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By Root 1434 0

off—however this works out, we’re not going to look good. In fact, we’re going to look very, very bad. If she were to succeed in killing Czastka too…” “Have you considered evacuating him?” “Of course I have—but I can’t do it against his will. He’s sealed himself in. If I ordered the helicopters to land and seize him, I’d look even more stupid than I already do if they couldn’t actually get to him to execute the order. He really does seem to be intent on securing his own destruction. He may not actually want to die, but he’s perversely determined not to be saved.” “As he said before, all he actually needs to do is to keep the house sealed,” Charlotte pointed out. “If we can’t get in, neither can she. He must know that—he’s perfectly safe, as long as he doesn’t open the door to her, unless she has an atom bomb as well as a submarine. If all she has is nanotech, it’s his against hers—and his ought to win, given that they have the home-ground advantage.” “It all sounds so simple, put like that,” Hal agreed. Charlotte could tell that he had no more confidence in the calculation than she had. All the evidence said that the woman had no chance at all of getting to Czastka, but even Hal couldn’t quite believe that Rappaccini’s grand plan was going to fizzle out into a soggy anticlimax.

“We located the real Julia Herold, by the way,” Hal continued. “She’s a dead ringer for the fake. She really was on Kauai while the Inacio clone was making her way around the world—and, for that matter, while her double was carefully forging a relationship with Stuart McCandless in her name. She spends a lot of time in VE, and she’s rather careless about security of her sims and systems. If you want more details, I’ve downloaded everything to the copter that’s waiting on Kauai—and to the machine in front of you, although you won’t have time to look at it before you land. It’s all in place: every detail of the woman’s journey; every dollar of the money trail. It’s a magnificent job of case building, although no one will ever believe that, given that we failed to apprehend the killer on Kauai.” Charlotte wished that she were capable of feeling more sympathy for Hal’s plight, but she still had her own to worry about—and she was distracted by the fact that Michael Lowenthal had just risen from his bunk. The emissary from Olympus climbed into the seat formerly occupied by Oscar Wilde and said: “What’s new?” Charlotte took a deep breath and began to tell him.

* * * “This is the text on the condolence card the woman left at McCandless’s house,” Charlotte told Michael Lowenthal, displaying the words on the screen.

Farewell, happy fields, Where joy forever dwells! Hail, horrors! hail, Infernal world! and thou, profoundest Hell, Receive thy new possessor, one who brings A mind not to be changed by place or time. The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.

“Very apt,” said Lowenthal dryly. “Should we wake Dr. Wilde, do you think, and plead with him for an interpretation?” It was a rhetorical question.

“It’s from Paradise Lost,” Charlotte said.

“John Milton,” Lowenthal was quick to say, avid to seize a rarely accessible corner of the intellectual high ground. “Not the nineteenth century. Earlier.” “The seventeenth,” said a muffled voice from the rear. “Written then, allegedly, to ‘justify the ways of God to men’—but by the nineteenth, some had begun to adjudge that Milton had been of the Devil’s party without knowing it and had made a hero of Satan and a villain of God in spite of his own intention. Which passage is it, exactly, that Rappaccini has taken the trouble to quote?” Charlotte was tempted to tell Wilde to come forward and read it for himself, but did not want to be churlish. She read it aloud.

“It hardly needs interpretation,” Wilde observed—not altogether accurately, if Michael Lowenthal’s expression could be taken as a guide. Charlotte understood what Wilde meant, though. The words could be read as a valedictory speech by Rappaccini/Moreau: a warning, a threat, and a statement of intent.

“When this