Architects of Emortality - Brian Stableford [58]
While Oscar ordered eggs duchesse for breakfast, Charlotte activated the wallscreen beside their table and summoned up the latest news. The fact of Gabriel King’s death was recorded, as was the fact of Michi Urashima’s, but there was nothing about the exotic circumstances. She was momentarily puzzled by the fact that no one had yet connected the two murders or latched onto the possible biohazard, but she realized that the MegaMall’s interest in the affair had advantages as well as disadvantages. The MegaMall owned the casters, and until the MegaMall decided that discretion was unnecessary, the casters would keep their hoverflies on a tight rein.
“Where’s Lowenthal?” she asked. “Still sleeping the sleep of the just, I suppose.” She wondered briefly whether she ought perhaps to wait for the man from the MegaMall before talking to Wilde about the investigation, but figured that it was up to her, as the early bird, to go after any available worms as quickly and as cleverly as she could. Unfortunately, she wasn’t at all sure how to start.
“My dear Charlotte,” said Oscar, while she dithered, “you have the unmistakable manner of one who woke up far too early after working far too hard the night before.” “I couldn’t sleep,” she told him. “I took a couple of boosters before breakfast—once the croissants get my digestive system in gear they’ll clear my head.” Wilde shook his head. “I am not normally a supporter of nature,” he said. “No one who looks twenty when he is really a hundred and thirty-three can possibly be less than worshipful of the wonders of medical science—but in my experience, maintaining one’s sense of equilibrium with the aid of drugs is a false economy.
We must have sleep in order to dream, and we must dream in order to discharge the chaos from our thoughts, so that we may reason effectively while we are awake. Your namesake, I know, was in the habit of taking cocaine, but I always thought it implausible of Conan Doyle to suggest that it enhanced his powers of ratiocination.” Charlotte had already taken note of Oscar Wilde’s date of birth while researching his background, and the fact that he had mentioned his age offered her an opportunity to ask what seemed to be a natural—if not conspicuously relevant—question. “If you’re only a hundred and thirty-three,” she said, “what on earth possessed you to risk a third rejuvenation? Most people that age are still planning their second.” “The risks of core-tissue rejuvenation mostly derive from the so-called Miller effect,” Wilde observed equably. “In that respect, the number of rejuvenations is less significant than the absolute age of the brain. Given the limitations of cosmetic enhancement, I felt that an increased risk of losing my mind was amply compensated by the certainty of replenishing my apparent youth. I shall certainly attempt a fourth rejuvenation before I turn one hundred and eighty, and if I live to be two hundred and ten I shall probably try for the record. I could not live like Gabriel King, so miserly in mind that I allowed my body to shrivel like the legendary Tithonus.” “He didn’t look so bad, until the flowers got him,” Charlotte observed.
“He looked old,” Wilde insisted. “Worse than that, he looked contentedly old. He had ceased to fight against the ravages of fate. He had accepted the world as it is—perhaps even, if such a horror could be imagined, had actually become grateful for the condition of the world.” Charlotte remembered that Wilde had not yet arrived at the Trebizond Tower when Hal had forwarded King’s last words, which had carried a different implication.
She did not attempt to correct him; he had turned his attention to his eggs duchesse.
It was a pity, Charlotte thought as Colorado flew past, that there was no longer a quicker way to travel between New York and San Francisco. She had an uncomfortable feeling that she might end up chasing a daisy chain of murders all around the globe, always twenty-four hours behind the breaking news—but the maglev was the