Architects of Emortality - Brian Stableford [132]
“We’ve got to warn Czastka,” she said. “We have to tell him not to unseal his locks.” “That’s not necessary,” said Oscar Wilde. “He has a TV set. If he’s taking any notice of anything, he must have seen the woman release the spores—but he will not fall into the trap that claimed us. He knows, as I think he always knew, what form the final murder was always intended to take.” “What do you mean?” Charlotte asked.
“I mean that we failed to anticipate the last ironic twist and turn of Rappaccini’s plot. It’s not Walter those spores are after—it’s his ecosphere.
The woman didn’t come here to murder Walter, but to murder his world. But what will poor Walter be, when his entire Creation is gone? Or should the question be: What has he become during these last forty years, while it was taking shape? Did you not see, Charlotte? Did you not see what lay beyond the palms fringing the beach?” Charlotte remembered, vaguely, that as her helicopter had come in to land she had looked briefly sideways, scanning the trees which stood guard on the margin of the island’s vegetation. She recalled a blurred impression of lush ferny undergrowth nestled about the boles of palmlike trees. She half remembered an extensive patchwork of vivid green, flecked with darker colors: crimsons, purples, and blues deep enough to be almost black—but nothing distinct. She had looked, but she had not observed. Her attention had been fixed on the woman and the rival helicopters; she had not spared a moment’s thought for Walter Czastka’s exercise in petty godhood.
“I didn’t notice anything in particular,” she told Oscar Wilde.
“Nothing can stop them,” Oscar said, his voice reduced almost to a whisper.
“Each murderer is one hundred percent specific to its victim. Walter’s own body is safe inside the house, but that’s not what Walter cares about… it’s not what Walter is. What you didn’t even notice, in particular, was Walter Czastka. It was all that was left of him, the sum total of his life’s achievement.
Rappaccini’s instruments will devour and digest his ecosphere—every last molecule of it—and in doing so will devour Walter more absolutely than they could ever have done by transforming his flesh. I doubt that he can or will be thankful for the fact that he’s already past caring, and that the spores are carrion-feeders consuming something that had never properly come to life.” For the first time, Charlotte realized, Oscar Wilde was genuinely horrified. The infuriating equanimity which had hardly been rippled by his first sight of Gabriel King’s hideously embellished skeleton, or anything else they had seen in their travels, had at last been moved to empathetic outrage. The thought that this kind of murder might be visited upon a fellow human being—a fellow Creationist—had finally cracked his composure.
For the first time, Oscar was identifying with one of Rappaccini’s victims—ironically enough, with the one who had most aroused his contempt. He was finally seeing Rappaccini as a great criminal as well as a mediocre artist.
“Why do you say that Czastka’s miniecosphere had never properly come to life?” Charlotte asked.
“Did you really see nothing?” he countered. “Did you really not see what kind of demi-Eden Walter Czastka had been endeavoring to build? Perhaps that is the most damning indictment of all. Were you to visit my island in Micronesia, even under such stressful circumstances…” As Wilde left the sentence dangling, Charlotte tried once again to remember what she might have glimpsed—in addition to helicopters—from the corners of her eyes while she confronted the red-haired woman on the beach. There had been trees, bushes, flowers—but no animals. Nothing remarkable. Nothing which had called attention to itself. Even so, given the strength