Some of Rowland’s “worms” looked more like elongated centipedes than maggots, being bright yellow in color and equipped with hundreds of pairs of limbs along the length of their plated bodies. These too were the largest of their kind I had ever encountered, being at least four meters long, although only as thick as a man’s wrist. A few of the living machines were, on the other hand, surprisingly small: there were black, hard-skinned creatures that were only a few centimeters from head to tail, though they had vast heads that were almost all jaws. Rowland informed me that these were very difficult to rear because of the enormous amounts of food they had to consume in order to work the massive mandibles. In their holding tank, they were virtually submerged in high-protein fluid.
“Perpetual life in the womb,” I observed. “Born for rare brief intervals, and the returned. Every embryo’s dream.”
“Do you think so?” he said, as if I’d meant it seriously.
“Of what else can an embryo dream but an eternal, or near-eternal womb?” I suggested, flippantly. “How could it imagine the potential rewards of life after birth, even after having fallen into that hell repeatedly, to perform allotted tasks?”
“But it’s not an embryo,” he objected. “It’s a larva.”
“The principle,” I insisted, frivolously, “is the same. It’s the way of life that’s important, not the exact biological status of the liver.”
He nodded. “Sorry,” he said. “Slow on the uptake—I see what you mean.”
But I wasn’t sure that he did, given the way he was living himself.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The marvels of the tour had a cumulative effect, as we moved from room to room, and my initial frustration evaporated. Rowland showed me clusters of “roots” that the house extended into the substrate of the swamp, and the apparatus for gathering in organic materials from the silt. He showed me further examples of the biological batteries that produced electricity for his research laboratories—which had a potential output, Rowland boasted, equivalent to thirty billion electric eels. All I saw of such systems, however, were their superficial termini; most of their mass inevitably remained hidden; what could be seen of the house’s systems was far less, in metaphorical terms, than the tip of an iceberg.
Rowland assured me that there was still more to be seen, and than the full tour would require at least one more day. He reeled off statistics in an impressively casual manner, telling me that the biomass of the house was greater than ten thousand elephants, and that if it had been a single organism then it would have been the vastest that had ever existed on Earth.
As the time afternoon wore on, however, it was evident that Rowland was once again becoming increasingly tired. His graphic descriptions began to diversify into flights of fantasy, in which he repeated himself without apparently being aware that he was doing so—but they did extend further than the beginnings laid down the previous day.
I listened to his prophetic ramblings, to the effect that houses descendant from this one would gradually replace the plants and animals making up the world’s ecosystems in the course of the third millennium, so that in a thousand years’ time the entire ecosphere might well consist of nothing but organic artifacts: not merely houses but entire cities, all of which would be locked into a careful mutually symbiotic relationship, controlled by humans or their successors.
“Successors? I said. “Post-humans, you mean?”
“If you like,” he replied—but the remark was a mere punctuation-mark in his flight of fancy, and he obviously disapproved of my interruption. In a world such as the one he was anticipating, Rowland hypothesized, sexual reproduction might become the sole prerogative of humankind, if humans survived at all, everything else in the organic realm being capable only of vegetative growth or of being cloned and transformed by genetic engineers—but only if the masters of the ecosphere wanted it that way.
I got the strong impression that he wouldn’t, if he were the master of the ecosphere: that houses descended from his would be sexual mothers in every sense of the world—more so, although he was careful not to spell it out in those precise terms, than Rosalind, who had to make elaborate use of in vitro fertilization and ectogenesis in producing her children.
I confess that I did not find his vision of a world full of living houses a wholly attractive prophecy (or speculation, for Rowland was talking of opportunity rather than destiny) but there was, as ever, something very attractive in the sheer grandiosity of Rowland’s ecstatic voyages of the imagination. The magic of his ideas took a firm grip on me, encouraging my own mind to the contemplation of vistas of future history extending toward infinite horizons. I joined in with his game for a while, and briefly became so carried away that I didn’t notice immediately that Rowland was so very tired that he was having difficulty supporting himself.
I couldn’t believe that showing me around his petty empire was any more physically exhausting than the work he routinely did in his laboratories, but Rowland definitely seemed more distressed than he had at any time during the previous two days. After the previous day’s argument, I didn’t want to labor the point, but I felt that I had to forbid any further wandering when we were still more than an hour short of diner time. Diplomatically, I told him that I was tired and needed rest, and he seemed grateful that I had taken the trouble to spare his feelings.
Once dinner was served, however, the food seemed to revive Rowland’s body and mind alike, and he ate heartily. Afterwards, he seemed sufficiently restored to commit himself to conversation again, in the comfort of the study, with another bottle of wine.
He set out, initially, to tell me more about the history of his researches, but we soon moved on yet again—quite naturally, it seemed—to more intimate personal matters. I didn’t have to make any effort to steer him toward the subject of Magdalen, which seemed to be exactly where he wanted to go.
“She should have come back here,” he said, flatly. “I deserved that. Whether we could have worked things out or not, she should have given me the chance. She owed me that much. She should at least have kept in touch with the work, and continued talking to me about serious matters, instead of mere trivia.”
“Perhaps she didn’t consider the things she wanted to talk about mere trivia,” I suggested, softly. “She was worried about you, as I am…and Rosalind too. If you were as dismissive of her anxieties as you are of mine, that probably made her worry even more.
Tellingly, his reply was: “She had no cause to worry about me. Evidently, I was the one who had cause to be worried…but I didn’t know that. She knew how busy I was, but if she’d given me any hint that she was in trouble…more trouble….”
“Perhaps she knew what you’d say,” I offered, hesitantly. “Perhaps she knew that you’d only urge her with all your might to come back here—and didn’t want to do that.”
“But it’s what she should have done,” Rowland persisted, “whether she wanted to or not. Given time, I could have explained. Given time, I could have brought her back into the work, shown her what we needed to do, taught her how we needed to go about it. She was brilliant, you know, in her way. She never thought so, but she was. She was Rosalind’s daughter—and my sister. I tried so hard to get her past the obstacles that were in her way. If she’d only stayed, or come back….”
“Perhaps she needed you to go to her,” I suggested. “Perhaps, if you’d been willing….”
“That’s Rosalind talking,” he said, flatly—and quite unfairly, I thought.
“Just because she’s your mother,” I said, in a voice that was hardly above a whisper, “it doesn’t mean she’s always wrong.”
He contrived to laugh at that, although I wasn’t at all sure that I’d intended it as a joke.
“Don’t take her side,” he said. “You’re my friend. You’re supposed to side with me, even if you can’t quite understand yet what this is all about.”
“I loved Magdalen too,” I said.
“I know—but she wasn’t
your sister.”
“She was your half-sister,” I said, “and even Rosalind says, now, that she could have coped, and would have supported you, if….”
“Don’t be absurd,” he retorted. “She’s lost a daughter, and is entitled to a little foolishness after the fact—but you know full well what kind of effect it would have had on the family, the Hive, everything, if we’d ever be able to reconcile ourselves to it…which we couldn’t.”
“In which case,” I said, quietly, “what would have been the point of her coming back here?”
He shook his head, but didn’t bother to tell me out loud that I didn’t understand. “Do you think Rosalind has ever had sex?” he asked me, abruptly.
I was shocked as well as startled. “How should I know?” I retorted.
“I didn’t mean with you,” he said, misunderstanding the alacrity of my reaction. “I meant with anyone.”
“I knew what you meant,” I assured him. I wanted to change the subject, but I didn’t dare. Absurd as the question was, he’d asked it with certain intensity. For some unimaginable reason, he thought that it was important. “It’s none of my business. I imagine so. Just because she didn’t go that route to have her children doesn’t mean that she doesn’t do it….and certainly not that she’s never done it.”
“I don’t think she ever has,” Rowland opined, brutally. “I don’t think anyone could ever be good enough for her, except the one man with whom it was out of the question.”
This time I was astounded. “Roderick?” I said, incredulously.
“Exactly,” he replied.
“Are you sure you’re nor projecting your own feelings on to her, wanting to co-opt her into a similar confusion?” I asked, rather rudely—but we already seemed to have left the limits of diplomacy far behind.
He laughed, though, and said: “Maybe. Sorry—this is making you uncomfortable isn’t it? Although you’ll need to understand everything, in the end. In my youth, you know, while Rosalind and I were still on speaking terms, she told me about one of her grand plans—trying it out for size, as it were. You’re only familiar with the grand plans she’s actually put into operation, of course, but there were many others that fell by the wayside. The one thing I’ll always be thankful to her for is my imagination. Anyway, the grand plan was that she wanted to free humankind from the burden of sexual attraction, and direct our capacity for love into more appropriate channels—and she meant it, quite seriously.”
The one thing I couldn’t possibly say was that it didn’t sound like such a lousy idea to me, so I tried to formulate a sardonic laugh instead. “Can I have three guesses as to what the more appropriate channels might be?” I asked, flippantly.
“You’d only need one,” he told me.
“Flowers?” I suggested, knowing that I’d almost certainly hit the nail on the head.
“Absolutely,” he said. “Can you imagine it: on-line catalogues of floral sex-aids? Sweetly-perfumed, of course, and as lovely to touch as to look at?”
I could imagine it easily enough—what I couldn’t imagine, though, was that such outlets would every command the loyalty of a significant minority of humankind, let alone the entire race. “Actually,” I told him, “I’m not sure that she’s given up on that particular dream. She might have accepted that marketing flowers designed as masturbation-aids was a non-starter, but her research in olfactory psychotropics might have been inspired by the dream of cutting out the middleman—or middlething—entirely.”
“Olfactory orgasms,” Rowland mused. “Yes, that sounds like Rosalind’s sort of dream. I doubt that it’s possible, though.”
“You shouldn’t underestimate possibility, Rowland,” I said. “Just because she’s your mother….”
“You’ve already done that joke once,” he said, interrupting sharply. Obviously, he wasn’t prepared to laugh at it a second time.
The moment was becoming awkward, and I cast around for a way to break the spell.
“I had a dream last night,” I said, hesitantly. “At least, I think it was a dream. I thought I saw Magdalen’s ghost.”
“Where?” he asked, in a determinedly neutral tone—so determinedly neutral that I couldn’t tell what emotion he was trying to keep out of it.
“Here. I chased her round and round the spiral corridor, but I couldn’t catch her. In the end, I lost her.”
He paused for three exceedingly long seconds before saying: “I sometimes dream about her myself. More than sometimes. Often. More often still since I got the news.”
“Understandable,” I opined.
“Understandable,” he agreed. “You too—understandable, that is. Even Rosalind….”
“Please,” I said, “no more discussion of Rosalind’s sex life, or lack of one.”
“Right,” he said. “Insensitive. Sorry. How on earth did we get on to it in the first place? My fault, wasn’t it? You must forgive me. Spending so much time on my own, I’ve got into the habit of talking to myself—my internal censor’s dropped its guard. I’ll have to remember, now that I have company more intimate than Adam and Eve, that I need to think before I speak—or at least before I change the subject. We should be taking about sensible matters: gantzing, genetic transformation, the management of control genes, house-building. We were talking about those sorts of things, weren’t we, before we went astray?”
“It’s okay,” I said. “We’re friends. We can go astray occasionally. It doesn’t matter.” I didn’t want to suggest that it might not have been a lapse in his internal censorship that had led us astray—that it might, instead, have been the effects of his self-induced tumor—because I didn’t want to make him angry, and because I didn’t want to say that even to myself, privately.
“You’re right,” he said. “It’s harder to slip back into the old relationship than I thought it would be, isn’t it? Sometimes, everything seems so easy, so natural, but then….we suddenly realize how long it’s been, and that time hasn’t stood still in the interim. We have time, though, don’t we?—time to rediscover what it was that made us such good friends, back then.”
“Yes,” I said. “We have all the time in the world.”
I thought it was true.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“Do you see your father at all, nowadays?” Rowland asked me, even though he’d observed only a few minutes before that we ought to be talking about rational and constructive matters, about what made the world tick and how its clockwork could be adjusted to bring about a better time.
“No,” I said. “He and I don’t move in the same social circles any more. People think geneticists are mad, because all our discoveries seem unnatural at first, but it’s the physicists who cling most obsessively to their own asylum and speak entirely in tongues. He took it hard when I deliberately went my own way. I’m a clone, after all. He’d hated his own father, but at least he’d fought him on his own ground. He could have understood it if I’d hated him in the same way—but to walk away entirely, to wash my hands of him, to take up genetics…there’s only so much a clone-parent can stand. And only so much a clone-child can take.”
“If there were a Peter Bell the Fourth,” Rowland observed, “you could direct the development of the embryo much more cleverly than he did. You wouldn’t have to do any genetic transformation—just give the control genes a little nudge, aiming for a better balance in the initial set-up of the cerebrum.”
“Why?” I said. “Don’t you think I’m perfect as I am?”
He didn’t laugh. “None of us is perfect,” he said. “Mercifully.”
“Mercifully because we’d have nothing to strive for if we were?” I queried.
“No,” he said. “Quite the opposite. If perfection were possible, we’d know what we were striving for, and we’d probably find a way to achieve it. Far better for perfection to be impossible, flaws inescapable…or, at the very least, for everyone to disagree as to what would count as perfection.”
“According to theoretical physic
ists,” I said, quoting something I’d read, which my father certainly hadn’t written, “the universe itself is imperfect. Their continued failure to find a unifying theory isn’t the fault of their observational and experimental technique or mathematical ingenuity—it’s the fault of the universe, and its dogged refusal to make sense. I’m not sure how they can claim to know that, but they’re physicists, after all.”
“We all do it,” Rowland said.
“Do what?”
“Project our own perceived faults on to others—including the universe. Why haven’t you ever amounted to anything, Peter?”
“What?” I said, outraged by the insult even though I could see why he might think that I hadn’t.
“When we were young,” he said, forgetting that we still were, “we seemed to be on the same wavelength, equally intelligent, equally imaginative—but now you’re a teacher, collecting marine alga, looking for trivial chimerical anomalies. You’ve never attempted anything. You’re still a physicist at heart, looking at the world and trying to understand it, but not involving yourself in it.”
He was allowed to say such things because he was a friend, but I wasn’t going to take it lying down. “Unlike you,” I said, “living in the middle of a reconstituted wilderness, making yourself a new mother because you can’t get along with the one who didn’t want to give birth to you because it didn’t give her enough control of your destiny, and shaping her as a vast glorified womb. You’ve really made something of yourself. I’m not quite sure what it is, mind, but it’s certainly something.”
“Touché,” he said. “If only you’d ever managed to lash out at your father like that, or I’d ever got that kind of grip on Rosalind…do you think we’d feel a little better about ourselves?”
I shook my head, tiredly. “I doubt it,” I said. “They wouldn’t take it in the same hilarious spirit as we do, of course, but they’d still laugh it off. We’re their children, after all.”
“And neither of us would ever have dreamed of saying anything similar to Mag, would we?—even though she’s the one who really didn’t make anything of herself at all.”
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