“Excellent. I should reassure you immediately, of course, that there is absolutely no need to panic regarding the possibility of a random outbreak of homicidal flowers—less need, in fact, than even I had feared. This particular weapon will never be used again, because it was designed expressly to consume the flesh of Gabriel King. It is what the parlance of the old plague wars called a smart agent—far smarter, in fact, than any agent then devised. It may well qualify as the most narrowly targeted weapon in history.” Hal and Lowenthal absorbed this information silently. Even Charlotte knew enough about genetics to be astonished by it.
“Perhaps I ought also to say,” Oscar went on, “that although I remain absolutely convinced that the plant’s designer was Rappaccini, it appears to have been derived from a natural template that Rappaccini has never actually used—a temporarily extinct species that was recovered from a twenty-first-century seed bank by another person, and which has so far been developed for the marketplace exclusively by that person.” “Which person?” Hal asked—although Charlotte presumed that he must already have guessed.
“Me,” said Oscar Wilde. “Although the finished product bears little enough resemblance to its model, the gentemplate makes it clear that the original was a globoid amaranth of the genus Celosia-once popularly known, my research assures me, as the cockscomb. That is as far as facts can take us. If I am to make more of the information I have gleaned, I shall have to make use of intuition—and I intuit far more effectively on a full stomach. There is nothing like good food and a bottle of fine wine to liberate the power of the imagination.” Hal Watson would undoubtedly have protested that what was required of an expert witness was scrupulous attention to fact rather than indulgence of the imagination, but he was distracted by two beeping sounds, which immediately entered into competition for his attention. While he tried to deal with both of them, a third commenced its siren song, and he was forced to begin juggling all three data streams.
“Go,” he said. “I’ll be listening.” “It’s good to know,” Wilde observed as Charlotte led her two companions toward yet another elevator, “that there are so many silvery recording angels sorting religiously through the multitudinous sins of mankind. Alas, I fear that the capacity of our fellow men for committing sins may still outstrip their best endeavors.” “Actually,” Charlotte observed as she pressed the button to summon the car, “the crime rate is still going down—as it always has while the number of spy eyes and bubblebugs embedded in the walls of the world has increased.” “I spoke of sins, not crimes,” said Wilde as they moved into the empty car.
“What your electronic eyes do not see, the law may not grieve about, but the capacity for sin will lurk in the hearts and minds of men long after its expression has been banished from their public actions.” “People can do whatever they like in the privacy of their virtual environments,” Charlotte retorted. “There’s no sin in that. The point is that what lurks in the darker corners of their hearts and minds shouldn’t—and mostly doesn’t—affect the way they conduct themselves in the real world.” “If there were no sin in our adventures in imagination,” Wilde said, evidently reluctant to surrender the last word even in the most trivial of arguments, “there would be no enjoyment in them. While we are as vicious at heart as we have ever been, and are encouraged to remain so by the precious freedom of virtual reality, we cannot be entirely virtuous even in the real world. The ever-presence of potential observers will, of course, make us exceedingly careful—but in the end, that will only serve to make all murders as intricate and ingenious as the one we are investigating. If you do not understand that, my dear Charlotte, I fear that you will not be comfortable in your chosen career.” Charlotte tried hard not to be infuriated by his condescension, but it wasn’t easy. It wouldn’t have been easy even if she hadn’t formed the impression that Michael Lowenthal was amused by her distress. She wondered whether it might be natural that so-called Naturals would find amusement in the petty quarrels of mere mortals.
As they left the car two uniformed officers got in, one of them a sergeant in whose company Charlotte had gone through basic training.
“Any progress, Charlotte?” the sergeant asked, his inquisitive gaze sliding sideways to examine her two companions.
“Not yet, Mike,” Charlotte said as breezily as she could, “but all the bloodhounds are out.” “Newshounds too,” Mike murmured. “They don’t know the details yet, but King’s big enough to make them chase hard. Watch out for hoverflies.” Charlotte nodded, glad that she had been adamant that they ought to eat within the building. Even police headquarters couldn’t be guaranteed to be 100 percent secure, but eating in any public restaurant would have been tantamount to hiring a loudhailer.
Once they were seated, Oscar Wilde decided that what his appetite demanded was toumedos bearnaise with saute potatoes, carrots, and broccoli. He informed Lowenthal, while Charlotte was busy acknowledging other greetings from sympathetic colleagues, that he had had an unusually taxing day for one so recently restored to youth, and that the solidity of beef would serve his needs better than the delicacies of quail. He decided on a bottle of Saint Emilion to go with it—the occasion, he declared, cried out for a full-bodied wine.
Lowenthal agreed to take the same dish and share the wine, but Charlotte punched out an individual order for tuna steak and salad, with water to drink.
The police restaurant’s food technology was, of course, easily adequate to the task of meeting Wilde’s requirements. Its beef was grown by a celebrated local tissue culture which had long rejoiced in the pet name of Baltimore Bess: a veritable mountain of muscle which was fiercely guarded by traditionalists from the strong competition offered by SAP-derived “meat.” The Saint Emilion was wholly authentic, although the Bordeaux region and its immediate neighbors had been replanted from gene banks as recently as 2330, when connoisseurs had decided that the native rootstocks had suffered too much deterioration in the tachytelic phase of ecospheric deterioration which had followed the environmental degradations of the Crash.
The dispenser delivered fresh bread, still warm from the oven, and a selection of hors d’oeuvres. Charlotte took some bread but left the rest to her companions; she had never liked excessively complicated food.
Hal had been silent while they made their way to the restaurant, but as soon as Charlotte had opened a link from the table’s screen he took up the theme of Wilde’s observations about the murder weapon. “According to my records,” he said, “no one but you has ever withdrawn specimens of this particular globoid amaranth from the bank—which implies that you must have supplied the stocks from which the weapon was developed.” “Supplied seems a trifle exaggerated,” Wilde objected. “My amaranths have been on open sale for decades. Tens of thousands of people have fertile specimens growing in their walls and gardens.” “I wasn’t implying that you intended to supply the raw material for a murder weapon,” Hal said disingenuously. “I’ve set one of my silvers to collaborate with one of yours in sorting through your records. I’d be obliged if you’d keep track of them, just in case some idiosyncratic modification of yours can be traced through a particular customer to the murder weapon.” “I’ll do that,” Wilde promised, although his tone suggested that he didn’t expect a result. Hal nodded, and his face disappeared from the screen.
“Assuming that it would be relatively easy, once the basic pattern was in place, to modify this kind of smart weapon for other targets,” Michael Lowenthal put in pensively, “I assume that it would also be relatively easy to plant individually targeted booby traps in gardens and hotel rooms all over the world.” Charlotte inferred that he was still pondering the possibility that King’s murder was just a warning shot, and that the murderer’s next target might be closer to the Inner Circle.