“Perhaps there is no real significance in the more bizarre facts,” Hal said, stubbornly plugging on. “As you must have realized, Dr. Wilde, we’re obviously dealing with a mad person: a very dangerous mad person. The method of murder may simply be an expression of his—or, of course, her—madness.” “Perhaps we are dealing with a mad person,” Wilde agreed, refusing to respond to the obvious suggestion that he might be the mad person in question, “but if this is madness, it is very methodical madness, and madness with a hint of artistic genius. You must confess that as crimes go, this qualifies as one of the most unusual ever devised—highly original, and executed with great care.” “Dr. Wilde,” said Hal, his voice weary with tried patience, “originality is not an issue here. This was cold-blooded murder, and it has to be treated like any other murder.” “I love that phrase,” said the geneticist teasingly. “Cold-blooded murder. It’s so provocative.” Charlotte stared at him, wondering whether she might indeed be face-to-face with a uniquely dangerous madman—and whether, if so, he might still be a murderously inclined madman. She did not know what to make of the man at all, any more than she knew what to make of the crazy investigation into which he had so casually intruded himself. She knew that she was supposed to leave the real detective work to Hal Watson, but she couldn’t help wrestling with the logic of the affair, trying hard to see some glimmer of sense somewhere within the absurd pattern.

“Hal,” she put in, remembering again what Regina Chai had said. “Wasn’t there a card with the flowers? Have you a still you can put up on the screen?” Hal apparently had sufficient respect for her judgment not to ask her why—although, for once, he was probably glad of the opportunity to let go of the conversation.

* * * The image on the screen flickered, then shifted to a shot in which the camera was zooming in on something which lay on the glass-topped table, propped up against the vase containing the yellow flowers. It was a small cardboard rectangle. It had already been monomol-sealed as a safety measure, but the transparent film did not obscure the words written on the card.

Charlotte’s eyes went directly to the bottom right-hand corner of the card, which bore the legend: Rappaccini Inc.

Perhaps he did leave his name after all, Charlotte marveled. If the flowers in the vase are one of Wilde’s designs, the card might conceivably refer to the others: the ones which consumed Gabriel King. If Wilde’s right, the arrogant swine has actually signed his crime! But what, she quickly wondered, if Wilde were a liar? What if this had been planted purely and simply to back up his story? Her eyes had reflexively moved from the bottom of the card to the top, so that she could read the message of condolence inscribed there. Unfortunately, she couldn’t understand the words; the message was not written in English. It read: La sottise, l’erreur, le péché, la tésine, Occupent nos esprits et travaillent nos corps, Et nous alimentons nos amiables remords, Comme les mendiants nourrissent leur vermine.

“ ‘Stupidity, error, sin, and poverty of spirit,’ ” Oscar Wilde obligingly translated, thoughtfully, “ ‘possess our hearts and work within our bodies, and we nourish our fond remorse as beggars suckle their parasites.’ Hardly an orthodox condolence card—if Rappaccini mass-produces them, I can’t believe that he sells very many.” “Do you recognize the words?” Charlotte asked suspiciously.

“A poem by Charles Baudelaire. ‘Au lecteur’—that is, ‘To the Reader.’ From Les Fleurs du Mal. A play on words, I think.” The camera’s eye had obligingly moved back, to focus once again upon the black flowers which had destroyed Gabriel King. It occurred to Charlotte that Hal must have known about this all along—and in spite of that advantage and all of his experience, he had still allowed Oscar Wilde to rattle him.

“He’s right,” Hal said, as if on cue. “I checked—that’s where the words come from. The book was originally published in eighteen fifty-seven. Dr. Wilde is also an expert of nineteenth-and twentieth-century literature. The condolence card is a fake, though—no such message has ever been commercially released by Rappaccini Inc.” “My expertise does not extend to all of nineteenth-and twentieth-century literature,” said Oscar Wilde modestly. He was wearing a slight frown, as if he had taken offense at the suggestion that his judgment might have been mistaken.

Charlotte wondered how many men there were in the world who could recognize six-hundred-year-old poems written in French. Surely, she thought, Wilde must have made up the card himself. He must be the person behind all this. But if so, what monstrous game was he playing? “What significance do you attach to the poem, Dr. Wilde?” Hal asked, having recovered his most officious manner.

“Assuming that my earlier reasoning was correct, I must suppose that its message is directed to me,” replied the imperturbable and ever ingenious Wilde.

“Rappaccini—if he is indeed the ultimate author of this affair—seems to have made every effort to ensure that I would be a witness to, and perhaps a partner in, your investigation. I must assume that all of this is communication—not merely the card, and the message which summoned me, but the flowers, and the crime itself. The whole affair is to be read, decoded, and understood. I am here because Rappaccini expects me to be able to interpret and comprehend what he is doing. There is more to this, Sergeant Holmes and Inspector Watson, than has yet met our eyes. May I address you as Charlotte and Hal, by the way? If we are to work together in this matter, it will be more convenient—and you, of course, must call me Oscar.” Charlotte tried to remain impassive, but she knew that her amazement must be showing. She was grateful when Michael Lowenthal spoke to Wilde for the first time. “In that case,” he said, “you must call me Michael. It seems that we shall all be working together.” There was a pause before Hal’s voice came back on line. “I’m blocked on Rappaccini for the moment,” he said, evidently having turned away to consult one of his many assistant silvers. “Publicly available information regarding the founder of the company gives his real name as Jafri Biasiolo, but there’s hardly any official data on Biasiolo at all apart from his date of birth, 2323. It’s all old data, of course, and it’s possible that it’s just sketchy disinformation. I’ll have to mount a deep scan into Rappaccini’s more recent activities—especially his business interests—but it looks as if that will involve cutting through some very tangled undergrowth.” Charlotte knew what Hal’s contemptuous reference to “old data” implied. Old data was incomplete data, often corrupted by all kinds of omissions and errors—although she noticed that Hal had said “disinformation,” which meant lies, rather than “misinformation,” which meant mistakes. In Hal’s view, old data was senile and corrupt data, too decrepit and intrinsically unreliable to be of much use in a slick, modern police inquiry. But Gabriel King had been nearly two hundred years old, and Oscar Wilde—in spite of appearances—might well be over a hundred, given that he had just undergone intensive rejuvenation treatment. If the man who had once called himself Rappaccini really had been born in 2323, the motive for this affair might conceivably date back to the mid-twenty-fourth century.

In theory, the Web had been fully formed as early as the beginning of the twenty-first century, but its checkered history was full of holes. In the wake of the epidemic of sterility that had caused the Crash a century afterward many data stores—including many that had come through the plague wars unscathed—had been irredeemably lost and many others fragmented. The losses had been further compounded by data sabotage, which had itself become epidemic as the twenty-second century gave way to the twenty-third, loudly advertised as “youth’s last stand against the empire of the old.” Once it had become clear, in the late twenty-third century, that all the miracles of nanotechnology could not give human minds more than two centuries of effective life, the young had realized that they would, after all, inherit the earth if they would only be patient - but the years spanning the birth dates of Gabriel King and Jafri Biasiolo, 2301 and 2323, remained years of acute data blight in the reckoning of perfectionists like Hal Watson. It was an era in which the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth had rarely been recorded, and whose already inefficient records had been markedly eroded in the interim.