Architects of Emortality - Brian Stableford [120]
When he had been a young man, people really had packed luggage when they needed to travel; suitskins and household dispensers had not been as clever in the early twenty-third century as they were in the late twenty-fourth, and utilitarian possessions had not been so easily interchangeable. Information technology had been almost as clever, but people’s attitudes to its instrumentality had been far more cautious; even people with nothing to hide had routinely kept data bubbled up, and had carried self-contained machines wherever they went in order to access and process the bubbles. In those days, the notion of “personal property” had meant far more than it seemed to mean now.
Walter realized belatedly that there would have been no point in filling the case even if there had been anything to put into it. No matter what the UN police said, he was not going to leave. There was no need, because there was nothing left to be afraid of—not even the threat of murder.
“After all,” he murmured, “I am guilty of something. No matter how long I have lived, and no matter how much time I have wasted, I am still the man who found Maria Inacio, still the man who tried to grasp that single slender reed of opportunity… and failed.” He wondered whether there might be grounds for perverse gratitude in the fact that his unnatural son had somehow found in that unique circumstance a motive for murder. He could not fathom that motive, and it was too late now to repair the omission of a lifetime and make the attempt to communicate with his son, but at least he knew now that his son had not been as neglectful of their relationship as he. The fact that his son, having discovered the circumstances of his birth, had decided to murder his father and all of his father’s accomplices was surely proof that the matter of paternity was not irrelevant to him, and could therefore be construed as a compliment of sorts.
That, at any rate, was surely what Oscar Wilde would have said.
“Damn him to hell,” Walter murmured—meaning Oscar Wilde, not Jafri Biasiolo, alias Rappaccini.
The profoundest mystery of all, of course, was why Jafri Biasiolo, having learned from Maria Inacio the identity of his father and the circumstances of his birth, had done nothing for so long. Had he postponed his “revenge”—if “revenge” it was—until he himself was dead merely in order to avoid punishment? If so, he was worse than a coward, because his agent undoubtedly would be caught and would suffer his punishment in his stead.
It made no sense.
Walter left the bedroom and ordered a bowl of tomato soup from the dispenser in the living room. He ordered it sharp and strong, and he began to sip it while it was still too hot, blistering his upper palate. He carried on regardless, forcing the liquid down without any supplementation by bread or manna. He contemplated chasing the soup with a couple of double vodkas, but there was a difference between the stubborn recognition that he ought to eat and mere folly.
In any case, the benign machines which had colonized his stomach would not let him get drunk unless he first sent messengers to rewrite their code—and that would take hours.
He tried yet again to drag his mind back to the matter in hand. Why should his son want to kill him? Because he—the son—felt abandoned? Because the experiment had failed? Because his mother had asked him to? But why should Maria Inacio want him dead, when she had been a willing partner in the escapade? Why should she want all those who had helped to set it up to be killed along with him, when not one of them had hurt her in any way? And if Maria or her son had wanted to take revenge, why had they waited so long? Why now, when there was so little life left in any of their intended victims? If Moreau had lived thirty or forty years longer—as he certainly would have, had the experiment not failed so ignominiously—there would probably have been