* * * “This is the text on the condolence card the woman left at McCandless’s house,” Charlotte told Michael Lowenthal, displaying the words on the screen.

Farewell, happy fields, Where joy forever dwells! Hail, horrors! hail, Infernal world! and thou, profoundest Hell, Receive thy new possessor, one who brings A mind not to be changed by place or time. The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.

“Very apt,” said Lowenthal dryly. “Should we wake Dr. Wilde, do you think, and plead with him for an interpretation?” It was a rhetorical question.

“It’s from Paradise Lost,” Charlotte said.

“John Milton,” Lowenthal was quick to say, avid to seize a rarely accessible corner of the intellectual high ground. “Not the nineteenth century. Earlier.” “The seventeenth,” said a muffled voice from the rear. “Written then, allegedly, to ‘justify the ways of God to men’—but by the nineteenth, some had begun to adjudge that Milton had been of the Devil’s party without knowing it and had made a hero of Satan and a villain of God in spite of his own intention. Which passage is it, exactly, that Rappaccini has taken the trouble to quote?” Charlotte was tempted to tell Wilde to come forward and read it for himself, but did not want to be churlish. She read it aloud.

“It hardly needs interpretation,” Wilde observed—not altogether accurately, if Michael Lowenthal’s expression could be taken as a guide. Charlotte understood what Wilde meant, though. The words could be read as a valedictory speech by Rappaccini/Moreau: a warning, a threat, and a statement of intent.

“When this is all over,” Lowenthal said to the still-invisible Wilde, “you can write a book about it—and then we’ll see how many of the world’s busy citizens have the time and inclination to download it to their screens.” “Soon,” said Wilde, “all the world’s children will have the time—and I hope that they will also have the inclination. I suspect that their fascination with the artistry of death will be all the greater because death will be, for them, a matter of aesthetic choice. When everyone has the opportunity to extend life indefinitely, the determination to cling onto it for the sake of stubbornness alone will inevitably come to seem absurd. Some will choose to die; those who do not will feel obliged to make something of their lives. I hope, Michael, that you will take your place in the latter company.” By the time he had finished his speech, Wilde had slipped into the seat behind Lowenthal—the one which the man from the MegaMall had occupied the previous evening. Glancing back and forth from one to the other, Charlotte decided that although there was nothing to choose between them on the grounds of physical perfection, Wilde had emerged more rapidly from sleep to claim the fullest advantage of his brightness and beauty. The authentically young man who now sat beside her was still afflicted by the temporary stigmata of frustration and mental weariness.

“You seem to have slept well, Oscar,” Charlotte said.

“I usually do, my dear,” he said. “You’ll probably find, as you get older—especially at those times when you replenish your youth without losing the wisdom of maturity—that deep sleep will come more easily.” “We’ve all had the biofeedback training,” Lowenthal said dismissively. “We all know the drill.” Charlotte felt a sudden surge of anxiety about the appearance of her own face.

She altered the lateral viewport to full reflection and studied her lax features and bleary eyes with considerable alarm. The face she wore was not entirely the gift of nature; she had had all the conventional manipulations in infancy, but she had always refused to be excessively pernickety about matters of beauty, preferring to retain a hint of naturalness on the grounds that it gave her character and individuality. Oscar Wilde had all of that and phenomenal beauty, and he was a hundred and thirty-three years old. Somehow, it didn’t seem quite fair. She worked her facial muscles feverishly, recalling the elementary exercises that everyone learned at school and almost everyone neglected thereafter. Then she straightened her hair.

Oscar Wilde looked politely away as she did so, tutting over the condition of the fading green carnation which still protruded from the false collar of his suitskin.

As Charlotte took stock of the reward of her efforts she noticed the faint wrinkles which were just becoming apparent in the corners of her eyes. She knew that they could be removed easily enough by the most elementary tissue manipulation, and she would not have given them a second thought two days before, but now they served as a reminder of the biological clock that was ticking away inside her: the clock that would need to be reset when she was eighty or ninety years old, and again when she turned a hundred and fifty… and then would wind down forever, because her brain would be unable to renew itself a third time without wiping clean the mind within.

For Michael Lowenthal, she knew, it would be different. No one, least of all Lowenthal himself, knew as yet exactly how different it would be, but there was reason to believe that he might live for three or four hundred years without needing any kind of nanotech restructuring, and reason to hope that he might go on for a further half-millennium, and on and on… Barring accidents, suicide, and murder.

But who would be the suicides and murderers, in a world of beautiful ancients? Who would kill or choose to die, if they could live forever? “The mind is its own place,” Charlotte quoted silently, “and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” She passed a hand across her face, as if to wipe away the tried laxity of the muscles and the embryonic wrinkles. Fifty or sixty years to rejuve number one, she told herself, and no point yet in counting.

By the time she switched the viewport back to transparency, the island toward which they had been headed was below them, and their plane was descending toward the trees, preparing to alter the orientation of its engines so that it could complete its descent in helicopter fashion.

Like all the Hawaiian islands, Kauai had been blighted by the ecocatastrophes of the twenty-first century and the fallout from the plague wars. Most of its ecosystems had been stripped down almost to the prokaryot level, but it was small enough to have been comprehensively rehabilitated. The biodiversity loss had been enormous, and the current genetic variety of the island was probably only a few percent of what it had been in pre-Crash days, but the painstaking work done by natural selection in the cause of diversification was beginning to bear fruit on a prolific scale. The trees over which the aircraft passed while making for the landing field almost qualified as authentic wilderness.

Charlotte checked the equipment in her belt, making dutiful preparations for the dash from one vehicle to another. She had already invited Oscar Wilde to accompany her rather than taking the helicopter chartered by the late Gustave Moreau, but he had declined the offer. She was not displeased by the thought of putting a little distance between herself and one of her annoying companions—although, had she been given a choice, she would have kept Wilde and banished Lowenthal.

As soon as they had set down at the heliport, Charlotte opened the cockpit door and leapt down to the blue plastic apron. Michael Lowenthal made haste to follow her, but Wilde had perforce to take his time. Uniformed officers hurried toward her, directing her to a police helicopter that was waiting less than a hundred meters away. Its official markings were a delight to Charlotte’s eyes, holding as they did the impression of authority. From now on, she told herself, she would no longer be a passenger but a determined pursuer: an active instrument of justice.

One of the local men tried to tell her that there was no need for her to join the dragnet, and that she could watch it all on screens, but there was no way she was going to be turned aside now. She strode toward the police helicopter very purposefully, brushing off the attentions of the Kauai men as if they were buzzing flies, and Michael Lowenthal trotted along in her wake, barely keeping pace with her in spite of the fact that his stride was longer.