Architects of Emortality - Brian Stableford [8]
As the screen above the elevator began to count down the car’s descent, Charlotte turned back to the screen beside the apartment door, which was now occupied by an unsimulated image of her superior officer.
“I’ve enhanced the audiotapes the team transmitted from the apartment’s ears,” Hal said laconically. “I’m ninety-nine percent sure that we have all the subvocalized remarks. The first of the three he muttered before the girl came in was ‘The age of the human herbivores; the cud-chewing era.’ The second was ‘Posturing apes in fancy dress.’ The third was ‘The devastation of the wild.’ The one that was an aside to his conversation was ‘That posturing ape,’ first word stressed—presumably referring to the man she named, Oscar Wilde. It’s possible, of course, given that he seems to have had posturing apes on his mind, that the previous reference was to the same person, but the fact that he said ‘the wild’ makes it unlikely. It’s also possible, I suppose, that the three remarks might be symptomatic of a suicidal turn of mind, but all the other evidence I’ve looked at seems to be against that.” “Do you have Wilde’s number?” Charlotte asked.
“Already tried it,” Hal told her, in a tone which implied that she should have realized that. “The sim which answered says that he’s here in New York, but that he’s currently in transit and never takes calls in cabs because it’s unaesthetic.” What is it with these flower designers? Charlotte wondered. “I’ll bet the sim was a Stone Age sloth, carefully designed for maximum stupidity,” she said.
“On the contrary,” said Hal. “It was a medium-level silver, as clever as any answering machine I’ve ever had occasion to speak to, but it’s still a slave to its programming, and it hasn’t been programmed with the authority to break in while the Young Master is in a cab.” “The Young Master?” Charlotte queried.
“The silver’s phrase, not mine,” said Hal. “I’ll get through to him as soon as I can—and if he still feels like playing the winsome eccentric I’ll get tough with him. In the meantime, the public eyes are beginning to turn up a lot of tentative matches to the girl’s face—far too many and much too tentative for my liking. It’s bad enough that she’s been sculpted to a standard model without her having changed key details of her appearance both before and after leaving the building. If she did carry the murder weapon in, she was almost certainly more than a mere mule. With luck, I’ll have the case cracked in a matter of hours, once the moonwalkers have run tests on the bedsheets. She can hide her idealized face from the street’s eyes, but she can’t hide her DNA.” “Great,” said Charlotte. “At the pace the boys and girls inside are working, they should be able to get the data to you by the middle of next week.” “Don’t worry,” Hal said. “It’ll all open up once we have the forensics. It’s just a matter of starting with the right data—at the moment I’m fiddling around the periphery. With average luck, we’ll have it all wrapped up before the story leaks out to the vidveg.” When Hal broke the connection Charlotte went to the window at the end of the corridor in order to look out over the city. She was on the thirty-ninth floor of Trebizond Tower, and there was quite a view.
Central Park looked pretty much the way it must have looked for centuries, carefully restored to its antediluvian glory, but the decaying skyline was very much a product of the moment. She wondered whether the fact that Gabriel King had been in New York to execute the demolition of the old city might have provided the motive for his murder. Some Manhattanites had become very angry indeed when the Decivilizers had finally claimed the jewel in their crown, and murder was said to be the daughter of obsession.
There was a funeral procession making its patient way along the southern flank of the park. The traffic must have been backed up