Architects of Emortality - Brian Stableford [144]
“No,” she admitted, “but it’s difficult to avoid it, isn’t it? The fact that his mother went and drowned herself—deliberately or not—can’t have helped young Jafri to come to terms with his inheritance. It did make him unique, though.
From that moment on, he must have been very conscious of the fact that there was nobody else in the world quite like him. I can imagine how it might have preyed on his mind. Whom the gods destroy, they first make mad, according to Euripides.” “That’s a terrible habit you’ve picked up from Wilde,” Hal complained, referring to her use of the classical quotation.
“If, by the gods, one means the vicissitudes of chance and circumstance,” Charlotte went on unrepentantly, “then we all stand on the brink of destruction: every one of us who is not a Natural. Some of us are two hundred years old, others merely twenty, but we’re all doomed. Oscar Wilde thinks I ought to be even more fiercely resentful of that fact than he is, because my foster parents actually had the choice of going for the more expensive option and paying for my admission to the New Human Race. Wilde’s parents didn’t—and whatever Jafri Biasiolo chose to think, neither did his. Perhaps it’s just youth that prevents me from plumbing the depths of disappointment that claimed both Wilde and his good friend Rappaccini. Perhaps, in due course, the news of my destruction will actually come home to me. Tell me, Hal—how mad are you? And how long will your sanity last, while we two grow old in a world where the gradually increasing majority of our contemporaries stay young?” “We’re policemen,” Hal reminded her. “We’re the ones who are supposed to help keep the mad ones in check. Rappaccini and Wilde haven’t done us any favors there.” “We’re policemen,” Charlotte agreed. “We’re the ones who are supposed to make sure that the Gustave Moreaus and Michi Urashimas of this world keep their follies at home and their sins in virtual reality. But are we doing the world any favors?” “I think so,” Hal answered without hesitation.
“It’s a living, I suppose,” she conceded. “It’ll keep us occupied until we die, if we want it to. But Oscar Wilde was right about something else too. I won’t want to be a policeman all my life. Life’s too short, you see, for the likes of us.” “You can’t win them all,” said Hal philosophically, “no matter how closely you rub shoulders with the biggest winners there are. You have to play the hand you’re dealt by fate, as cleverly as you can.” “That’s exactly what Jafri Biasiolo must have thought,” said Charlotte, determined to have the last word, “and I suppose that’s exactly what he did, in his own peculiar fashion.” Having completed his report, Michael Lowenthal looked anxiously around the virtual conference room, trying to measure the response. There were thirteen men and women whose representative sims were arranged about the illusory table, seven of whom he did not yet know by name. Their images were as obsessively minimalist as the “room” in which they were gathered; they looked perfectly human and perfectly ordinary, except for a slight gloss that might have been a reflection of the light that bounced up at them from the polished tabletop.
According to those elements of the Hidden Archive which had so far been opened to Michael’s inquiries, there had been a time when the Secret Masters had donned all manner of gaudy raiment in order to conduct their board meetings. They had delighted in appearing to one another as gods and demons, monsters and mirror-men, and they had met at the summits of virtual peaks higher by far than the meager mountains of Earth’s crumpled crust—but that had been in the early days of their power. Now they dressed more fittingly, not out of humility but to emphasize that their assemblies were straightforwardly utilitarian, merely a matter of business.
Virtual environments were now the arena of all