Architects of Emortality - Brian Stableford [67]
Charlotte held the spray gun ready, her finger on the trigger.
The ribbon yielded easily to Wilde’s quick fingers, and he drew it away. The lid lifted quite easily, and Wilde laid it to one side while he, Lowenthal, and Charlotte looked down at what was in the box.
It was, as Charlotte had half expected since she had first seen the shape and size of the container, a Rappaccini wreath. Its base was a very intricate tangle of dark green stalks and leaves. The stalks were thorny, the leaves slender and curly. There was an envelope in the middle of the display, and around the perimeter were thirteen black flowers like none she had ever seen before. They looked rather like black daisies—but there was something about them that struck Charlotte as being not quite right.
Oscar Wilde extended an inquisitive forefinger and was just about to touch one of the flowers when it moved.
“Look out!” said Michael Lowenthal and Reginald Quan, in unison.
As if the first movement had been a kind of signal, all the “flowers” began to move. It was a most alarming effect, and Wilde reflexively snatched back his hand as Charlotte pressed the trigger of the spray gun and let fly.
When the polymer hit them, the creatures’ movements became suddenly jerky. They had been moving fairly slowly, in random directions, but now they thrashed and squirmed in obvious distress. The limbs which had mimicked sepals struggled vainly for purchase upon the thorny green rings on which they had been mounted.
Now that Charlotte could count them she was able to see that each of the creatures had eight excessively hairy legs. What had seemed to be a cluster of florets was a much embellished thorax.
They were not perfectly camouflaged; it was simply that she had been expecting to see flowers, not spiders, and Charlotte’s expectation had enabled them to get away with their masquerade for a few seconds. She was perversely gratified to notice that Michael Lowenthal’s eagerness to get in on the act had evaporated; he had taken a big stride backward and now appeared to be awkwardly caught between conflicting desires. Now that the man from the MegaMall had a hypothesis at stake, he was desperately anxious to keep up with the data flow, but he was clearly arachnophobic. Either he had undergone some unfortunate formative experience while in the care of his foster parents or the Zaman transformation had not tidied every last vestige of deficiency from the human genome.
“Poor things,” said Oscar Wilde as he watched the spiders writhe in desperate distress. “They’ll asphyxiate, you know, with that awful stuff all over them.” “I may have just saved your life,” observed Charlotte dryly. “Those things are probably poisonous.” “My dear Charlotte,” said the geneticist tiredly, “the last human being to die of a spider bite did so more than five hundred years ago—and that was the result of a totally unexpected allergic reaction.” “It was a perfectly ordinary spider too,” Charlotte retorted. “Those aren’t. If this murderer can make man-eating plants, he can make deadly spiders.” “Perhaps,” Wilde conceded. “But this little performance was no attempted murder.
It’s a work of art—presumably an exercise in symbolism.” “According to you,” she said, “the two are not incompatible.” “Not even the most reckless of dramatists,” said Wilde, affecting a terrible weariness, “would destroy his audience at the end of act two of a play that is clearly intended to extend over twice or three times that number. I am quite certain that I am safe from any direct threat to my well-being, at least until the final curtain falls. I am almost certain that the same immunity will extend to anyone accompanying me on