Nature's Shift

by Brian Stableford

  He just couldn’t let it alone. How could he? I was only here because Magdalen was dead; how could we keep the thought of her out of our minds for long, no matter how determined we were to throw ourselves into our work, into our safely scientific obsessions? Whatever we had come to, we had come to it because of our love for Magdalen: the love that we couldn’t have, but couldn’t bring ourselves to live without…except that we had lived, after a fashion, without it. Magdalen was the one who hadn’t. Magadelen was the one who had actually summoned up the guts to kill herself.

  “She shouldn’t have done it, though,” I said, in a low voice.

  “Made something of herself?” Rowland queried, not having been privy to the train of my thoughts.

  “Killed herself,” I said. “She should have carried on. She should have done something, made something of herself—built her own crazy house, rather than going back to living in the bosom of Rosalind’s. However imperfect our lives are, they are lives.” I hesitated, momentarily, but then plunged on: “It wasn’t our fault, Rowland, was it? It wasn’t because of the way we handled things…both running away…that left her with so little that, in the end….”

  “Don’t flatter yourself,” he said, brutally. “No, it wasn’t your fault. No, it wouldn’t have mattered a damn if you’d tried to so something different, found some way to be or behave that would have changed her mind. I’m the one who killed her, not you.”

  I felt suddenly guilty about putting the idea into his head. “You mustn’t think like that, Rowland,” I told him. “She killed herself. If it’s self-indulgent for me to try to blame myself, it’s just as self-indulgent for you. I shouldn’t have put it as a question. It wasn’t our fault, Rowland. She was the one who ran away, from you as well as me. She killed herself.”

  “No, Peter,” Rowland said, in a voice that was pure desolation. “Rosalind lied to you…or let you believe the false conclusion to which you jumped. Magdalen didn’t kill herself. Rosalind let everyone believe that because it was preferable to letting the truth be known—or what she thought was the truth. I don’t know whether she figured out the whole of it—Mag certainly didn’t—but either way, she had grounds for sending you here to torment me. In a way, if not quite in the way that Rosalind thinks, I did kill her.”

  I was completely out of my depth. I had no idea what he was talking about. “But you’ve been here all the time, haven’t you?” I said, hesitantly. “Magdalen died in England—in Eden. You couldn’t possibly have killed her. Rosalind said that she was poisoned….in circumstances, if I remember her words correctly, that made it highly implausible that it had been a accident, and that it certainly wasn’t murder.”

  “Very scrupulous of her,” Rowland said. “Avoiding the word suicide in order to direct attention to it. Kind of her too, in a way, though not entirely. Accident and murder highly implausible, were they? But she was poisoned, in a way. Rosalind chose her words as carefully she chose her messenger…but nobody could accuse her of being a pedant. I know how Magdalen died, Peter—and I know why Rosalind sent you here. I know why you came, too, so there’s no need to protest against the last remark. You came because you wanted to, because I’m your friend. I know that. But she still sent you, and I know why. She’s wrong, but also right. I’m sorry, Peter—I won’t say that I’m sorry that you got dragged into it, because you were always in it, and you’re entitled to know the truth.”

  That was when enlightenment finally hit me—belatedly, it seemed, and I cursed myself for a fool because I hadn’t caught on earlier, although, in retrospect, I had been handed the essential piece in the jigsaw very recently, and out of context. At any rate, I realized, all of a sudden, what he was talking about.

  I didn’t blurt it out, though. My lips actually felt numb; I couldn’t speak. The revelation came in a single surge, not in dribs and drabs. I understood how and why Rowland had killed his sister. I understood why Rosalind had sent me. And I understood why Rowland was sorry.

  “You and I first met when we were eighteen,” Rowland said, his voice weakening almost to a whisper, as if the process of distant recall required him to lapse into trance-like reverie. “Magdalen was eighteen too, of course—we met you at the same time, although I don’t know which of us saw you first, or which of us you saw first. It doesn’t matter. You didn’t know anything about us, except for the fact that we were Rosalind’s children, and we liked that—we liked it about all the people we met, of course, but we saw something of a kindred spirit in you that we didn’t see in others. Superficially, at least, your upbringing had been similar to ours: like us, you’d never been to school, but had been educated at home, according to a strict regime that had a particular end in mind…ends against which, not surprisingly, we had all rebelled.

  “In the beginning, Peter, I admired you, because I thought that you had taken your rebellion further than ours. Eventually, I realized that the appearance in question was superficial…but I still admired you for succeeding in it, and saw myself in you, as you must have seen yourself in me, perhaps with a little admiration thrown in. I’d always had Magdalen, and Magdalen had always had me, but you didn’t seem to have had anyone. I think we befriended you thinking that you might need us—the sort of support that we’d always been able to provide for one another—and we really did want to be kind, but in reality, we needed you more than you needed us.

  “You were already self-sufficient, but the fact that we were brother and sister made our mutual endorsement of our own eccentricity seem suspect, a potential folie à deux. We needed someone outside ourselves to pass favorable judgment on us, and you did that. You never withdrew that favor, either—never, even when you realized that falling in love with Magdalen had been futile, because she was too intimately bound up with me ever to return your love. You never turned against us, even when it became obvious that we hadn’t done you any kindness at all—quite the reverse.”

  “That’s not true,” I murmured. He ignored me.

  “You weren’t the only one to fall in love with Magdalen, of course,” he continued. “How could you be? She was beautiful. She won the admiration of everyone, merely by her appearance, and there was nothing in her character to alienate that affection. She was charming, and she was good. There was no malevolence in her at all. Nobody who loved her could turn that love to any kind of distaste, even though she couldn’t and didn’t return it.

  “Perhaps we simply didn’t rebel sufficiently against the grand plan that Rosalind had mapped out for our lives. I don’t mean that we should have abandoned genetics for solid-state physics—that would only have been a small sidestep, and it would only have been a reaction against the part of the plan of which we were consciously aware. We didn’t realize, you see, the extent to which our own relationship had been planned. My mother had produced non-identical twins with different fathers deliberately, not in pursuit of some puerile symmetry but because she wanted to provide each of us with what she considered to be an ideal companionship. She wanted us to become a self-sufficient atom of community, as tightly bound as the proton and electron of a hydrogen atom.

  “Rosalind actually set out, in supervising our upbringing, to build such a bond of affection and intimacy between us as to make us the lights of one another’s lives. I’m not saying that she actually intended that the bond in question would be literally incestuous—in fact, I suspect, implausible as it might seem from an objective viewpoint, that she never actually thought about the possibility of a sexual element, because she sincerely believed that, as brother and sister, we’d have no need of any such complication, and that no feelings of that sort would every materialize. If she had anticipated the possibility, she would have dismissed it as a minor irrelevancy—something not worth worrying about. I suspect that she’d never had any strong feelings of that kind herself—that she’d successfully repressed any that had threatened to arise in the course of her own unorthodox upbringing—and that she simply took it for granted that we wouldn’t either.


  “I suspect that, looking back on her own childhood and adolescence, Rosalind was only conscious of one defect, one lack. She had been an only child. She had felt an absence of a companion like herself. It must have seemed to her that the kind of uniquely close companionship that she tried to develop in her own first-born children was the greatest treasure that any human life was capable of discovering. She never said that to us, though; we thought of it as ours, as an aspect of our rebellion against the more obvious ways in which she tried to direct us. We tried to isolate ourselves from her, in the interests of psychological survival, but we didn’t try to isolate ourselves from one another—indeed, our collaboration became the heart and soul of our reaction against her, enabling us to present a unified front in every act of defiance, petty or otherwise.

  “Rosalind must have realized very swiftly that her experiment was going awry. Mag and I were eight before she decided to have another child, but even at that early stage she must have been dissatisfied with her experiment, because she didn’t plump for another pair of twins, and never had another son thereafter. When we were at university—as I undoubtedly told you—I thought that was because she thought the downside of masculine genius too dangerous, to closely akin to madness. She might even have told me that herself one day, when she was trying to teach me and I was trying not to learn. There’s probably even some truth in it…but I’m not sure that it was the real reason, even if the events that brought us to this could be interpreted as a vindication of that excuse.”

  What he meant by that was that an uninformed observer might think that it was, indeed, the masculine or quasi-autistic aspect of his genius that had brought him to the Orinoco delta, prompting his seclusion as well as his bizarre experiments with giant insects and the living house. An informer observed of the single additional fact that he had killed his sister—or believed that he had—would have been even more convinced of it. I knew, however, that he wasn’t mad, and that the worst charge that could be leveled against him was that he had been reckless, and unnecessarily so. He had made a mistake—but I never imagined, even for a moment, that he had made it without Magdalen’s informed consent.

  He was undoubtedly the one who had used a transformation vector to implant twin benign tumors in their forebrains, but they must have collaborated in the experimental design, and Magdalen must have insisted that if he were to try his experiment on himself, then he must try it on her too, simultaneously. He was evidently convinced, now, that it was the tumor that had killed Magdalen—perhaps because he suspected that his own tumor was about to kill him, having reach a similarly critical stage in its unexpected development—but he didn’t actually know that to be the case. For all he knew, Rosalind might have been telling the exact truth, her implication being straightforward instead of sly. Magdalen really might have swallowed poison. I knew that I would have to put that to him at some stage, if only to persuade him that he need not die in his turn—especially if he consented to obtain an expert second opinion as to what was going on inside his brain. For the time being, though, it seemed best to let him continue his monologue, which obviously still had some way to go.

  “Rosalind over-reached herself in trying to bring us up in the image she wanted us to become,” Rowland went on. “You and I can hardly blame her for that, though. Our ambition always raced far ahead of our capabilities, in those days, and I dare say that it still does—I apologize for implying, a little while ago that yours had fallen behind, for I really have to idea of what is going on in your head, and haven’t yet given you the opportunity to tell me. Perhaps her plan to create a perfect partnership, and her plan to perpetuate her own ambition, both succeeded too well. At any rate, the difficulties that materialized in my relationship with Magdalen gave us both a reason to exercise our powers of creativity, and perhaps to overstretch them. I don’t say, now that I have hindsight to aid me, that our attempt to solve our predicament was sensible—but it was its very boldness, its very recklessness, that drew us to it.

  “It wasn’t so very original, I fear. Two hundred years ago, people who found their own feelings—their own lusts—inconvenient, uncongenial or hateful sometimes tried to suppress or redirect them with the aid of psychotropic drugs, operant conditioning, electroshock therapy and brain surgery. My plan was much subtler than that, and, I thought, much cleverer. I was arrogant, of course, perhaps stupid—and perhaps Magdalen should have stopped me instead of encouraging me—but we really thought that Rosalind’s mistake could be corrected.

  “We weren’t, of course aiming to do anything as simple as obliterate the sexual feelings we had for one another. What we wanted to do—or at least, the way we represented it to one another and ourselves—was to enhance our powers of reason, the dominance of thought over notion, in the interests of achieving the kind of calm of mind that Platonic philosophers recommend as the ideal….for philosophers, at least. We wanted to be great scientists, and I thought that there might a short cut to the attainment of that ambition. Nor am I convinced, even today, that I was entirely wrong about that—for I am doing great work here, Peter, as you’ll understand when I’ve explained it in full, and shown you its dearest fruits.”

  I couldn’t take any more.

  “You gave her a brain tumor, Rowland,” I whispered. “You gave your own sister a brain tumor, in the hope that it might somehow allow her to rise above or set aside the feelings that were supposedly getting in the way of her intellect. No matter how good a deal you think you’ve made on your own account, do you have any idea how monstrous that is, from an objective point of view?”

  “Of course I do,” he replied. “That’s why I gave her the placebo. I thought that would be enough. It was only a matter of exorcising an illusion. I thought it would be enough to persuade her that I’d done it. I was prepared to try the real experiment on myself, but not on Mag. Not on anyone else.”

  Yet again, my assumptions came crashing down—for once, an ugly hypothesis slain by a fact that, if not beautiful, had a certain weird elegance about it.

  I thought I understood everything, then—or almost everything. I thought I understood why Rosalind had sent me—and why, although she was wrong about what had killed Magdalen, she was also right.

  “Rosalind doesn’t know that you gave Magdalen a placebo,” I said. “Does that mean that Magdalen still didn’t know, even at the end?”

  “That depends what you mean by know,” he said. “As soon as I was convinced that the placebo effect hadn’t worked—that her feelings were just as intense and confused as ever—I confessed to Mag what I’d done. The trouble is that I’m not sure that she ever believed me. She should have one, because she knew me. You believe me, don’t you, Peter?”

  I believed him. But I could see why Magdalen might not have done.

  “Oh what a tangled web we weave,” I muttered, helplessly.

  “You’re quoting again,” Rowland pointed out.

  I didn’t care. I understood, now, why even Rowland, who had actually done nothing at all to Magdalen, imagined that he had killed her. He had put a belief into Magdalen’s head, and then had been unable to free her of it by means of a mere confession that the belief was false.

  Rosalind had sent me to accuse him, without knowing what I was doing. And I had, without knowing what I was doing. It hadn’t been necessary. Rowland was already accusing himself, even though he knew exactly what he hadn’t done. A tangled web indeed.

  “It didn’t work, did it?” I said.

  “Obviously not,” he said.

  “I don’t mean that it didn’t work on Magdalen—I mean that it didn’t work on you, either. You really did try to give your own brain a nudge, but it didn’t work. You still loved Magdalen. You still do.”

  “I never really expected it to work on me in that way,” he said. “I did hope for the results I actually got, though, and I’m more than willing to settle for those. The lust thing was never really an obstacle for me, in the way it was for Mag…or, as it seems to have turned out
, for you. It never stopped me thinking, or working. As you say, I still loved her…but I’m thinking, and working, harder than ever. If Mag had only come back, I could have convinced her, in the end. I could have proved to her that I hadn’t done anything to her. I could have helped her over the obstacle some other way. Rosalind couldn’t, you see—and no matter how much it pisses Rosalimd off that she couldn’t, that’s the truth of it. Mag should have come back…but Rosalind wouldn’t let her. It’s fair enough, though, that Rosalind should blame me, rather than herself. However you slice it, I did it. I set the wheels in motion. Ultimately, no matter how you weigh it up, I caused Mag’s death. I didn’t mean to, but I did do it.”

  I wasn’t about to contradict him, to tell him that Rosalind was really to blame. I don’t even think he was fishing for the contradiction. What I actually said was: “It might have been a lust thing to you, but for her…and me…it was love.”

  “Call it what you want,” he said. “No need to glorify it, though—it’s still just one of Mother Nature’s nasty little tricks, not something we should wallow in.”

  “You really are your mother’s son,” I murmured, “no matter how much you dislike her.”

  “Maybe,” he conceded. “Unfortunately, Magdalen wasn’t quite her mother’s daughter. In retrospect, the placebo effect never had a chance. She always believed that the experiment would fail, in her case if not in mine. She wanted to free herself from the victimization of her emotions, as her mother seemed to have done, but she never believed herself capable of it. She went back to her mother, I think, in the hope that her mother might enable her to succeed where I had failed. It was difficult for her, because she thought of it as a betrayal—as, indeed, it was—but she thought it necessary at the time, and I dare say that Rosalind has done her best, with her own methods and placebos.