Architects of Emortality - Brian Stableford [137]
The animals whose shapes were reproduced by the trunks of the trees all had open eyes, which seemed to look at Charlotte no matter where she was in relation to them. Although she knew that they were all quite blind, she could not help feeling discomfited by their seeming curiosity.
Her own curiosity, however, was more than equal to theirs.
Every tree of the forest was in flower, and every flower was as bizarre as the plant which bore it. All possible colors were manifest in the blossoms, but there was a noticeable preponderance of reds and blacks. Butterflies and hummingbirds moved ceaselessly through the branches, each one wearing its own coat of many colors, and the tips of the branches moved as if stirred by a breeze, reaching out toward these visitors, seemingly yearning to touch their tiny faces.
There was no wind; the branches moved by their own volition, according to their own mute purposes.
Charlotte could see electronic hoverflies mingling with Gustave Moreau’s insects, and ponderous flitter-bugs jostling for position with the tinier hummingbirds. No predators came to harass them, although there were larger birds concealed by the foliage, audible as they moved from branch to branch and occasionally visible in brief flashes of vivid coloration.
Charlotte knew that much of what she saw was manifestly illegal. Creationists were restricted by all manner of arcane regulations in the engineering of insects and birds, lest their inventions should stray to pollute the artwork of other engineers or to intermingle with the more extensive ecosystems of the world at large. Most Creationists undoubtedly took some liberties to which they were not theoretically entitled—even Walter Czastka had probably been guilty of that, no matter how dull his efforts had seemed to Oscar Wilde—but Charlotte had no doubt that when the final accounting of Gustave Moreau’s felonies and misdemeanors was complete, he would turn out to have been the most prolific as well as the most versatile criminal who had ever lived upon the surface of the earth.
All of this would be destroyed, of course—as Moreau must have known when he had planned it and while he built it. He had given birth to an extraordinary fantasy, fully aware that it would be ephemeral; but instead of leaving it to the scrupulously scientific attentions of a UN inspection team—who would have filed their records away and left them moldering in some quiet corner of the Webworld—he had found a way to command that rapt attention be paid to it by every man, woman, and child in the world. Only thus, he must have decided, could due recognition be given to his awesome genius: his talent as an artist and engineer, and his ingenuity as a social commentator.
Had the designer of this alien ecosphere, Charlotte wondered, dared to hope that his contemporaries might recognize and reckon him a true Creationist, to be set as far above the petty laws of humankind as the obsolete gods of old had once been set? Had he dared to believe that even the vidveg might condone what he had done, once they saw it in all its glory? No, she concluded. Even Rappaccini/Moreau could not have credited the vidveg with that much imagination.
Charlotte soon perceived that Moreau’s creative fecundity had not been content with birds and insects. There were monkeys in the trees too: monkeys which did not hide or flee from the invaders of their private paradise, but came instead to peep out at them from the gaudy crowns and stare with patient curiosity at their visitors.
The monkeys were not huge; none was more than a meter from top to toe, and all had the slender bodies of gibbons and lorises—but they had the wizened faces of old men. Nor was that appearance merely the generic resemblance which had once been manifest in the faces of certain long-extinct New World monkeys; these faces were actual human faces, writ small. Charlotte recognized a family of Czastkas,