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By Root 1376 0

century.” “Granted,” he said. “But still, I’d far rather live beside the blue sea than the green, and I could never be content in a valley between SAP black hills. I can still remember the days before the green seas and black hills, you know; I think my memory has held up better than most, in spite of the unease of illusory deja vu. Sometimes I’m half-convinced that I’ve known you before, in the long-gone days of my first youth… but I understand how these tricks of the mind work. In these days of cosmetic engineering, when everyone is beautiful, it’s easy to recognize in the woman one sees today some or all of the women one knew many years before, who are simply phantoms imprinted on the vanishing horizon of remembrance…” He trailed off because they had reached the threshold of his home: a place at which he always hesitated.

Although he could not bring himself to entertain the thought, let alone believe it, Stuart McCandless was fated to die very soon.

It was likely that nothing could have saved him—certainly not a better memory.

What he took for an illusion of similarity was indeed an illusion, because he had recently been shown a better likeness of his darling Julia than ancient memory could possibly have preserved, and had not recognized it.

Sometimes victims collaborate in their own murders, even when they have been warned of danger—and why should they not, if they believe that murder and art are mere expressions of historical process, deft feints, and thrusts of causality? If idiosyncrasy, madness, and genius are no more than tiny waves on a great sullen tide of irresistible causality, even a man forewarned can hardly be expected to defy their force. Stuart McCandless certainly did nothing to avoid his fate, even when the second and far more explicit warning arrived. He simply could not imagine that his pupil could be anything but what she seemed or anyone but who she pretended to be. He was old, and he was complacent. He knew that he was fated to die, but he carried in his consciousness that remarkable will to survive that refuses to recognize death even while it stares death in the face.

Nor was he a fool; he was probably as knowledgeable a historian as there was in the world, and as wise a lover.

If those who tried to warn him had been able to explain to him exactly why he was being murdered, he would have laughed aloud in flagrant disbelief. Like the vidveg he affected to despise, and in spite of his claustrophobia, he was a man whose imaginative horizons were narrower than he knew or could ever have admitted to himself.

Investigation: Act Five: From Land to Sea

The sun was setting by the time Charlotte and her companions emerged into the open; it remained visible solely because its decline had taken it into the cleft of a gap between two spiry crags.

The car had gone.

Charlotte felt her hand tighten around the bubblebugs which she had carefully removed from their stations above her eyebrows. She had been holding them at the ready, anxious to plug them into the car’s systems so that their data could be decanted and relayed back to Hal Watson.

She murmured a curse. Michael Lowenthal’s exclamation of distress was even louder—and the man from the MegaMall immediately reached for his handset, moving to one side to call for assistance.

Charlotte took out her beltphone and tried to send a signal, although the charge indicator suggested that the battery no longer had enough muscle to reach a relay station or a convenient comsat. Nothing happened. She muttered another curse beneath her breath, and then she turned back to Oscar Wilde.

“I should have…” she began—but she trailed off when she realized that she didn’t know exactly what she should have done, or even what she might have done.

“Don’t worry,” said Wilde. “I doubt that Rappaccini brought us up here simply to abandon us. I suspect that a vehicle of some kind will be along very shortly to carry us on our way.” “Where to?” she asked, unable to keep the asperity out of her voice.

“I don’t know for certain,” he said, “but I would hazard a guess that