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By Root 1391 0

Wainewright was a critic and murderer who was the subject of an essay by my namesake called ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’—an exercise partly inspired by Thomas De Quincey’s more celebrated essay ‘Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.’ I fear that these aliases are little more than a series of jokes—decorative embellishments of the unfolding plot.” “The names don’t matter,” said Hal. “What matters is where the money that fed the accounts originated, and where it goes when it makes its exits. I already have surfers going through the books of Rappaccini Inc. with a fine-toothed comb. At present, the money trail seems more likely to deliver the goods than the picture searches. With luck, I’ll eventually be able to find out where the man who used to use the Rappaccini name and our mysterious nonexistent woman have their basic supplies delivered—food, equipment, and so on—and when I know that, I’ll know where they are, and what names they use when they’re not using silly pseudonyms. Then we can pick them both up and charge them.” “What about this brainwave of Lowenthal’s?” Charlotte asked—having reported the conjecture while the maglev was pulling into the San Francisco station. “Have you found any evidence to suggest that Czastka might have set up the Biasiolo identity?” “Not yet,” said Hal noncommittally. Charlotte guessed that Hal wasn’t taking Lowenthal’s hypothesis any more seriously than Wilde was. Although he was reluctant to say so, Hal was presumably still beavering away at the brainfeed link—which could easily extend from King, Urashima, and Rappaccini to Kwiatek, but not to Czastka. Or to Wilde, for that matter, Charlotte admitted to herself.

Despite her aggressive question about whether he had ever used brainfeed equipment, she had found not the slightest shred of evidence that he had ever had a substantial financial or practical interest in the field.

The car which awaited them in the underground garage was roomy and powerful.

Once it was free of the city’s traffic-control computers it would be able to zip along the transcontinental at two hundred kilometers per hour. If they were headed for Alaska, Charlotte thought, they’d be there sometime around midnight They’d need a couple of thermal suits.

Michael Lowenthal opened the door to the seat which faced the driver’s control panel and politely stood aside, offering it to her—but she remembered their journey across Manhattan only too well. She shook her head, leaving him no alternative but to take the front himself while Charlotte got into the rear with Oscar Wilde.

As soon as they were all settled, Wilde activated the car’s program. The car slid smoothly up the ramp and into the street.

Michael Lowenthal, who had skipped breakfast on the maglev in order to lay his beautiful hypothesis before the stern gaze of Oscar Wilde, called up a menu from the car’s synthesizer and looked it over unappreciatively.

“I fear,” said Wilde as he scanned the duplicate which had appeared in the panel on the back of the seat in front of him, “that we are in for a rather Spartan trip.” Most hire cars only stocked manna with a choice of artificial flavorings; this one was a deluxe model, but it didn’t have anything else to offer.

“The time to worry about that,” Charlotte said tersely, “is when we reach Guadalajara.” She had taken note of the fact that the car had turned southeast, heading for intersection nine of the transcontinental instead of eight. Wherever they were headed, it was not Alaska.

Lowenthal was obviously used to better fare than the car had to offer; he decided not to bother with breakfast after all.

Charlotte plugged her beltphone into the screen mounted in the back of the drive compartment and began scrolling through more data that Hal’s silvers had collated while she had been otherwise occupied. The artificial geniuses had found a great many links between Gabriel King and Michi Urashima to add to the coincidence of their possible attendance at the same university—more links, in fact, than anyone could reasonably have expected, even allowing for the fact that