Architects of Emortality Read Online Free Page A

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 beginning to turn up a lot of tentative matches to the girl’s face—far too many and much too tentative for my liking. It’s bad enough that she’s been sculpted to a standard model without her having changed key details of her appearance both before and after leaving the building. If she did carry the murder weapon in, she was almost certainly more than a mere mule. With luck, I’ll have the case cracked in a matter of hours, once the moonwalkers have run tests on the bedsheets. She can hide her idealized face from the street’s eyes, but she can’t hide her DNA.” “Great,” said Charlotte. “At the pace the boys and girls inside are working, they should be able to get the data to you by the middle of next week.” “Don’t worry,” Hal said. “It’ll all open up once we have the forensics. It’s just a matter of starting with the right data—at the moment I’m fiddling around the periphery. With average luck, we’ll have it all wrapped up before the story leaks out to the vidveg.” When Hal broke the connection Charlotte went to the window at the end of the corridor in order to look out over the city. She was on the thirty-ninth floor of Trebizond Tower, and there was quite a view.

    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