Architects of Emortality

by Brian Stableford

  It was a very large tomb, hewn from a white marble whose austerity stood in imperious contrast to the fabulous forest around it. There was nothing overelaborate about its formation, although it was tastefully decorated. It bore neither cross nor carven angel, but on the plain white flank which loomed above its pediment a text was inscribed. It read: SPLEEN Je suis comme le roi d’un pays pluvieux, Riche, mais impuissant, jeune et pourtant tres-vieux, Qui, de ses precepteurs meprisant les courbettes, S’ennuie avec ses chiens comme avec d’autres betes. Rien ne peut 1’egayer, ni gibier, ni faucon, Ni son peuple mourant en face du balcon. Du bouffon favori la grotesque ballade Ne distrait plus le front de ce cruel malade; Son lit fleurdelise se transforme en tombeau, Et les dames d’atour, pour qui tout prince est beau, Ne savent plus trouver d’impudique toilette Pour tirer un souris de ce jeune squelette.

  Le savant qui lui fait de 1’or n’a jamais pu De son étre extirper 1’element corrompu, Et dans ces bains de sang qui des Remains nous viennent, Et dont sur leurs vieux jours les puissants se souviennent, II n’a sur échauffer ce cadavre hebete Ou coule au lieu de sang l’eau verte du Lethe.

  “Baudelaire?” Charlotte asked of Oscar Wilde. “Of course,” he replied. “Would you like me to translate?” “If you would.” “It runs approximately thus,” he said.

  “I am like the monarch of a rain-soaked realm,” “Rich but powerless, young but perhaps too old, “Who, despising the sycophancy of his teachers,” “Is as sick of his dogs as of all other beasts.

  “Nothing can enliven him, neither prey, nor predator,” “Nor deaths displayed before his balcony.

  “The satirical ballads of his appointed fool” “No longer soothe the frown of his cruel malady; “His flower-decked couch is transformed into a tomb,” “And the courtesans for whom every prince is handsome, “Can no longer find attire sufficiently immodest,” “To force this youthful skeleton to smile.

  “The maker of alchemical gold has never contrived” “To extirpate elementary corruption from his own being, “And in those baths of blood which the Romans left to us, “Which powerful men recall in the days of their old age,” “He has failed to renew the warmth of that dazed cadaver “Where runs instead of blood the green water of forgetfulness.” “Spleen, I assume, does not here refer to the common or garden organ of that name?” said Michael Lowenthal.

  “It does not,” Wilde confirmed. “Its meaning here is one that was rendered obsolete by the modern medical theories which replaced the ancient lore of bodily humors. Spleen was the aggravated form of the decadents’ ennui: a bitter world-weariness, a sullenly wrathful resentment of the essential dullness of existence.” “Is that, do you suppose, what drove him to make all this?” Charlotte asked.

  “I doubt it. This paradise was not born of bitterness or resentment, although the trail of murders that paved our way with bad intentions must have been. The poem is a commentary on the artist’s final approach to death, not on his life as a whole. Spleen was what Moreau fought with all his might to resist, although he knew that he could not live forever, and that it would claim him in the end.

  Like us, dear Charlotte, he was delivered by history to the very threshold of true emortality, and yet was fated not to live in the Promised Land. How he must have resented the fading of the faculties which had produced all this! How he must have hated the knowledge that his creative powers were ebbing away! How wrathful he must have become, to see his fate mirrored in the faces and careers of all those who had a hand in his own Creation. While the true emortals emerge from the womb of biotechnical artifice, today and tomorrow—and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow—they can no longer care who their fathers are or might have been, for they are designed by men like gods, from common chromosomal clay.” He looked at Michael Lowenthal as he pronounced the final sentence—but Michael Lowenthal looked away rather than meet the geneticist’s accusing stare.

  Charlotte looked around, wondering where the red-haired woman might be—and wondering, now, exactly what the red-haired woman might be. She was a clone of Maria Inacio, and yet not quite a clone. Some of her genes had been modified by engineering while she was still an ovum—just as some of her son/father’s genes had been modified by the young Walter Czastka. She, like her own Creator, had been designed by a man trying to become like a god, from common chromosomal clay—but Gustave Moreau must have done everything within his power to surpass Walter Czastka in that regard. The woman must surely be a Natural, in the limited sense that Michael Lowenthal was, but how much more had Moreau tried to make of her? Charlotte remembered some words that Moreau, as Herod, had quoted at Oscar Wilde, teasing him with the charge that even he could not have encountered them before: “Mortality, Behold and Fear! What a change of flesh is here!” But the woman was a multiple murderess; when the law took its course, her career would surely be subject to a demolition as comprehensive and as brutal as the one to which this exotic demi-Eden would be subject.

  Charlotte knew, as she framed that thought, that it might not be quite as simple as that. Oscar Wilde, for one, would fight for the preservation of Moreau’s island—and how many allies would he find among the millions of watchers who were waiting for her to locate and arrest her suspect? How many allies might the lovely murderess find, even in a world where death was regarded with such intense loathing and fascination? While Michael Lowenthal was still making shift to avoid Oscar Wilde’s stare, Charlotte moved away from them to make a tour of the massive mausoleum.

  It required only half a dozen steps to bring her quarry into view. The fugitive was sitting on the pediment on the further side of the tomb, facing a crowd of leaping lions and prancing unicorns, vaulting hippogriffs and rearing cobras, all of them hewn in living wood beneath a roof of rainbows. Hundreds of man-faced monkeys were solemnly observing the scene.

  The woman was quite still, and her vivid green eyes, which matched the color of the foliage of one particular tree which stood directly before her, were staring vacuously into space. It was as if she could not even see the fantastic host which paraded itself before her. Her arms were slightly spread, the palms of her hands upturned, each balancing a different object—but it was not her hands which drew Charlotte’s gaze.

  The woman was quite bald, and her skull was studded with silver contact points.

  The hair that the woman had worn throughout her murderous odyssey lay like stranded seaweed upon the white marble between her feet—but its strands were still stirring like stately ripples in a quiet pond, and wherever it caught a shaft of sunlight it glittered, showing all its myriad colors in rapid sequence, from polished silver through amber gold and flaming red to burnt sienna and raven black.

  The stars in the hairless skull glistened too, in the reflected light of the sun. Charlotte could hardly help but be reminded of the cruder decorations which Michi Urashima had accumulated on his own skull, but she knew that these must be different. Urashima was a self-made man, who had found his true vocation late in life. This person had been born to her heritage; her brain had been designed to be fed, and not with any ordinary nourishment.

  In the woman’s left hand lay a single flower: a gorgeously gilded rose. In her right hand she held a scroll of parchment, neatly rolled and tied with blue ribbon.

  Oscar Wilde stepped past Charlotte and picked up the gilded rose. He placed it carefully in the mock buttonhole formed by the false collar of his suitskin. He had discarded his green carnation.

  Charlotte stooped and reached out to touch the mass of “hair” which lay upon the marble. It moved in response to her touch, but not to recoil or flee. The ripples in its surface became waves, and its strands coiled like a nest of impossibly slender and improbably numerous snakes. It had more mass than she had thought likely. Quelling her instinctive revulsion, Charlotte picked it up and let its strands wrap themselves around her wrists and fingers, as if in grateful affection. She could not help but marvel at the awesome complexity and vivacity of its myriad threads.

  “What is it?” Mic
hael Lowenthal asked, his tone suspended somewhere between fear and fascination.

  “I don’t know what to call it,” Charlotte said. “I daresay that the scroll will tell us.” “I can only guess at its nature,” said Oscar Wilde, “but I imagine that we shall discover that it is the murderer’s real accomplice. That, I suspect, is Rappaccini’s daughter, and the woman of flesh and blood is its mere instrument.

  Those Medusan locks presumably comprise the virtual individual which has moved this Innocent Eve hither and yon throughout the world, fascinating her appointed victims and luring them to the acceptance of her fatal kisses. Perhaps we should think of it as the ultimate femme fatale: vengeful fury appointed by Rappaccini to settle all his earthly accounts.” Charlotte saw Lowenthal’s face turn suddenly pallid, and wondered why she had not reacted in the same way.

  “And we thought the flowers posed a biohazard!” he said—we, in this instance, being a grander company by far than the one comprised by his immediate neighbors. “Imagine what that could do!” “Only to those primed for its convenience,” Wilde observed—and then his own expression shifted. Mindful of the number of the eyes that were watching and the ears that would overhear, he hesitated for a second or more—but he was not a cautious man by nature. “And your ever dutiful employers already know, do they not, exactly what machines like this could do? Is it not part and parcel of their careful stewardship to keep such monstrosities in their place, locked away in the vaults beneath their infinite emporium where everything unfit for the marketplace is stored?” Charlotte observed, however, that Wilde made no reference to the probable ultimate source of the income which had fed the less orthodox researches of Michi Urashima and Paul Kwiatek.

  “She’s got away again, hasn’t she?” Charlotte murmured.

  “I suspect that when your Court of Judgment eventually sits,” Oscar Wilde agreed, “that cyborg creature you hold in your hand will be the only guilty party that can legitimately be summoned to appear before it. Alas for the justice which requires to be seen in order to be properly done, I doubt that it has any consciousness or conscience that can be sensibly held to account or punished. The evil that Rappaccini did may have lived after him for a little while, but everything that might have been punished for his sins was interred with his bones.” Charlotte let out her breath, unaware that she had been holding it. The exhalation turned into a long, deep sigh that sounded exactly like one of Oscar Wilde’s. She looked up into the little tent of blue sky above the mausoleum, which marked the clearing in which they were standing.

  The sky was full of flying eyes which sparkled like crystal dust in the sun’s kindly light.

  Charlotte knew that the words which they were speaking could be heard by millions of people all over the world and would in time be relayed to billions.

  The real Court of Judgment was here and now, and any verdict which the three of them chose to return would probably stick.

  “It’s over,” Charlotte said quietly. “Punishment is neither here nor there. It’s just a matter of counting the cost.” She looked at Michael Lowenthal as she spoke, even though the people he represented were experts on prices rather than costs.

  “It was still murder,” was all that Lowenthal could find to say.

  “Of course it was,” said Oscar Wilde. “It was a perfect murder—perhaps the only perfect murder the world has seen, as yet.”

  Epilogue: Happily Ever After

  In Hal Watson’s crowded workroom in the bowels of the UN building in New York—whose upper stories were already decaying to ash and dust—Sergeant Charlotte Holmes faced her superior officer with all the calm and confidence she could muster.

  “Walter Czastka died of natural causes,” Hal told her. “The death certificate makes conventional reference to general neuronal failure, which usually means that the nanotech patchwork holding the hindbrain together couldn’t maintain the feedback loops necessary to sustain motor function.” “Usually?” Charlotte queried.

  “Regina says that the wastage in Czastka’s brain was more extensive than usual, and more evident in the cerebrum.” “What does that imply?” “In Regina’s words: ‘If you set aside all the jargon, he just gave up on himself and faded out.’ There’s no hard evidence in his own files to prove that in 2322 he carried out a series of illegal genetic manipulations on egg cells which had been taken from Maria Inacio’s unexpectedly active womb and fertilized by his own spermatozoa, but I’ve dipped into the private files of those officers of Wollongong University who could have been involved in hushing it up. There’s more than enough buried there to support Wilde’s conjectures. I’m still excavating it, but all bureaucrats tend to be careful in the maintenance of their private records, however fast and loose they play with official documents.

  Given that Czastka’s death wasn’t suspicious, there’s no need for us to publish our findings, but I’ve found sufficient confirmation of the factual allegations contained in Moreau’s scroll to be sure that they’re true.” “Information which, being good bureaucrats, we’ll naturally commit to our own records, for the edification of future excavators,” Charlotte said.

  Hal didn’t rise to that. “I have hard evidence of the peripheral involvement of at least twelve others in Czastka’s experiment. All of them, including the murder victims, are commemorated in the faces of the monkeys on Moreau’s island; none are still alive. That’s not to say that it was an organized conspiracy; Czastka appears to have recruited them as and when he needed them, and it’s probable that none of them knew exactly how many others were involved, or how.

  The scroll left behind by Gustave Moreau is based on hearsay, of course, but it confirms that Maria Inacio knew more than anyone else—except Walter himself—about the progress of the experiment and the subsequent cover-up.

  Moreau’s account of what she told him confirms the private notes made by the dean of Walter’s faculty and the assistant registrar who arranged the transfer of the embryo from her womb to the artificial one.

  “There’s no detailed map of the transformations that Walter carried out on the embryo formed from the ovum he took from Inacio’s womb and combined with his own sperm, but he was definitely trying to engineer it for longevity. It’s explicitly stated that he worked at several of the key loci to which Zaman later applied his own transformations. We’ll never know how close he came to succeeding, but he would have been extremely lucky to hit on the right substitutions first time out, without the benefit of the preparatory animal work that Zaman and his peers were able to do.” “If he’d succeeded,” Charlotte observed, “we might now be attributing the New Human Race to the Czastka transformation.” “But he didn’t.” “The photographs of Jafri Biasiolo in different phases of his career as Rappaccini that you showed Wilde when I first brought him in suggest that what Czastka did must have had some effect,” Charlotte reminded him. “If he’d carried on—if he’d kept track of Biasiolo and tried again—it would have been hard going; but he might have given us the New Human Race fifty or sixty years earlier than Ali Zaman.” “If he’d carried on in the 2320s,” Hal opined, “he’d have ended up like Michi Urashima: a sacrifice to the forces of convention. He’d have ended up in the freezer, while the masters of the MegaMall divided the work up into manageable packets and made sure the transformations were properly tested on animals before they started work on dismantling the legal restraints. They’d have been right to do it. These things have to be properly managed. We’re not living in the twentieth century.” “The spin-off from Michi Urashima’s pioneering efforts wasn’t properly managed, though,” Charlotte pointed out. “Not the bits that Rappaccini took it upon himself to carry forward, at any rate.” “From now on,” Hal judged, “they will be.” “Does the scroll explain why Moreau did it?” Charlotte asked curiously. She was still harboring the faint hope that Oscar Wilde might have got it completely wrong and that Moreau’s madness had not been quite as divine as Wilde insisted.

  “It does include some teasing comments about
the ethics of scientific research, and a slighting reference to the quality of Walter Czastka’s artistry, but there’s no detailed explanation of Moreau’s motives. He seems to have decided to carry the final solution to the mystery to his grave—unless, of course, he had such perfect trust in Wilde’s skills as a detective that he was content to leave that side of the matter to him. Fortunately, I’m not required to include speculations as to motive in my own report.” “The news tapes won’t be content with that,” Charlotte observed wryly. “The vidveg always want to know Why? “The news-tape mongers won’t give a damn what we say or don’t say, so long as they have the charismatic Dr. Wilde to supply all the lurid fantasies they need, and a few more besides.” “What about the court?” Charlotte asked.

  “It won’t get to court,” Hal told her. “Once the psychologists and neurophysiologists have completed their reports, all charges against the woman will be dropped. There’s no doubt that she wasn’t in control of her own actions; she doesn’t even have any memory of what happened. She’s the Robot Assassins’ worst nightmare—but however reckless Moreau may have been in other respects, he certainly did his best to make sure that his chief pawn came through it all. It seems that she’ll make a full recovery.” “She’ll simply walk free, then?” “Not exactly. She’ll be quietly given into the custody of the Secret Masters of the MegaMall. Not as a prisoner, of course, but as a valued employee. They’ll pay her whatever salary she requires in exchange for her full cooperation.

  There’s a great deal they can learn from her, or so they hope. It’s dangerous knowledge—but it’ll be even more dangerous if others decide to follow in Moreau’s footsteps and we don’t have the means to prevent them.” Charlotte thought about that for a few moments. In the long run, the entire Moreau affair might come to be seen as mere window dressing for the proof that it was possible to make brainfeed equipment that would turn humans into mere robots. That knowledge would now be entrusted to the Hardinist Cabal—but were they safe custodians? And if not them, then who? She realized that the repercussions of this remarkable series of incidents would extend over centuries—and that she, Charlotte Holmes, had been privileged to see the whole drama unfold from the best seat in the house.