Nature's Shift

by Brian Stableford

  Borgo Press Fiction by Brian Stableford

  Alien Abduction: The Wiltshire Revelations

  The Best of Both Worlds and Other Ambiguous Tales

  Beyond the Colors of Darkness and Other Exotica

  Changelings and Other Metaphoric Tales

  Complications and Other Science Fiction Stories

  The Cosmic Perspective and Other Black Comedies

  The Cthulhu Encryption: A Romance of Piracy

  The Cure for Love and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution

  The Dragon Man: A Novel of the Future

  The Eleventh Hour

  The Fenris Device (Hooded Swan #5)

  Firefly: A Novel of the Far Future

  Les Fleurs du Mal: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution

  The Gardens of Tantalus and Other Delusions

  The Great Chain of Being and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution

  Halycon Drift (Hooded Swan #1)

  The Haunted Bookshop and Other Apparitions

  In the Flesh and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution

  The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels

  Kiss the Goat: A Twenty-First-Century Ghost Story

  Luscinia: A Romance of Nightingales and Roses

  The Mad Trist: A Romance of Bibliomania

  The Moment of Truth: A Novel of the Future

  Nature’s Shift: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution

  An Oasis of Horror: Decadent Tales and Contes Cruels

  The Paradise Game (Hooded Swan #4)

  The Plurality of Worlds: A Sixteenth-Century Space Opera

  Prelude to Eternity: A Romance of the First Time Machine

  Promised Land (Hooded Swan #3)

  The Quintessence of August: A Romance of Possession

  The Return of the Djinn and Other Black Melodramas

  Rhapsody in Black (Hooded Swan #2)

  Salome and Other Decadent Fantasies

  Swan Song (Hooded Swan #6)

  The Tree of Life and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution

  The Undead: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution

  Valdemar’s Daughter: A Romance of Mesmerism

  The World Beyond: A Sequel to S. Fowler Wright’s The World Below

  Xeno’s Paradox: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution

  Zombies Don’t Cry: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution

  Author’s Note

  This novel is loosely based on a short story entitled “The Growth of the House of Usher,” which first appeared in Interzone 24 in 1988.

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Copyright © 1988, 2011 by Brian Stableford

  Published by Wildside Press LLC

  www.wildsidebooks.com

  DEDICATION

  For Linda

  EPIGRAPH

  But from the first ’twas Peter’s drift

  To be a kind of moral eunuch,

  He touched the hem of Nature’s shift

  Felt faint—and never dared uplift

  The closest, all-concealing tunic.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Peter Bell the Third”

  CHAPTER ONE

  I didn’t want to go to the funeral. I told myself repeatedly, while I waited for the trains that took me from Lancaster to Birmingham, Birmingham to Bristol, and from Bristol to Exeter, that I would do better to turn around and go home, and avoid any reconnection with the desolate past. I told myself again when I caught my first glance of the Crystal Palaces of Eden and the Great Pyramid in the distance. I couldn’t help feeling a twinge of nostalgia, of course, but any affection I had for the place, and the memories associated with it, was drowned by the residue of disappointment it had left behind, and the aching wreckage of…well, calling it a broken heart would probably be stretching cliché too far.

  I was still telling myself that I shouldn’t have come when I was confronted by the huge gates of Eden, far more steely than pearly. They were manned by uniformed security guards, and when I told one of them my name I had a faint, absurd flash of hoping that he might consult a list on his phone or a virtual palm-print, decide that I wasn’t on it, and turn me away.

  The fact that he didn’t have to consult his phone or the palm of his hand seemed somehow ominous, although it was presumably just a tribute to technical elegance. I didn’t suppose that the poor fellow had been required to memorize two hundred names—there were more than four hundred people at the ceremony, but they included a lot of family groups—so I concluded that he had some kind of subtle earpiece relaying information to him from a central control-room, whose guardians obviously had eyes as well as ears on me.

  At any rate, the petty Saint Peter didn’t turn poor Sinner Peter away, or even ask to see any kind of documentation. I didn’t have an invitation, as such—but someone, presumably Rosalind, had taken the trouble to send me a notification of the time and place of the funeral, not via the web but by means of a courier-delivered black-rimmed card. I had it in my pocket, just in case. Would I have had the courage to refrain from showing it, if I had been asked, in order to be turned away? Probably not. I had come at the way from Lancaster, after all, even though I knew, deep down, that I shouldn’t have.

  I mustn’t exaggerate, though. It wasn’t a case of fascination, like those old myths about birds hypnotized by snakes. I was there because I needed to be there, even though I knew I shouldn’t want to. I needed to see Rowland again. I needed to give him my sincere condolences. It never occurred to me for an instant that he wouldn’t be present at his own sister’s funeral—and not just any sister, but Magdalen. That was beyond belief, even for Rowland.

  If I’d known that he wouldn’t be there, I probably wouldn’t have gone—not because of any disrespect for Magdalen, with whom I had once been in love, or even because the thought of having to face Rosalind without any protective presence to shield me from her glare was too much to bear, but simply because Rowland’s absence would have made the whole occasion seem pointless. It was almost as if, without Rowland there to bear witness, Magdalen couldn’t possibly be dead, and the funeral couldn’t possibly be taking place.

  At any rate, I did want to see Rowland; that was the only reason I had for going back to Eden. We were still friends, in some mysterious sense independent of actual communication. Even if he did take invisibility to extraordinary lengths when it came to web-presence and web communication—to the extent that people who did not know him would have declared him a friendless recluse—I knew that there was something unbreakable and eternal in the bond we had forged in our late teens and early twenties. I hadn’t seen him in the flesh since he had taken up residence thousands of miles away in Venezuela, in the most remote spot he could find—presumably in order to get away from Rosalind, although that bond too was eternal and unbreakable—and it was at least seven years since I’d spoken to him over the phone, but the omission was a result of careless neglect, not design.

  I hadn’t spoken to Magdalen either—in fact, I hadn’t seen or spoken to Magdalen since she’d left Venezuela to return home, after not much more than a year in the tropics. It wouldn’t have surprised me very much to learn that Rowland hadn’t spoken to Magdalen for years either, in spite of the fact that their bond was the most intimate and intense of them all. If so, I imagined, as I crossed the threshold of Eden, he must be feeling bitterly regretful now.

  Inevitably, I only recognized a tiny fraction of the people making their way along the pathways toward the purpose-built marquee where the ceremony was to be held. Everyone was on foot; although there was a driveway leading from the steely gates to the base of the Pyramid, all vehicles had been halted at the gate and diverted into an ad hoc car park. Today, Eden was for pedestrians only. There was no way of getting to the marquee without smelling the flowers, save for donning a
gas mask.

  You can get very unobtrusive gas masks nowadays—bimolecular films that are as invisible as a recluse’s web-presence—but it would have been impolite to wear one to a funeral. Even though I didn’t recognize ninety-five per cent of the mourners, and only knew most of the rest from the TV, I didn’t suppose for a moment that they included anyone impolite. After all, we all knew that there was nothing to fear in a crudely literal sense—that Rosalind had no wish to harm us. Subtle manipulation was, of course, a different matter. That was her deepest inclination as well as her chief stock-in-trade. When he was in a slightly vindictive mood, Rowland had been wont to remark that although God had almost equaled Rosalind’s talent as a creator, he’d never shown anything like her ability as a control-freak. People with a sense of humor always laughed at that, assuming that he was making a slightly off-color joke. I never did. I’d actually met Rosalind, on several occasions, when Rowland and Magdalen had invited me to their exotic home, and had felt the awesome force of her personality.

  Have the flower-beds been specially replanted for the occasion? I couldn’t help wondering, as I walked between two that were gloriously in flower—even though it was April and the Met Office directors, ever sticklers for tradition, were keeping the weather cool and showery—and if so, what effect are the flowers supposed to have?

  There was nothing gloomy about the visual aspect of the flowers, which were mostly in pastels shades of blue, yellow, purple and pink, without a lily to be seen, but Rosalind wasn’t that unsubtle, except when she really wanted to be, and I knew that any kicker would be in the scents. Had Rosalind’s research in psychotropics achieved sufficient sophistication to allow her to engineer flowers that would assist mourners to cultivate an appropriately mournful mood? Probably—but that would have been an insult of sorts. If the scents of Eden’s flowers had been carefully planned for the occasion, according to her own aesthetic scheme, they would be sowing more complex emotions than mere sadness. When it came to moving in mysterious ways, God might still have the edge on Rosalind, but not by much.

  This had been Roderick’s Eden before it was Rosalind’s however, so I didn’t just look at the flowers. I searched for their pollinators, expecting bees—but what I actually found was black butterflies. As soon as I saw them, fluttering discreetly between the blooms, I kicked myself mentally for not having guessed. It was the perfect combination of delicacy and ostentation. Black butterflies: the perfect mutes to lead a funeral procession for one of Rosalind’s daughters, one of the pillars of the Hive of Industry. Black bees couldn’t have done the job nearly so well.

  Before the Crash, I knew, there had been a species of butterfly called a Mourning Cloak, but its wings had not been black. The butterflies in Eden’s specially-replanted beds were not a resurrected or simulated species; they were new. They were Magdelen’s butterflies, made for her commemoration. If the Hive of Industry’s marketing department decided that there was money to be made out of funeral butterflies, the ones supplied for future events would not be the same as these; Rosalind would make sure of that.

  Even after I had seen and understood the significance of the butterflies, it took me at least three minutes to relax and breathe with some semblance of natural rhythm as I moved through the flowers-beds. The only olfactory sensations of which I was conscious were sweet, pleasant and welcoming—but the whole point of olfactory psychotropics is that they by-pass consciousness entirely and work at a deeper mental level, so I couldn’t be certain, purely on the grounds of what I was feeling consciously, that there wasn’t some subtler subconscious effect. The very uncertainty and confusion of my feelings seemed to be a guarantee of sorts that there was no insidious manipulation going on, and that the pleasant scents were exactly what they seemed, but….

  I abandoned the vicious circularity of that train of thought.

  They were pleasant scents, and not in any crude quasi-pheromonal sense. They might not have been calculated to make people feel sad, but any reference they were making to the ancestral olfactory spectrum was quite chaste; even their sweetness seemed strangely wholesome, although there isn’t a lot of room for sophistication in that regard. On the other hand, if anyone were capable of discovering a new kind of sweetness, it would surely be Rosalind, or one of her daughters. Rosalind was not to be underestimated, in biotechnical terms, and nor were her daughters. She was, after all, the Queen Bee as well as the Bee Queen, and her surviving offspring were fearsome workers.

  Even Magdalen had been a fearsome worker, in her way. Not that Rowland was any sort of drone, of course, but he had always stuck out as something of an anomaly within the family, even if one contrived to set aside his sex. He wasn’t by any means a fly in the ointment, but he wasn’t a team player either. While his sisters worked with relentless determination on Rosalind’s behalf, following the disciplined lines of Rosalind’s imagination, Rowland had always been determined to exert his independence, not merely to do what Rosalind did not want to do, but, if possible—and it was a very big if—to do things that couldn’t or shouldn’t be done, in Rosalind’s opinion. When I had first met him, I had assumed that it was a perfectly natural teenage rebellion against parental authority—with which I, of all people, had every reason to sympathize—but as I had got to know him better I had learned that it cut much deeper than that the usual generation-gap issues. I had sympathized with that, too.

  Some of his more casual acquaintances had thought—and said—that he was merely taking after Rosalind, because she had taken a similar attitude to her father, but Rowland always denied that, and Magdalen had always backed him up. I had never had the privilege of meeting Roderick the Great myself—he had died many years before I met Rowland and Magdalen—so I had never had the opportunity to study Rosalind in the role of daughter, only that of matriarch.

  I decided, on due reflection, that the scent of the flowers produced for the occasion couldn’t have been loaded with psychotropics of any sort, because Rosalind would definitely have considered any ploy of that sort beneath her dignity. That didn’t mean, however, that they couldn’t intended to create a funereal mood by underhanded means, because Rosalind understood the placebo effect as well as anyone. The mere possibility that the flowers might be psychotropic, and might be intended to cultivate sadness, might lead some people actually to feel sadness. Sadness is only an emotion, after all, and in Rosalind’s world-view, emotion was mostly illusion….

  There was a threat of vicious circularity in that line of thought too, and I abandoned it.

  In any case, there was no illusion at all in the gut-wrenching sadness that I felt as I approached the marquee, because I wasn’t some client of the Hive putting on show of polite solidarity. In my case, there was no need for any artificial stimulus of any sort. I wasn’t the only person who had loved Magdalen, by any means, but I had loved her best, and longest.

  The general mood, as the crowd became more compact around the marquee, did seem decidedly solemn, though. Perhaps, I thought, even in a crowd almost entirely made up of people who did business with Rosalind rather than people who had known Magdalen personally, my grief might somehow be contagious—but that was sheer nonsense, and I tried to pull myself together.

  The marquee wasn’t any kind of standard model, of course. Funeral marquees are becoming rare nowadays—though not as rare as wedding marquees—because the conquest of death is making real progress, and rarity has inevitably bred originality as well as ostentation, but the majority of atheist funerals still retain the lessons of church architecture in attempting to cultivate an atmosphere of substituted sanctity. Add a crucifix or two and most of the structures in which early twenty-second century funeral ceremonies are held could still one mistaken for chapels or temples…but not the one that Rosalind had build for Magdalen.

  Roderick the Great had been, among his many other talents, a gantzer of genius, and Rosalind hadn’t forsaken that aspect of the family tradition while developing her own distinctive expertise. She was something o
f a Crystal Palace specialist, though—the Great Pyramid had been Roderick’s—and she had obviously felt that she ought to stick to what she did best, especially, for her eldest daughter’s funeral.

  Magdalen’s was, I presumed, the first family funeral Rosalind had ever had to organize. She had been too young to take a hand in planning Roderick’s. In any case, the Great Man had surrounded himself with an entourage of organizers, and would probably have designed every last detail of his own funeral in advance, so that his actual death merely functioned as a trigger setting the mechanism in motion, leaving nothing for Rosalind to do but learn her own allotted bit part. How she must have hated that, even as a child! All of her other daughters were still alive, as was her one and only son.

  The marquee was a dome of glass—a dome of many-colored glass, in fact. It was however, a plain dome, geometrically speaking, and its many colors retained a dutiful fidelity to the harmonics of the Newtonian spectrum. It was elegant and tasteful, if not obviously funereal at first glance. Some people might have mistaken its hemispherical smoothness and its insistent colors for an attempt to lighten the mood—a belated attempt to resurrect the twenty-first century vogue for pretending that funerals ought to be celebrations of life rather than defiant resentments of death—but Rosalind was the last person in the world to try to resurrect a vogue that was stupid as well as obsolete. She had nothing at all against resurrection, but she was a strict utilitarian in that regard. She had lived through the worst years of the Crash as a child and adolescent, and even though her view of it had been largely obtained from the top of Roderick’s Great Pyramid, she knew what death was, and knew that it was not something to be met meekly, with eyes turned resolutely backwards.

  To me, the statement made by the colored marquee was one of raging against the dying of the light—but I knew that I had to be careful of seeing it through the lens of my own imaginative inclinations. Rowland had often criticized me for “thinking in quotes,” deeming the habit slavish. He was not an admirer of poetry himself, least of all Romantic poetry, and had not reacted well when I had once referred to him, intending to pay him a compliment, as a “tyger” burning bright in the forests of the night, although he had mercifully failed to understand when I had once addressed him in a slightly less complimentary mood, as “Manfred.”