At the bottom of the stairway there was a very solid door made from some kind of synthetic organic material. It had neither handle nor visible lock, but as soon as Wilde touched it with his fingertips it swung inward.
“All doors in the world of theater open to Oscar Wilde,” Michael Lowenthal muttered sarcastically.
Beyond the doorway was a well of impenetrable shadow. Charlotte automatically reached up to the wall inside the doorway, placing another nanolight there, but the darkness seemed to soak up its luminance quite effortlessly, and it showed her nothing but a few square centimeters of matte black wall. The moment Wilde took a tentative step forward, however, a small spotlight winked on, picking out a two-seater sofa upholstered in black, set a few feet away from them.
“Very considerate,” said Oscar dryly. “Had you not been here, dear Charlotte, I would have been obliged to distribute myself in a conspicuously languid fashion.
As things are, one of us will be obliged to stand.” “I’ll stand,” said Lowenthal. “I’ve been sitting down too long.” Charlotte had to imagine the expression that must have been on his face as he looked at the sofa. There was no dust on it, but it was conspicuously cheap as well as very old. No modern MegaMall outlet would have stocked anything so tawdry.
“Shall we?” said Wilde. He invited Charlotte to move ahead of him, and she did, although she moved a little hesitantly through the darkness, unable to see the floor beneath her feet. There was an interval of five or six seconds after they were seated, and then the spotlight winked out.
Charlotte could not suppress a small gasp of alarm as they were plunged into a darkness which would have been absolute had it not been for the single nanolight she had set beside the door, which now shone like a single distant star in an infinite void.
When light returned, it was very cleverly directed away from them; Charlotte quickly realized that she could not make out Oscar Wilde’s form, nor the contours of her own body. It was as if she had become a disembodied viewpoint, like a tiny bubblebug, looking out upon a world from which her physical presence had been erased.
She seemed to be ten or twelve meters away from the event which unfolded before her eyes, but she knew well enough that the distance—like the event itself—was an illusion. Cinematic holograms of the kind to which Michi Urashima had devoted his skills before turning to more dangerous toys were adepts in the seductive art of sensory deception.
The illusory event did not seem to be a “play” at all, according to Charlotte’s reckoning, but merely a dance, performed solo. The hologrammatic dancer was a young woman. Charlotte had no difficulty at all in recognizing her, because her bronzed features were made up to duplicate the appearance that the image’s living model had presented to Michi Urashima’s spy eyes. Her hair was different, though; it was now long, straight, and jet-black. Her costume was different too and did not seem to be the conventional artifice of a suitskin. The dancer’s bare flesh was ungenerously draped with soft, sleek, and translucent chiffons of many colors, secured at various strategic points of her lissome form by glittering gem-faced catches.
The music to which she danced—lithely and lasciviously—was raw and primitive, generated by virtual drums and reedy pipes.
“Salome,” whispered Oscar Wilde.
“What?” said Lowenthal uncomprehendingly. “I don’t—” “Later!” was Wilde’s swift response to that. “Hush now—watch!” Two days ago the name would have meant absolutely nothing to Charlotte, but thanks to the background reading she had done in the maglev couchette, she now knew that Oscar Wilde—the original Oscar Wilde—had written a play called Salome.
She had taken sufficient note of it to recall that he had written it in French, because it had been too calculatedly lewd to be licensed for the nineteenth-century English stage. She had also pressed the support key which had informed her that Salome was the name attached by legend to the daughter of Herodias, wife of King Herod of Judea, who was mentioned in two of the gospels of the New Testament, the holy book of the Christian religion.
Forearmed by this knowledge, Charlotte thought that she understood what it was that she was to watch—and now assumed that the dance would indeed turn into a play of sorts.
Her ready understanding made her feel rather smug, even though she still had no idea what the purpose of this display could possibly be. For the first time since leaving New York, Charlotte did not feel that she was trailing hopelessly in the wake of the better-informed counterpart dispatched by the Secret Masters to keep track of her investigation. She assumed that she was at least as well prepared as Michael Lowenthal for whatever coups de theatre were to follow.
As the nonexistent woman, isolated in an apparently infinite cage of darkness, swayed and gyrated to the beat of ancient drums, the first impression Charlotte received was one of utter artlessness and a pitiful lack of sophistication.
Modern dance, which had all the artifice of contemporary biotechnology as a key resource, was infinitely smoother and more complicated. But this performance, she knew, was three times an artifact. The image of the dancer was produced by the technology of the twenty-fifth century, but what was being offered to her eyes was a nineteenth-century vision of the first century before the conventional calendrical century count began. This was a half-primitive representation of the genuinely primitive: an ancient fantasy recapitulated as a fantasy of a different kind, contained by a medium which was no less fantastic, in its own marvelous fashion.
In the nineteenth century, Charlotte knew—and thought that she had at least begun to grasp—there had been something called pornography, which had to be distinguished from art, although there had been some people who considered that much art was merely pornography with pretensions and others who felt that at least some pornography was art which dared not speak its name. Nowadays, in a world where most sexual intercourse took place between individuals and clever machinery, while most of the remainder was consciencelessly promiscuous, the idea of pornography had become quaint and antique. To nineteenth-century eyes, the programming of any modern person’s intimate technology would have been bound to seem pornographic, but everyone—in spite of what Oscar Wilde had said about a sense of sin being somehow necessary to sexual pleasure—now accepted that in the realm of private fantasy nothing was perverse and nothing was taboo.
Charlotte understood, therefore—and was proud of herself for being able to understand—that part of the point of this performance was that one had to try to see it from several different viewpoints: from the viewpoint of some legendary petty ruler of the early Iron Age; from the viewpoint of would-be aesthetes and their rival moralists of the late Iron Age; and from the viewpoint of a double rejuvenate of the middle period of the Genetic Revolution.
After a moment’s hesitation, she added two more hypothetical viewpoints: the viewpoint of an authentically young citizen of the late-twenty-fifth-century United States of North America; and the viewpoint of a nano-tech recording device whose function was to preserve for future reference the sensory experiences of lives which were continually outstripping the resources of inbuilt memory.
With all this to take into account, she thought, the sight of Salome dancing should have been far more interesting that it actually was. In spite of all that she knew, Charlotte simply could not place herself, imaginatively, in the shoes of one of Herod’s courtiers, nor the shoes of one of the original Oscar Wilde’s gentleman friends, nor even the shoes of whatever strange individual had manufactured the mercurially virtual Rappaccini. She doubted that anyone of her era could have done better—not even the flesh-and-blood Oscar Wilde who sat invisibly but not quite intangibly beside her.