• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1395 0

no one left for him to murder. Only luck had preserved all five of the people who had given Walter the resources with which to work, a place to hide his experimental subject, and the alibis he had needed to keep his endeavors secret. Only luck had preserved him long enough to outlive his son—if his current state of body and mind could be thought of as “preservation.” Perhaps that was what Moreau resented: the fact that Walter and his five accomplices had all outlived him, when the whole point of his creation was that he was supposed to outlive them. Perhaps, if he had been a better artist, a better Creationist, he would not have failed. Perhaps that was what his forsaken son had been unable to forgive him. Perhaps that was why his forsaken son had said to himself: when I die, you must come with me, for it was your failure that determined the necessity of my death. That almost made sense. Could it also begin to make sense of the fact that the instrument of the son’s murderous intent was a replicate of his mother? The game of God, Walter reflected, must have been the only one he had wanted to play when he was young and devoid of pretense. Perhaps, when he had been forced to put that game aside he had put aside playfulness itself. Perhaps, thereafter, he had presented to the world at large the perfect image of a man who was down-to-earth and matter-of-fact. Everyone thought of him as a realist: a man of method, a hardheaded person without any illusions about himself or anything else. He had lived that pretense for nearly two hundred years—unless, of course, it was no pretense at all, and he really was down-to-earth and matter-of-fact, hard of head and hard of heart, incapable of play.

Walter remembered the Great Exhibition held in Sydney in 2405, when he had seen the work exhibited by Oscar Wilde and Rappaccini and said to himself: These idle egotists can only play; they have not the capacity for real work. They are vulgar showmen whose only real talent is for attracting attention. Even their names are jokes. They are the froth on the great tide of biotechnics, whose gleam and glitter will adorn the moment while the real power of the surge will come from honest, clear-sighted laborers like myself. I am the one who has the intelligence and the foresight to play the game of God as it was meant to be played.

In the ninety years that had passed since the days of the Great Exhibition, Walter had gradually come to understand the frailty of that hope. Here, on his Pacific atoll, he was the unchallenged lord of all he surveyed, with none to stay his hand or resist his edict, and yet… He had set out to build a Garden of Eden, but the Tree of Knowledge was not here, nor even the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. When he was dead—which would presumably be fairly soon, whether or not Gustave Moreau’s murderous scheme could be interrupted—people would be able to visit his island, and say: “Yes, this is Walter’s work.” If they were generous of spirit, they might say: “Look at the sense of order, the cleanness of line, the careful simplicity. No wild extravagance for Walter, no illusions. Method, neatness, economy—those were always Walter’s watchwords.” And if they were not so generous? “Dull, dull, dull.” In the quiet arena of his mind, Walter could almost hear the voices which would deliver that deadly verdict. Oscar Wilde would state it much more elaborately, of course, while waving his pale left hand in a dismissive arc. Few people would pay any attention to Oscar—people never did pay attention to mere caricatures—and no one would ever believe for a second that he, dear Walter, would care a fig what Oscar Wilde might think of his work, but the majority opinion was not the important one.

“What do I think?” Walter asked himself, knowing that that was the real heart of the matter. “Now that it’s all coming out, now that it can’t be kept inside anymore, what do I think? What have I made of my life and my work, and how does it compare with what I might have made? That’s the thing that has to be decided.” It sounded so simple, but