It required only half a dozen steps to bring her quarry into view. The fugitive was sitting on the pediment on the further side of the tomb, facing a crowd of leaping lions and prancing unicorns, vaulting hippogriffs and rearing cobras, all of them hewn in living wood beneath a roof of rainbows. Hundreds of man-faced monkeys were solemnly observing the scene.
The woman was quite still, and her vivid green eyes, which matched the color of the foliage of one particular tree which stood directly before her, were staring vacuously into space. It was as if she could not even see the fantastic host which paraded itself before her. Her arms were slightly spread, the palms of her hands upturned, each balancing a different object—but it was not her hands which drew Charlotte’s gaze.
The woman was quite bald, and her skull was studded with silver contact points.
The hair that the woman had worn throughout her murderous odyssey lay like stranded seaweed upon the white marble between her feet—but its strands were still stirring like stately ripples in a quiet pond, and wherever it caught a shaft of sunlight it glittered, showing all its myriad colors in rapid sequence, from polished silver through amber gold and flaming red to burnt sienna and raven black.
The stars in the hairless skull glistened too, in the reflected light of the sun. Charlotte could hardly help but be reminded of the cruder decorations which Michi Urashima had accumulated on his own skull, but she knew that these must be different. Urashima was a self-made man, who had found his true vocation late in life. This person had been born to her heritage; her brain had been designed to be fed, and not with any ordinary nourishment.
In the woman’s left hand lay a single flower: a gorgeously gilded rose. In her right hand she held a scroll of parchment, neatly rolled and tied with blue ribbon.
Oscar Wilde stepped past Charlotte and picked up the gilded rose. He placed it carefully in the mock buttonhole formed by the false collar of his suitskin. He had discarded his green carnation.
Charlotte stooped and reached out to touch the mass of “hair” which lay upon the marble. It moved in response to her touch, but not to recoil or flee. The ripples in its surface became waves, and its strands coiled like a nest of impossibly slender and improbably numerous snakes. It had more mass than she had thought likely. Quelling her instinctive revulsion, Charlotte picked it up and let its strands wrap themselves around her wrists and fingers, as if in grateful affection. She could not help but marvel at the awesome complexity and vivacity of its myriad threads.
“What is it?” Michael Lowenthal asked, his tone suspended somewhere between fear and fascination.
“I don’t know what to call it,” Charlotte said. “I daresay that the scroll will tell us.” “I can only guess at its nature,” said Oscar Wilde, “but I imagine that we shall discover that it is the murderer’s real accomplice. That, I suspect, is Rappaccini’s daughter, and the woman of flesh and blood is its mere instrument.
Those Medusan locks presumably comprise the virtual individual which has moved this Innocent Eve hither and yon throughout the world, fascinating her appointed victims and luring them to the acceptance of her fatal kisses. Perhaps we should think of it as the ultimate femme fatale: vengeful fury appointed by Rappaccini to settle all his earthly accounts.” Charlotte saw Lowenthal’s face turn suddenly pallid, and wondered why she had not reacted in the same way.
“And we thought the flowers posed a biohazard!” he said—we, in this instance, being a grander company by far than the one comprised by his immediate neighbors. “Imagine what that could do!” “Only to those primed for its convenience,” Wilde observed—and then his own expression shifted. Mindful of the number of the eyes that were watching and the ears that would overhear, he hesitated for a second or more—but he was not a cautious man by nature. “And your ever dutiful employers already know, do they not, exactly what machines like this could do? Is it not part and parcel of their careful stewardship to keep such monstrosities in their place, locked away in the vaults beneath their infinite emporium where everything unfit for the marketplace is stored?” Charlotte observed, however, that Wilde made no reference to the probable ultimate source of the income which had fed the less orthodox researches of Michi Urashima and Paul Kwiatek.
“She’s got away again, hasn’t she?” Charlotte murmured.
“I suspect that when your Court of Judgment eventually sits,” Oscar Wilde agreed, “that cyborg creature you hold in your hand will be the only guilty party that can legitimately be summoned to appear before it. Alas for the justice which requires to be seen in order to be properly done, I doubt that it has any consciousness or conscience that can be sensibly held to account or punished. The evil that Rappaccini did may have lived after him for a little while, but everything that might have been punished for his sins was interred with his bones.” Charlotte let out her breath, unaware that she had been holding it. The exhalation turned into a long, deep sigh that sounded exactly like one of Oscar Wilde’s. She looked up into the little tent of blue sky above the mausoleum, which marked the clearing in which they were standing.
The sky was full of flying eyes which sparkled like crystal dust in the sun’s kindly light.
Charlotte knew that the words which they were speaking could be heard by millions of people all over the world and would in time be relayed to billions.
The real Court of Judgment was here and now, and any verdict which the three of them chose to return would probably stick.
“It’s over,” Charlotte said quietly. “Punishment is neither here nor there. It’s just a matter of counting the cost.” She looked at Michael Lowenthal as she spoke, even though the people he represented were experts on prices rather than costs.
“It was still murder,” was all that Lowenthal could find to say.
“Of course it was,” said Oscar Wilde. “It was a perfect murder—perhaps the only perfect murder the world has seen, as yet.”
Epilogue: Happily Ever After
In Hal Watson’s crowded workroom in the bowels of the UN building in New York—whose upper stories were already decaying to ash and dust—Sergeant Charlotte Holmes faced her superior officer with all the calm and confidence she could muster.
“Walter Czastka died of natural causes,” Hal told her. “The death certificate makes conventional reference to general neuronal failure, which usually means that the nanotech patchwork holding the hindbrain together couldn’t maintain the feedback loops necessary to sustain motor function.” “Usually?” Charlotte queried.
“Regina says that the wastage in Czastka’s brain was more extensive than usual, and more evident in the cerebrum.” “What does that imply?” “In Regina’s words: ‘If you set aside all the jargon, he just gave up on himself and faded out.’ There’s no hard evidence in his own files to prove that in 2322 he carried out a series of illegal genetic manipulations on egg cells which had been taken from Maria Inacio’s unexpectedly active womb and fertilized by his own spermatozoa, but I’ve dipped into the private files of those officers of Wollongong University who could have been involved in hushing it up. There’s more than enough buried there to support Wilde’s conjectures. I’m still excavating it, but all bureaucrats tend to be careful in the maintenance of their private records, however fast and loose they play with official documents.
Given that Czastka’s death wasn’t suspicious, there’s no need for us to publish our findings, but I’ve found sufficient confirmation of the factual allegations contained in Moreau’s scroll to be sure that they’re true.” “Information which, being good bureaucrats, we’ll naturally commit to our own records, for the edification of future excavators,” Charlotte said.