* * *
When I awoke the next day Rowland seemed better, and we breakfasted together. He told me, though, that he did not feel well enough to guide me about the house. He promised that he would show me its wonders at a later date, and offered instead to tell me something of the researches which had led to its construction, and which formed the substance of his intellectual legacy.
“You may recall from discussions we had nearly a quarter of a century ago,” he said, “that I was always impatient with the traditional Gantz techniques which were in common use in our youth, and which we were expected to learn in a more-or-less slavish fashion in the course of our education in civil engineering.
“One of my chief interests—which we shared, I think—was the possibility of integrating better artificial living systems into the structure of buildings. It will not be long now, I am sure, before biotechnologists develop methods of artificial photosynthesis, and truly sophisticated living dwellings will not come into being until then. Houses will one day be living machines harvesting the energy of the sun as plants do. My house simulates, by necessity, a more primitive kind of organism: a lowly scavenger which draws its energy from the organic detritus of the silt out of which it is constructed. It is no more sophisticated than many sedentary creatures which live in shallow seas, filtering food from the murky waters which overflow them. Its closest analogues, if you wish to think in such terms, are coral polyps, barnacles and tubeworms. Nevertheless, however primitive it is, it lives and it grows. The Orinoco feeds it with all manner of decayed vegetable matter via the network of filters which extend from the foundations.
“You will probably remember another of my fascinations, which is similarly embodied in this house. Ordinary Gantz processes involve the use of inert moulds—the cementing organisms simply bind the material brought to them, and the architect controls the shape of what they produce by crude mechanical means. I was always impressed, though, by the way that living organisms adapt themselves to the construction of complicated edifices: the nests of wasps and termites, of bower-birds and ovenbirds; the supporting structures of corals; the astonishing forms of flowering plants and trees. I designed this house, therefore, by programming into the genes of its microorganic creators the kind of structure it should be.
“Its main structure is, of course, built primarily from non-living tissue, like the xylem of a tree or the shell of a mollusc, but that structure retains its connections with living cells, and is formed more-or-less precisely by the pattern of their activity.”
“The house, then, is really a gargantuan living organism,” I observed.
“Not strictly speaking,” he corrected me. “It’s builders are micro-organisms, which associate and collaborate like the members of a beehive or the individual cells in a slime-mould. If it is to be seen as a single entity, then it is a colony—a colony of trillions of quasi-bacterial cells. In adapting it for habitation, though, I do have cause to use other engineered organisms, which might be regarded as symbiotes of the elementary cells. The structure is naturally honeycombed by tunnels and chambers, but the precise design of the corridors and the rooms—not to mention the various connecting conduits which carry water, electricity and optical fibres—requires supplementary work.”
Such work in ordinary Gantzed structures tends to be carried out by de-cementing bacteria whose work is precisely the opposite of the cementers, but from Rowland’s reference to “other engineered organisms” I inferred that he was using “worms” more akin to the artificial organisms used to pulverize rocks like granite and basalt. Most such organisms are, though vermiform, not really worms—most are the larvae of insects, akin to “woodworm”, these frequently being equipped with jaws and rasps powerful enough to cope with stone and metal.
“I have always been interested in insect larvae,” he explained, when I asked him to elaborate. “They have in them so much potential—the phenomenon of metamorphosis has always fascinated me.”
This was an interesting sideline to the discussion, and I pursued it. “None of the larvae which are conventionally used to tunnel through rock are capable of metamorphosis,” I said. “They are of such a size that the insects which would emerge from their pupae would be inviable giants—incapable of breathing or of locomotion.”
“That is because Gantzian engineers have not been interested in the genes which the larvae will only switch on during and after metamorphosis,” Rowland told me. “They have made only feeble efforts to modify such genes, and the giant insects they have managed to produce are mere grotesques. No one has tried to explore fully the real metamorphic potential of these larvae. Crudely utilitarian research into rock-breaking organisms can do no more than scratch the surface.”
“But you have gone further?”
“I have … taken an interest. The humble servants which help to hollow out my rooms have been my only companions for many years, and I have used them in certain unorthodox experiments quite unconnected with their more obvious purpose.”
I could see that this was a point upon which Rowland was, as yet, unwilling to elaborate. He seemed very tired and strained.
“Would it not be a good idea,” I asked, “if we were to return together, however briefly, to the United States? I know you are in touch with medical researchers there, and can transmit information gleaned from analysis of your blood and other fluids, but if you are suffering from a tumour in the brain, you surely need a sophisticated scan, which must be beyond the capacity of your own facilities.”
“Although my illness has its origins in the brain,” he told me, “it is not a localized tumour. It is some kind of genetic defect which is capable of affecting all the cells, and will eventually affect enough of them to kill me, as it killed my sister. The researchers at Harvard have quite enough samples of my cells—and, for that matter, my sister’s cells—in their freezers to allow them to continue examining the chromosomes for many years. Eventually, I feel sure, they will map and identify the anomaly, though by then the knowledge may be redundant as the last known sufferer will be dead—I shall leave no children of my own.
“I hope that the work done on my cells after I am dead will serve to pave the way for their successful treatment and cure. I have been doing my own research, too, using the apparatus that permits me to engineer my bacteria and my worms, to do what I can to study my own chromosomes. I have my own cryonic chambers, and my own tissue-cultures—my father made the first contribution to my stocks before he died.”
“I wonder that you have not devoted your life to that research,” I said, “instead of spending so much time on your other project.”
“Ah!” he said. “My other project will assure me something worth far more than an extended lifespan—it will provide a kind of immortality. Even had I succeeded in curing myself I would have died after seventy or eighty years, but this house will live for centuries, perhaps for millennia. The Usher family will die out with me, but the House of Usher will continue to grow for many generations, and will be one of the wonders of this world when your descendants have built new worlds around distant stars. You see, my friend, that I have lost none of that Romantic imagination which drew you to me all those years ago!”
Indeed he had not, and as we talked further he waxed rhapsodic on the subject of the futures that were already nascent in the genetic technologies of the present day, his inventiveness vaulting across the centuries with talk of the miracles that godlike genetic engineers of the far future would work.
“It is not for you and I to see such things,” he told me, after some while, “but your grandchildren will come into a world that will discover how to offer them immortality, and they will see the world transformed in ways we can hardly imagine. I will have my monument then, as Khufu has his—one of the last and greatest achievements of mortal mankind. We are members of one of the last generations to need tombs, my friend, and I intend that my sister and I shall have one of the very finest!”
His speech was becoming slurred and
his tone was feverishly excited. I knew that his illness was taking hold of him, and I made every effort to calm him. In the afternoon, though, he had to leave me again, and I dined that evening alone.
The hours before I retired to my bed I spent in reading, but I was not tempted to begin the work of making my way through the discs which contained the long record of Rowland Usher’s experiments. Instead, I sought solace in more familiar works—in the poetry of Blake and Byron, and (how could I avoid it?) Edgar Allan Poe. I say solace, but I really mean distraction, because the more time I spent in my tiny apartment deep in the heart of that utterly strange house, the more uneasy I began to feel about my virtual captivity. I did not like to be so cut off from the world outside and the sound of the everpresent murmur in the smooth, warm walls that surrounded me no longer seemed quite so comforting.
When I finally went to my bed I had a turbulent night, full of vague nightmares in which the imagery of Poe’s poems mingled with the dreams and achievements of Rowland Usher. Conqueror worms continually triumphed in an uncertain tragedy, from whose toils I could not escape until I woke in a cold sweat, many hours before morning.
* * *
My nightmare had had such a profound effect on me that I did not like to close my eyes again for fear of its return. I reached out to activate the bioluminescent strips that would light my room, threw back the quilt and rose unsteadily to my feet. I went to the sink on the far side of the chamber, and obtained a cup of water.
No sooner had I taken a sip than my attention was caught by a sound in the corridor outside. Though there was nothing sinister in the sound itself, I had not yet escaped the effects of my evil dream, and it drew from me a gasp of pure terror.
I knew, at the level of reason, that I ought not to be afraid, and I forced myself to go to the door and open it. Such was my state of mind, though, that it was only by the merest crack that I pulled it ajar, and as I peeped out into the corridor my heart was pounding in my breast.
The corridor was not quite dark, though its bioluminescence was considerably toned down, so that what remained was a faint bluish radiance. Because the corridor curved I could see only a few metres in either direction, and could see only one other door—that of Rowland Usher’s bedroom.
That door too seemed to be ajar, but there was darkness within. Moving away from the door, though—just disappearing from sight around the gentle angle of the tunnel—was a human figure. I caught no more of the merest glimpse of it, but I had the distinct impression that it was a young female, perhaps fourteen or fifteen years of age. She was quite naked.
The idea that this was Rowland’s sister Magdalen, somehow risen from the dead, sprang into my mind, provoked by my dream even though I knew full well that it could not be. The power of the thought, even as I fought to dispel it, was sufficient to make me close my door again, and I found to my disgust that I was actually trembling. I—a scientist of the twenty-second century—was infected by the morbidity of the Gothic Imagination! I cursed Rowland Usher and his absurd termitary of a house, and resolved to demand an explanation in the morning.
When morning came, though, the matter seemed far less urgent to me. I had slept again, more restfully, and when I awoke at the proper time my experience in the corridor seemed rather to belong to the realm of my nightmare than to the realm of reality. I honestly could not tell whether or not it had been part of my dream, and even though the cup from which I drank was still on the side of the sink, I could not take seriously what I thought I had seen. Perhaps I simply did not want to.
In any case, I asked no questions of Rowland over breakfast regarding the possibility of his being haunted by the ghost of his sister.
* * *
That day, Rowland felt well enough to conduct me on a tour of his abode, and so we set forth into its amazing winding corridors. He showed me several other guest-rooms—none of which showed the slightest sign of ever having been inhabited—and several storerooms, some of them crammed with collections of objects which he had obviously inherited from past generations, as well as hoards of his own.
There were many antique books, some with acid-rotten pages that should have decayed a century ago, some even dating back to the nineteenth century. There was a collection of minerals, one of medical specimens, one of ancient navigational instruments, and a particularly quaint assembly of display screens and keyboards from the early days of information technology. I asked if these devices were in working order, but Rowland simply shrugged his shoulders; he did not know.
When we descended into the lower strata of the house I found things much more coherently organized, and there were clearly many rooms in active use. First he showed me the laboratories where he conducted his experiments in genetic analysis and his transformations of Gantzing bacteria. His equipment was reasonably modern, though no private individual, however rich, can possibly keep up with the larger research institutions.
His fermenters, where his bacterial cultures grew, were built into the fabric of the house, and it was not until he told me their cubic capacity that I realized how much of the house was hidden, circled by the spiralling corridors. Clearly, that space was not wasted.
I marvelled that any one man could possibly make use of the extensive laboratory facilities, but he assured me that the high level of automation made it reasonably easy. He had relatively few household robots, regarding the motile varieties as inherently unreliable examples of the mechanician’s art, but some routine activities were contracted out to service personnel who operated machines by remote control.
At a lower level still, he showed me other holding tanks, where he kept his many species of burrowing worms. Most species needed special containers of some substance which they could not break up or digest. There were observation-windows which let us look in upon the creatures, though sometimes we could see little enough within because of the difficulties of providing lighting systems immune from their ravages.
Rowland allowed a few species of these worms to live free in the structure of the house, almost as parasites, because they could not damage its structure and performed useful waste-disposal functions as they foraged for food. At first it was disconcerting to come across these creatures at irregular intervals, but I soon got used to it.
“How do you direct the burrowing of the more voracious species?” I asked him. “Surely, any kind of escape would be desperately dangerous—the worms could devour the entire fabric of the house.”
“Elementary cyborgization,” he told me. “These creatures have little or no brain, and are guided through life by simple behavioural drives. It is a relatively easy matter to fit them with electronic devices which deliver the appropriate commands by electrical or biochemical stimulation. I handle them with great care. They cannot live, of course, on the materials they are designed to tunnel through, and their diets are deliberately exotic. I feed them what they need in order to execute a particular task, and no more. They cannot escape, and could not live wild if they did.”
Watching these curious creatures, roaming loose or in their tanks, made me slightly nauseous, though I had often seen their like before. Most were like blowfly maggots—big and soft and white, their body walls so transparent that one could see the organs inside them. Rowland’s were the biggest I had ever encountered, a metre and a half in length and at least eighty centimetres in girth. Their internal organs were not themselves coloured, but were enwrapped in a webwork of blue and pink. I asked Rowland to explain this, and he told me that he had equipped their circulatory systems with haemoglobin in order to serve the oxygen-needs of their organs; like us these creatures had deoxygenated blue blood in their veins and oxygenated red blood in their arteries.
Some others looked more like elongated centipedes than maggots, being bright yellow in colour and equipped with hundreds of pairs of limbs along the length of their plated bodies. These too were the largest of their kind I had ever encountered, being at least four metres long, though only as thick as a man’s wrist. A few of
these living machines were, on the other hand, surprisingly small: there were black, hard-skinned creatures that were only a few centimetres from head to tail, though they had vast heads that were almost all jaw. Rowland informed me that these were very difficult to rear because of the enormous amounts of food they had to consume in order to work those massive jaws. In their holding tank, they were virtually submerged in high-protein fluid.
These marvels impressed me tremendously, and we spent many hours in these lower regions. He showed me something of the “roots” which the house extended into the substrate of the swamp, and the apparatus for gathering in organic materials from the silt. He also showed me the biological batteries which produced the houses’s electricity—which had a potential output, Rowland boasted, equivalent to thirty billion electric eels. Most of this, however, remained inevitably hidden; what could be seen of the house’s systems was far less, in metaphorical terms, than the tip of an iceberg. Rowland assured me that there was much more to be seen than could be taken in during a single day. He reeled off statistics in an impressively casual manner, telling me that the biomass of the house was greater than ten thousand elephants, and that if it had been a single organism then it would have been the vastest that had ever existed on Earth.
By the time afternoon came, though, he was becoming increasingly tired, and his graphic descriptions began again to diversify into flights of fantasy, in which houses such as this one would gradually replace the plants and animals making up the world’s ecosystems, so that in a thousand years the entire ecosphere might consist of nothing but organic artifacts—not merely houses but entire cities—all locked into a carefully symbiotic relationship controlled by men.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection Page 52
