As soon as they had set down at the Kauai heliport, Charlotte opened the door, and leapt down to the blue plastic apron. The promised helicopter was waiting less than a hundred meters away. Its police markings were a delight to her eyes, holding the promise of control. From now on she would no longer be a passenger but an active participant; a pursuer, an active instrument of justice. Oscar kept pace with her in spite of the fact that his gait seemed much lazier.
“I should leave you here,” she said, while climbing aboard. “I can, you know—this isn’t public transport.”
“You wouldn’t be so cruel,” he said. He was right.
The helicopter lifted as soon as they were strapped in. Charlotte reached into the equipment-locker under the seat, and brought forth a handgun. She checked the mechanism before clipping it to her belt.
“You’re not thinking of using that, I hope?” said Oscar.
“Now the proof’s in place,” Charlotte answered, tautly, “I can employ any practical measure which may be necessary to apprehend her. The bullets are non-lethal. We’re the police, remember.”
They were traveling at a slower speed than they had previously, but flew so low that their progress seemed more rapid. The downdraft of their blades carved the roiling waves into all manner of curious shapes. High in the sky above them, a silver airship was making its stately progress from Honolulu to Yokohama. Oscar tuned in a broadcast news report. There were pictures of Gabriel King’s skeleton, neatly entwined with winding stems bearing black flowers in horrid profusion. This was only the beginning; the AI voice-over promised that details of several more murders would soon be revealed. Charlotte knew that an operation of the size that was now being mounted would attract the attention of half the newshawks in United America and a good few in not-very-united Eastasia. Flocks of flying eyes would be migrating this way from every direction. The privacy which Walter Czastka so passionately desired to conserve was about to be rudely shattered.
Oscar blanked the newscast as soon as it moved on to more mundane matters, and his fingers punched out Walter Czastka’s telephone code. The AI sim which answered had clearly been reprogrammed since Charlotte had last seen it.
“Damn you, Oscar Wilde,” it said, without bothering with any conventional identification or polite preliminary. “Damn you and Rappaccini to the darkest oblivion imaginable.”
Charlotte turned the camera-eye so that her own image filled the view-field. “Dr. Czastka,” she said, “this is Charlotte Holmes of the UN Police. I need to speak to you, urgently.”
“Damn you, Oscar Wilde,” replied the sim, stubbornly. “Damn you and Rappaccini to the darkest oblivion imaginable.”
Charlotte looked at Oscar, whose face had creased into an anxious frown. “I have a horrible suspicion,” he said, “that we might be too late.” Charlotte looked at her wristwatch. They were still twenty minutes away from the island. She punched in another code, connecting herself to the commander of the task-force that had surrounded it.
“What’s happening?” she demanded.
“No sign of her yet,” the answer came back. “If anything happens, Inspector, you’ll be the first to know.” There was nothing to do but wait, so she sat back in her seat and stared down at the agitated waves. They were still a few minutes away when the voice came back on line. “We have camera-contact,” it said. “Relaying pictures.”
The screen showed a female figure in a humpbacked wetsuit walking out of the sea, looking for all the world as if she were enjoying a leisurely stroll. She paused at the high tide line to remove the suit and its built-in paralung, then knelt beside the discarded wetsuit and removed something from an inner pocket. Over the voice-link they could hear the officer who had spoken to them instructing her to desist.
Suddenly, the air around the girl was filled by a dense smoke, which swirled in the breeze as it dispersed.
“Alate spores,” Oscar guessed. “Millions of them.”
Julia Herold stood, with her arms upraised in a gesture of seeming surrender. She had apparently done what she’d come to do.
“Stay in the copters,” Charlotte instructed. “The stuff she’s released is probably harmless to anyone but Czastka, but there’s no need for everyone to take the risk. I’ll pick her up myself.”
“As you wish,” said the other officer, sourly. He evidently thought that Charlotte was intent on appropriating what little glory there might be in making the arrest.
“I think we may have mistaken the exact form that the final murder was intended to take,” said Oscar, quietly. “It’s not Walter those spores are after—it’s his ecosystem. She came here to destroy his private Creation.”
As the helicopter swept in to land Charlotte scanned the trees which fringed the beach. Lush undergrowth nestled about the boles of palmlike trees. She half-expected to see the green leaves already flecked with darker colors, but nothing was happening yet.
“Nothing can stop it,” said Oscar, softly, his voice reduced now almost to a whisper. “Each murder is one hundred percent specific to its victim. Walter’s own body is safe inside the house, but that’s not what he cares about … it’s not what he is. Rappaccini’s instruments are going to devour his entire ecosphere—every last molecule.”
For the first time, Charlotte realized, Oscar Wilde was genuinely horrified. The equanimity that had hardly been rippled by the sight of Gabriel King’s hideously embellished skeleton was ruffled now. For the first time, Oscar was identifying with one of Rappaccini’s victims, seeing Rappaccini as a criminal as well as an artist. But even as Charlotte observed his outrage, Oscar’s expression was changing.
“Look!” he said. “Look what kind of demi-Eden Walter Czastka has been endeavoring to build here.” The helicopter had set down some thirty meters from the woman, who still stood there, with her arms upraised. She was taking no notice of them or the other hovering machines; her green eyes were quite blank. Charlotte climbed down, keeping one eye on the woman while she obeyed Oscar’s instruction to look inland. She could not see anything surprising or alarming.
“Poor Walter!” said Oscar, sadly. “What a petty Arcadia this is! Immature and incomplete though it undoubtedly is, its limitations already show. Here is the work of a hack trying desperately to exceed his own potential—but here is the work of a man who has not even the imagination of blind and stupid nature. I can see now why Walter tried to keep me away. The mysterious Julia does not have to kiss poor Walter, because Walter is already dead, and he knows it. Even if his heart still beats within his withered frame, he is dead. Rappaccini’s worms are feeding on his carcass.”
“It looks perfectly ordinary to me,” said Charlotte, staring up at the uneven line made by the crowns of Walter Czastka’s palmlike trees, as they extended their ample canopies to bask in the life-giving light of the sun.
“Precisely,” said Oscar Wilde, with a heavy sigh.
Charlotte moved to confront the woman, who stood statue-still, looking up into the brilliant blue sky.
“Julia Herold,” she began, “I arrest you for…”
She heard a strange squawking sound behind her, and guessed that someone was trying to attract her attention by shouting over the voice-link to the helicopter’s comcon. She picked up her waistphone impatiently. “It’s okay,” she said. “I’ve got her. It’s all over.”
“Look behind you!” said the voice from the other end, trying to shout at her although the volume control on her waistphone compensated automatically. “Corrosion and corruption, woman, look behind you!”
Uncomprehendingly, Charlotte looked behind her.
Falling toward her from the vivid brightness of the early afternoon sun was a black shadow. At first she could judge neither its size nor its shape, but as it swooped down, 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 flatly impossible, and her mind stubbornly refused to accept the truth of what she saw.
It was a b
ird, but it was a bird like none that had ever taken to the skies of earth in the entire evolutionary history of flight, bigger by far than the helicopters whose automatic pilots were taking evasive action to avoid it. The pinion-feathers of its black wings were the size of samurai swords, and its horrible head was naked, like a vulture’s. Its beak was agape, and it cried out as it swooped down upon her. Its cry was a terrible inhuman shriek, which made her think of the wailing of the damned in some Dantean Hell.
Wise panic took hold of her and threw her aside like a rag doll, lest she be struck by the diving impossibility. She had no time to fire her gun, nor even to think about firing it. Her reflexes rudely cast her down, tumbling her ignominiously onto the silvery sand.
Julia Herold didn’t move a muscle. Charlotte understood, belatedly, that the raising of her arms was not a gesture of surrender at all. With confident ease, the girl interlaced her fingers with the reaching talons of the huge bird, and was lifted instantly from her feet.
According to all the best authorities, Charlotte knew, no bird could lift an adult human being from the ground—but this bird could. It was climbing again now, beating its fabulous night-black wings with extravagant majesty, circling back into the dazzling halo of brilliance that surrounded the tropical sun.
Charlotte reached up her own hand to take the one that Oscar Wilde was extending to her. “Do you remember when Rappaccini’s simulacrum said to us, ‘This is no cocoon of hollowed rock; it is my palace. You will see a finer rock before the end’?” he asked, resignedly. “The second ‘rock’ was actually ‘roc.’ A cheap shot, in my judgment.”
“Get back in the helicopter,” she said, grimly. “I don’t know how far or how fast that thing can fly, but she is not going to get away.”
“I don’t think she’s even trying,” said Oscar, with a sigh. “She’s merely escorting us to the much-joked-about island of Dr. Moreau, so that we may cast a critical eye over her father’s Creation.”
12
Moreau’s island was more or less identical in size and shape to Walter Czastka’s. By the time it was in view, Charlotte had Hal Watson on the line, watching the drunken flight of the giant bird through the helicopter’s camera-eyes. Huge though it was, the woman’s weight was burden enough to make flight very difficult, and Charlotte wondered whether the creature had sufficient strength left to make landfall.
“It is clear,” said Oscar, “that the murders were committed partly in order to lay a trail. We shall be the first to reach its end, but by no means the last. Every news service in the world must have dispatched spy-eyes by now. We are about to attend an exhibition, dear Charlotte—one which will put the so-called Great Exhibition of 2505 to shame.”
“We picked up enough body-cells at McCandless’s house to produce a DNA-spectrum,” Hal put in. “The lab people didn’t expect any kind of correlation with the people who were registered as Julia Herold’s parents, but they found one. According to her genes, Herold is Maria Inacio, saving some slight somatic modifications compatible with cosmetic transformation. Inacio’s alleged death in 2423 must be disinformation.”
“No,” said Oscar, softly. “Maria Inacio was born in 2402; there’s no way that she could be Rappaccini’s daughter. You won’t find Julia Herold’s birth recorded anywhere, Dr. Watson. She was born from an artificial womb on the island, not more than twenty years ago.”
“A clone!” said Charlotte. “An unregistered clone! But she’s not his daughter. You were wrong about that.”
“In the literal sense, yes,” admitted Oscar, as the bird summoned the last vestiges of its strength for one last surge toward the silver strand where the waves were breaking over Dr. Moreau’s island, “but he’s raised her from infancy within the confines of his own Garden of Eden, and I’ll wager that he has exactly the same degree of genetic relatedness to her as he would have to a daughter: fifty percent.”
“You mean,” said Charlotte, “that she’s his sister!”
“No,” said Oscar, clenching his fist in a tiny gesture of sympathetic triumph as the bird dropped the girl into the sand and lurched exhaustedly to a sprawling landing twenty meters further on. “I mean that Maria Inacio was Rappaccini’s mother.”
“I suppose you’ve worked out who his father was, as well?” said Charlotte, as the helicopter zoomed in to land. The helicopter’s safety-minded AIs gave the beached roc a wide berth, putting them down sixty meters away from the point where the woman had been dropped; she had already picked herself up and disappeared into the trees fringing the beach. Charlotte unplugged her waistphone from the comcon. She didn’t bother unshipping any transmitter-eyes. Hal would soon have plenty of eyes with which to see. The whole world was coming to this party.
“We can narrow it down to one of six,” said Oscar, as he opened the door and climbed out of the slightly tilted helicopter. “Perhaps that’s as far as Rappaccini cared to narrow it down. It’s possible, if McCandless’s half-recollection of a beach-party at which all six of the victims might or might not have been present means anything at all, that Maria Inacio was uncertain which of them was the father of her child. I strongly suspect, though, that a genetic engineer of Rappaccini’s skill and dedication could not have been content with any such uncertainty.”
Charlotte looked uneasily along the strand at the chimerical creature that was peering at them dolefully from an unnaturally large and bloodily crimson eye. “It was Walter Czastka,” she said, knowing that she could claim no credit simply for filling in the blank.
“It was Walter Czastka,” he echoed. “Poor Walter! To harbor such genius in his genes, and such mediocrity in his poor mortal body.”
Charlotte wasn’t about to waste time feeling sorry for Walter Czastka—not, at any rate, for that reason—but she couldn’t help feeling a pang of sympathy for poor Maria Inacio, dead before her life had really begun, leaving nothing behind but a child of uncertain parentage. Such things couldn’t happen nowadays, when all children were sterilized as a matter of course—and only a tiny minority ever applied for desterilization in order to exercise their right of reproduction while they were still alive—but Maria Inacio had been a child of the Aftermath. Hers had been the last generation of women victimized by their own fertility.
Charlotte and Oscar walked side by side to the place where Rappaccini’s mother/daughter had disappeared. They kept a wary eye on the roc, but the bird made no move toward them. It seemed to be in considerable distress. As they paused before moving into the trees, Charlotte saw the bloodshot eyes close. They walked into the forest, following a grassy pathway that had all the appearance of an accident of nature, but which had in fact been designed with the utmost care, as had every blade of grass.
The trunk of every tree had grown into the shape of something else, as finely wrought in bronze-barked wood as any sculpture. No two were exactly alike: here was the image of a dragon rampant, here a mermaid, here a trilobite, and here a shaggy faun. Many were the images of beasts that natural selection had designed to walk on four legs, but all of those stood upright here, rearing back to extend their forelimbs, separately or entwined, high into the air. These upraised forelimbs provided bases for spreading crowns of many different colors. Some few of the crowns extended from an entire host of limbs rather than a single pair, originating from the maws of krakens or the stalks of hydras.
The animals whose shapes were reproduced by the trunks of the trees all had open eyes, which seemed always to be looking at Charlotte no matter where she was in relation to them, and although she knew that they were all quite blind, she could not help feeling discomfited by their seeming curiosity. Her own curiosity, however, was more than equal to theirs. Every tree of the forest was in flower, and every flower was as bizarre as the plant which bore it. There was a noticeable preponderance of reds and blacks. Butterflies and birds moved ceaselessly through the branches, each one wearing its own coat of many colors, and the tips of the branches moved as though stirred by a breeze, reaching out towards these vi
sitors as though to touch their faces. There was no wind: the branches moved by their own volition, according to their own mute purpose.
Charlotte knew that almost all of what she saw was illicit. Creationists were banned from engineering insects and birds, lest their inventions stray to pollute the artwork of other engineers, or to disrupt the domestic ecosystems of the recently renewed world-at-large. When the final accounting was complete, and all of Rappaccini’s felonies and misdemeanors had been tabulated by careful AIs, he would probably turn out to have been the most prolific criminal who had ever lived upon the surface of the earth. Rappaccini had given birth to an extraordinary fantasy, fully aware that it would be destroyed almost as soon as others found out what he had done—but he had found a way to show it off first, and to command that attention be paid to it by every man, woman, and child in the world. Had he, perhaps, hoped that his contemporaries might be so overawed as to reckon him a god, far above the petty laws of humankind? Had he dared to believe that they might condone what he had done, once they saw it in all its glory?
Rappaccini’s creative fecundity had not been content with birds and insects. There were monkeys in the trees, which did not hide or flee from the visitors of their demi-paradise, but came instead to stare with patient curiosity. The monkeys had the slender bodies of gibbons and lorises, but they had the wizened faces of old men. Nor was this simply the generic resemblance that had once been manifest in the faces of long-extinct New World monkeys; these faces were actual human faces, writ small. Charlotte recognized a family of Czastkas and an assortment of Kings and Urashimas, but there were dozens she did not know. She felt that her senses were quite overloaded. The moist atmosphere was a riot of perfumes, and the murmurous humming of insect wings composed a subtle symphony.
The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994 Page 99