Architects of Emortality - Brian Stableford [92]
She recognized the sixth face, though. She had seen it on a screen within the last few hours, looking considerably older and more ragged than its manifestation here but unmistakably the same.
It was Walter Czastka.
Charlotte remembered belatedly that Oscar Wilde had been about to say something about Czastka’s role in this affair when he had been interrupted by sudden anxiety about the speed of the hire car. Had he been about to confound Michael Lowenthal with the judgment that Czastka, far from being the murderer, must have been marked down as a victim? Could this be taken as proof that Czastka was not, after all, the man behind Rappaccini, but merely one more of Rappaccini’s chosen victims? Or might it simply be one more joke, one more bluff? She tried to pull herself together. The real significance of this revelation, surely, was that if Walter Czastka had been marked down as a victim, he might yet be saved—as might the mysterious fifth man. Czastka, at least, had been alive not much more than an hour ago, even though he had stopped answering his phone as soon as Oscar Wilde had talked to him.
There was no seventh face. Salome slowed in her paces, faced the sofa where Oscar and Charlotte sat watching, and took her bow.
Then the lights came on.
Charlotte had assumed that the performance was over, and its object attained, but she was wrong. What she had so far witnessed was merely a prelude.
The lights which sprang into dazzling life brought a new illusion, infinitely more spectacular than the last Charlotte had attended numerous theatrical displays employing clever holographic techniques, and knew well enough how a black-walled space which comprised in reality no more than a few hundred cubic meters could be made to seem far greater, but she had never seen a virtual space as vast and as ornate as this.
Here was the palace in which Salome had danced, transfigured by the phantasmagoric imagination of some later artist: a crazily vaulted ceiling higher than that in any reconstructed medieval cathedral, with elaborate stained-glass windows in mad profusion, offering all manner of fantastic scenes.
Here was a polished floor three times the size of a sports field, with a crowd of onlookers that must have numbered tens of thousands. There was no sense at all of this being an actual place: it was an edifice born of nightmarish dreams, whose awesome and impossible dimensions weighed down upon a mere observer, reducing Charlotte in her own mind’s eye to horrific insignificance.
Men like Gabriel King called their quasi-organic nanotech constructors shamirs, after the magical entity which had helped Solomon build his temple when his laborers had been forbidden the use of conventional tools, but this was the first time Charlotte had seen an edifice worthy of the labor of fabulous mythical creatures.
Salome, having bowed to the three visitors from the future who had watched her dance at far closer range than any of the fictitious multitude, turned around to bow to another watcher: to the biblical king of Judea, Herod, seated on his throne.
Charlotte could not remember whether Herod had been Salome’s father or merely her stepfather, but she was certain that he had been one or the other. She was certain too that there had never been a throne like this one in the entire history of empires and kingdoms. None but the most vainglorious of emperors could even have imagined it; and none of them could have ordered it built. It was huge and golden, hideously overburdened with silks and jewels: an appalling monstrosity of avaricious self-indulgence. It was, Charlotte knew, intended to appall, to constitute an offense to any taste or sense of proportion.
All of this was a calculated insult to the delicacy of effective illusion. It was a parody of grandiosity, an exercise in profusion for profusion’s sake. And yet, she understood the kind of technological sophistication that must have been required to produce this. She knew how much more difficult it was to produce