Architects of Emortality - Brian Stableford [140]
Charlotte looked around, wondering where the red-haired woman might be—and wondering, now, exactly what the red-haired woman might be. She was a clone of Maria Inacio, and yet not quite a clone. Some of her genes had been modified by engineering while she was still an ovum—just as some of her son/father’s genes had been modified by the young Walter Czastka. She, like her own Creator, had been designed by a man trying to become like a god, from common chromosomal clay—but Gustave Moreau must have done everything within his power to surpass Walter Czastka in that regard. The woman must surely be a Natural, in the limited sense that Michael Lowenthal was, but how much more had Moreau tried to make of her? Charlotte remembered some words that Moreau, as Herod, had quoted at Oscar Wilde, teasing him with the charge that even he could not have encountered them before: “Mortality, Behold and Fear! What a change of flesh is here!” But the woman was a multiple murderess; when the law took its course, her career would surely be subject to a demolition as comprehensive and as brutal as the one to which this exotic demi-Eden would be subject.
Charlotte knew, as she framed that thought, that it might not be quite as simple as that. Oscar Wilde, for one, would fight for the preservation of Moreau’s island—and how many allies would he find among the millions of watchers who were waiting for her to locate and arrest her suspect? How many allies might the lovely murderess find, even in a world where death was regarded with such intense loathing and fascination? While Michael Lowenthal was still making shift to avoid Oscar Wilde’s stare, Charlotte moved away from them to make a tour of the massive mausoleum.
It required only half a dozen steps to bring her quarry into view. The fugitive was sitting on the pediment on the further side of the tomb, facing a crowd of leaping lions and prancing unicorns, vaulting hippogriffs and rearing cobras, all of them hewn in living wood beneath a roof of rainbows. Hundreds of man-faced monkeys were solemnly observing the scene.
The woman was quite still, and her vivid green eyes, which matched the color of the foliage of one particular tree which stood directly before her, were staring vacuously into space. It was as if she could not even see the fantastic host which paraded itself before her. Her arms were slightly spread, the palms of her hands upturned, each balancing a different object—but it was not her hands which drew Charlotte’s gaze.
The woman was quite bald, and her skull was studded with silver contact points.
The hair that the woman had worn throughout her murderous odyssey lay like stranded seaweed upon the white marble between her feet—but its strands were still stirring like stately ripples in a quiet pond, and wherever it caught a shaft of sunlight it glittered, showing all its myriad colors in rapid sequence, from polished silver through amber gold and flaming red to burnt sienna and raven black.
The stars in the hairless skull glistened too, in the reflected light of the sun. Charlotte could hardly help but be reminded of the cruder decorations which Michi Urashima had accumulated on his own skull, but she knew that these must be different. Urashima was a self-made man, who had found his true vocation late in life. This person had been born to her heritage; her brain had been designed to be fed, and not with any ordinary nourishment.
In the woman’s left hand lay a single flower: a gorgeously gilded