Architects of Emortality - Brian Stableford [89]
She seemed to be ten or twelve meters away from the event which unfolded before her eyes, but she knew well enough that the distance—like the event itself—was an illusion. Cinematic holograms of the kind to which Michi Urashima had devoted his skills before turning to more dangerous toys were adepts in the seductive art of sensory deception.
The illusory event did not seem to be a “play” at all, according to Charlotte’s reckoning, but merely a dance, performed solo. The hologrammatic dancer was a young woman. Charlotte had no difficulty at all in recognizing her, because her bronzed features were made up to duplicate the appearance that the image’s living model had presented to Michi Urashima’s spy eyes. Her hair was different, though; it was now long, straight, and jet-black. Her costume was different too and did not seem to be the conventional artifice of a suitskin. The dancer’s bare flesh was ungenerously draped with soft, sleek, and translucent chiffons of many colors, secured at various strategic points of her lissome form by glittering gem-faced catches.
The music to which she danced—lithely and lasciviously—was raw and primitive, generated by virtual drums and reedy pipes.
“Salome,” whispered Oscar Wilde.
“What?” said Lowenthal uncomprehendingly. “I don’t—” “Later!” was Wilde’s swift response to that. “Hush now—watch!” Two days ago the name would have meant absolutely nothing to Charlotte, but thanks to the background reading she had done in the maglev couchette, she now knew that Oscar Wilde—the original Oscar Wilde—had written a play called Salome.
She had taken sufficient note of it to recall that he had written it in French, because it had been too calculatedly lewd to be licensed for the nineteenth-century English stage. She had also pressed the support key which had informed her that Salome was the name attached by legend to the daughter of Herodias, wife of King Herod of Judea, who was mentioned in two of the gospels of the New Testament, the holy book of the Christian religion.
Forearmed by this knowledge, Charlotte thought that she understood what it was that she was to watch—and now assumed that the dance would indeed turn into a play of sorts.
Her ready understanding made her feel rather smug, even though she still had no idea what the purpose of this display could possibly be. For the first time since leaving New York, Charlotte did not feel that she was trailing hopelessly in the wake of the better-informed counterpart dispatched by the Secret Masters to keep track of her investigation. She assumed that she was at least as well prepared as Michael Lowenthal for whatever coups de theatre were to follow.
As the nonexistent woman, isolated in an apparently infinite cage of darkness, swayed and gyrated to the beat of ancient drums, the first impression Charlotte received was one of utter artlessness and a pitiful lack of sophistication.
Modern dance, which had all the artifice of contemporary biotechnology as a key resource, was infinitely smoother and more complicated. But this performance, she knew, was three times an artifact. The image of the dancer was produced by the technology of the twenty-fifth century, but what was being offered to her eyes was a nineteenth-century vision of the first century before the conventional calendrical century count began. This was a half-primitive representation of the genuinely primitive: an ancient fantasy recapitulated as a fantasy of a different kind, contained by a medium which was no less fantastic, in its own marvelous fashion.
In the nineteenth century, Charlotte knew—and thought that she had at least begun to grasp—there had been something called pornography, which had to be distinguished from art, although there had been some people who considered that much art was merely pornography with pretensions and others who felt that at least some pornography was art which dared not speak its name. Nowadays, in a world where most sexual intercourse took place between individuals and clever machinery,