That, at any rate, was surely what Oscar Wilde would have said.

“Damn him to hell,” Walter murmured—meaning Oscar Wilde, not Jafri Biasiolo, alias Rappaccini.

The profoundest mystery of all, of course, was why Jafri Biasiolo, having learned from Maria Inacio the identity of his father and the circumstances of his birth, had done nothing for so long. Had he postponed his “revenge”—if “revenge” it was—until he himself was dead merely in order to avoid punishment? If so, he was worse than a coward, because his agent undoubtedly would be caught and would suffer his punishment in his stead.

It made no sense.

Walter left the bedroom and ordered a bowl of tomato soup from the dispenser in the living room. He ordered it sharp and strong, and he began to sip it while it was still too hot, blistering his upper palate. He carried on regardless, forcing the liquid down without any supplementation by bread or manna. He contemplated chasing the soup with a couple of double vodkas, but there was a difference between the stubborn recognition that he ought to eat and mere folly.

In any case, the benign machines which had colonized his stomach would not let him get drunk unless he first sent messengers to rewrite their code—and that would take hours.

He tried yet again to drag his mind back to the matter in hand. Why should his son want to kill him? Because he—the son—felt abandoned? Because the experiment had failed? Because his mother had asked him to? But why should Maria Inacio want him dead, when she had been a willing partner in the escapade? Why should she want all those who had helped to set it up to be killed along with him, when not one of them had hurt her in any way? And if Maria or her son had wanted to take revenge, why had they waited so long? Why now, when there was so little life left in any of their intended victims? If Moreau had lived thirty or forty years longer—as he certainly would have, had the experiment not failed so ignominiously—there would probably have been no one left for him to murder. Only luck had preserved all five of the people who had given Walter the resources with which to work, a place to hide his experimental subject, and the alibis he had needed to keep his endeavors secret. Only luck had preserved him long enough to outlive his son—if his current state of body and mind could be thought of as “preservation.” Perhaps that was what Moreau resented: the fact that Walter and his five accomplices had all outlived him, when the whole point of his creation was that he was supposed to outlive them. Perhaps, if he had been a better artist, a better Creationist, he would not have failed. Perhaps that was what his forsaken son had been unable to forgive him. Perhaps that was why his forsaken son had said to himself: when I die, you must come with me, for it was your failure that determined the necessity of my death. That almost made sense. Could it also begin to make sense of the fact that the instrument of the son’s murderous intent was a replicate of his mother? The game of God, Walter reflected, must have been the only one he had wanted to play when he was young and devoid of pretense. Perhaps, when he had been forced to put that game aside he had put aside playfulness itself. Perhaps, thereafter, he had presented to the world at large the perfect image of a man who was down-to-earth and matter-of-fact. Everyone thought of him as a realist: a man of method, a hardheaded person without any illusions about himself or anything else. He had lived that pretense for nearly two hundred years—unless, of course, it was no pretense at all, and he really was down-to-earth and matter-of-fact, hard of head and hard of heart, incapable of play.

Walter remembered the Great Exhibition held in Sydney in 2405, when he had seen the work exhibited by Oscar Wilde and Rappaccini and said to himself: These idle egotists can only play; they have not the capacity for real work. They are vulgar showmen whose only real talent is for attracting attention. Even their names are jokes. They are the froth on the great tide of biotechnics, whose gleam and glitter will adorn the moment while the real power of the surge will come from honest, clear-sighted laborers like myself. I am the one who has the intelligence and the foresight to play the game of God as it was meant to be played.

In the ninety years that had passed since the days of the Great Exhibition, Walter had gradually come to understand the frailty of that hope. Here, on his Pacific atoll, he was the unchallenged lord of all he surveyed, with none to stay his hand or resist his edict, and yet… He had set out to build a Garden of Eden, but the Tree of Knowledge was not here, nor even the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. When he was dead—which would presumably be fairly soon, whether or not Gustave Moreau’s murderous scheme could be interrupted—people would be able to visit his island, and say: “Yes, this is Walter’s work.” If they were generous of spirit, they might say: “Look at the sense of order, the cleanness of line, the careful simplicity. No wild extravagance for Walter, no illusions. Method, neatness, economy—those were always Walter’s watchwords.” And if they were not so generous? “Dull, dull, dull.” In the quiet arena of his mind, Walter could almost hear the voices which would deliver that deadly verdict. Oscar Wilde would state it much more elaborately, of course, while waving his pale left hand in a dismissive arc. Few people would pay any attention to Oscar—people never did pay attention to mere caricatures—and no one would ever believe for a second that he, dear Walter, would care a fig what Oscar Wilde might think of his work, but the majority opinion was not the important one.

“What do I think?” Walter asked himself, knowing that that was the real heart of the matter. “Now that it’s all coming out, now that it can’t be kept inside anymore, what do I think? What have I made of my life and my work, and how does it compare with what I might have made? That’s the thing that has to be decided.” It sounded so simple, but it wasn’t. There were far too many awkward questions, and far too little time to hunt for the answers he should have found a hundred and seventy years before.

The hour of Rappaccini’s judgment—the judgment of the reckless father by the resentful son—was at hand. Whether he were here or elsewhere, Walter thought, there was nowhere left for him to run. If fools like Oscar Wilde were not so foolish after all, there was nowhere left where he might even stand and fight.

Finale: Eden Approached from the East

Charlotte woke with a start, jolted out of a fugitive dream by a sudden flash of light. Behind the tiny plane, in the east, the dawn was breaking; a fleeting sequence of reflections had diverted a ray of golden light from the tip of the wing to the viewport beside her head and then to the strip of chrome around the forward port.

Ahead of her, in the west, the sky was still dark blue and ominous, but the stars were already fading into the backcloth of the day. Charlotte roused herself and craned her neck to look out of the viewport at her side. Beneath the plane, the sea was becoming visible as fugitive rays of silvery light caught the tops of lazy waves.

In these latitudes, the sea was relatively unpolluted by the vast amount of synthetic photosynthetic substances pumped out from such artificial islands as those which crowded the Timor Sea. By day it was stubbornly blue, although its eventual conquest by the Stygian darkness of Liquid Artificial Photosynthesis was probably inevitable. Even now, this region of the ocean could not be thought of as an authentic marine wilderness; the post-Crash restocking of the waters had been too careful and too selective. The so-called seven seas were really a single vast system, which was already half-gentled by the hand of man. The continental engineers, despite the implications of their name, had better control of evolution’s womb than extinction’s rack.