Murder must be rehabilitated, Oscar, made romantic and flamboyant, made gorgeous and excessive, made glamorous and hideous and larger than life. What have my six victims left to do but set an example to their younger brethren? Who is more fitted than I to appoint himself their deliverer, their ennobler, the proclaimer of their fame—and who more fitted than my beloved daughter to serve as my instrument?” “But she’s not—,” Michael Lowenthal began—and Charlotte suddenly realized what should have been plain even as they sat in the car, distractedly arguing possibilities.
“She’s a clone!” whispered Charlotte fiercely.
“I fear, my friend,” said Wilde, loudly overriding their brief exchange, “that this performance might not make the impact that you intend. If you hope for sympathy from me, and find none, what can you expect from the world at large? Perhaps you pretend too hard to madness. If the world thinks you merely mad, they will see neither motive nor artistry in anything you may have done. For myself, I do not deny that you have intrigued me, but I have always been an unnaturally generous man. My attention is easy to capture—my approval is less so. So far, Dr. Rappaccini, I have yet to see the merit in your murders or your absurd distractions, not because they seem too clever but because they seem so stupid.” The hologrammatic sim of Rappaccini smiled again. “You will repent that cruelty, Oscar,” he said. “You must, for you are already committed, already exposed, already known to me. Your hands are bound; the privilege of disapproval was surrendered when you chose the truth of your name. You must judge me as a true liar, Oscar Wilde, and no trick of the mind or the pen can reduce what I have done to mere deception. No matter how hard you resist, I will convince you. You know in your heart that what surrounds you now is no mere rock, rough-hewn and polished for delusion’s sake. You know in your heart that this marvelous appearance is real, and the hidden reality a mere nothing. This is no cocoon of hollowed stone; it is my palace. Hear me, Oscar: you will see the finest rock of all before the end.” Wilde did not reply to that immediately; Charlotte could imagine the frown of vexation which must lie upon his forehead.
“Your representations are deceptive, King Herod,” she said. “Your dancing stepdaughter showed us Gabriel King’s head first and foremost, but Kwiatek died before him, and I suspect that Magnus Teidemann was probably dead even before Kwiatek. It was optimistic too—we have already warned your fifth and sixth intended victims, and we intend to save them both.” Herod turned back to face her. She had not been able to deduce, so far, exactly how high a grade of artificial intelligence its animating silver had, but she hoped that it might be less clever than it seemed. It was responsive, to be sure, but much of what it said consisted of scripted speeches fairly loosely connected to the reactive remarks which prefaced them. She was not optimistic about the prospect of provoking it to reveal anything authentically useful, nor did she expect any explicit confirmation of her guess that Magnus Teidemann was indeed a victim, but she felt obliged to try.
“All six will go to their appointed doom whatever you do,” the sim told her.
“You do not understand what is happening here. You and your companion must look to Oscar to provide what explanations he can. If he does not understand yet, he will understand soon enough.” Charlotte noted that the sim did not use her name, even though Wilde had addressed her by her first name as they had entered; that made her feel slightly better, because it was a welcome reminder to her that the abilities of the mercurial Rappaccini were not, after all, supernatural. All this was mere artifice, albeit of Byzantine complexity. She wanted to get out now, to transmit a tape of this encounter to Hal Watson so that he could identify the fifth face—but she hesitated.
“What can these men possibly have done to you?” she asked, trying to sound contemptuous although there was no earthly point in it. “What unites them in your hatred?” “I do not hate them at all,” replied the sim, “and the link that unites them in my affections is not recorded in that silly Web built by cyberspiders to trap the essence of human experience.” The image was no longer looking at her, but at Oscar Wilde. She suspected that it had somehow received the cue for another programmed speech, which it was determined to direct to the intended recipient.
“I have done what I have done,” the AI continued, steadfastly following its programming, “because it was absurd and unthinkable and comical, lies have been banished from the world for far too long, and the time has come for us not merely to tell them, but to live them also. It is by no means easy to work against the grain of synthetic wood, but we must try. All this is for you, dear Oscar—the last and best gift you will ever receive.” “I think I could have done without it,” said Oscar, not quite as coldly as before. “In any-case, this is not my birthday. I repeat—I cannot fathom your timing.” “Oh, but it is your birthday,” countered the fatuous creature on the ridiculous throne. “And you look simply fabulous.” And with that, darkness fell.
The gloom would have been absolute and impenetrable were it not for a single tiny pinprick of light which shone behind them, marking the door through which they had entered the underworld.
Intermission Four: A Teacher and His Pupil
Stuart McCandless walked along the beach on the southern shore of Kauai east of Puolo Point, patiently awaiting the restoration of his subjective equilibrium.
His IT had already taken charge of his heart, and his pituitary monitors would ensure that his endocrine system would soon be finely tuned and perfectly balanced, but within the gap that separated state of being from state of mind there was still a considerable margin of unease.
Stuart adjusted the brim of his hat to take better account of the angle of the afternoon sun and stared out over the quiet Pacific, fixing his eyes on the distant horizon. Although he knew that there were countless smaller islands out there, hidden by the subtle curvature of the earth, it was easy enough to imagine that the ocean went on forever, unsullied by the dabblings of the so-called continental engineers and their Creationist clients. One day, he supposed, the Hawaiian archipelago would be so extensively augmented that there would be islet eyesores by the score visible in every direction, but he counted himself fortunate to have lived in an era of relative stability, when the most ingenious efforts of the world’s environmental revisionists had been directed to the repair of the damage done to the natural islands by the Greenhouse Crisis and the eco-catastrophic Crash.
The sight of the seemingly infinite sea calmed him, as it always had done, and helped him to feel that his true self had been restored to him. Ever since childhood, Stuart had been claustrophobic. He had consulted therapists of half a dozen different kinds, but their analyses and practical advice had never had the least impact on the problem. Before his second rejuve, while it still seemed that brainfeed research might yield results, he had taken as keen an interest as any nonspecialist could in the painful advance of neurophysiological science and technology, but he had waited in vain for a product that might cure him of his unwanted delicacy.
There were, of course, worse afflictions that a man might be condemned to live with for a hundred and ninety-four years, but Stuart had never been able to take comfort from that fact. His situation would not have been so bad if he had only been required to avoid such close confinement as that associated with elevators and whole-body VE apparatuses; that would have been a definite inconvenience, but not a crippling handicap. The real problem was the slow unease which crept upon him by day whenever he was confined to his house. It was not something that caused him any acute pain, and it never threw him into a panic attack no matter how long the pressure was sustained, but its very slightness was annoying. It was like an insidious internal tickling, whose effect grew by degrees until its psychological effect was out of all proportion to its sensational marginality.