Nature's Shift

by Brian Stableford

  Perhaps he was right. Perhaps, in fact, he was understating the case, and it had really been rank cowardice in the face of someone who wasn’t even an enemy, strictly speaking. In my view, of course, I was simply showing solidarity with Rowland, who might well have taken it as an insult if I had gone to work for Rosalind, even if I hadn’t done it until after Magdalen had returned to England...perhaps especially if I had done so after Magdalen’s return.

  The professor must have felt that his lack of enthusiasm was impolite, given my heroic efforts to build up his own specialty, because he was quick to backtrack on his lukewarm judgment. “Important work, though, algal studies, quite apart from the marine oil industry” he said. “We don’t really know, as yet, how badly the littoral ecosystems were hit by the ecocatastrophe, do we? They were in the front line, after all, forced into rapid geographical shifts during the Antarctic Depletion. The resettlement isn’t simply going to put things back the way they were—it’s going to be a century or more until we can even measure the lingering effects, and evolution would be in tachytelic mode even if human creativity weren’t playing such a strong hand. How is the work going?”

  “Slowly,” I said, philosophically. After “still the same old stuff,” there is no more hallowed response in the corridors of academe. One’s research is always going slowly, and one always has to admit the fact with an expression of philosophical resignation. In my case, though, it was true, and not because of the ever-pressing demands of teaching. Had I been working for Rosalind, of course, everything would have been different. In the Hive of Industry, everything moved rapidly. Urgency was the norm, philosophical resignation was prohibited, and results flowed in abundance, nourishing the world as the infant Zeus had once been nourished by Amalthea’s magical horn.

  There was still some time to go before the ceremony was due to begin—the professor and I had been standing relatively close to the marquee when crowd dynamics began to move us, and we’d been among the first inside, although we’d naturally taken up positions in the rear, as befitted our lowly status. We had no alternative but to go on making conversation, and the Professor inevitably followed the script dictated by Fate.

  “Do you know what it is that Rowland’s doing, out in the Orinoco delta?” he asked. “I haven’t seen any of his recent publications, I fear.”

  “Not exactly,” I admitted. “He’s not very good at keeping in touch—and he doesn’t publish at all, so you haven’t actually missed out on anything—but we’re still friends.” I felt compelled to add the last remark, simply because the fact seemed so vulnerable to doubt.

  “I’ve seen images of his gargantuan mud hut on the web,” the Professor said. “Quite an achievement in itself, though not as elegant as Roderick’s Pyramid. You and Rowland both did elective courses in civil engineering, didn’t you? Rowland was determined to match his grandfather’s qualifications as a true Renaissance Man, wasn’t he? You both did Practical Neurology too, as I remember, with old Fliegmann—he died five years ago, alas. You were keeping Rowland company, I assume—lending moral support. Magdalen stuck more narrowly to the central syllabus, as I recall. She was intelligent enough, but she didn’t have Rowland’s vaulting imagination.” Dutifully—because he hadn’t, after all been my personal tutor—he didn’t add: “Nor had you.”

  “Rowland had a lot of interests,” I confirmed. “I tried to keep up, but I couldn’t. Magdalen, having grown up with him, had already given up, although Rosalind didn’t approve. Rosalind had intended them to be equals and collaborators—and she was probably right to believe that Magdalen was Rowland’s equal intellectually, only made timid by the backwash of his energy and his arrogance.”

  “Arrogance is no sin in a scientist,” the professor observed—perhaps plaintively, since he was not an arrogant man himself. “The great ones always had infinite faith in themselves, and no respect at all for orthodoxy. That kind of attitude fuels the drive, the necessary obsession.”

  He wasn’t just expressing regret for his own lack of that drive, and his own lack of greatness. He was looking at me. He had no right to do that. He didn’t know me at all.

  “I expect that Rowland will come down from the Pyramid with the other family members, when the ceremony’s just about to start,” the professor opined, when I didn’t make any reply to his last remark. “I don’t know his other sisters, but I’d certainly recognize Rosalind if I saw her—she wasn’t mingling outside, was she?”

  “Rosalind doesn’t mingle,” I said, flatly. “But I didn’t see any of the sisters either. I met most of them, when Rowland and I were still students, but they were all kids back then—Rosalind left a long gap after the first two, presumably to give her time to see how the experiment was working out. The older ones will have grown up now, and even the little ones I met will be teenagers. It’s ten years since I’ve seen any of them—they wouldn’t remember me.”

  “I’m surprised by that…that you didn’t keep in touch with the family,” the professor ventured, probing as subtly as he could, because he knew that he was on sensitive ground.

  “I shouldn’t have let things slide,” I admitted. “I wish that Magdalen had taken the trouble to call me, though, if…when…” I couldn’t finish the sentence. If, or when Magdalen had decided to kill herself, she probably hadn’t called anyone. I wasn’t the only one she hadn’t turned to in extremis.

  “You were...quite fond of her, though, back then?”

  “Yes,” I confirmed, through teeth that were only slightly gritted, “quite fond.”

  He knew when a subject had to be dropped, and returned to safer ground. “I thought that Roland would make an insect man back then,” he said, settling back into his rut, in terms of his phraseology as well as his subject-matter. “In spite of all the flirtations with strange sidelines, I thought he’d eventually take up where Roderick had left off, Rosalind having gone off at something of a tangent.”

  “According to the Usher family doctrine,” I said, only a trifle sarcastically, “there’s no such thing as an insect man per se. In Roderick the Great’s vocabulary, insects are components of dedicated symbiotic partnerships; their early evolution took place in harness with the evolution of flowering plants, as a complex pas de deux. In Usher mythology, an insect’s place is in the bosom of a flower, trading its services as a pollen-distributor for nectar.”

  “You’re being flippant,” he said. “That might apply, albeit loosely, to bees, but insects are extraordinarily versatile, ecologically speaking—almost as versatile as worms. Only a tiny minority are involved in pollination, or any other kind of symbiosis, and then only as imagoes.”

  “That was the past, Professor,” I reminded him. “The Ushers are looking to the future. From now on…from fifty years ago, in fact…the fate of insects is to be whatever the Hive of Industry wants them to be. Pests out, symbiotes in, no neutrals. Anyway, insects were never all that versatile. There might still be hundreds of thousands of beetle species left, out of the pre-Crash millions, but they’re all just beetles. The insects never contrived to recolonize the sea in the way that reptiles, mammals and birds did. There aren’t any insects in my little corner of creation—yet.”

  “You’re still being flippant,” was Professor Crowthorne’s expert judgment. Gallantly, he added: “And why not? We take ourselves and our work too seriously, sometimes—and in the face of tragedy, of matters that we can’t control, no matter how clever we might be as biotechnicians, what psychological weapons do we have, except for a refusal not to take things too seriously? You have to laugh or you’d cry—isn’t that what they say up there in Lancashire.”

  His idea of northern parlance had obviously been forged by historical dramas on TV, but he meant well.

  “So it’s rumored,” I agreed.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Fortunately, the family members were beginning to make their appearance and fill up the front rows of the auditorium. The daughters didn’t enter in a disciplined file, but there was an orde
r of sorts to their gradual filtration. The older ones were looking after the younger ones. I wasn’t really counting—I was looking for Rowland, still believing that he was bound to appear—but I couldn’t help being aware that the daughters were more than a dozen strong, perhaps nearer to twenty in total.

  Rowland didn’t appear. Maybe, I thought, right up until the last possible moment, he was going to come in last, escorting Rosalind as a dutiful son should. Maybe, I thought, the tragedy of Magdalen’s suicide—or Magdalen’s death, if it had been accidental—had brought them together in grief, had healed their differences and united the family again. Maybe, I thought, there might be something resembling a happy ending to place in the credit column against the debit of Magdalen’s loss, to provide some crumb of consolation, if not to produce some impossible semblance of balance in the books.

  But Rowland didn’t appear. When Rosalind finally made her grand entrance, she was alone: unaccompanied, unsupported, devoid of any symbiotic partnership, dedicated or otherwise.

  How could I ever have thought that it might be otherwise? Of course Rosalind was alone. If Rowland had been there, he would have been sent to sit down, not allowed to stand beside Rosalind, or even slightly behind her.

  She was perfectly composed, and quite beautiful, in her own way. In an era of sophisticated somatic engineering, any woman can be beautiful, in a conventional sense, but distinctive beauty is still rare and precious, and Rosalind had it, more than any of her beautiful daughters. She wasn’t as pretty as Magdalen, as charming as Magdalen or as lovable as Magdalen, but she was more beautiful, not because of her metallic blonde hair or her striking pale blue eyes, or the delicacy of her nose, or the symmetry of her ears and chin, but because she was Rosalind, the Queen Bee, in all her absolute majesty. Web chatter sometimes likened her to Cleopatra or Catherine the Great, but those models were morally compromised; the most frequently-cited analogy by far was to Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen.

  Rosalind had twenty children, but she had never married, and never would. The idea was unthinkable. Unlike Elizabeth, she didn’t even have “favorites.” She was always unescorted, at social occasions of every sort.

  She looked magnificent. I had no doubt that she would be magnificent. It was Magdalen’s funeral, but it was her show.

  “He’s not here, is he?” said Professor Crowthorne, in a whisper that had horror in it as well as amazement.

  “No,” I said, in a much more level tone. “He’s not here. He hasn’t come.”

  My first instinct was not so much to explore possible reasons for Rowland’s absence, but to find excuses for him—excuses I hadn’t been able to find, in the event, for myself.

  Perhaps Rowland and Magdalen had enjoyed—or had at least believed that they enjoyed—such a close union of mind and spirit that Rowland felt that his presence in spirit made any physical presence at her funeral quite irrelevant. Perhaps they had been so close—and yet, paradoxically, so far apart—that Rowland had been overwhelmed by grief. Perhaps he was ill in bed, unable to travel. Perhaps….

  Rosalind, I knew, would not have tolerated any excuses of those sorts. She was the kind of hard-line positivist who thought all talk of “spirit” nonsensical; the only kind of presence she recognized was physical presence. Grief she did believe in, but did not believe that it could or should be incapacitating. Illness she undoubtedly believed in too, but similarly believed that it could not and should not be incapacitating, unless literally mortal. In Rosalind’s view, I had no doubt, Rowland should have been sitting meekly in the front row, with all his sisters—perhaps positioned arrogantly at their head, but nevertheless with them, in the junior ranks of the family.

  In theory, I suppose I agreed with her standpoint—but I admit to being a slightly fuzzy thinker, and when it came to Rowland, and Magdalen too, I was prepared to think in terms of spirit, and incapacitating grief. There had always been something slightly uncanny about Rowland, and if there was one person in the world who might be capable of surviving death as a ghost, in the minds of people who had known her, it was Magdalen. But still, Rowland should have been there. Whatever excuse he had, he should have set it aside, for Magdalen’s sake.

  I could only speculate, of course, as to the effect the Magdalen’s return to Eden, after little more than a year in Venezuela—her desertion, as he would have seen it—must have had on Rowland. That was one of the many things about which he maintained absolute web-silence. I could understand that he might have felt deeply offended—angry, even—but not to the extent that he would refuse to attend her funeral.

  Obviously, I wasn’t the only person who had expected to see Rowland there, although there was probably only one other who had turned up for that express purpose, because there was a ripple of reaction when the other members of the crowd realized what the professor and I had realized. It wasn’t exactly a murmur of disapproval, but it was audible and tangible. Magdalen’s brother wasn’t there: only her sisters, and her mother.

  All eyes were on Rosalind anyway, but the general awareness of Rowland’s absence focused that attention even more intently, and lent an extra dimension of sympathy to it.

  Rosalind probably wasn’t quite as old as Professor Crowthorne, but she was certainly in her seventies, at least. She had made far more use of somatic engineering to modify her appearance than he had, but she had been equally wise in not attempting to preserve the visual illusion that she might be in her twenties. She was not interested in seeming venerable, but she was even less interested in seeming youthful. She wanted to appear mature in her distinctive beauty, not because maturity implied wisdom, but because it implied power—real power, not the ineffectual sham manifested by such historical lightweights as Elizabeth I. The cast of her features was not masculine, but it was not feminine either, unless one assumed—as some sycophantic commentators had been willing and eager to do—that it was the type-specimen of a new femininity, which would eventually redefine the notion.

  She seemed capable of redefining such terms as “beautiful” and “regal,” and I mean no insult in saying that the funeral brought out the best in her. She was clad in black, but she was no mute butterfly. She was a human Queen Bee from top to toe, in her sober and somber mourning-dress. Lesser mortals still hired minister-substitutes to act as masters-of-ceremonies in humanist funerals, but not Rosalind. Rosalind took the podium herself, and it was obvious that she would be in charge from beginning to end, no matter who else she might invite to eulogize or sing.

  There were eulogies, of which Rosalind’s was the most elegant, if not the longest; there was also music, some of it accompanied by voices. There was no mention, by anyone, of the cause of Magdalen’s death. There was no mention either, by anyone, of Rowland. How Rosalind improvised a eulogy without mentioning that Magdalen had a twin of sorts, I’m not entirely sure, but she did. She spoke about her love for her first-born daughter, and her other daughters’ love for their eldest sister, and she said something about Magdalen’s significant contributions to the work of the Hive of Industry, but she never mentioned that Magdalen had ever visited Venezuela. I noticed those absences far more than the words that were actually pronounced, perhaps because I was numb with the shock of Rowland’s absence.

  As soon as the disbelief wore off, I resumed thinking, with all the force that mentality could muster: I shouldn’t have come. I should have had the courage to stay away. If he could do it, why couldn’t I? I actually felt resentful. I felt as if I had somehow been tricked—as if the possibility of seeing Rowland had been dangled as a lure, but that, on taking the bait, I had found nothing but a cruelly-barbed steel hook.

  It was nonsense, of course. I hadn’t even been invited to the funeral, let alone lured. I had merely been given permission to attend, if I wished, not because I had once known Rowland, but because I had once known Magdalen. I had been given permission to attend because I had once loved Magdalen, very dearly, and because Rosalind had known that Magdalen—however she had died—would have wanted
the people who had loved her dearly to be at her funeral. Rowland didn’t come into it…except that what had sprung first and foremost to the minds of ingrates like myself and Professor J. V. Crowthorne, who had known and loved Magdalen as a component in a dedicated symbiotic relationship, had been the possibility of seeing the living remainder of that relationship, not the corpse of its extinct fraction.

  Not that we actually got to see a corpse. There was a container, in the geometrical center of the circle mapped out by the dome’s circumference, but it wasn’t even a coffin. The legally-required cremation had already taken place, in private; all that was offered to the contemplation of the mourners was a casket the size of a tea-caddy, which presumably contained her ashes. I say presumably not because I doubted that she was really dead, or because I doubted that that the contents of the casket really were the residue of her cremation, or because I had any cynical reservations about identifying post-cremation ashes with a person, but simply because we had to presume. All we could actually see was a casket. We had to imagine its contents.