“What a waste it all was!” Wilde paused again, but only for effect. This time, it wasn’t Charlotte who made haste to interrupt him. “You can’t compare the present era to the one that preceded the Crash, Dr. Wilde,” said Michael Lowenthal, the agent of the MegaMall. “There’s no prospect whatsoever of another ecocatastrophe. Everything is under control now.” “Exactly so,” said Wilde. “The old world ended with a bang and a whimper. Ours will not. Ours is far more likely to end in Hardinist stasis, in perfect order, with everything under control.” “That’s not what I meant, and you know it!” Lowenthal protested. “The masters of the MegaMall like change. They need change. Change is what keeps the marketplace healthy. There has to be demand. There has to be innovation. There has to be growth. There has to be progress. But…” “But it all has to be managed” Oscar Wilde finished for him. “It has to be measured and orderly. Change is good but chaos is evil. Growth is good but excess must be stifled. There are still those among us who cannot agree. Few of them are authentic revolutionaries—even the most extreme Green Zealots and Decivilizers, like the Eliminators and Robot Assassins before them, probably ought to be reckoned clowns and jesters rather than serious anarchists—but they still desire to make their dissenting voices heard. I think you will agree that whatever the outcome of this comedy may be, Rappaccini will certainly succeed in being heard. When dawn breaks, five men will be dead and a sixth will be under sentence of execution. A vast swarm of helicopters and hoverflies will be headed for Walter Czastka’s island, avid to watch the denouement of the drama at close quarters. Can Walter be saved? Can the woman be apprehended? What has been done, and how, and why? Above all else: why? “Perhaps, when all is said and done, the question is the answer; perhaps the sole purpose of every move in this remarkable play is to force us to recognize that it is, indeed, play. At any rate, my friends, we are no longer an audience of three: tomorrow, we will merely be the avant-garde of an audience of billions. Tomorrow, everyone will listen, even if hardly anyone will actually understand, while Rappaccini informs us, in the most grandiosely bizarre way he can contrive, that our culture too has reached its terminus, and that it is on the brink of being interred forever, mourned for a while, and then forgotten.” “It’s nonsense!” Michael Lowenthal protested. “Everything worthwhile will be preserved. Everything!” “But you and those like you, Michael, will be the ones who decide what is worthwhile,” Wilde pointed out. “Even if men like Rappaccini and I were to agree with you, we should still feel the need to mourn the loss of the superfluous.

What Rappaccini is trying to make us understand, I suppose, is the horror of a Hardinist world of carefully stewarded property, inhabited entirely by the old.

That might, after all, be the ultimate consequence of the Zaman transformation.

Children have already become rare on the surface of the earth; they will eventually become as nearly extinct as those obscure species which are never decanted from the ark banks except to supply the demands of zoos.

“Whatever might happen on Mars, or in the circum-lunar colonies, Earth will presumably remain what it has already become: the MegaMall-dominated Empire of the Old. In time, maturation will ensure that it becomes the Empire of the Eternal. Some form of that empire is the heart’s desire of every thinking man and the ambition of every practical scientist—even those, like me, who stand condemned as the last generation of the envious—but its emergence is bound to cause us anxiety and fear. The death of death is a prospect we ought to celebrate, but it is also a prospect we ought to approach with solemn concern.

Who better to remind us of that than Rappaccini, the master of commemoration, the monopolist of wreaths?” Charlotte suddenly realized that Wilde was deliberately understating the case.

He was waiting for someone else to take the next step in the sequence, lest it be thought that he understood a little too well what the man he called Rappaccini wanted to achieve.

“He’s murdering people,” she said, taking it upon herself to fill the gap. “He’s murdering old men. He’s not just making an aesthetic statement; he’s writing an ad for the philosophy of Elimination. That’s how some of the vidveg are going to read this crazy business, at any rate—and I, for one, think that he always intended them to read it that way. His sim said as much, when it said that murder mustn’t be allowed to become extinct.” Oscar Wilde smiled wryly. “He did indeed,” he admitted.

“And is that the way you were supposed to read it?” Charlotte followed up. “Is that part of the interpretation that you were supposed to put to the world on his behalf?” “I don’t know,” he answered frankly. “But I am, as you have cleverly observed, reluctant to go so far in my approval.” “So you don’t agree with him, then?” Michael Lowenthal put in. “When all the fancy rhetoric is set aside, you agree with us.” Charlotte knew that the implied collective was the masters of the MegaMall, not Lowenthal and herself.

“I do share Rappaccini’s anxieties,” Wilde replied, “but I don’t think the threat is as overwhelming as he seems to think. I don’t believe that the old men will ever take over the world completely, no matter how few they are or how long they live, or how clever they are in sustaining their claim to own the earth. I can’t believe that a world in which death has been virtually abolished will be a world full of Walter Czastkas. I may, of course, be prejudiced by vanity, but I think that such a world could and should be a world full of Oscar Wildes. I’m even prepared to concede that the world will probably get by perfectly adequately even if I’m half wrong, and men like me are forced by circumstance to live alongside men like Walter.

“The spark of authentic youth can be maintained, if it’s properly nurtured. The victory of ennui isn’t inevitable. When we really can transform every human egg cell so as to equip it for eternal physical youth, at least some of those children—hopefully the greater number—will discover ways to adapt themselves to that condition by cultivating eternal mental youth. My way of trying to anticipate that is, I will admit, primitive and rough-hewn, but I am here to help prepare the way for those who come after me: the true children of our race; the eternal children; the first authentically human beings.” “That’s all very well,” Charlotte said, “but it’s Rappaccini, not you, who’s going to be world-famous tomorrow, at least for a while. Others may be more sympathetic to the violent aspects of his message than you are.” “Undoubtedly,” said Wilde.

“On the other hand,” said Michael Lowenthal, “the great majority will be horrified and sickened by the whole thing.” “I’m a police officer,” said Charlotte sourly. “I’ll be dealing with the troublesome minority.” “That was another thing the decadents helped to demonstrate, or at least to reemphasize,” Oscar Wilde observed, stifling a yawn. “Human beings are strangely attracted to the horrific and the sick. We have been careful in this guilt-ridden age of dogged reparation to invent a multitude of virtual realities which serve and pander to that darker side of our nature, but we have no guarantee that it can be safely and permanently confined in that way. With or without Rappaccini’s bold example, we might well be overdue for a new wave of Eliminator activity or a new cult of hashishins. We have done sterling work in displacing our baser selves, but the impulse to sin is not something that can be entirely satisfied by vicarious fulfillment. As our indefatigable murderess has demonstrated, actual sexual intercourse is coming back into fashion. Can violence be far behind?” Charlotte turned to look out of the viewport beside her, lifting her head to stare at the patient stars. I’m a police officer, she repeated in the privacy of her own thoughts. If he’s right, it’s me, not him or Michael Lowenthal, who’ll bear the brunt of it. It might have been a symptom of her own exhaustion, but she couldn’t bring herself to believe that Wilde might be wrong, even about the likelihood of Julia Herold evading all Hal’s traps. She no longer had any faith at all in the ability of the UN and the MegaMall to prevent the late Jafri Biasiolo, alias Rappaccini, alias Gustave Moreau, from bringing this affair to the conclusion which he had predetermined, or from making as deep an impression upon memory and history as he had always intended.