“What is incontrovertible,” the geneticist said in a more level tone, “is that Jafri Biasiolo, alias Rappaccini, alias Gustave Moreau, devoted his life to the design and manufacture of funeral wreaths—and whatever else this series of murders may be, it is Rappaccini’s own funeral wreath. All its gaudy display, including the invitation sent to me, is explicable in those terms, and only in those terms. Rappaccini has supplied materials to so many funerals that he must have decided a long time ago that he could never be satisfied by any mere parade through the streets of a city, however grandiose. He wanted a funeral to outdo every other funeral in the history of humankind—and we are part and parcel of its ceremony. These condolence cards are not addressed to his victims—they are leaves from his own Book of Lamentations, and must be understood in that light.” “I can’t believe it,” said Michael Lowenthal, shaking his head. “It’s too ridiculous.” Wilde’s remark about refraining from jumping to silly conclusions had obviously needled him.

“Maybe it is ridiculous,” said Charlotte, “but it’s no more so than the crimes themselves. Go on, Dr. Wilde—Oscar.” Wilde beamed, welcoming her belated concession. Then he relaxed back into his seat and half closed his eyes, as if preparing himself to deliver a long speech—which, Charlotte realized, was exactly what he intended to do.

“It may seem unduly narcissistic,” Oscar Wilde began, “but I wonder whether the most fruitful approach to the puzzle might be to unpack the question of why Rappaccini chose me to be its expert witness. The Herod sim informed us that it was because I was better placed than anyone else to understand the world’s decadence. The quotations reproduced on the condolence cards are taken from works identified in their own day as ‘decadent,’ but it is not ancient history per se that is the focus of attention here. It’s the repetition of history: the resonance implied by Jafri Biasiolo’s performances as Rappaccini and Gustave Moreau, and my own performance as my ancient namesake.

“According to the tape which you kindly showed me, Gabriel King described me as a ‘posturing ape,’ and you probably took some slight pleasure in the implied insult. The description is, however, perfectly accurate, provided one assumes that ape is a derivative of a verb meaning to imitate rather than a reference to an extinct animal. I am, indeed, an imitation; my whole existence is a pose—but the original Oscar Wilde was a poseur himself, and ironic echoes of my performance extend through my own work and through his. Once, when someone complained that my namesake had criticized a fellow artist for stealing an idea when he was an inveterate thief himself, he observed that he could never look upon a gorgeous flower with four petals without wanting to produce a counterpart with five, but could not see the point of a lesser artist laboring to produce one with only three. You will understand why that analogy has always been particularly dear to me—but there are other echoes more vital still.

“In the first Oscar Wilde’s excellent novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, the eponymous antihero makes a diabolical bargain, exchanging fates with a portrait of himself, with the consequence that the image in the picture is marred by all the afflictions of age and dissolution while the real Dorian remains perpetually young. In the nineteenth century, of course, the story of Dorian Gray was the stuff of which dreams were made: the purest of fantasies. We live in a different era now, but you and I, dear Charlotte, have been caught on the cusp between two ages. We can indeed renew our youth—once, twice, or thrice—but in the end, the sin of aging will catch up with us. It still remains to be proven whether Michael’s New Human Race is really capable of enduring forever, but the glorious vision is in place again: the ultimate hope is there to be treasured.

“Like me, Charlotte, you will doubdess do what you may to make the best of the life you have. I am living proof of the fact that even our kind may set aside much of the burden with which ugliness, disease, and the aging process afflicted us in days of old. We are corruptible, but we also have the means to set aside corruption, to reassert in spite of all the ravages of time and malady the image which we would like to have of ourselves. I daresay that you will play your part bravely and make the best of what is, after all, a golden opportunity for achievement and satisfaction. Perhaps, even as you watch the progress of such contemporaries as Michael, you will never experience a single moment’s anguish at the thought that you are a mere betwixt-and-between, becalmed halfway between mortality and authentic emortality. Perhaps, though, you will not find it impossible to find a grain of sympathy for Rappaccini’s obsession with death and its commemoration. In designing a funeral for himself that would surpass all the funerals of the past in its ludicrous self-indulgence and mawkish extravagance, he must also have had it in mind that there would soon come a time when funerals would lose their aura of inevitability, occurring only in the wake of rare and unexpected accidents.” “But I still don’t see—,” Charlotte began.

Oscar Wilde silenced her with an imperious wave of his delicate hand. “Please don’t interrupt,” he said. “I realize that you may well find this boring as well as incomprehensible, but I am trying hard to arrange my own thoughts in order, and I hope you might allow me to bore and confuse you a little while longer.

Even if you fail, in the end, to make sense of what I have to say, you will be no worse off than you are now.” “I wasn’t—,” Charlotte protested, but stopped as he pursed his perfect lips. She felt a perverse pulse of lust as his gleaming eyes bade her be silent.

“The nineteenth-century writers who were called decadent,” Wilde continued, “saw themselves as products of a culture in terminal decay. They likened their own era to the days of the declining Roman Empire, when the great city’s grandeur gradually ebbed away, and its possessions were overrun by barbarians. According to this way of thinking, the aristocracy of all-conquering Rome had grown effete and self-indulgent, so utterly enervated by luxury that its members could find stimulation only in orgiastic excess. By the same token, the decadents asserted, the ruling classes of nineteenth-century Europe had been corrupted by comfort, to the extent that anyone cursed with the abnormal sensitivity of an artistic temperament must bear the yoke of a terrible ennui, which could only be opposed by sensual and imaginative excess.

“An entire way of life, according to the decadents, was damned and doomed to collapse; all that remained for men of genius to do was mock the meaninglessness of conformity and enjoy the self-destructive exultation of moral and artistic defiance. Many of them died of excess, poisoned by absinthe and ether, rotted in body and in mind by syphilis—but they were, of course, absolutely right. Theirs was a decadent culture, absurdly distracted by its luxuries and vanities, unwittingly lurching toward its historical terminus. The next two hundred years saw wars, famines, and catastrophes on an unprecedented scale, in which billions of people died, although the hectic increase in human population was not halted until the descent of the final plague: the plague of sterility. The comforts of the nineteenth century—hygiene, medicine, international trade—were the direct progenitors of the feverish ecocatastrophe whose crisis was the Crash.

Throughout the twentieth century the petty deceivers of politics maintained their ruthless grip upon the fettered imagination of the vast majority of humankind, ensuring that few men had the vision to understand what was happening, and even fewer had the capacity to care. Addicted to their luxuries as they were, even terror could not give them adequate foresight. Blindly, stupidly, madly, they laid the world to waste and used all the good intentions of their marvelous technology to pave themselves a road to hell.