Architects of Emortality - Brian Stableford [138]
The eyes set in these surrounding faces, which now increased in number with Charlotte’s every stride, were neither blind nor utterly stupid; nor was she prepared to invoke her habitual notions of impossibility to set a limit on the intelligence which lurked behind them. It seemed entirely likely that they might break out into cacophonous speech at any moment, and just as probable that one appointed spokesman might lower itself to the path ahead of her and offer her a formal welcome.
Posturing apes, she thought, remembering Gabriel King’s verdict.
Charlotte swallowed air, unsuccessfully trying to remove a lump of unease from her throat. She tried to ignore the staring eyes of the monkeys in order to concentrate on the gorgeous blossoms which framed their faces. They all seemed unnaturally large and bright, and every one presented a great fan or bell of petals and sepals, surrounding a complex network of stamens and compound styles.
There was no way that she could begin to take in their awesome profusion and variety. She felt that her senses were quite overloaded—and not merely her sense of sight, for the moist atmosphere was a riot of perfumes, while the murmurous humming of insect wings improvised a subtle symphony.
Is it truly beautiful? Charlotte asked herself as she studied the sculpted trees which stared at her with their myriad illusory eyes, their hectic crowns, and their luminous flowers. Or is it all fabulously mad? She did not need to consult Oscar Wilde; she knew his intellectual methods by now.
It was truly beautiful, she admitted, and fabulously mad too—and having admitted it, she let the tide of her appreciation run riot. It was more beautiful than anything she had ever seen or ever hoped to see. It was more beautiful and more intoxicating than anything anyone had ever seen or hoped to see. It was infinitely more beautiful than the ghostly echoes of Ancient Nature which modern men called wilderness. It was infinitely more beautiful and infinitely less sane than Ancient Nature itself, even in all its pre-Crash glory, could ever have been.
All this, even Charlotte’s unschooled eyes could see, was the work of a young man. However many years Rappaccini/Moreau had lived, however many he had spent in glorious isolation in the midst of all this strange fecundity, he had never grown old and never grown wise. All this was Folly: unashamed and unapologetic Folly. This was not the work of a man grown mournful in forgetfulness, obsessed with the pursuit of a vanishing past; this was the work of a man whose only thought was of the future: of novelty, of ambition, of progress. Perhaps Walter Czastka’s illegal experiment had not been such an abject failure after all; perhaps the transformation it had wrought had merely been subtler than its designer had intended.
This was Moreau’s island—morrow’s island—but the child that had been father to the man who became Moreau had itself been fathered, and created. Perhaps this ought to be reckoned Walter Czastka’s Eden too, at least as much as the one into which he had poured the futile labor of his dotage.
Charlotte no longer needed the advice of Oscar Wilde’s interpretations. Whatever resonances of the distant past might have evaded her youthful ignorance, she felt that she understood the present heart of the little world which surrounded her, and the kind of soul which hovered invisibly in every molecular skein of it all.
Yes, it was truly beautiful, and fabulous and mad—but the truth, the beauty, the fabulousness, and the madness were the work of a true Creationist.
In the heart of Moreau’s island, Charlotte expected to find a house,