“It’s a living, I suppose,” she conceded. “It’ll keep us occupied until we die, if we want it to. But Oscar Wilde was right about something else too. I won’t want to be a policeman all my life. Life’s too short, you see, for the likes of us.” “You can’t win them all,” said Hal philosophically, “no matter how closely you rub shoulders with the biggest winners there are. You have to play the hand you’re dealt by fate, as cleverly as you can.” “That’s exactly what Jafri Biasiolo must have thought,” said Charlotte, determined to have the last word, “and I suppose that’s exactly what he did, in his own peculiar fashion.” Having completed his report, Michael Lowenthal looked anxiously around the virtual conference room, trying to measure the response. There were thirteen men and women whose representative sims were arranged about the illusory table, seven of whom he did not yet know by name. Their images were as obsessively minimalist as the “room” in which they were gathered; they looked perfectly human and perfectly ordinary, except for a slight gloss that might have been a reflection of the light that bounced up at them from the polished tabletop.
According to those elements of the Hidden Archive which had so far been opened to Michael’s inquiries, there had been a time when the Secret Masters had donned all manner of gaudy raiment in order to conduct their board meetings. They had delighted in appearing to one another as gods and demons, monsters and mirror-men, and they had met at the summits of virtual peaks higher by far than the meager mountains of Earth’s crumpled crust—but that had been in the early days of their power. Now they dressed more fittingly, not out of humility but to emphasize that their assemblies were straightforwardly utilitarian, merely a matter of business.
Virtual environments were now the arena of all the most cherished dreams of humankind—every impossible adventure, every bizarre fetish, every body of knowledge, every shameful desire—but the Dominant Shareholders liked to remember that virtual space was first and foremost the repository of the world’s wealth.
It was where money was, and it was where stewardship of the earth was exercised with scrupulous care. Michael knew that this imagistic room was more securely cloaked than any other in all the world, whether bedded in the hardware of the UN police or the so-called World Government. Whatever was said here remained here, consigned to the abyssal core of the Hidden Archive—but those who met here did not think of it as the conference chamber of the Secret Masters, the Gods of Olympus, or the Hardinist Cabal. It was merely a place where businessmen could meet and consider matters of mutual concern. It was just a room with bare walls and a rectangular table, devoid of all unnecessary ostentation, except a little extra polish.
“Thank you, Michael,” said the chairman. “All things considered, you did a good job. If you hadn’t taken the decision to follow Wilde, the police would certainly have tried—and might have contrived—to keep a little more from us than they actually did. It would have been annoying, to say the least, if we hadn’t been able to secure the equipment in that ingenious theater for our exclusive use. There are tricks we can actually use in that setup. They’re trivial tricks by comparison with what we’ll eventually learn from the girl and her lovely hair, but trivial tricks are often the most rewarding, in purely commercial terms.” “I wish the distractions had worked a little better,” Michael said, feeling that it was safe, in view of the chairman’s generosity, to indulge in a little judicious self-criticism. “I can’t help feeling that if only I’d framed my reckless hypotheses a little more cleverly, I might have persuaded Wilde to fall for one or other of them. He is a sucker for a good story, and it might have been better if he hadn’t been quite so accurate in his subsequent guesses.” “Wilde’s a fool,” opined a white-haired man who must have been two hundred and twenty if he were a day. “It doesn’t matter how accurate he is—no one will ever take his opinions seriously.” “Rightly so, Mr. Hart,” observed a female of equal apparent antiquity. “People know full well that it’s men like him who invent disparaging terms like vidveg, and they’re absolutely right to feel insulted. They’re correct in their estimation of him as a vain, patronizing poseur. Nobody watching the final act of that farce live identified with him—they all identified with the policewoman.
We don’t have to put any substantial amount of spin on the commercial resumes; she’s already the star, and her act only needs a little cleaning up. Wilde will come across as a spokesman for a lunatic and a lunatic himself; the only people who’ll listen to what he says are people who are out on a limb anyway—irrelevant people. The show can’t work against us, in the short run or the long. There’ll be no substantial comeback about the extirpation. The vast majority will thank us, as they always do.” How was it possible, Michael wondered, to be so old and yet so calm? Why were these people immune to the kinds of resentments which Jafri Biasiolo and Oscar Wilde had stored up against the undying inheritors of Earth? It was, he realized, people like Oscar Wilde who made up such disparaging epithets as “MegaMall” It was people like Oscar Wilde who charged the people whose duty and vocation it was to run the world with being hidebound monsters of greed, incapable of any but quantitative reckoning. In fact, only people like those gathered around this conference table could properly understand the quality of life. By virtue of that understanding, they were neither afraid to die nor resentful of their appointed heirs.
“We were right to let it go all the way,” another dutiful soul put in. “It would have been a pity to put a stop to it fifty years ago. The obsessive secrecy of true madmen is a great asset to the sane; it allows us to be discreet and eclectic in releasing the products of their creativity. It would be a terribly dull world if we always had to take the oddballs out before they did their most interesting work, just because the ripples might spread too fast and too far.” “But we’ll have to keep a closer eye on Wilde, from now on,” another and more ominous voice put in.
“It’s hardly worth it, surely,” said Michael, so relaxed by now that he did not even feel that he was taking a risk in issuing the mild contradiction. “He’ll be dead soon enough, won’t he?” In the Green Carnation Suite of the New York Majestic, Oscar Wilde stood before a full-length mirror, carefully inspecting every detail of his face. He caressed the flawless flesh with sensitive fingertips, rejoicing in its gloss.
“Ivory and rose leaves,” he murmured. The sound of his voice, lower in pitch and more musical than he remembered it, gave him an exquisite thrill.
He repeated the phrase reverently, as though it were a magical incantation: “Ivory and rose leaves.” Oscar had never been afraid of vanity. He was a man ready and willing to address his own reflection in the most admiring terms, provided only that it remained full of youth and perfect in its symmetry. Whenever it grew old, as it had three times over, it lost its capacity to inspire admiration and became a mocking reminder of the hazards which he and all men of his obsolescent kind still faced: decay, senescence, decomposition.
“One hundred and thirty-three years old,” he said softly. “One hundred and thirty-three years old, and young again. Age cannot wither, nor custom stale…” He reached out to pluck a green carnation from the wall beside the mirror. It was one of only half a dozen in full bloom, and he twirled it between his delicate fingers, admiring it with as much satisfaction as he admired his own image.
The flower was a trivial creation, only a little more elegant than the variety which the horticulturalists of old had wrought without the aid of genetic engineering, but it had been a necessary endeavor. It was a joke, of course, but a very serious joke. The never-ending games which Oscar played in consequence of his name were no mere matter of public relations. His identification with the ideas and ideals of his alter ego had long ago become a deep-seated obsession as well as a mischievous fetish. He was not afraid to acknowledge that fact, nor to take pride in it. He had always felt that life, if it were to be lived to the full in modern conditions, required a definite style and aesthetic shape: a constant flow of delicate ironies, tensions, and innovations; a cause. Perhaps, as Charlotte Holmes and Michael Lowenthal clearly believed, his own cause was hardly less mad than poor Rappaccini’s—but then again, perhaps all causes that had the power to change the world were bound to be reckoned mad until they bore sweet fruit.