Nature's Shift

by Brian Stableford

  He smiled at that, wryly. “No you don’t,” he said. “You’re in the House of Usher now, and you have no idea what lies beneath your feet—but I’ll show you, in due time, and I’ll help you to understand, fully.”

  He was so weary by now that his speech was becoming slurred—and that kind of incapacity was something he obviously did not want to display. Before I could reply to his last challenge, he announced, abruptly, that he needed to go to bed—but that he would try to make some time the following day to show me a little more of the house and its wonders.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The hour before I retired to my own bed I spent reading. On the shelves in my bedroom I found a box of memory-sticks containing records of Roderick Usher’s experiments, and some of Rosalind’s too, but I wasn’t tempted by offerings of that sort, and might not have been tempted even had Rowland taken the trouble to include records of his own work, selective or otherwise. Instead, I sought solace in more familiar works loaded on to my own bookplate—the poetry of William Blake and Lord Byron, and (how could I avoid it?) Edgar Allan Poe. I say solace, but I really mean distraction, because my recent conversation with Rowland really had given me cause for extreme anxiety. The storm outside was dying down now, but as I looked back mentally over the day, I was struck once again by the remarkable effectiveness of the insulation provided by the house.

  I had not quite realized the extent to which Rowland had cut himself off from the world, by retreating into a house that he evidently imagined as a kind of maternal womb. No doubt he went outside on a regular basis, and not just to unload and distribute supplies from the quayside or harvest his plantations, but even his further ventures were mere excursions into wilderness and solitude, with no human contact. With the exception of Adam and Eve, he seemed to have placed all his social relationships in suspended animation. Marvelous as it was, could the House of Usher really be reckoned a healthy environment, in psychological terms?

  I was not afraid on my own account, of course—I had every confidence in my own psychological resistance—but I would have been afraid for Rowland even if he had not vouchsafed his revelation about the supposedly-benign tumor that he had deliberately implanted in his brain in order to feed his imagination with even more recklessness extravagance than Mother Nature had provided.

  Perhaps it was my reading-matter, and perhaps it was the residue of my discussion with Rowland, but I felt a slight and subtle shift in my experience of the house. Although it was almost silent, and fully proof against the gusts and vibrations of the wind, the smooth, warm walls that surrounded me no longer seemed quite as comforting as they had when I had stood at my window that morning, reveling in my immunity to the storm.

  When I finally lay my head on my pillow I suspected that I was in for a turbulent night, full of vague nightmares in which the imagery of Eddie Poe’s poems would mingle with the dreams and achievements of Rowland Usher’s Conqueror Worms, who would continually triumph in an uncertain, unnamed tragedy—from whose toils I would not escape until I awoke, perhaps in a cold sweat, several hours later but long before the dawn.

  The last part of the prophecy was true, but no sooner was I fully awake than I was no longer able to remember whether there had been any truth in its more Romantic aspects. I reached for the bedside table, on which I had placed a glass of water, and put it to my lips. My hand seemed steady enough.

  No sooner had I taken a sip of water, however, than my attention was caught by a sound in the corridor outside. Although there was nothing sinister in the sound itself, I felt a prickling sensation run down my spine, and my heartbeat suddenly accelerated.

  Don’t be silly, I told myself. If you can’t remember a nightmare, it’s ludicrous to let its emotional aftershocks reverberate.

  That was perfectly reasonable, but when I heard the sound again, it drew a gasp of pure terror from my throat.

  There is nothing to fear, I quoted to myself, but fear itself. Sometimes, innovation is the last thing we need, and habit is healthy.

  I knew perfectly well, on a rational level, that I ought not to be afraid, so I deliberately got out of bed. Then I forced myself to go to the door and open it. Such was my querulous state of mind, however, that it was only by the merest crack that I pulled the batten ajar, and as I peeped out into the corridor my irrational heart still was pounding in my breast.

  The corridor was not quite dark, although its bioluminescence was considerably toned down, so that what remained was a faint radiance—which was bluish now, not ruddy, as before. Because the corridor curved I could see only a few meters 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.

  Eve? I thought—but that was ridiculous. Eve was in her thirties, and dark-skinned. In the blue-tinted light she would have seemed almost black, like a gleaming shadow. The person I had glimpsed had been pale—almost as pale as a ghost.

  It was the word ghost rather than any impression of recognition that called forth the next absurd hypothesis.

  Magdalen?

  Again, I told myself not to be ridiculous—that Magdalen too had been in her thirties when she died—but barely had the syllables of the thought been sub-vocalized in my mind than I flung the bedroom door wide open and set off down the corridor in pursuit of the phantom.

  I was barefoot, and the floor of the corridor was as soft as the walls; I ran without making the slightest sound. Had anyone seen me, they would doubtless have come to the same conclusion I had reached on glimpsing my quarry: that I was a phantom, whose very existence was absurd—but no one saw me, and no one came after me. She it was who fled from me down the labyrinthine ways, as if I were the Hound of Hell.

  I didn’t catch her. How could I have caught her, since she couldn’t really exist? But I did glimpse her again, on three more occasions, just as she as about to disappear again around a curved in the spiral corridor that led down to the lower floors of he house. The tunnel had forks, but I thought I knew them all, and thought that I was close enough behind her not to mistake the route that she had taken—but somehow, I must have missed my way, or hers, because I lost her, eventually, and ended up in the vestibule inside the main door, confronted with the doors of the store-rooms and the two elevators.

  I was sure that she hadn’t opened any of those doors. She was, after all, a ghost. It would have been easier for her to pass straight through one without opening it—but I was certain that she hadn’t done that either. How? I don’t know—but I was certain…just as certain as I was that, if the phantom really had been a phantom, then it must have been the phantom of Magdalen Usher, come to haunt the brother she had loved—in the end, fatally—more than she had been able to love me.

  I wondered whether Rowland had seen her, and decided that it was unlikely. He had been very tired; he must surely have been fast asleep. Perhaps the ghost had stood beside his bed and leaned over him; perhaps she had reached out to plant a dream in his weary head—not a nightmare, but a pleasant dream, a luxurious nostalgia.

  Yes, I thought, if Magaden really were a ghost now, this was the house that she would choose to haunt. And if ironic Fate had allowed her to do that, it would surely draw some amusement from the fact that Rowland had not seen his sister on this occasion, while I had. It was not me that she had come to haunt, but I had loved her too, unrequitedly. Rowland had been loved in return, but had felt the eyes of the world and his mother upon him, as had Magdalen, and they had fled the mutual attraction: a voluntary abandonment. My loss had been of another kind. How apt, then, that I should see Magdalen’s ghost slipping out of Rowland’s bedroom, where he lay fast asleep, in order to pursue her, fruitlessly, t
hrough the labyrinth whose twists and turns I had obviously not yet mastered in full!

  That was too much. I pinched my arm violently, to make sure that I was awake. The pinch hurt, and raised a welt. I was definitely awake. In order to prove it to myself, I took the stairs back to my room rather than taking the short cut via the elevator or the long way round via the spiral ramp. My feet made no sound on the stairs, but I felt them as I hoisted myself up from one to another, ascending by degrees.

  The pointlessness of it all seemed suddenly overwhelming. Deserting Rowland, after a few months spent in the bare bones of the house, had not solved Magdalen’s problem. Separation had killed her. Frustrated love had killed her. Regret had poisoned her, perhaps with a little chemical assistance. Rowland had suffered too—that was obvious. As for me…I was so stupidly prey to my residual feelings that I had just raced through a labyrinth in pursuit of her ghost, even though I knew that what I had seen—what I continued to see, at intervals—could not possibly be real. I hadn’t even recognized her; it was desire, and desire alone that had summoned Magdalen’s mirage into my mind.

  It is better to have loved and lost, I told myself, sternly, than never to have loved at all—but I didn’t believe myself. I believed Sophocles. The best thing of all is not to be born, and after that to die young. Anyway, I hadn’t really loved and lost, had I? I had only yearned, longed, desired and driven myself mad with stupid obsessive infatuation…I had never really loved, because I had not been loved in return. But Magdalen had always been so kind. She had not even done me the bitter favor of spurning me, of explicitly rejecting me. She had always been my friend, albeit in a very different sense from the sense in which Rowland had always been my friend. She had always been elusive, continually glimpsed but somehow never really there.

  I closed my bedroom door behind me and got back into bed, but I sat up straight momentarily, in order to take another sip of water.

  I wondered briefly whether the water might have been drugged, but rejected the notion as yet another absurdity. I told myself that I would be perfectly all right in the morning….

  And so I was.

  When I woke up again, and showered, I felt all the craziness of the night flow away and disappear, leaving me serene. The idea that Rowland’s sister Magdalen had somehow risen from the dead became the indulgent Romantic fancy that it was—a sport of the imagination. The power of rational thought, exercised in the warm light of the tropical dawn, enabled me to dispel the idiot fancy, and to feel a cool breath of welcome disgust at the fact that I—a pragmatic scientist of the twenty-second century—had allowed myself to be briefly infected by the morbidity of the Gothic Imagination.

  I cursed Rowland Usher and his absurd termitary of a house, but I was only blowing the last of the night’s cobwebs away. I didn’t mean the curse. Had Rowland been at breakfast when I arrived in the dining-room, I would have greeted him with sincere warmth. In fact, there was no one there at all—but I had been shown where all the supplies were, and could fend for myself.

  I stared idly out the window while I ate, noting that the weather was still a little blustery, though not longer authentically stormy. It was still raining, but the rain was morose now, rather than fierce, almost as if it were conscious of the fact that it could not long endure. So, at least, my personal version of the pathetic fallacy interpreted what I saw.

  I was on my second cop of coffee—dilute, milky coffee—when Rowland finally appeared. He seemed quite well, and cheerful too, so I set aside all possibility of asking him, even in jest, whether he might conceivably be being haunted by the ghost of his near-twin sister.

  Rowland told me that he had time enough, that morning, to continue the guided tour of his abode, promising glimpses into some of its remoter nooks and crannies, and so we soon set forth yet again into its amazing winding corridors.

  He paused to showed me several other guest-rooms—none of which showed the slightest sign of ever having been inhabited—and several further storerooms, some of them crammed with collections of objects that he had obviously inherited from past generations, as well as hoards of his own, but we both knew that any time spent on the upper floors was effectively wasted. Not that the collections were devoid of interest. There were antique books for which there was no room on his study shelves, 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 old medical specimens, and one of ancient navigational instruments—all inherited, I suspected, from generations even remoter than Roderick’s

  When we eventually descended into the lower strata of the house I found things much more coherently organized, and considerably more interesting.

  “I probably shouldn’t show you the most important of the laboratories yet,” he told me. “I’ve a great deal of explaining to do before you’d be able to understand what I’m doing. I’ll show you some of my early work, though.”

  I was hoping that we would go down below as far beyond ground level as possible, so that I could at least form an estimate of the extent of that part of the house, but we only went down to the first subterranean floor, which was almost indistinguishable from the floor directly above it. Rowland did show me some laboratories—rooms full of sequencers where he had once conducted extensive endeavors in genomic analysis, and rooms fitted out for the transformation of gantzing bacteria—but none of them seemed to be in current use. They belonged to his past; he had moved on. The equipment they contained was modern, but it would not have been reckoned “state of the art” even by mortals far lesser than Rosalind—Professor Crowthorne, for example.

  His fermenters were all in use, growing bacterial cultures, but fermenters are essentially unspectacular. Rowland’s were more interesting than others I had seen because they were built into the fabric of the house, but that was a mere design detail. I saw more giant insects, but none significantly more exotic than the ones I had already seen on higher floors.

  Rowland talked a great deal, offering information as to what the equipment he showed me had been used to do, and what tasks it was still performing, but there was little explanation in what he said. He seemed determined to let his precious secrets out slowly—more, I suspect, because he was so used to clinging on to them than because he really feared that I would be slow to grasp their intellectual essence.

  I memorized the route down to the first subterranean level, though, and took note of doors that might yield access to lower ones.

  In return for all the information that Rowland vouchsafed, I marveled audibly that any one man could possibly make use of such extensive laboratory facilities, and complimented him repeatedly on the achievements he had made. He assured me that the high level of automation made it reasonably easy to operate his machinery and maintain his cultures. He had relatively few household robots, regarding the motile varieties as inherently unreliable examples of the mechanician’s art, but admitted that some routine activities were contracted out to service personnel who operated machines by remote control.

  “I suppose that I should train Adam and Eve to offer more assistance on the scientific side,” he said, “but I prefer them in their present roles. That’s selfish of me, I know…but I think they prefer it too. If either of them were specifically to request…but the simple fact is that things are as they are.”

  He showed me other holding tanks in which he kept his various species of burrowing “worms”, which interested me more than anything else I had seen, because of the previous evening’s conversation. Most of the species needed special containers, made of some substance that they could not break up or digest, so there was more metal and plastic here than in other specimen-holding rooms. There were observation-windows that let us look in upon the creatures in opaque containers, although we could see little enough within because of the difficulties of providing lighting systems immune from the ravages of the larvae.

  Rowland told me that he allowed a few species of these “worm
s” to live freely in the structure of the house, as parasites, because they were too limited in their habits to damage its structure, and performed useful waste-disposal functions as they foraged for food.

  “You’ll run across one of them sooner or later, in one of the corridors,” Rowland told me. “It might give you a shock at first, but you’ll soon got used to it. Please don’t tread on them, deliberately or accidentally.”

  “How do you direct the burrowing of the more voracious species?” I asked him. “Surely, any kind of escape would be desperately dangerous—some of the worms must be able to devour the fabric of the house.”

  “Elementary cyborgization,” he told me. “The creatures have little or no brain, and are guided through life by simple behavioral drives. It’s a relatively easy matter to fit their nervous systems with electronic devices that deliver the appropriate commands by electrical or biochemical stimulation. I handle them with great care, mind. They can’t live on the materials they’re 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 can’t escape, and couldn’t live in the wild, so to speak, if they did.”

  Watching those curious creatures, whether roaming loose or imprisoned in their tanks, made me slightly nauseous, although I had often seen their smaller kin before. Most were like monstrous blowfly maggots—big and soft and white, their body walls so transparent that one could see the organs inside them. Some of them were a meter and a half in length and at least eighty centimeters in girth. Their internal organs were not conspicuouly colored, but they were wrapped in complex webs of blue and pink. Rowland told me that he had equipped their bodies with defined circulatory systems, in which hemoglobin-laden ichor circulated, in order to serve the oxygen-needs of their organs; like us the creatures had deoxygenated blue ichor in their veins and oxygenated red ichor in their arteries.