While Oscar ordered eggs duchesse for breakfast, Charlotte activated the wallscreen beside their table and summoned up the latest news. The fact of Gabriel King’s death was recorded, as was the fact of Michi Urashima’s, but there was nothing about the exotic circumstances. She was momentarily puzzled by the fact that no one had yet connected the two murders or latched onto the possible biohazard, but she realized that the MegaMall’s interest in the affair had advantages as well as disadvantages. The MegaMall owned the casters, and until the MegaMall decided that discretion was unnecessary, the casters would keep their hoverflies on a tight rein.
“Where’s Lowenthal?” she asked. “Still sleeping the sleep of the just, I suppose.” She wondered briefly whether she ought perhaps to wait for the man from the MegaMall before talking to Wilde about the investigation, but figured that it was up to her, as the early bird, to go after any available worms as quickly and as cleverly as she could. Unfortunately, she wasn’t at all sure how to start.
“My dear Charlotte,” said Oscar, while she dithered, “you have the unmistakable manner of one who woke up far too early after working far too hard the night before.” “I couldn’t sleep,” she told him. “I took a couple of boosters before breakfast—once the croissants get my digestive system in gear they’ll clear my head.” Wilde shook his head. “I am not normally a supporter of nature,” he said. “No one who looks twenty when he is really a hundred and thirty-three can possibly be less than worshipful of the wonders of medical science—but in my experience, maintaining one’s sense of equilibrium with the aid of drugs is a false economy.
We must have sleep in order to dream, and we must dream in order to discharge the chaos from our thoughts, so that we may reason effectively while we are awake. Your namesake, I know, was in the habit of taking cocaine, but I always thought it implausible of Conan Doyle to suggest that it enhanced his powers of ratiocination.” Charlotte had already taken note of Oscar Wilde’s date of birth while researching his background, and the fact that he had mentioned his age offered her an opportunity to ask what seemed to be a natural—if not conspicuously relevant—question. “If you’re only a hundred and thirty-three,” she said, “what on earth possessed you to risk a third rejuvenation? Most people that age are still planning their second.” “The risks of core-tissue rejuvenation mostly derive from the so-called Miller effect,” Wilde observed equably. “In that respect, the number of rejuvenations is less significant than the absolute age of the brain. Given the limitations of cosmetic enhancement, I felt that an increased risk of losing my mind was amply compensated by the certainty of replenishing my apparent youth. I shall certainly attempt a fourth rejuvenation before I turn one hundred and eighty, and if I live to be two hundred and ten I shall probably try for the record. I could not live like Gabriel King, so miserly in mind that I allowed my body to shrivel like the legendary Tithonus.” “He didn’t look so bad, until the flowers got him,” Charlotte observed.
“He looked old,” Wilde insisted. “Worse than that, he looked contentedly old. He had ceased to fight against the ravages of fate. He had accepted the world as it is—perhaps even, if such a horror could be imagined, had actually become grateful for the condition of the world.” Charlotte remembered that Wilde had not yet arrived at the Trebizond Tower when Hal had forwarded King’s last words, which had carried a different implication.
She did not attempt to correct him; he had turned his attention to his eggs duchesse.
It was a pity, Charlotte thought as Colorado flew past, that there was no longer a quicker way to travel between New York and San Francisco. She had an uncomfortable feeling that she might end up chasing a daisy chain of murders all around the globe, always twenty-four hours behind the breaking news—but the maglev was the fastest form of transportation within the bounds of United America, and had been since the last supersonic jet had flown four centuries before. The energy crises of the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries were ancient history now, but the inland airways were so cluttered with private flitterbugs and helicopters, and the zealots of Decivilization so enthusiastic to crusade against large areas of concrete, that the scope of commercial aviation was now reduced to intercontinental flights. Even intercontinental travelers tended to prefer the plush comfort of airships to the hectic pace of supersonics; electronic communication had so completely taken over the lifestyles and folkways of modern society that almost all business was conducted via com-con.
When the silence proved too oppressive, Charlotte began to talk again, although Wilde was still engrossed in his breakfast. “The detail is still piling up by the bucketload,” she said, “but we’ve had no major breakthrough. We still haven’t pinned down the current name and location of the woman who visited the victims or the man who used to be Rappaccini, although Hal thinks that we’re getting close on both counts. Most of the new information concerns the second murder, and possible links between Urashima and King. You knew Urashima at least as well as you knew King, I suppose?” “We met on more than one occasion,” Wilde admitted, laying down his fork for a moment or two, “but it was a long time ago. We were not close friends. He was an artist, and I had the greatest respect for his work. I would have been glad to count him as a friend, had that ridiculous business of house arrest not made it virtually impossible for him to sustain and develop his social relationships.” “He was released from the terms of his house arrest and communications supervision thirteen years ago,” Charlotte observed, watching for any reaction, “but he seems to have been institutionalized by the experience. Although he began to receive visitors, he never went out, and he continued to use a sim to field all his calls. The general opinion was, I believe, that he was lucky to get away with house arrest. If he hadn’t been so famous, he’d have been packed off to the freezer.” “If he hadn’t deserved his fame,” Wilde countered, “he wouldn’t have been able to do the work he did. His imprisonment was an absurd sentence for a nonsensical crime. He and his coworkers placed no one in danger but themselves.” “He was playing about with brainfeed equipment,” Charlotte observed patiently.
“Not just memory boxes or neural stimulators—full-scale mental cyborgization.
And he didn’t just endanger himself and a few close friends—he was pooling information with other illegal experimenters. Some of their experimental results made the worst effects of a screwed-up rejuve look like a slight case of aphasia.” “Of course he was pooling information,” Wilde said, pausing yet again between mouthfuls. “What on earth is the point of hazardous exploration unless one makes every effort to pass on the legacy of one’s discoveries? He was trying to minimize the risks by ensuring that others had no need to repeat failures.” “Have you ever experimented with that kind of equipment, Dr. Wilde?” Charlotte asked. She had to be vague in asking the question because she wasn’t entirely sure what multitude of sins the phrase “that kind of equipment” had to cover.
Like everyone else, she bandied about phrases like “psychedelic synthesizer” and “memory box,” but she had little or no idea of the supposed modes of functioning of such legendary devices. Ever since the first development of artificial synapses capable of linking up human nervous systems to silicon-based electronic systems, numerous schemes had been devised for hooking up the brain to computers or adding smart nanotech to its cytoarchitecture, but almost all the experiments had gone disastrously wrong. The brain was the most complex and sensitive of all organs, and serious disruption of brain function was the one kind of disorder that twenty-fifth-century medical science was impotent to correct. The UN, presumably with the backing of the MegaMall, had forced on its member states a worldwide ban on devices for connecting brains directly to electronic apparatuses, for whatever purpose—but the main effect of the ban had been to drive a good deal of ongoing research underground. Even an expert Webwalker like Hal Watson would not have found it easy to figure out what sort of work might still be in progress and who might be involved. In a way, Charlotte thought, Michi Urashima was a much more interesting—and perhaps much more likely—murder victim than Gabriel King.