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By Root 1421 0

the decadents helped to demonstrate, or at least to reemphasize,” Oscar Wilde observed, stifling a yawn. “Human beings are strangely attracted to the horrific and the sick. We have been careful in this guilt-ridden age of dogged reparation to invent a multitude of virtual realities which serve and pander to that darker side of our nature, but we have no guarantee that it can be safely and permanently confined in that way. With or without Rappaccini’s bold example, we might well be overdue for a new wave of Eliminator activity or a new cult of hashishins. We have done sterling work in displacing our baser selves, but the impulse to sin is not something that can be entirely satisfied by vicarious fulfillment. As our indefatigable murderess has demonstrated, actual sexual intercourse is coming back into fashion. Can violence be far behind?” Charlotte turned to look out of the viewport beside her, lifting her head to stare at the patient stars. I’m a police officer, she repeated in the privacy of her own thoughts. If he’s right, it’s me, not him or Michael Lowenthal, who’ll bear the brunt of it. It might have been a symptom of her own exhaustion, but she couldn’t bring herself to believe that Wilde might be wrong, even about the likelihood of Julia Herold evading all Hal’s traps. She no longer had any faith at all in the ability of the UN and the MegaMall to prevent the late Jafri Biasiolo, alias Rappaccini, alias Gustave Moreau, from bringing this affair to the conclusion which he had predetermined, or from making as deep an impression upon memory and history as he had always intended.

Intermission Five: A Failed God and His Creation

Whenever Walter Czastka attempted to focus his attention on the practical questions which still required settlement, they slipped away. He could not confront them without first confronting the sheer enormity of the fact, unkindly revealed to him by the UN’s hapless investigators, that Jafri Biasiolo was his son.

He had, of course, always known that he had a son, but he had never made any attempt to find out what name the boy had been given following his perfectly orthodox birth. It would have been very foolish of him to make any such inquiry, given that it would have been compounding a criminal act, whose commission had been carefully covered up by calculatedly bad record keeping—but that had not been the real reason for his refusal to investigate.

The truth was, Walter admitted to himself at long last, that he simply had not cared enough. Once the experiment had been rudely taken out of his hands, he had forsaken all interest in it. The authorities had taken over, and the young Walter had reacted in a way that had been typical of the young Walter; he had resentfully washed his hands of the whole affair. The fact that he had escaped punishment for his alleged misdeed had made things worse rather than better; it had been the local authorities which had stepped in, undertaking in their wisdom to keep the “problem” confined, to enter the child into the records in a calculatedly and deceptively economical fashion: to pretend, in essence, that the whole thing had never happened, and to demand—on pain of punishment—that he should do likewise.

Presumably they had done that for the child’s sake, but all that the young Walter had seen was a brutal minimization of his heroic effort, a casual refusal to see it as anything important, anything meaningful, anything worth recording.

And his own direly youthful reaction had been: So be it; if that’s what you think, you’re welcome to it. You want pretense, I’ll pretend—and I’ll never try to change the world again. From now on, the world can rot.

He saw, now that he was forced to see, that it had been a petty and childish reaction—but he had been no more than a child.

Perhaps, he thought, pettiness was something he had not entirely grown out of, even now. What had become of his once-grand ambitions, his once-fervent lust to be a pioneer? He had followed through with his threat, and had let the world’s corruption alone, leaving it to fester. He had pretended,