Architects of Emortality - Brian Stableford [148]
Oscar did not doubt for a moment, as his greedy eyes devoured the glory of his reflection, that he would be equal to the immediate task before him. He had never been the kind of habit-dominated man who renewed his appearance only to remain confined by a straitjacket which his earlier way of life had made for him. He was no crass businessman, apt to fall back into the same old routines at the first opportunity, wearing a new face as if it were merely a mask laid over the old. Nor was he the kind of man who would go to the opposite extreme, reverting to the habits and follies of first youthfulness, playing the sportsman or the rake as though there were nothing to do with the gift of youth except recycle the same stereotyped errors. He was a man properly equipped, in heart and in mind, for serial rejuvenation. There would be time, later, for him to prove himself equal to the less immediate task of making sure that the example of Rappaccini’s reckless inventiveness did not go entirely to waste. There would even be time for him to become a murderer, if he decided that the cause of Art demanded it.
He closed his eyes for one last lingering moment while he savored the pleasures of anticipation. He pretended that the moment was an infinite one, in which a man might lose himself in the ecstasy of a chosen dream.
Such was the power of his imagination that he did indeed win a moment’s suspension of the oppressive curse of Time: a moment of true and total freedom which promised to last… certainly not forever, and certainly not long enough, but at least for a little while.
He knew that it was up to him to use that little while as fully as he could, not merely here in the great wide world whose eyes were yet upon him and whose ears were eager for his every epigram and aphorism, but also in his private island covert: his garden; his folly; his Creation. Would the world ever see his like again, once he was gone? He was, of course, an imitation, but he was an imitation which had outshone its original. The first Oscar Wilde would have approved of that, just as he would have approved of the fact that in the company of Charlotte Holmes, he had reduced her to the role of a mere Watson, while he himself had played the master of deduction.
If only there were time enough, Oscar thought, to be a thousand men instead of one or two. What a wonder I might have made of myself, had my youth been truly eternal!
End of Book
Table of Contents
Front
Investigation: Act One The Trebizond Tower
Intermission One: A Lover in the Mother's Arms
Investigation: Act Two: Across Manhattan
Intermission Two: A Pioneer on the Furthest Shore
Investigation: Act Three: Across America
Intermission Three: A Mind at the End of Its Tether
Investigation: Act Four: The Heights and the Depths
Intermission Four: A Teacher and His Pupil
Investigation: Act Five: From Land to Sea
Intermission Five: A Failed God and His Creation
Finale: Eden Approached from the East
Epilogue: Happily Ever After
End of Book