actually formed that phrase in her mind before realizing that it concealed a barb.

  Walter Czastka’s Eden was not unpleasing. Its elements were very nicely shaped.

  The whole vast expanse was neat and delicately coordinated, colorful, and clever, but ultimately lifeless. Perhaps, Charlotte thought, Walter Czastka had never seen his work from such a distance and altitude. Perhaps it all seemed very different at ground level. Perhaps, if one could only see the fine detail, the meticulous workmanship, the delicacy of each individual flower… “I can’t judge it,” she said to Oscar Wilde. “I’m not qualified.” “I am,” Wilde told her, with all the assurance of perfect arrogance. “So was Rappaccini. What a miserably enfeebled Arcadia poor Walter had built! Immature and incomplete though it undoubtedly was, its limitations were painfully conspicuous. Had you only had time to stand and stare, you would have seen—and even you, dear Charlotte, would have known that you had seen—the work of a hack.

  A hack, admittedly, who was trying to exceed his own potential, but the work of a hack nevertheless. Had you my eyes, you would see plainly enough even in this snapshot the work of a man who had not even the imagination of blind and stupid nature. Skills honed by a hundred years and more of careful practice had been exercised on that isle, but the result was mere kitsch.” “That’s not fair,” Charlotte said. “You don’t know what he was trying to achieve, or what he would have achieved, given time.” “No,” said Oscar, “it’s not fair—but neither is artistry. I know now why Walter tried to keep me away. I understand the message which he engraved upon the minuscule soul of his nearest and dearest simulacrum. But Rappaccini had seen it! Rappaccini must have kept careful watch on Walter for more than half a lifetime, ever since his mother took the trouble to tell him what and who he was. How disappointed he must have been in his Creator!“ “Creator?” Charlotte queried.

  “But of course! What is the subject of this melodrama, if not Creation? Unless Walter cares to tell us, or Rappaccini has left a record, I doubt that we shall ever know the intimate details, but I cannot believe that Maria Inacio’s pregnancy was an accident or the result of a rape. Hal blithely assumed that she could never have known that she was immune to the endemic chiasmatic transformers until she became pregnant, and perhaps he was right—but when did she first become pregnant, and who did she tell? If we suppose that her first pregnancy was surreptitiously terminated, we may also suppose that she might then have come to seem, in the eyes of an ambitious but desperately naive Creationist, a unique resource. Suppose, for a moment, tha
t the plagues which sterilized the human race had never occurred and never forced the universalization of ecto-genesis. Had the chiasmatic transformers not ravaged all the wombs that Mother Nature had provided, what other kinds of transformers might have been sent forth in their stead?” “You’re saying that Walter Czastka used Maria Inacio in some kind of clandestine experiment in human genetic engineering—that he used her as an incubator for a modified embryo that he’d never have got permission to grow in an artificial womb?” “It was 2322,” Oscar Wilde reminded her, “more than eighty years before the Great Exhibition. The limitations of indwelling nanotech had come to light, but work to put something in its place had hardly begun in earnest. The Green Zealots were in their heyday, and the Robot Assassins were not yet a spent force. The opportunity for daring was there—but so was the need for secrecy. We know that Jafri Biasiolo had been subjected to considerable genetic manipulation that was idiosyncratic in nature and unusual in extent. Who could or would have done that but Walter? Who else but he could have removed ova from her womb, fertilized them with his own sperm, then set about remaking them? Who else but he could have selected out the best of the transformed embryos and reimplanted it within her womb? “I don’t know how the other five were involved, but each of them must have contributed something to the project, even if some or all were ignorant of the contributions made by the others. Perhaps one of them was responsible for Maria Inacio’s first pregnancy, while another assisted in its termination. Perhaps one was Walter’s accomplice in the laboratory, while another played some part in having the second embryo removed to a Helier womb. Perhaps one was to have provided safe accommodation for the pregnant mother when she could no longer be seen in public. There are a thousand different scenarios I could imagine… but the one salient point is that Jafri Biasiolo did not think of Walter Czastka as his father. He thought of him as his Creator! In all of this, he has engaged himself with Walter the Creator—and in preparing to obliterate all the products of Walter’s Creationist ambition, he also took it upon himself to obliterate all those named by Maria Inacio as accomplices in the exploitation of her unexpectedly fertile womb.” “You certainly have an extraordinarily vivid imagination, Dr. Wilde,” Charlotte murmured. Her policeman’s conscience had already reminded her that there was not a shred of hard evidence to support any of it, but she could see that it had to be true in its essentials.