Nature's Shift

by Brian Stableford

  “The demands of the work leave me little choice,” he told me, unrepentantly. “Sometimes, I need a little assistance to keep going. Yes, I take Aether. There’s no problem—I know my practical neurology, just as you do. The compound’s safer than its predecessors, and much safer than the cocaine that made Venezuela what it was before the bottom fell out of the market. I’m careful.”

  He did know all there had been to know about practical neurology ten years before, thanks to Professor Fliegmann, and I had no doubt that he was keeping closer tabs on current developments in all the branches of psychotropics than I was, but I wasn’t convinced that the Rowland Usher I knew was capable of being careful. “Nothing that interferes with your neurotransmitters can ever be entirely safe,” I said.

  “Don’t be sanctimonious,” he retorted. “You did Fliegmann’s course too—you took part in the experiments we undertook in consequence, and it certainly wasn’t always you who got the placebo.”

  “That was different,” I said.

  “Was it? Just normal student folly, to be put away with other childish things? You know that it was more serious than that.”

  Our psychotropic experiments had certainly seemed more serious, at the time; but it had been just normal student folly—perhaps not so very foolish, though, given that we had made every attempt to inform ourselves, academically, as to the risks associated with playing games with “the old tumor.” I didn’t make the point aloud, though: I just stared at Rowland with what must have been an anxious expression.

  “Oh, don’t look at me like that,” Rowland said. “I just need to boost my energy occasionally, when fatigue makes work difficult. I haven’t taken anything at all today, in honor of your arrival—perhaps that’s where I went wrong. Yes, the old tumor’s a little out of sorts at the moment—but I’m not suffering withdrawal symptoms any more than I’m under the influence. I haven’t become any sort of addict while I’ve been living in the wilds. I’ll be all right in a minute—please don’t worry”

  He seemed determined to fulfill his prophecy, and by the time the minute was up, he seemed to have succeeded.

  “Let’s go,” he said, his voice becoming firmer again.

  So we went on—to the storehouses where the equipment he had ordered for my laboratory had been placed. I was briefly distracted by the task of checking the crates. Once we had done that, and taken a swift glance into some of the other storage-bunkers, I was able to admire the network of bioelectrical generators that fueled the air-conditioning, the elevators and the communication system.

  Having briefly inspected the generating apparatus and the water-purification and waste-disposal apparatus—although very little of the latter was actually visible—we returned to the elevator in order to go up to the white-button region, where my as-yet-unequipped laboratory space was located, along with a number of chambers that seemed, in essence, to be miniature and opaque equivalents of Rosalind’s showcases. They were filled with glass compartments containing specimens of various sorts. There were a few flowering plants, but the great majority of the glass cages contained insects in various stages of their development.

  Here, at least, Rowland was able to pause, and lean against one of the cabinets, while I wandered around on my own tour of inspection.

  The mature insects weren’t particularly exotic, for the most part; they included beetles, moths and a few flies, but no bees. Without exception, however, they were unusually large—sometimes very large. The larvae and pupae were even larger, suggesting that future adults might be larger still…if they could survive the final phase of metamorphosis.

  “I see that your experiments with induced giantism have gone way beyond the size of the conventional larval borers used in construction,” I remarked. “How are you coping with the traditional biomechanical difficulties and problems with oxygen distribution to the tissues?”

  “The difficulties aren’t as extreme as you might think,” he said, dismissively, adapting his tone to his negligent pose. “When insects first evolved, more than a hundred million years ago, they soon produced forms much larger than the ones Mother Nature produces today. The gene for producing hemoglobin is still included in the genomes of many insect species, and so are relics of the old control genes that organized and facilitated its distribution and circulation within larger bodies. The insects we know from Mother Nature’s recent work are all exoskeletal specialists, but there’s no reason why insectile chitin can’t be adapted to endoskeletal structures of various kinds, to facilitate mechanical organization. Organizing the control genes isn’t easy, of course, even with vertebrate models for reference, because the metamorphic phase introduces an extra level of complexity—but that has advantages as well as creating difficulties. It’s not the kind of genetic engineering that we learned at Imperial, but it’s a linear extension of the work that Roderick did in later life—in a very different direction from the one in which Rosalind elected to develop his work. She was always more interested in the flowers than the pollinators…nor that I read any crude sexist lesson into that, of course.”

  I looked at him a trifle skeptically, for more than one reason. All I said, though, picking on the most innocuous factor in his speech was “You’re trying to produce insects with backbones? Insects with hearts and veins? Why?”

  “Why?” he echoed. “That’s not a question you’d have asked ten years ago, Peter. Because Mother Nature didn’t, and maybe I can. To say that she, like Rosalind, was more interested in the flowers would be putting the cart before the horse—and I certainly wouldn’t want to get tangled up in silly mythological metaphors about Father Sky and Mother Earth—but what insects actually became, in the course of that chapter of the evolutionary story, was very heavily influenced by the rapid parallel evolution of the angiosperms. If the insects hadn’t found all those new niches opening up, and committed so many of their species to symbiotic dependency on plant sexuality, the big picture might have worked out very differently.

  “Primitive insects had the potential to produce descendants with far more of the characteristics we associate with vertebrates—but the vertebrates had got there first, albeit hesitantly. Thanks to the legacy thy inherited from the fish in the sea they invaded the land with lots of evolutionary scope and momentum already in hand. The insects took the road of least resistance—which is the road that natural selection always takes. Clever genetic engineering allows us to go back in time now, in a manner of speaking, with a view to expanding the insects’ early genetic potential in ways that natural selection never found profitable. Why? Just because. What other motive do I need? Giantism might be the most obvious aspect of it, but it’s far from being the only one—there’s much more. ”

  I cast my eye around the room we were in. “Much more,” I repeated. “You mean, in other rooms than this?”

  He did, but he also seemed to think that he had done enough, for the time being. “There’s lots to talk about in that regard, when we have the time,” he told me. “There are a lot of gleams in my paternal eye…but you’re right that there’s not much more to see in here but huge larvae, bloated beetles and pupae that aren’t able to produce live imagoes. Sometimes, I get ahead of myself, seeing far more potential in my achievements than I’ve actually contrived to accomplish. You know how it is—you remember how it was, when we were students. Don’t tell me that you aren’t playing God-games with your algae, without ever bothering to ask yourself why?”

  I did remember, and knew that I was guilty as charged, with respect to the algae—and I couldn’t help feeling a slight thrill at the idea that, in entering the room, I’d stepped back in time, by ten years as well as a hundred million. This was, indeed, the kind of work we had dreamed of doing, back then—and if we had asked ourselves why, in those days, we would indeed have been perfectly satisfied to answer: Just because.” Beating Mother Nature at her own game had always seemed reason enough.

  “Yes,” I confirmed, “I do know how it is, and I’m remembering more of how
it was with every passing moment. I’m sure that we will have a lot to talk about, and not just about giant beetles and genuine dragonflies—although I doubt that my algae can compete in terms of glamour.”

  Rowland seemed pleased by this response, and he led me back into the corridors with the evident intention of moving on to the next phase of his conducted tour—but his enthusiasm, or at least his energy, seemed suddenly to weaken again. This time, he gave in.

  “That’s enough for now,” he said. “It’s almost dinner time anyway.” He changed direction and led me to an elevator—not the same one that we had used before, although it had the same triangular array of buttons.

  We went back up to the floor where the bedrooms and the study were located, where there was also a dining-room.

  “Half an hour,” he said, before disappearing into his bedroom.

  I had plenty to do in the interim, and when I made my way back to the dining-room, once the thirty minutes had elapsed, I found the table set for four and Rowland already seated. Adam and Eve had evidently been busy preparing food, but had not anticipated that we would appear quite so soon; Rowland and I sat for a further fifteen minutes, conscientiously talking about nothing in particular, until the others joined us, bringing a tureen of soup with them.

  The soup was anonymous, compounded out of vegetables and fungi—and possibly algae too—that were no longer identifiable, but it wasn’t unpleasant. It was followed by a fillet of some kind of fish, accompanied by small potatoes and assorted green vegetables; I didn’t recognize the species of the fish, but the taste was better than tolerable.

  “This is a special occasion,” Rowland told me. “As I said before, the routine fare will be tissue-cultured meat—but the river fish are making a reasonably strong comeback in these parts. Adam’s developing considerable skill with a spear, although it has to be said that the shallow pond around the house doesn’t pose much of a challenge when the weather’s calm. The fish are unwary—and likely to remain so for quite some time, given that Adam doesn’t let very many of his targets get away.”

  Adam smiled at the compliment. “Weather good today,” he observed. “Not tomorrow. Day after, big storm. So Met Office says.”

  For a moment, I thought he was making a joke, but then realized that satellite-based weather-forecasting could issue reports for sparsely-inhabited regions just as easily as heavily-populated ones. There might be no weather control hereabouts, for lack of sophisticated wind-farming apparatus, but the available newsfeeds could still issue predictions for the local area.

  “Don’t worry,” Rowland, said, mistaking the reason for my momentary reflection. “The storms aren’t excessively violent at this time of year, and the house can stand up to the most powerful hurricanes. Some day, I ought to install apparatus to steal the energy of the wind, but I haven’t managed to find a gap in the schedule thus far.”

  The dessert proved to be some kind of chocolate confection, very sweet and glutinous. The coffee was served very strong, in tiny cups. It was good, but not the sort of coffee over which one could linger; two mouthfuls, and it was gone, administering a sudden caffeine hit to the bloodstream. Rowland certainly made no attempt to linger over his, getting up abruptly as soon as he’d gulped it down and offering profuse apologies for having to leave me alone.

  “God-work is demanding,” I conceded, graciously, refraining from raising the question of how he expected to work far into the night, given that he’d been exhausted by mid-afternoon, “especially for mere mortals. Will I see you later?”

  “Not tonight,” he replied, unsurprisingly. “If you need anything, phone Adam and Eve—their apartment’s on the same corridor as our bedrooms. If you want to continue exploring, feel free—but be careful you don’t get lost. Stick to the corridors I’ve shown you, until I have time to show you the rest.”

  I had no intention of trudging through any more corridors, though. In spite of the caffeine hit, I was conscious of being weary myself. It had been a long day—far longer than usual, in terms of daylight, given that the transatlantic flight had been traveling ahead of the sun, and my limbs were in need of rest. Indeed, when I thought about it, I suspected that it might have been wiser to give the coffee a miss, in order to catch up on my sleep without delay.

  Rowland disappeared, after offering more apologies for not having been able to give me a more thorough introduction to the house. I found my own way back to my bedroom easily enough.

  I spent a few minutes looking out of the window and admiring the dusky view. The harbor was on the northern face of the house, and my bedroom faced south, so I was looking out over the little patch of land that Rowland had called a “kitchen garden” and the still grey water of what looked from this vantage point more like a wide moat than a lagoon, toward the vast arc of mangroves on the far shore. Rowland’s “plantations”—cultivated patches of varying size situated in what looked like natural clearings, by virtue of their irregular shapes and spacing—were clearly visible as a kind of patchwork, although it was impossible to make out exactly what was being grown in each one, given the distance and the twilight. Beyond that evidence of culture, however, there was nothing but a sea of green wilderness.

  I knew that at least one branch of the river was in there somewhere, snaking southwards in a dozen or more substantial threads that would ultimately combine into a single powerful stream, but none of the major watercourses was distinctly visible from where I stood. In the rapidly-fading light, the regenerated forest was reminiscent of a single vast organism, within whose body the various braches of the Orinoco were flowing, as if through arteries and veins. Doubtless there would be flowers in there too—gorgeous tropical blooms of all shorts, including water-lilies more than a meter across—but there were none of those on the water surrounding the house, which looked quite still, although it had to be in complex motion, at least in the form of undercurrents. The river-water never ceased to ease its way toward the sea, even in its backwaters, and we were not quite beyond the reach of the tides. The quietness of the air and the low clouds was equally illusory; I was actually standing at the focal point of one of Mother Nature’s most active regions, about as far away from domesticated England as could be.

  For a moment, I regretted having left home—but only for a moment.

  I went to bed, knowing that I wouldn’t be able to sleep immediately, in spite of my physical fatigue, but quite prepared to lie awake and think, given that Rowland had given me far more food for thought than I’d carried with me on to the plane.

  I could have taken up any number of cues or threads, of course, but one phrase that had stuck in my mind, although I hadn’t reacted to it at the time, was “pseudo-symbiotic dependency on plant sexuality.” In itself, it was just standard biojargon, but what made it significant, in Rowland’s mouth, was its marked deviation from the jargon that Roderick and Rosalind had popularized, whose ideological foundation-stone was the notion of “dedicated symbiotic partnership.”

  In Roderick and Rosalind’s world-view, the relationship between insects and flowering plants was authentic symbiosis, authentic partnership and—with all the implications that the word could carry—authentic dedication. Flowers made special provision to feed certain kinds of insects, having been designed by natural selection to do so because of the advantage gained from the transfers of pollen effected by those insects in the course of their feeding. There were, of course, countless other insect species, cousins of the obliging symbiotes, which took without providing any service in return—predators and parasites—but in the world-view of the Hive of Industry, they were a peripheral issue, mere passengers on an evolutionary bus driven and steered by the fundamental symbiotic relationship. There were other plants too, which relied on the wind to distribute their pollen, or simply did not bother, idly committing themselves to asexual reproduction or to incestuous self-pollination, but they too were sidelines and backwaters, far from the heart of the evolutionary narrative—at least in the world-view of the Hiv
e.

  During the days of the bee problem, of course, the world-view of the Hive had seemed patently obvious. There had been a moment—a moment that had stretched over decades—when it looked as if the loss of the pollinators responsible for maintaining the greater part of humankind’s crop-species might precipitate an abrupt worldwide food shortage. Even Roderick the Great had not been able to prevent some temporary shortages, but he and those working in his shadow had succeeded in smoothing out the decline as well as facilitating the recovery. He had negotiated and guided the transition—and he had done it within the framework of the crucial symbiotic relationship, the crucial partnership, and the age-old dedication.

  But Rowland, it seemed, saw things differently. He saw a “pseudo-symbiotic dependency” in which the insects were exploited by “plant sexuality”—fed, as even slaves were fed, but not accepted into genuine partnership.

  The concept of symbiosis does not, of course, imply equality of effort or endeavor; like any kind of trade, it’s a matter of exchanging a good that one party needs or desires for a different good that the other party needs or desires. In any kind of trade, there is scope for exploitation, and it’s arguable that no trade is every truly free or fair, no matter what Utopian gleams may shine in the eyes of purist economists. In every commercial deal, cynics will readily tell you, one of the two parties is getting screwed. There’s no earthly reason to think that things work differently in the bosom of Mother Nature.

  On the other hand, it isn’t always obvious which party to the deal is the one getting screwed, and the wheels of trade would spin a lot less smoothly if it weren’t for the fact that, in many deals, both parties can at least delude themselves into thinking that they’re coming out ahead.

  One might think, on first glancing at the bee/flower relationship, that it’s the bees who are getting the better part of the deal. They, after all, are the ones getting fed; all the flowers are getting out of it is sex—and orgasm-less sex at that. In the hierarchy of needs, eating comes way ahead of….well, we shouldn’t call it “screwing,” having already compromised that item of metaphorical jargon within the argumentative frame, so let’s call it “love.” On the other hand, as even folk wisdom has observed, it’s the bees who are doing all the physical work, always busy, endlessly toiling away. And it would not be irrelevant to observe, at this point, that the worker bees who are doing the toiling appear not only to be doing it on behalf of the flowers, but also on behalf of their own queens. Worker bees get fed, but they get no love. Only queens, as seemingly idle as flowers, save for one nuptial flight per annum, produce offspring—and although the equally idle drones get to have sex as well, it’s difficult to think of them as “screwers” in the economic sense, when only one drone per annum gets to do it, once and once alone, and dies immediately afterwards.