Architects of Emortality - Brian Stableford [104]
Charlotte filled in time by looking around the cabin. The airplane was a small one, built to carry a maximum of four passengers. Again, Lowenthal had been left to play odd man out. Behind the second row of seats there was a curtained section, but the curtains were drawn back, allowing her to see the four bunks it contained. That implied that they were in for a long flight—and the plane’s engine seemed distinctly fainthearted. They were traveling no faster than they had on the maglev or the transcontinental superhighway.
“Hal!” she said as soon as her colleague’s image appeared on the inset screen.
“What do you mean, you’ve closed the file? The tape is proof of Rappaccini’s involvement.” “He’s dead, Charlotte,” Hal repeated, calmly emphasizing the crucial word. “He’s been dead all along. I found the new identity he took up after his rejuvenation, with the aid of a much-changed appearance, as soon as I’d cut through the obfuscations in the leases pertaining to the artificial islands in the vicinity of Kauai. Actually, he’d established half a dozen fake identities under various pseudonyms, but the one he appears to have used for everyday purposes is the late Gustave Moreau. As Moreau, Biasiolo leased an islet west of Kauai; he’s been Walter Czastka’s nearest neighbor for the last forty years. He’s spent most of the last quarter century on the islet, never leaving it for more than three or four weeks at a time. According to the official records, he was alone there, but we now presume that he was taking advantage of the quarantine gifted to all Creationists in order to bring up his mother’s clone. All of this was carefully obscured, of course, but it was just a matter of digging down. We’ve touched bottom now—everything’s in place except the location and arrest of the woman.” “The late Gustave Moreau,” Charlotte repeated, glancing sideways at Oscar Wilde.
It had been Wilde, she remembered, who had said that the Moreau name was just part of a series of jokes, not worth taking seriously—but that was before they had seen the “play” whose stage set was based on a painting by the original Gustave Moreau. Was it possible, she wondered, that Biasiolo/Rappaccini/Moreau had gone out of his way to involve Wilde in this comedy simply because he, like Wilde, had taken the name of a nineteenth-century artist fascinated by the legend of Salome? “That’s right,” Hal replied patiently. “Gustave Moreau, alias Rappaccini, alias Jafri Biasiolo, died six weeks ago in Honolulu. The precise details of his conception might be lost in the mists of obscurity, but every detail of his death was scrupulously recorded before the body was released. According to the boatmaster who handled Moreau’s supplies, the corpse was shipped back to the islet—where the mysterious foster daughter presumably took delivery of it.
There’s no doubt that the dead man was Biasiolo; I’d have found the DNA match if I’d only thought to check Biasiolo’s record against the register of the dead as well as the living. It was the same error of omission I initially made with the woman’s DNA, delaying her identification as an Inacio clone.” “The comcon links to Moreau’s island haven’t been closed down, but there’s no one answering at present. The boatmaster says that he’s been shipping equipment and bales of collapsed LSP from the islet to Kauai for over a year, every time he’s made a supply drop. According to him, there’s virtually nothing left on the islet except for the ecosystem which Moreau built—and, presumably, his grave.
The UN will send a team in to examine and record the ecosystem. Under normal circumstances it would probably take three months or so to put the people together and another three before they finished the job, but in view of the biohazard aspect of the case I’ve put Regina Chai in charge and I’ve asked her to make all possible speed.