Architects of Emortality - Brian Stableford [93]
“Do you like it?” asked the man on the throne: the king on the throne, who had even drawn himself three times life-size, as a bloated, overdressed grotesque.
Herod’s body, even had it been reduced to a natural scale, was like nothing any longer to be seen in a world which had banished obesity four hundred years before—but the face, had it only been leaner, would have been the face which Jafri Biasiolo, alias Rappaccini, had worn in the three photographs which Hal Watson had shown to Oscar, Lowenthal, and herself the day before.
But we know that she’s not his daughter, Charlotte thought. She’s supposed to be his mother now! Charlotte felt Oscar Wilde’s hand take up her wrist and squeeze it. He was still invisible to her, as she was to herself, although the glorious light of the illusory palace surrounded them. “Tread carefully,” Wilde whispered, his lips no more than a centimeter from her ear. “This simulation may be programmed to tell us everything, if only we can question it cunningly enough.” Herod/Rappaccini burst into mocking laughter. The sim’s tumultuous flesh heaved and seethed with it: “Do you think that I have merely human ears, my dear Oscar? You can hardly see yourselves, I know, but you are not hidden from me. Your friends are charming, Oscar, but neither the woman nor the man is one of us.
They are of an age which has forgotten and erased its past. They are neither revenants nor artists.” AI or not, thought Charlotte, it’s still mad. As absolutely and irredeemably insane as the man whose simulacrum it is. She wondered whether she might be in mortal danger, if the man beside her really was the secret designer of all of this: Rappaccini’s creator and puppet master.
“Gustave Moreau might have approved,” Wilde said offhandedly, “but he always tended to become dispirited and leave his work half-done. His vision always outpaced his capacity for detail. Michi Urashima would not have been satisfied so easily even when he was a VE technician, although I detect his early handiwork in some of the effects. Did Gabriel King supply the artificial organisms which hollowed out this Aladdin’s cave, perchance?” “He did,” answered the gargantuan Rappaccini, squirming in his uncomfortable seat like a huge painted slug. “I have made art with his sadly utilitarian instruments. I have taken some trouble, as you have seen, to weave the work of all my victims into the tapestry of their destruction.” The sim was obviously a high-grade silver rather than a sluggish sloth, but it was making preprogrammed speeches rather than responding with any real intelligence to Wilde’s provocations.
“It’s overdone,” said Oscar Wilde with insultingly mild contempt. “Grotesquely overdone and more than a little chaotic. As a show of apparent madness, it’s too excessive to be anything but pretense. Can we not talk as one civilized man to another, Jafri, since that is what we are?” Rappaccini smiled. “That is why I wanted you here, my dear Oscar,” he said.
“Only you could suspect me of cold rationality in the midst of all this. But you understand civilization far too well to wear its gifts unthinkingly. You may be the only man in the world who understands the world’s decadence, but you cannot hide that understanding from me, or deny it to my face. Have the patient bureaucrats of the United Nations police force discovered my true name yet?” “Jafri Biasiolo?” Wilde queried. “Is that what you mean by your true name? I doubt it. Even Rappaccini is truer than that. Half a dozen other pseudonyms have come to light—but I doubt that we have found the true one yet. Would you care to tell us what it is?” “Not Herod,” said the sim. “Be sure of that, at least.” “It’s only a matter of time, as you must know,” Charlotte put in, unable to resist the temptation. “By the time we get back to the car, it might be all over.” The sim turned its bloodshot eyes upon her, and she could not help but shrink before the baleful stare.
“The final