Architects of Emortality - Brian Stableford [142]
“It was still murder,” was all that Lowenthal could find to say.
“Of course it was,” said Oscar Wilde. “It was a perfect murder—perhaps the only perfect murder the world has seen, as yet.”
Epilogue: Happily Ever After
In Hal Watson’s crowded workroom in the bowels of the UN building in New York—whose upper stories were already decaying to ash and dust—Sergeant Charlotte Holmes faced her superior officer with all the calm and confidence she could muster.
“Walter Czastka died of natural causes,” Hal told her. “The death certificate makes conventional reference to general neuronal failure, which usually means that the nanotech patchwork holding the hindbrain together couldn’t maintain the feedback loops necessary to sustain motor function.” “Usually?” Charlotte queried.
“Regina says that the wastage in Czastka’s brain was more extensive than usual, and more evident in the cerebrum.” “What does that imply?” “In Regina’s words: ‘If you set aside all the jargon, he just gave up on himself and faded out.’ There’s no hard evidence in his own files to prove that in 2322 he carried out a series of illegal genetic manipulations on egg cells which had been taken from Maria Inacio’s unexpectedly active womb and fertilized by his own spermatozoa, but I’ve dipped into the private files of those officers of Wollongong University who could have been involved in hushing it up. There’s more than enough buried there to support Wilde’s conjectures. I’m still excavating it, but all bureaucrats tend to be careful in the maintenance of their private records, however fast and loose they play with official documents.
Given that Czastka’s death wasn’t suspicious, there’s no need for us to publish our findings, but I’ve found sufficient confirmation of the factual allegations contained in Moreau’s scroll to be sure that they’re true.” “Information which, being good bureaucrats, we’ll naturally commit to our own records, for the edification of future excavators,” Charlotte said.
Hal didn’t rise to that. “I have hard evidence of the peripheral involvement of at least twelve others in Czastka’s experiment. All of them, including the murder victims, are commemorated in the faces of the monkeys on Moreau’s island; none are still alive. That’s not to say that it was an organized conspiracy; Czastka appears to have recruited them as and when he needed them, and it’s probable that none of them knew exactly how many others were involved, or how.
The scroll left behind by Gustave Moreau is based on hearsay, of course, but it confirms that Maria Inacio knew more than anyone else—except Walter himself—about the progress of the experiment and the subsequent cover-up.
Moreau’s account of what she told him confirms the private notes made by the dean of Walter’s faculty and the assistant registrar who arranged the transfer of the embryo from her womb to the artificial one.
“There’s no detailed map of the transformations that Walter carried out on the embryo formed from the ovum he took from Inacio’s womb and combined with his own sperm, but he was definitely trying to engineer it for longevity. It’s explicitly stated that he worked at several of the key loci to which Zaman later applied his own transformations. We’ll never know how close he came to succeeding, but he would have been extremely lucky to hit on the right substitutions first time out, without the benefit of the preparatory animal work that Zaman and his peers were able to do.” “If he’d succeeded,” Charlotte observed, “we might now be attributing the New Human Race to the Czastka transformation.” “But he didn’t.” “The photographs of Jafri Biasiolo in different phases of his career as Rappaccini that you showed Wilde when I first brought him in suggest that what Czastka did must have had some effect,” Charlotte reminded him. “If he’d carried on—if he’d kept track of Biasiolo and tried again—it would have been hard going; but he might have given us the New Human Race fifty or