“I’m very sorry to hear that,” said Wilde. “Michi was a better man by far than Gabriel King.” Lowenthal had snatched up his own handset by the time Wilde had finished his sentence, and had turned away to speak into it. Charlotte had no difficulty at all in deducing that Michi Urashima’s was not one of the names Lowenthal’s employers had feared or expected to hear in this context—although there was one item of their discussion downstairs which had pointed to a pattern into which Urashima fit as snugly as a hand into a glove.

Before his trial and imprisonment, Michi Urashima had been one of the world’s foremost pioneers of “encephalic augmentation”: brainfeed research. Gabriel King must have known him well. So must Jafri Biasiolo, alias Rappaccini.

On the other hand, it was difficult to imagine anyone less in tune with the MegaMall’s economic and social philosophy than Urashima. Even in the earliest phase of his career, when he had been an expert in computer graphics and image simulation, widely celebrated for his contributions to synthetic cinema, he had been a political radical. If the Hardinist Cabal feared that King’s assassination had been the first move in a conspiracy directed against their ownership of the world, Michi Urashima was the last person they would expect to find on the hit list.

“Not everyone would agree with you about his being a better man,” Charlotte said to Wilde speculatively, “but he must, I suppose, have been of the same generation. In any case, there’s no need for you to take the midnight maglev now.” “On the contrary,” said Oscar. “Even if this revelation is, by Rappaccini’s reckoning, premature, I feel that he would still want me to visit the scene.

This affair is still in its early stages, and if we want to witness the further phases of its unfolding we really ought to follow the script laid down for us.” “You think there will be more murders?” Charlotte asked.

“I always thought so,” said Wilde. “Now, I am certain of it.”

Intermission Two: A Pioneer on the Furthest Shore

As if it were caught by the surge of a fast-flowing black river, the soul of Paul Kwiatek was hurled upon its wayward course through the warp of infinity. It was outside the universe of atoms, beneath the wayward play of nuclear interaction forces, having been reabsorbed into the implicate order itself. Paul knew that his fleshy envelope must be dead and that his body must already be in its coffin, borne through the streets of Bologna on a black-draped bier—but his soul was free, miraculously inviolate.

Tossed as he was by the whim of the reckless current, Paul could see nothing of the river’s shore, the Land of the Dead. Perhaps it was only his imagination which assured him that he could hear the whispering voices of the spirit legions, welcoming him with gossip as they marveled over the achievements of his life.

The guardian at the entrance to an older heaven might have stopped him at the gate, for his life had not been entirely without sin, but he had always worked in the cause of Mind and the further evolution of the human intellect. In the reckoning of cowards, he had committed crimes—crimes from whose legal consequences the agents of the MegaMall had fortunately condescended to shield him—but everything he had done he had done for the sake of increased understanding of the last and greatest of the ancient mysteries: the nature of consciousness, the fundamental phenomenon of the human mind. In any case, the heaven of tradition was now a virtual theme park owned and operated by the MegaMall, through which silver saints offered guided tours to the living; this was the world beyond death, the ultimate upload, the exit to eternity.

Paul knew that the flow of the river was not the flow of time, because he was now beyond the reach of time, although his consciousness had no alternative but to arrange its thoughts and feelings consecutively, preserving the illusion of duration even in a realm without any such dimension. Nor was his soul confined in any way; free of his body, it had neither width nor breadth nor depth—but consciousness had no alternative but to define itself in terms of “position” and “magnitude,” and so he perceived himself as an inconsiderable atom in the flotsam of a river which fed the Sea of Souls—an atom as yet alone, but fit nevertheless to join the company of all humankind at the omega point of creation.

Paul did not fear dissolution in the ocean of the implicate order, nor did he fear annihilation at the Climacticon; he knew that he could not be lost, even in infinity. Nothing, ultimately, could be lost, no matter how many inflationary domains bubbled up from the wellspring of creation, making worlds within worlds within worlds and selecting those best fitted to be cradles of further worlds, further minds, further candidates for the ultimate upload. The surge of creativity was illimitable, possessed of no vestige of a beginning and no prospect of an end, and the surge of mind within it was irresistible in its insistence on being heard and felt. Every sensation that was ever felt, every thought that was ever framed, was gathered here into the river of intelligence, neatly bound into identities and personal histories, stories made from memory, racing upon the tide toward omega, the summation of all.

Souls bound for lesser heavens were supposed to be joyous, worshipful, and above all grateful, but Paul was prey to no such petty treasons. He was an explorer, whose mind was questioning, and he had no space within his virtual self for gladness or triumph, ecstasy or awe. He had come to see all that there was to be seen, to feel all that there was to be felt, and above all else to know all that there was to be known. His purpose was discovery: to go to the undiscovered country where multitudes had been before, but from whose bourn no traveler had yet returned; to be what multitudes would one day be, although they could not know it.

It was, of course, a virtual experience—Paul had always despised the phrase “virtual reality” as a vile oxymoron, and thought “virtual environment” misleading because it implied that a person within one had merely altered his existential wallpaper without altering himself—but that did not make it any less valuable, in Paul’s reckoning. As he was fond of reminding the few friends he had left, all experience was virtual, because that was the very essence of Mind.

The cogitative brain was a machine for generating virtual experiences of a kind that would allow the body to function in the world of things-in-themselves, but to describe the phenomenal world of things-as-perceived as the real world was a conceptual step too far.

Few would have agreed with him, but Paul felt perfectly entitled to put the experience of the black river on a par with his experience of the Tiber or the Po, and to deem the implicate order of the Sea of Souls as sensible as the streets of Rome and the shores of the Adriatic.

Paul had no doubt of his own effective immortality, but still he could not shake the last vestiges of his fear of death. Perhaps, if he had been able to do that, he would have been able to ride the black current to its terminus, without the necessity of a return to vulgar quiddity. As things were, however, he felt compelled to call an end to his odyssey when his IT began to send unmistakable distress calls from his not-quite-abandoned flesh.

Paul lifted the VE hood from his head and set about unsealing the special suitskin in which he had been enwrapped for thirty-six hours. He fumbled every seam, his quivering fingers seeming huge and repulsive.

When he was finally free he made no immediate attempt to raise himself into a sitting position, let alone to swing his legs from the cradle to the floor. He simply lay there, becoming reaccustomed to his lumpen body and his mere humanity. He felt utterly deflated as well as severely disoriented; it was an effort even to blink his rheumy eyes.