Architects of Emortality - Brian Stableford [91]
The dancer did look as if she were mesmerized, Charlotte noted. She looked as if she were lost in some kind of dream, not really aware of who she was or what she was doing. Charlotte remembered that the young woman had given a similar impression during the brief glimpse of her which Gabriel King’s cameras had caught. Was that significant—and if so, of what? The dance slowed and finally stopped.
Without speaking, Salome stood with bowed head for a few moments—and then she reached out into the shadows which crowded around her, and brought out of the darkness a silver platter, on which there rested the decapitated head of a man.
She plucked the head from its resting place, entwining her delicate fingers in its hair.
The salver disappeared, dissolved into the shadow.
Charlotte was not in the least surprised. She was quite ready for the move.
Nevertheless, she flinched. The virtual head—which she knew to be a synthesized illusion—looked more startlingly horrid than a real head would have done, by virtue of the artistry which had gone into the design of its agonized expression and the bloodiness of the crudely severed neck.
She recognized the face which the virtual head wore: it was Gabriel King’s.
The dance began again.
How differently, Charlotte wondered, was Oscar Wilde seeing this ridiculous scene? Could he see it as something daring, something monstrous, something clever? Would he be able to sigh with satisfaction, in that irritating way of his, when the performance was over, and claim that Rappaccini was a genius of many disparate talents? If he could, she thought, it would surely be pure affectation: an assertion of the virtual reality which he wore as a costume, by courtesy of the genius of cosmetic engineers. She felt certain that Michael Lowenthal would have as low an opinion of this vulgar theatricality as she had, even though he would not have anticipated the arrival of the severed head and probably would not know even now that it was supposed to be the head of Christ’s precursor, John the Baptist.
The macabre dance began to seem even more mechanical. The woman appeared to be unaware—or at least uncaring—of the fact that she was supposedly brandishing a severed head. She moved its face close to her own and then extended her arms again, all the while maintaining the same distant and dreamy expression.
Charlotte began to grow impatient—but then her attention was caught again.
Subtly, almost imperceptibly, the features of the severed head had changed. Now it was no longer the head of Gabriel King; it had acquired an Oriental cast.
Charlotte recognized Michi Urashima and suddenly became interested again, eager for any hint of further change. She was fully aware of the necessity of capturing every detail of the sequence—if it were indeed to be a sequence—with her recording devices, so she fixed her own gaze steadfastly upon the horrid head.
She had seen no picture of Paul Kwiatek as yet, so she could only infer that the third appearance presented by the luckless Baptist was his, and she became even more intent when the third set of features began to blur and shift. This, she thought, was a countdown of a rather different kind, in which the number and nature of the steps might well be crucial to the development of her investigation.
She felt a surge of triumph as she realized that this revelation, if nothing else, might vindicate her determination to accompany Oscar Wilde on his strange expedition.
She did not recognize the fourth face, but she was confident that the bubblebug set above her right eye would record it well enough for computer-aided recognition. If Hal’s investigations could be trusted, it was almost certainly the ecologist Magnus Teidemann.
How many more, she wondered, would there be? The fifth face was darker than the fourth—naturally dark, she thought, not cosmetically melanized. Men of King and Urashima’s generation rarely played games with skin color, even when they had recourse to cosmetic