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Carrying a bunch of flowers—even state-of-the-art flowers formed according to a brand new gentemplate—was not yet illegal, although it might one day become so if the forensic team was right about the biohazard aspect of the case.
“Thank you, Mr. Carnevon,” said Charlotte, meaning Go away, you horrid little man. The meaning was clear enough to have the desired effect, although Carnevon might have decided to hang around out of spite if he’d caught the full import of her thought.
As the screen above the elevator began to count down the car’s descent, Charlotte turned back to the screen beside the apartment door, which was now occupied by an unsimulated image of her superior officer.
“I’ve enhanced the audiotapes the team transmitted from the apartment’s ears,” Hal said laconically. “I’m ninety-nine percent sure that we have all the subvocalized remarks. The first of the three he muttered before the girl came in was ‘The age of the human herbivores; the cud-chewing era.’ The second was ‘Posturing apes in fancy dress.’ The third was ‘The devastation of the wild.’ The one that was an aside to his conversation was ‘That posturing ape,’ first word stressed—presumably referring to the man she named, Oscar Wilde. It’s possible, of course, given that he seems to have had posturing apes on his mind, that the previous reference was to the same person, but the fact that he said ‘the wild’ makes it unlikely. It’s also possible, I suppose, that the three remarks might be symptomatic of a suicidal turn of mind, but all the other evidence I’ve looked at seems to be against that.” “Do you have Wilde’s number?” Charlotte asked.
“Already tried it,” Hal told her, in a tone which implied that she should have realized that. “The sim which answered says that he’s here in New York, but that he’s currently in transit and never takes calls in cabs because it’s unaesthetic.” What is it with these flower designers? Charlotte wondered. “I’ll bet the sim was a Stone Age sloth, carefully designed for maximum stupidity,” she said.
“On the contrary,” said Hal. “It was a medium-level silver, as clever as any answering machine I’ve ever had occasion to speak to, but it’s still a slave to its programming, and it hasn’t been programmed with the authority to break in while the Young Master is in a cab.” “The Young Master?” Charlotte queried.
“The silver’s phrase, not mine,” said Hal. “I’ll get through to him as soon as I can—and if he still feels like playing the winsome eccentric I’ll get tough with him. In the meantime, the public eyes are begi
Central Park looked pretty much the way it must have looked for centuries, carefully restored to its antediluvian glory, but the decaying skyline was very much a product of the moment. She wondered whether the fact that Gabriel King had been in New York to execute the demolition of the old city might have provided the motive for his murder. Some Manhattanites had become very angry indeed when the Decivilizers had finally claimed the jewel in their crown, and murder was said to be the daughter of obsession.
There was a funeral procession making its patient way along the southern flank of the park. The traffic must have been backed up for miles, and anyone in the queue older than a hundred must have been complaining that such a thing would never have been allowed in the old days. Nowadays, deaths were so rare that it was tacitly taken for granted that even the meanest corpse had an inalienable right to hold up traffic for an hour or two, whatever the letter of the law might be.
How long, Charlotte wondered, would Gabriel King’s funeral train be, and how long a standstill would it cause? The train she was watching was led by six carriages laden with flowers, all of them black, white, or scarlet. Each of the carriages was drawn by four jet-black horses. Behind the carriages came the black-clad mourners. Professionals, friends, and family members were all mingled together, but they were distinguishable even at this distance by the tall stovepipe hats the professionals invariably wore. Charlotte counted thirty-some pros and estimated that there must be about a hundred and forty amateurs. For New York, that was very small-scale. Gabriel King would probably command ten times as many, maybe more; he had, after all, been one of the oldest men in the world. In his time, he must have met—as well as made—millions.
Among those millions, it seemed, was one who had found motive enough to kill him, and to kill him in a ma
Murder was nowadays the rarest of crimes, and such murders which did happen usually occurred when some private tsunami of rage or spite smashed through the barriers erected by years of primary-school biofeedback training. Pla
The Decivilization movement, she thought, must have been a great boon to King’s business. He must have been very grateful indeed to the city-hating prophets, although the more extreme among them would have detested Gabriel King as thoroughly as they detested all old-fashioned entrepreneurs—especially those who were fabulously wealthy double rejuvenates. King could easily have made enemies even among the people whose crusade he was furthering, and among the business rivals who had competed with him for the contracts—but those who hated him most fervently of all must surely be the New Yorkers whose city he was even now subjecting to u
Unfortunately, Hal was the one to whom the forensic evidence would be sent, and he was the one who would pull the relevant DNA match from the records. The best Charlotte could hope for was to be part of the team sent to make the arrest.
Charlotte heard the hum of the motor as the elevator became active again, and she glanced back at the screen above the door; it dutifully revealed that the left-hand car was bound for thirty-nine.
Charlotte frowned. It had to be Rex Carnevon—the whole floor had been temporarily quarantined until the forensic team had made a more accurate assessment of the biohazard.
She moved to meet the elevator car, psyching herself up for another confrontation, but when the door opened, it was not the supervisor’s elliptical form that emerged but that of a tall young man with perfect blond hair and luminous blue eyes. His suitskin was sober in hue but very delicately fashioned, taking full advantage of the sculpted curves of his elegant frame. Now that cosmetic engineering was available to everyone, it had become exceedingly difficult for its artisans to produce striking individual effects, but this man struck her instantly as a person of exceptional beauty and bearing.