Architects of Emortality - Brian Stableford [27]
No man or woman has been born from a human womb for nearly two centuries—longer than that if the official records are believable—but the womb is still a temple of life, and its rites of approach are Gaea’s rites. This is not merely love but worshipful love, the antithesis of ignorance, stupidity, and greed.
Magnus hated ignorance, stupidity, and greed. All wise men, he supposed, must hate ignorance, stupidity, and greed. Wisdom was love of knowledge, intelligence, and moderation. Wisdom was thinking in terms of embraces, and not in terms of conquests. He did not think of the wondrous woman as a conquest, and he was certain that she did not think of herself as having been conquered.
When he kissed her before lowering her onto the narrow bed, Magnus thought for a fleeting instant that he might have known the young woman before—that somewhen in the mists of time which had clouded his memory over the years, he had caught a glimpse of a supremely beautiful face almost exactly like hers—but he dismissed the thought. She was far too young, and her face had clearly been somatically modified to bring the features into line with one of the so-called seven archetypes of female beauty. He had long grown used to the silly tricks which memory sometimes played, and was too wise to let them bother him unduly.
The kiss was delicious, the taste of it far from merely utilitarian.
Before the sun rose again, Magnus Teidemann was dead.
He had died peacefully, and happily, in the forest which he loved. Because it was wilderness, to which human access was, by necessity, very strictly controlled, no one found his body for a long time. No alarm had been raised, and no one thought it in the least odd that they could not get access to him via his answering machine.
By the time his body was discovered, the cunning flowers which had transmuted his flesh into their own had withered and died. The humus had reclaimed them, and in reclaiming them had reclaimed him. He was no longer alien to the forest; he had been assimilated. It was the end for which he had yearned.
Of all the kindly murders which the innocent flowers and their innocent host were to commit, this was both the first and the most generous.
Investigation: Act Two: Across Manhattan
As soon as the elevator door slid shut, Oscar Wilde seemed to take it for granted that Charlotte’s interrogation had been temporarily suspended. Had she been quick enough to seize the initiative, Charlotte might have established that no such suspension had been granted, but she was not. While she paused to collect her thoughts, Wilde turned his attention to Michael Lowenthal.
“I hope you won’t think me impolite, Michael,” said Wilde, “but I believe you are what common parlance calls a Natural, or a member of the New Human Race.” “Yes, I am,” Lowenthal agreed in a slightly surprised tone. “I congratulate you on your perspicacity. Most people can’t identify a Zaman transformation by means of superficial appearances.” “I’m something of a connoisseur of authentic youth,” Wilde admitted. “Charlotte is, of course, a fine specimen of the Old Race, but I could never doubt that she and I are of the same sad kind. Perhaps you think that I am too old to share her inevitable regret that her foster parents did not seize the opportunity of subjecting her embryo to the Zaman transformation, but I am not. I have been a genetic engineer all my life, you see, born in the days of prejudice. Like others of my kind, I have always known the perversity and tragedy of the folly which long withheld the generosity of the Finest Art from the most precious flower of all: the flower of human youth.“ “You are not so very old, Dr. Wilde,” said Lowenthal politely.
“Call me Oscar,” said Wilde reflexively. “Indeed I am not—but my youth has been hard-won. I have had to renew it three times over. Having been immunized against the ravages of age from the moment of conception,