Here was the palace in which Salome had danced, transfigured by the phantasmagoric imagination of some later artist: a crazily vaulted ceiling higher than that in any reconstructed medieval cathedral, with elaborate stained-glass windows in mad profusion, offering all manner of fantastic scenes.

Here was a polished floor three times the size of a sports field, with a crowd of onlookers that must have numbered tens of thousands. There was no sense at all of this being an actual place: it was an edifice born of nightmarish dreams, whose awesome and impossible dimensions weighed down upon a mere observer, reducing Charlotte in her own mind’s eye to horrific insignificance.

Men like Gabriel King called their quasi-organic nanotech constructors shamirs, after the magical entity which had helped Solomon build his temple when his laborers had been forbidden the use of conventional tools, but this was the first time Charlotte had seen an edifice worthy of the labor of fabulous mythical creatures.

Salome, having bowed to the three visitors from the future who had watched her dance at far closer range than any of the fictitious multitude, turned around to bow to another watcher: to the biblical king of Judea, Herod, seated on his throne.

Charlotte could not remember whether Herod had been Salome’s father or merely her stepfather, but she was certain that he had been one or the other. She was certain too that there had never been a throne like this one in the entire history of empires and kingdoms. None but the most vainglorious of emperors could even have imagined it; and none of them could have ordered it built. It was huge and golden, hideously overburdened with silks and jewels: an appalling monstrosity of avaricious self-indulgence. It was, Charlotte knew, intended to appall, to constitute an offense to any taste or sense of proportion.

All of this was a calculated insult to the delicacy of effective illusion. It was a parody of grandiosity, an exercise in profusion for profusion’s sake. And yet, she understood the kind of technological sophistication that must have been required to produce this. She knew how much more difficult it was to produce such a fabulous extravaganza than it would have been to produce something which would have seemed possible and likely, on any scale.

“Do you like it?” asked the man on the throne: the king on the throne, who had even drawn himself three times life-size, as a bloated, overdressed grotesque.

Herod’s body, even had it been reduced to a natural scale, was like nothing any longer to be seen in a world which had banished obesity four hundred years before—but the face, had it only been leaner, would have been the face which Jafri Biasiolo, alias Rappaccini, had worn in the three photographs which Hal Watson had shown to Oscar, Lowenthal, and herself the day before.

But we know that she’s not his daughter, Charlotte thought. She’s supposed to be his mother now! Charlotte felt Oscar Wilde’s hand take up her wrist and squeeze it. He was still invisible to her, as she was to herself, although the glorious light of the illusory palace surrounded them. “Tread carefully,” Wilde whispered, his lips no more than a centimeter from her ear. “This simulation may be programmed to tell us everything, if only we can question it cunningly enough.” Herod/Rappaccini burst into mocking laughter. The sim’s tumultuous flesh heaved and seethed with it: “Do you think that I have merely human ears, my dear Oscar? You can hardly see yourselves, I know, but you are not hidden from me. Your friends are charming, Oscar, but neither the woman nor the man is one of us.

They are of an age which has forgotten and erased its past. They are neither revenants nor artists.” AI or not, thought Charlotte, it’s still mad. As absolutely and irredeemably insane as the man whose simulacrum it is. She wondered whether she might be in mortal danger, if the man beside her really was the secret designer of all of this: Rappaccini’s creator and puppet master.

“Gustave Moreau might have approved,” Wilde said offhandedly, “but he always tended to become dispirited and leave his work half-done. His vision always outpaced his capacity for detail. Michi Urashima would not have been satisfied so easily even when he was a VE technician, although I detect his early handiwork in some of the effects. Did Gabriel King supply the artificial organisms which hollowed out this Aladdin’s cave, perchance?” “He did,” answered the gargantuan Rappaccini, squirming in his uncomfortable seat like a huge painted slug. “I have made art with his sadly utilitarian instruments. I have taken some trouble, as you have seen, to weave the work of all my victims into the tapestry of their destruction.” The sim was obviously a high-grade silver rather than a sluggish sloth, but it was making preprogrammed speeches rather than responding with any real intelligence to Wilde’s provocations.

“It’s overdone,” said Oscar Wilde with insultingly mild contempt. “Grotesquely overdone and more than a little chaotic. As a show of apparent madness, it’s too excessive to be anything but pretense. Can we not talk as one civilized man to another, Jafri, since that is what we are?” Rappaccini smiled. “That is why I wanted you here, my dear Oscar,” he said.

“Only you could suspect me of cold rationality in the midst of all this. But you understand civilization far too well to wear its gifts unthinkingly. You may be the only man in the world who understands the world’s decadence, but you cannot hide that understanding from me, or deny it to my face. Have the patient bureaucrats of the United Nations police force discovered my true name yet?” “Jafri Biasiolo?” Wilde queried. “Is that what you mean by your true name? I doubt it. Even Rappaccini is truer than that. Half a dozen other pseudonyms have come to light—but I doubt that we have found the true one yet. Would you care to tell us what it is?” “Not Herod,” said the sim. “Be sure of that, at least.” “It’s only a matter of time, as you must know,” Charlotte put in, unable to resist the temptation. “By the time we get back to the car, it might be all over.” The sim turned its bloodshot eyes upon her, and she could not help but shrink before the baleful stare.

“The final act has yet to be played,” Rappaccini told her. “Even the penultimate phase of the drama has not yet reached its fatal climax. You may already know all of my true names, but you might still have difficulty in identifying the one which I presently use as my own, for reasons which dear Oscar will readily understand.” The sardonic gaze moved again, to meet Wilde’s invisible stare.

“You will thank me for this evasiveness, Oscar—an element of surprise is indispensable to the enjoyment of any unfolding drama. You would never have forgiven me had I not been just that little bit too clever for you.” “The car chase was entirely gratuitous,” said Oscar. “A jarring note of modernism in a performance which might otherwise have had the benefit of consistency, if not of coherency. I cannot concede that manifestation of cleverness.” “Consistency is the hallmark of a narrow mind,” replied the sim, seemingly unworried by the criticism.

“If you wanted to kill six men,” said Oscar Wilde, in a pensive tone which rather suggested that he was talking to himself rather than the AI, “why did you wait until they were almost dead? I cannot understand the timing of your performance. At any time in the last seventy years fate might have cheated you.

Had you waited another month, you might well have been too late to find Walter Czastka alive.” “You underestimate the tenacity of men like these,” Biasiolo-as-Herod replied.

“You think they are ready for death because they have ceased to live, but longevity has ingrained its habits deeply in the flesh. Without me to help them, they might have protracted their misery for many years yet—even dear, sad Walter. But I am nothing if not loyal, nothing if not affectionate to those most deserving of my tenderness. I bring them not merely death but glorious transfiguration—‘Mortality, Behold and Fear! What a change of flesh is here!’ But even you, Oscar, can never have read Beaumont… the point is, dear Oscar, that the mere fact of death is not the central motif here. Did you think me capable of pursuing mere revenge? It is the manner of a man’s death which is all-important in our day and age, is it not? Have we not rediscovered all the ancient joys of mourning, and all the awesome propriety of solemn ceremony and dark symbolism? “Wreaths are not enough for the likes of us, Oscar—not even wreaths which are spiders in disguise. The death of death itself is upon us, and how shall we celebrate that, save by making a new and better compact with the grim reaper? Murder is almost extinct—but it should not be, and cannot be, and must not be.