Architects of Emortality - Brian Stableford [119]
Now, at the age of a hundred and ninety-four, he had nothing to look back on but that determined pretense. Apart from the single experiment that had produced Jafri Biasiolo—which had to be recognized, in retrospect, as a failure—had he ever even tried to pioneer anything worth pioneering? He had tried… but what had he tried, and how hard? He had abandoned all thought of human engineering and had turned instead to the engineering of pretty flowers. He had thought himself accomplished in that safe and lucrative field, and he had been successful. Had he really been outdone by those who came after him: Oscar Wilde and his unacknowledged son? Had he somehow consented to be upstaged by a clown and a designer of funeral wreaths? Surely not. And yet… Had he been allowed to follow his experiment through, Walter thought, his career path would have been very different, and his life too—but it had been taken from him in too brutal a fashion. The unborn child had been transferred to a Helier womb, and its transference undocumented, so that no one referring to the bare record of the child’s birth would see at once that he was anything but an ordinary product of the New Reproductive System.
The “local authorities” who had discovered what he had done had died off one by one, but the young men who had helped him out, in their various mostly trivial ways, had not. Like him, they had gone unpunished; like him, they had probably pushed the memory of their involvement to the very backs of their minds and might even have contrived to forget it entirely. Only three of them had known the whole story, and not one of them knew the names of all the others who had helped him. Maria Inacio was the only one who could have listed all five names and coupled them to his. Clearly, she had—but the only person to whom she had revealed the names was her son.
Her presumably beloved son.
Her presumably uniquely beloved son. Or was that presuming too much, given that the world of 2323 had changed so drastically since the days when all women had been born like Maria Inacio, capable of conception and parturition? There was no reason, of course, why Maria Inacio or any of his accomplices should ever have spoken publicly of what they knew. None of them could have won any credit by revealing that they had been part of such a wild endeavor. It was in no one’s interest belatedly to add into the record that which had been carefully excluded therefrom—not even Jafri Biasiolo’s. Now, Biasiolo had gone to his grave and had taken King, Urashima, Kwiatek, and Teidemann with him. That only left McCandless, and McCandless did not even know that the other four had been involved. Even if McCandless were spared, or had been spared long enough to tell the police what he knew, he would be unable to connect himself to Urashima or Kwiatek. The most he might remember—and even that would require a prodigious feat of memory—was that Walter might have mentioned King’s interest, and Teidemann’s, while the two of them had walked along that lonely beach discussing a little favor which McCandless might do in order to help Walter keep a secret.
The secret was safe now. Or was it? There was one other person who might—perhaps must—have heard from Biasiolo’s lips the names of those involved and the nature of his scheme: the woman who was carrying out Rappaccini’s scheme.
And that too was a mystery.
“What, exactly, is my murder intended to achieve?” Walter murmured aloud. “What, if anything, is it intended to demonstrate?” Saying it aloud did not help. There was no answer waiting in the wings for an audible prompt.
All of it, Walter thought, is beyond understanding. If I were to wrestle with the puzzle for a hundred years, I would not get close to a solution.
He sat on his bed and stared into the depths of an empty suitcase. He had opened it with the intention of filling it with everything he needed and fleeing the island, but the plan had spontaneously aborted within