Charlotte found the steps of the dance trite and inexpressive; to her it seemed neither stimulating nor instructive, nor even quaintly amusing. The gradual removal of the dancer’s seven veils was merely a laborious way of counting down to a climax that was already expected. And still there was nothing to suggest a purpose for the charade—unless, as she had earlier suspected, all of this was mere distraction, intended to divert attention away from the true substance of the crime and to confuse the investigations being carried out by Hal’s silvers.
If this is mere mockery, she thought, Wilde might soon change his mind about being glad that Lowenthal and I chose to accompany him. If all this is just another joke intended to tease him, he might prefer to have kept it to himself.
As soon as Lowenthal and I decant our bubblebugs, this will be public property—and when the MegaMall gives the go-ahead to the casters, it will be all over the news.
No sooner had she formulated the thought, however, than she realized that she might have got it backward. Perhaps the whole point of the summons to Gabriel King’s appointment, the wreath at the San Francisco Majestic, and the car chase through the mountains had been to make Wilde’s involvement in this matter newsworthy. Perhaps the mystery and melodrama were intended solely to create audience interest in a rough-and-ready artwork which had little enough interest of its own. Perhaps the real intended audience of this play was the vidveg, who would need Wilde as an interpreter. Under ordinary circumstances, the vidveg would not have found it at all interesting, but if it were aired on the news, as an appendix to the tale of three—perhaps four—lurid murders, it would command an eager audience of billions.
Was that what its author craved? Was it conceivable that all of this, including the murders, was a publicity stunt? Salome was almost naked now, and the few encrustations she preserved upon her body were intended to heighten rather than to conceal, but Charlotte could summon up neither any vestige of emotional response nor any twinge of moral panic. All she could sense within herself was a precautionary tension, because she knew that at any moment Salome was likely to acquire a mute partner for her mesmerized capering.
The dancer did look as if she were mesmerized, Charlotte noted. She looked as if she were lost in some kind of dream, not really aware of who she was or what she was doing. Charlotte remembered that the young woman had given a similar impression during the brief glimpse of her which Gabriel King’s cameras had caught. Was that significant—and if so, of what? The dance slowed and finally stopped.
Without speaking, Salome stood with bowed head for a few moments—and then she reached out into the shadows which crowded around her, and brought out of the darkness a silver platter, on which there rested the decapitated head of a man.
She plucked the head from its resting place, entwining her delicate fingers in its hair.
The salver disappeared, dissolved into the shadow.
Charlotte was not in the least surprised. She was quite ready for the move.
Nevertheless, she flinched. The virtual head—which she knew to be a synthesized illusion—looked more startlingly horrid than a real head would have done, by virtue of the artistry which had gone into the design of its agonized expression and the bloodiness of the crudely severed neck.
She recognized the face which the virtual head wore: it was Gabriel King’s.
The dance began again.
How differently, Charlotte wondered, was Oscar Wilde seeing this ridiculous scene? Could he see it as something daring, something monstrous, something clever? Would he be able to sigh with satisfaction, in that irritating way of his, when the performance was over, and claim that Rappaccini was a genius of many disparate talents? If he could, she thought, it would surely be pure affectation: an assertion of the virtual reality which he wore as a costume, by courtesy of the genius of cosmetic engineers. She felt certain that Michael Lowenthal would have as low an opinion of this vulgar theatricality as she had, even though he would not have anticipated the arrival of the severed head and probably would not know even now that it was supposed to be the head of Christ’s precursor, John the Baptist.
The macabre dance began to seem even more mechanical. The woman appeared to be unaware—or at least uncaring—of the fact that she was supposedly brandishing a severed head. She moved its face close to her own and then extended her arms again, all the while maintaining the same distant and dreamy expression.
Charlotte began to grow impatient—but then her attention was caught again.
Subtly, almost imperceptibly, the features of the severed head had changed. Now it was no longer the head of Gabriel King; it had acquired an Oriental cast.
Charlotte recognized Michi Urashima and suddenly became interested again, eager for any hint of further change. She was fully aware of the necessity of capturing every detail of the sequence—if it were indeed to be a sequence—with her recording devices, so she fixed her own gaze steadfastly upon the horrid head.
She had seen no picture of Paul Kwiatek as yet, so she could only infer that the third appearance presented by the luckless Baptist was his, and she became even more intent when the third set of features began to blur and shift. This, she thought, was a countdown of a rather different kind, in which the number and nature of the steps might well be crucial to the development of her investigation.
She felt a surge of triumph as she realized that this revelation, if nothing else, might vindicate her determination to accompany Oscar Wilde on his strange expedition.
She did not recognize the fourth face, but she was confident that the bubblebug set above her right eye would record it well enough for computer-aided recognition. If Hal’s investigations could be trusted, it was almost certainly the ecologist Magnus Teidemann.
How many more, she wondered, would there be? The fifth face was darker than the fourth—naturally dark, she thought, not cosmetically melanized. Men of King and Urashima’s generation rarely played games with skin color, even when they had recourse to cosmetic engineers to make them handsomer. She did not recognize this man either.
She recognized the sixth face, though. She had seen it on a screen within the last few hours, looking considerably older and more ragged than its manifestation here but unmistakably the same.
It was Walter Czastka.
Charlotte remembered belatedly that Oscar Wilde had been about to say something about Czastka’s role in this affair when he had been interrupted by sudden anxiety about the speed of the hire car. Had he been about to confound Michael Lowenthal with the judgment that Czastka, far from being the murderer, must have been marked down as a victim? Could this be taken as proof that Czastka was not, after all, the man behind Rappaccini, but merely one more of Rappaccini’s chosen victims? Or might it simply be one more joke, one more bluff? She tried to pull herself together. The real significance of this revelation, surely, was that if Walter Czastka had been marked down as a victim, he might yet be saved—as might the mysterious fifth man. Czastka, at least, had been alive not much more than an hour ago, even though he had stopped answering his phone as soon as Oscar Wilde had talked to him.
There was no seventh face. Salome slowed in her paces, faced the sofa where Oscar and Charlotte sat watching, and took her bow.
Then the lights came on.
Charlotte had assumed that the performance was over, and its object attained, but she was wrong. What she had so far witnessed was merely a prelude.
The lights which sprang into dazzling life brought a new illusion, infinitely more spectacular than the last Charlotte had attended numerous theatrical displays employing clever holographic techniques, and knew well enough how a black-walled space which comprised in reality no more than a few hundred cubic meters could be made to seem far greater, but she had never seen a virtual space as vast and as ornate as this.