Nature's Shift

by Brian Stableford

  As for Rosalind, I am obliged to conclude, in spite of the fact that I do not really like the woman, that she really was a successful product of Roderick’s genius. She is not only a great scientist but a great artist too. Her understanding of beauty might be based in a scientific mind-set, but she does understand beauty and she is a prolific creator of beauty. Her understanding of eroticism is similarly based in analysis and theorization, but she does understand it, and her mastery of olfactory psychotropics is no mere chemistry. I know little or nothing about her love life, but everything I do know inclines me to believe that she is an exceptional human being in every respect—which makes it all the more remarkable, in a way, that she neither foresaw nor was able to prevent her daughter’s premature death. But even perfect human beings have flaws—how could they be perfect if they had not, given that humanity is, in essence, flawed?

  Even Peter Bell the First—whose arrogance was, I would like to believe, far greater than my own—knew that humanity has intrinsic flaws. He was more prepared to tolerate his own flaws than other people’s—but aren’t we all?

  Rosalind knew regret, now, as burden and poison. I had known it for a long time, as Rowland had—but evidently not as dolorously, or at least not as decisively, as Magdalen.

  I was still sure, even as my plane touched down in Trinidad, that my going to visit Rowland could not and would not do him any harm. I wanted to see him. He wanted to see me. There really were unique opportunities in the Orinoco delta for studying the crisis-reactions of algal species. But still, in spite of all of that, there was something deep within me—something deep within my scientific mind-set—that kept telling me that I shouldn’t have gone to Magdalen’s funeral, that I shouldn’t have exposed myself to Rosalind’s grief and Rosalind’s need.

  The first and foremost thing of which scientists are always acutely aware is the need to remain objective, external to the phenomena under consideration. The second is that it’s impossible to meet that need. No matter how inconvenient it is, we are in the world and part of the phenomena. I shouldn’t have gone to the funeral, but I had to. There was no alternative. I had to meet Rosalind’s grief, and Rosalind’s need. I had to come to see Rowland, not just for my sake and for his, but for Rosalind’s, and Magdalen’s Magadalen was dead; she had presumably killed herself in order to be free of her own insatiable, ineradicable need—but the rest of us weren’t free of it, and never would be, while we were still alive.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Eddie Poe would doubtless have been delighted to know that it was a dull, dark and seemingly-soundless day on which I finally approached the remarkable house that my friend Rowland Usher had built, in the loneliest spot he could find, in the new wilderness of the regenerated Orinoco delta. I say seemingly-soundless because I was being ferried there by a boat with a powerful internal-combustion engine, and the stuttering growl of that engine was all too evident. Its very insistence, however, emphasized that it was alien to the scene, and that without its rude interruption, the delta would indeed have been silent.

  In the olden days, before the sea had made its fatal incursion and mounted its subsequent retreat, there would have been plenty of sounds. The hum of insects would not have extended so far over the water, but the calls of birds would have done so, and perhaps the occasional cry of a jaguar. There would certainly have been distant sounds of some kind of human activity. Now, though, the birds were only just beginning to return, and were still maintaining a mute discretion, jaguars were extinct and other mammals would take a great deal longer to put in an appearance. As for the humans…well, the humans were as unpredictable as ever, but they had not yet started making a noise.

  The morning was dull and dark because the sky was covered in sullen cloud, behind which the invisible sun was already setting, signifying its presence by a dull ruddy glow that seemed more sulky than fiery. The clouds gave the impression that they were trying to rain, but had not quite summoned up the energy. We were still in the “rainy season,” although its peak had passed.

  I had been traveling for more than twenty-four hours—which had been transformed into twenty-eight by the clock—but I was neither unduly tired not unduly disorientated. I had slept unusually well on the plane, and the tropical air seemed strangely invigorating. I felt awake and energized.

  I was studying the placid surface of the water rather than the uneasy condition of the sky. A layman would have seen it as mottled green and curiously slimy, and might even have thought it stagnant, given the stillness of the moment, but I knew more than enough about algae to know that it was a far-from-stagnant battleground, where the flow of the numerous branches of the mighty river and the tides of the mightier ocean maintained incessantly shifting fronts and conflicts, creating ever-fluid challenges to freshwater specialists and saltwater specialists, and golden opportunities for versatile species that could adapt to and exploit vagaries in salinity. There was abundant fish-food there, but not, as yet, abundant fish to make use of it. Like the birds, the fish were coming back, but tentatively. Unlike the birds, the fish were capable of sudden population explosions, but conditions were not sufficiently settled, as yet, to permit or facilitate such explosions.

  The mottled green surface was, in consequence, not merely interesting to me but beautiful in its intricacy and its complex implication.

  The boat’s captain could not share my aesthetic appreciation or my fascination, but he was not surprised by it. He knew Rowland, because he ferried deliveries to Rowland’s home on a regular basis. He doubtless thought that Rowland was “mad,” and that any friend of Rowland’s was virtually certain to be “mad” as well.

  Fortunately, I didn’t have to make conversation with the captain, as his English was a trifle rudimentary and my Spanish even worse. Although he and his boat were resident in Trinidad, he was descended from refugees. His grandfather, if not his father, had been Venezuelan—and the boat certainly seemed old enough to have belonged to his grandfather, although it had doubtless undergone numerous repairs and refits in the interim. He had probably clung to his grandfather’s language as a means of asserting his roots, and perhaps expressing a vague intention of one day “coming home.”

  Although we weren’t in conversation, I noticed the captain watching me when Rowland’s “house” first came into view and I raised my eyes to study it. He probably expected me to say: “What’s that?”—or at least to make some remark about its bizarre nature. I didn’t, even though the pictures I’d seen didn’t do it justice, not just because it had grown in the interim, but because there as a wealth of fine detail visible to the naked eye that the photographic images hadn’t captured.

  Rosalind had described Rowland’s house as a “glorified termite mound,” but she had been thinking about its eccentric construction techniques rather than its appearance. In terms of its fundamental shape, it was not so very different from the Great Pyramid of Eden; it was approximately the same height, square-ish at the base, with four sloping faces. It had fewer windows, especially in its lower reaches, and more eccentric protrusions, which included the usual balconies, gargoyles and communication masts but also a considerable number of organic nodes and spikes with no obvious function. Some of them looked like thorns, and others not unlike flowers—but the latter were more like heraldic roses than the natural kind.

  One of the edifice’s four faces was equipped at the base with a sizeable walled harbor, where three boats of various were moored and there was room for two more of similar size to the ferry. I could understand why a simple jetty couldn’t have done the job, having studied the weather reports for the region. Fortunately, I had arrived too late in the year to catch anything more than the autumnal end of the hurricane season, but that didn’t mean that I wouldn’t have the chance to see a spectacular storm or two, and a good deal of heavy rain. The sea might have retreated somewhat, but the atmosphere was still considerably warmer and more violent than its pre-Crash average.

  Beyond the stone jetty that ran along
the front of the house there were three doors, two them as large as coaching entrances, presumably giving access to warehouses. The one in the middle, which presumably gave access to the stairways and elevators leading to the upper floors of the house, was conspicuously modest, but also conspicuously armored in steel. I couldn’t imagine that anyone was ever likely to try to rob the house, but Rowland obviously believed in not taking any chances. He was, after all, living in a region devoid of law, or even of civilization.

  Apart from the artificial harbor, the house was surrounded by water, although there were huge, epiphyte-laden mangroves growing in a semi-circular arc behind it, and spurs of land decked with palms and other trees extending raggedly from both horns of the semicircle. The setting was vaguely reminiscent of a shallow lagoon about two hundred meters in diameter, surrounded to a extent of about three hundred degrees by a coral atoll—but the remaining sixty degrees that was open to the broad waters of the river and the tides of the sea provided a vast gateway for vessels like the ferry, which was able to steer directly for the harbor entrance without its pilot having to worry about underwater hazards. I knew that lagoons were supposed to be atypical of the delta, whose channels had been unusually disciplined in olden days, but it was difficult to discern, as yet, whether the restored delta would retain all its old characteristics.

  My gaze inevitably tilted upwards as we drew closer to the edifice. By the time we came into the harbor it was looming up into the sky like a multicolored mountain, without a definite angle anywhere in spite of its discernible faces. Unlike the tip of the Great Pyramid of Eden, Roland’s house did not come to a point, but was rounded off, although the edges of the rounded hump were decorated with uneven crenellations—the merest suggestion of battlements—and a number of subsidiary projections, only a few of which included gutters to project water away from the walls.

  Rowland was waiting on the quayside, having doubtless seen the boat approaching while it was still some distance away. There were two other people with him—a male and a female clad, as he was, in long-sleeved white shirts and khaki trousers, and wearing large straw hats. Their faces were dark, though, while Rowland’s seemed uncannily pale, hardly touched by the sun at all. My own face must have seemed equally foreign in its pallor—I too was wearing a broad-brimmed hat to keep my face in the shade and a long-sleeved shirt to protect my arms. I knew from experience, however, that after two or three expeditions in search of specimens, the color of my skin would begin to turn bronze. Either Rowland did not get out much, or his skin was reluctant to produce melanin.

  Even as the boat was still approaching, and neither of us thought that it was close enough as yet to make it worth shouting a greeting, I saw that I had definitely been wrong about Rowland’s phone using an unvarnished camera-image. Not only did he look considerably paler than he had in the image, but thinner and somehow more agitated. I put the seeming agitation due to excitement at the prospect of seeing me again after so many years, but I was by no means certain of that diagnosis. He did not look well.

  Greetings were exchanged, however, with a suitable flux of enthusiasm. The boat had a crew of four, and its captain was not averse to pitching in, so there were nine of us to help with the unloading of the vessel, but there was only one gangplank and no cranes or pulleys, so the job took time and we all seemed to spend a great deal of time standing aside to let someone else cross over between deck and shore. When we were done, though, Rowland sent one of his companions—whom he had introduced, perhaps jokingly, as Adam and Eve—to fetch a case full of bottles from a refrigerator in one of the store-rooms. There was beer for the boat’s crewmen, but I followed the example of Rowland and his helpers in preferring iced water.

  I was sweating profusely; I knew that it would take me several days, at least, to adjust to the ambient outdoor temperature. I had already had enough tropical heat to make me hope with all my heart that Rowland’s peculiar dwelling had adequate air-conditioning.

  It wasn’t until the boat pulled away from the quayside again and chugged through the harbor entrance, homeward bound for Trinidad, that Rowland and I loosened up sufficiently to talk.

  “You look well,” Rowland commented. “Don’t try to tell me that I do too—I know how I look. I’m not ill, but I might have been overdoing things slightly, and my mind’s been in turmoil since I heard the news.” While speaking he moved indoors, leaving Adam and Eve to tidy up on the quay, and closed the door behind us.

  “Only to be expected,” I murmured. “I hope you’ll be able to take a little time away from your obsessions, now that my presence gives you a duty of hospitality, as well as providing an excuse.”

  As I had expected, the vestibule within the doorway was equipped with two elevators, as well as entrances to at least three stairways—I say at least because there were two closed doors, which might also have given access to staircases, although it seemed more likely that they were closets. There was also a portal giving access to a sloping ramp, which appeared to initiate a spiral corridor winding around the interior of pyramid. We took one of the elevators.

  “Of course I’ll take time out when I can,” Rowland said, “unless you’re so eager to hurl yourself into your own research that you have no time for me.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “My routine’s been well and truly broken. I saw J. V. Crowthorne at the funeral, by the way. He asked after you, inevitably.”

  “How is he?” Rowland asked. “Still tweaking tree-genes to produce more easily workable wood?”

  “Apparently,” I said. “He doesn’t look a day older than he did ten years ago—but most people don’t, nowadays. Except for the young, of course, who are still maturing—which includes us.”

  “Does it?” he said, but was quick to add: “I suppose it does. If these new nanotechnologies really can extend the lifespan to two or three hundred years, I suppose even octogenarians might count themselves adolescents, let alone septuagenarians. Speaking of septuagenarians….”

  “Yes,” I said, “I’ve seen Rosalind. Twice, in fact. Once at the funeral, once at the airport. We had quite a long chat, on the second occasion. She sends her love.”

  “You must thank her kindly for that, when you get back,” he said, with deliberate laconism.

  The elevator was still moving—quite slowly, I thought, although it wasn’t easy to estimate. The buttons weren’t numbered; nor were they arranged in a single vertical line. They were, however, color coded. They were grouped into a triangular array with a spike; there were four black buttons, three white, two red, one blue, one yellow and one green. The green one was at the top of the array; that was the one that Rowland had pressed.

  “You could have called her,” I pointed out to Rowland, “at least to offer your condolences. You still can.”

  He didn’t make any explicit reply, but he muttered something as if to himself, and I thought I caught the phrase “can of worms.” I gathered that he was afraid of what a resumption of communication with his mother might lead to. There was a further question trembling on his lips but he didn’t want to ask it in an elevator. When the doors opened he drew me along a corridor that curved around to the left quite sharply. There were doors to either side at regular intervals. He paused at the fourth on the right to say: “This will be your bedroom, if that’s okay.” He opened the door to show me a room that looked like a standard hotel room, with an en suite bathroom, but didn’t go in. “Adam will bring your personal luggage up,” he added. “You might need to help him install the lab equipment you ordered, though.”

  “I hope my presence doesn’t make too much extra work for your staff,” I said. “I’m very self-sufficient—I don’t need much in the way of service.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “Adam and Eve aren’t quite sure whether they’re in Heaven or Hell here, but they know when they’re well off. They were both orphaned by the latter phases of the Crash, although it was admirable that their parents managed to stay alive as long as they did. They put it
down to their Indian blood, but there are no more native tribesmen left in Venezuela, any more than the Caribbean islands. They’re probably descended from maroons—but that doesn’t affect their sense of homeland.”

  “Are they husband and wife?” I asked.

  “In effect,” he said. “They haven’t been through any public ceremony, but with no community to organize one…that’s presumably why they decided to call themselves Adam and Eve when I took them on…although it’s possible that thy didn’t have any confidence, in the beginning, in my ability to pronounce whatever names they had before. They have no children, though—a source of some sorrow, but it’s nothing I can correct. Eve’s problem, alas.”

  Considering how Cain and Abel worked out, I thought, it might have been better if the original Adam and Eve hadn’t bothered.

  “This is my bedroom, here on the left,” Rowland put in, before continuing his train of thought. “Their English is reasonably good, even though they only talk to one another in some weird quasi-Spanish dialect that I can hardly follow.” Then he changed tack again to say: “You’re still a bachelor, I assume?”

  “Yes,” I said, curtly, as he opened a further door, into what I instantly labeled a study, although I could equally well have called it a library. It had six big screens, three of them equipped with consoles, but Rowland was not the kind of man to do all his reading on screen. There were decks of long shelves along two of the walls, containing at least four hundred books, mostly pre-Crash, as well as cases full of memory-sticks of various kinds. There wasn’t much blank wall-space, because there was a broad set of French windows letting out on to a balcony, but the two considerable spaces that did remain were taken up by huge intimate pictures of flowers, if not by Georgia O’Keefe herself, then by some recent imitator. They were actual paintings, not prints, although they might have been copies rather than originals.