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By Root 1382 0

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.

“What a waste it all was!” Wilde paused again, but only for effect. This time, it wasn’t Charlotte who made haste to interrupt him. “You can’t compare the present era to the one that preceded the Crash, Dr. Wilde,” said Michael Lowenthal, the agent of the MegaMall. “There’s no prospect whatsoever of another ecocatastrophe. Everything is under control now.” “Exactly so,” said Wilde. “The old world ended with a bang and a whimper. Ours will not. Ours is far more likely to end in Hardinist stasis, in perfect order, with everything under control.” “That’s not what I meant, and you know it!” Lowenthal protested. “The masters of the MegaMall like change. They need change. Change is what keeps the marketplace healthy. There has to be demand. There has to be innovation. There has to be growth. There has to be progress. But…” “But it all has to be managed” Oscar Wilde finished for him. “It has to be measured and orderly. Change is good but chaos is evil. Growth is good but excess must be stifled. There are still those among us who cannot agree. Few of them are authentic revolutionaries—even the most extreme Green Zealots and Decivilizers, like the Eliminators and Robot Assassins before them, probably ought to be reckoned clowns and jesters rather than serious anarchists—but they still desire to make their dissenting voices heard. I think you will agree that whatever the outcome of this comedy may be, Rappaccini will certainly succeed in being heard. When dawn breaks, five men will be dead and a sixth will be under sentence of execution. A vast swarm of helicopters and hoverflies will be headed for Walter Czastka’s island, avid to watch the denouement of the drama at close quarters. Can Walter be saved? Can the woman be apprehended? What has been done, and how, and why? Above all else: why? “Perhaps, when all is said and done, the question is the answer; perhaps the sole purpose of every move in this remarkable play is to force us to recognize that it is, indeed, play. At any rate, my friends, we are no longer an audience of three: tomorrow, we will merely be the avant-garde of an audience of billions. Tomorrow, everyone will listen, even if hardly anyone will actually understand, while Rappaccini informs us, in the most grandiosely bizarre way he can contrive, that our culture too has reached its terminus, and that it is on the brink of being interred forever, mourned for a while, and then forgotten.” “It’s nonsense!” Michael Lowenthal protested. “Everything worthwhile will be preserved. Everything!” “But you and those like you, Michael, will be the ones who decide what is worthwhile,” Wilde pointed out. “Even if men like Rappaccini and I were to agree with you, we should still feel the need to mourn the loss of the superfluous.

What Rappaccini is trying to make us understand, I suppose, is the horror of a Hardinist world of carefully stewarded property, inhabited entirely by the old.

That might, after all,