Nature's Shift

by Brian Stableford

  I read the autopsy results. Rowland had died of a cerebral hemorrhage, apparently occasioned by an anomalous interaction between Aether—the official report gave the full chemical name and formula rather than the familiar term—and a cluster of transformed cells in a localized area of the cerebrum.

  The report did not say so, but I knew that the area in question was the one associated with rational and scientific thought…except, of course, that, like genes, brain-cells never do just one thing. You can’t enhance one propensity without affecting others. Nature is the Mother of improvisation; there’s always a trade-off on the road of least resistance, and even when you get what you wanted, you get screwed.

  Adam asked me what would happen, now. He meant to him and Eve. I told him that I didn’t know, yet—that I would have to talk to Rosalind before making any firm decisions—but that he need have no fear. For as long as he and Eve were prepared to tend to the house, they would be paid to do so. If they no longer wanted to do it, they would be given generous assistance to settle elsewhere.

  Adam told me that he didn’t want to leave the house. Eve agreed with him. It was their home, their refuge.

  Adam and I went down to meet Rosalind’s boat when it approached the harbor. She wasn’t alone, of course; she had brought four men with her—all drones, I could not help thinking, although I knew that they wouldn’t be idle, and I recognized one of them as her petty Saint Peter, who had let me in but wouldn’t let me out again while manning the gates of Eden. She left the hirelings to follow orders without direct supervision, though, when she accompanied me to inspect the body of her only son. She didn’t touch the body. She simply stood and looked at it, sorrowfully.

  “You expected this,” I said, accusatively. “You knew something like this was going to happen.”

  “No I didn’t, Peter,” she said, flatly. “I feared that it might—but I sent you here in the hope that you might somehow be able to prevent it from happening. It’s not your fault that you couldn’t. If anyone is at fault, it’s me, because I couldn’t.”

  “You should have told me exactly how Magdalen died.”

  “How could I, Peter? How could I, when I don’t even know myself? I know that she poisoned herself, by taking Aether. I tried to stop her, to substitute something more subtle, but she was mirroring what Rowland was doing. She knew that she didn’t need to—that he had given her a placebo instead of the loaded vectors—but she couldn’t help it. Whatever was driving her was operating below the level of consciousness, immune to any effort of will that she or I could make. I’ve done my damnedest to figure out the chemistry of such effects—to figure out how subconscious psychtotropics actually work—but even the resources of the Hive couldn’t solve the problem in time to help her.

  “What was I supposed to tell you, Peter—that she was killed by the placebo effect? I told you what I could: that she was poisoned, that it probably wasn’t an accident, and that it definitely wasn’t murder. I wasn’t even certain of that…but I was worried about Rowland. I thought his arrogance might save him—that even though Magdalen’s mirroring of his symptoms had killed her, he might simply be too self-satisfied to surrender to mortality in the same way—but I was wrong about that. I also hoped that your presence might help him, even though it couldn’t have helped Magdalen, because you were his friend. That didn’t work out either. It’s not your fault that it didn’t, though, any more than it’s his.”

  It was grief talking. Not that she wasn’t telling the truth, but she wouldn’t have gone on at such length if she hadn’t just suffered the double blow of losing her twins. She certainly wouldn’t have framed so many of her comments as questions. If she’d been herself—the Queen Bee—she’d just have given me the facts…but the Queen Bee was just an act. The Queen Bee was a pose she’d learned to strike, in order to compensate for the side-effects of her scientific genius, the forcefulness of her rational objectivity.

  “Rowland blamed himself for Magdalen’s death,” I told her.

  “Of course he did,” Rosalind retorted. “We all blamed ourselves, reveling in our supposed guilt, masochistic idiots that we are.”

  She didn’t mean that we were idiots who just happened to have a masochistic streak. She meant that the mocking masochism that sometimes welled up from beneath the conscious levels of our minds—from beneath our science—made idiocy of our genius, in a spirit of objective irony.

  “Rowland must have known about the danger,” I told her. “He must have taken scans, even if he didn’t transmit them for analysis by anyone else—but he was in denial. Even though he was in a hurry to give me the keys to his secret, he was still in denial. It wasn’t suicide, but there was a certain amount of contributory negligence involved. I came too late. A year ago, perhaps even six months, I might have been able to make a difference…but I left it too late.”

  “He left it too late,” Rosalind said. “He could have invited you at any time, and you’d have come—like a shot. You had to wait for an excuse to demand an invitation—for Magdalen to die.”

  “He left me the house, you know—he wants me to continue his work.”

  “I know. I knew before I asked you to come. He couldn’t keep that a secret, and didn’t even try.”

  “Do you intend to challenge the will?”

  Rosalind fixed me with her sky-blue eyes, but she didn’t attempt to reach out to me. “Why would I do that?” she said. “He was perfectly sane when he made the will, wasn’t he?”

  I didn’t answer that, but she took my silence for assent.

  “The Hive doesn’t need his money,” she went on, “and as for his work…if he was prepared to trust you with it, so am I. You needn’t cut yourself off the way he did though. If you want our collaboration, our help…or merely someone to talk to, who understands….”

  Again, I said nothing, but this time, she took it as evidence of doubt.

  “I do understand,” she told me. “They didn’t think I could, either of them—but I’m their mother. I understood them far better than they knew, far better than they hoped.”

  I didn’t contradict her.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  To start with, I took her into the underworld, so that she could see with her own eyes what Rowland had wrought, and what it was that he wanted me to continue on his behalf. I told him what he had said to me before he died, including his Romantic flight of fancy.

  “They’re beautiful,” she said, of the ephemerae. They clustered round the two of us, reaching out to us and touching us. I was slightly surprised to see that Rosalind didn’t seem to mind their touch at all, and certainly didn’t flinch from it. She looked into their empty eyes frankly. Nor was that part of her Queen Bee pose; she really didn’t mind. Perhaps, I thought, we had more in common than I’d previously imagined.

  “They’re modeled on Magdalen,” I told her.

  “I can see that,” she said. “What other model could they possibly have used? Did you expect me to be horrified, Peter? I’m a scientist, like you. Are you horrified?”

  “No,” I admitted—but I was still surprised at myself.

  “So what are you going to do?” she asked, again. I saw that, in her turn, she was reaching out to the ephemerae, as I was, and returning their unthinking caresses.

  “I don’t know,” I confessed. “I have my own work, my own life, in Lancaster.”

  “Do you?” she countered. “What happened when the word got around the university that you were coming out here?”

  “People started ringing up to beg me to bring them with me…have you been bugging my phone?”

  “Of course not. They rang me too, begging me to intercede on their behalf—I didn’t return the calls, obviously. If you need help, there won’t be any lack of it. I’ll send you a couple of my daughters if you like—but you mustn’t fall in love with any of them; there wouldn’t be any future in it.” She didn’t realize how insulting the final comment was.

  “Do you want m
e to carry on where Rowland left off?” I asked, slightly incredulously.

  “What I want doesn’t come into it,” she said. “That’s what he wanted. The question I asked, if you need me to repeat it, was what you want to do.”

  “I don’t know,” I repeated.

  “What you need to remember, Peter,” she said, “is that if our fundamental impulses are generated somewhere in the dark depths of the brain, beyond the reach of consciousness and rational planning, ever vulnerable to psychotropic agents of which we have no knowledge, let alone understanding, then it’s our manifest duty to fight them, to find a way to conquer them and subject them to the empire of reason. However hard it is, we need to exert all the force that consciousness and science can muster. We can’t let Mother Nature win. If we can’t defeat her in ourselves, we owe it to those who come after us to make sure that they’re better armed than we are, so that they have a better chance of succeeding where we failed. That’s what being human ought to be about.”

  “Not everyone would agree with you about that,” I said.

  “Not everyone,” she agreed. “But you do, Peter, don’t you?”

  I did. In spite of all the faults that my flesh was heir to, I could, and I did.

  EPILOGUE

  It was very rare that the ephemerae emerged from pupation in isolation. Usually, there were at least half a dozen alive at any one time. By virtue of that fact, they could respond to their innate behavioral drive in flocking together and fondling one another, achieving the meager fulfillment of which they were capable easily, comfortably and—by their own peculiar standards—naturally.

  Whenever I had to leave Rowland’s house temporarily, to collect my algal specimens, I was sorry to leave the ephemerae behind, even for a matter of hours, because I had grown fond of them, in my fashion. It was in their chamber that Rosalind and I buried Rowland Usher, and I couldn’t help feeling that it was unfortunate that his beloved Magdalen hadn’t been buried there alongside him. I knew that the brother and sister would have wished to rest side by side. I felt, however—in spite of Rosalind’s curt and contemptuous dismissal, when I was unwise enough to confess it to her—that Magdalen really was there in spirit, still haunting the house with her benign and loving presence. For as long as I remained faithful to her memory, I thought, she would never desert me. Magdalen had not been able to love me as I loved her, but she had always been kind.

  We had left Rowland lightly coffined, as he had wished, so that his decaying flesh might be absorbed, in due course, by the scavenging cells of the house, thus becoming a part of her ever-extending body, dissipated within her maternal flesh, united with her in substance whether or not any kind of spiritual union were really possible.

  I came to love the house, although I never thought to her as a substitute for the mother I had never had, and certainly never referred to her, even in the privacy of my flippant imagination, as Rosalind II.

  I didn’t have to give up teaching; I invited several of the research students to join me, at least on a temporary basis, and they jumped at the chance. Adam and Eve also became my pupils in genetics and many other braches of science, because they too wanted to do their utmost to perpetuate Rowland’s legacy. We soon had the beginnings of a true colony, though not a hive in any accurate metaphorical sense.

  Whenever I did venture out of the house, and found myself in the full glare of the tropical sun, I had to wrinkle my nose against the stench of the swamp, for I had become used to breathing clean and sterile air and feared that the complex reek might be concealing some of Mother Nature’s insidious olfactory psychotropics. The sky always seemed very blue, its light wild and abandoned, and my eyes ached for the gentle roseate glow of the house’s bioluminescence. I always took great pride, however, in looked back at the astonishing edifice from a distance, watching her walls gleaming and sparkling as if encrusted with precious gems, and savoring the objective aesthetics of her softened shape, which I liked to fancy as a surreal hand reaching upwards, as if to touch infinity with molten fingers.

  She was perfectly lovely.

  The fictitious House of Usher—a shameful allegory of the disturbed psyche—was burst asunder by the forces of its own innate decay and swallowed up by dark and unforgiving waters. In stark contrast, Rowland’s House of Usher still stands, soaring proudly above the tattered canopy of the twisted trees. It is still growing, and although it stands today in a noisome swamp, there will come a time, even if I have long been buried alongside my friend and absorbed into its flesh as nourishment, when it has purified the lakes and the islands, absorbing their apparent stagnancy into its own manifest vitality.

  I cannot claim originality for that thought—it’s yet another unashamed quotation. In one of the notes he appended to his data discs, Rowland explicitly contrasted his house with Poe’s imaginary one, damning the fictitious original as a typical product of the Romantic imagination and what he considered to be its myriad demonic afflictions. His own house, by contrast, he claimed as a personification of the nascent zeitgeist of the twenty-second century, and of the third millennium: a spirit perhaps best summed up by the reminder that Rosalind gave me, in helping me to make up my mind as to what I intended to do, of the ideal thrust of human duty.

  I no longer think of myself as Peter Bell, and certainly not as Peter Bell the Third. I think of myself as Rowland’s rock and loyal apostle, with no need of any surname.

  Rosalind held a memorial service for Rowland in Eden, a few days after her return to England. Professor Crowthorne was there. He probably hoped and expected to see me, but I was absent—with Rosalind’s permission and understanding.

  I had work to do. I still have.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Brian Stableford was born in Yorkshire in 1948. He taught at the University of Reading for several years, but is now a full-time writer. He has written many science-fiction and fantasy novels, including The Empire of Fear, The Werewolves of London, Year Zero, The Curse of the Coral Bride, The Stones of Camelot, and Prelude to Eternity. Collections of his short stories include a long series of Tales of the Biotech Revolution, and such idiosyncratic items as Sheena and Other Gothic Tales and The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels. He has written numerous nonfiction books, including Scientific Romance in Britain, 1890-1950; Glorious Perversity: The Decline and Fall of Literary Decadence; Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia; and The Devil’s Party: A Brief History of Satanic Abuse. He has contributed hundreds of biographical and critical articles to reference books, and has also translated numerous novels from the French language, including books by Paul Féval, Albert Robida, Maurice Renard, and J. H. Rosny the Elder.