The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  In such a world, he hypothesized, sexual reproduction would be the sole prerogative of mankind, everything else in the organic realm being capable only of vegetative growth or of being cloned and transformed by human genetic engineers.

  I confess that I did not find this a wholly attractive prophecy (or speculation, for Rowland was talking of opportunity rather than destiny), but there was something very attractive in the sheer grandiosity of Rowland’s ecstatic voyages of the imagination, and 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, for a while, with his game, and became so carried away that I did not notice for some time that Rowland’s condition was becoming desperate, and that he was on the brink of losing his powers of motor co-ordination. He demanded that he should be allowed to show me the upper parts of the house, above our apartments, and uttered dark hints about there being more in the basements than I was yet prepared to imagine, but I had to forbid any further wandering, and in the end I had to support him as we made our way back up to the dining room.

  For once, though, dinner seemed to revive Rowland’s spirits, and he ate a good meal. After he had rested for a while he was restored sufficiently to conduct a longer conversation than had been possible on the evenings of my first two days as his guest.

  He set out to tell me more about the history of his researches, but soon went on to personal matters, including secrets which he had hesitated to share with me when we were intimates in our younger days. In particular, he spoke of Magdalen, and I listened in fascination as he gradually peeled away the layers of inhibition which had hitherto concealed the inner mainsprings of his motivation. He granted me then such an insight into his character as he would surely never have conceded if he had not been certain that he was very close to death.

  Alas, he was closer than he knew!

  * * *

  “Magdalen lived always under the shadowy threat of death,” said Rowland, his voice weakening almost to a whisper as the process of recall carried him into a trance-like reverie. “My parents treated her with extraordinary indulgence; she was never sent to school because there seemed little point in trying to secure the kind of education that would be useful only as preparation for a later life which would not be her privilege. Instead, my father educated her himself, after his own theory, trying to equip her to obtain the greatest enjoyment from the years she actually would have. She was a beautiful child, who won the admiration of everyone, and of my father’s eccentric tutelage I can say only that it seemed to work magnificently, for she was the happiest being I have ever met.

  “Although I was allowed a more conventional schooling, I was also much involved in her life. My father sought to provide her with what he considered to be an ideal companionship; I too was a part of his scheme, though at first I did not know it. As he sought to mould her, so he sought to mould me, to build between the two of us such a bond of affection and community as to make us the lights of one another’s lives. Such a uniquely close companionship he considered to be the greatest treasure which any human life is capable of discovering. I have not had cause to disagree with him in the decades through which I have lived since I lost that perfect relationship.

  “I am a little sceptical now of my father’s motivations. I wonder why, knowing that he was the victim of a heritable disease, he chose to have children at all. At the time, I thought the way that he took such careful and absolute control over our nurture was a measure of his heroic desperation in trying to save us from a misfortune of fate. Now I suspect that he had children precisely in order to carry out this remarkable experiment, and that we were his guinea-pigs. Nevertheless, I do know that he loved us very dearly indeed, and that the grief which he felt when Magdalen died robbed his life, as it robbed mine, of almost all meaning.

  “You see around you the extraordinary lengths to which I have been driven in my attempts to find a meaningful project in which to absorb myself. He never did find another; he lived and died a sad man, save for those years when Magdalen gave him a reason to exercise his unusual powers of creativity. You and I work with the elements of physical heredity, and cannot fully understand the difficulties which attended his work in delicately manipulating the psyche and the environment, but I think you can appreciate what a triumph was his when I say that I wholeheartedly believe that Magdalen’s was the most joyful, the most compassionate, the most complete life that I think a human being might live, in spite of—or perhaps because of—its brevity.

  “He taught her only those things that might stimulate her sense of beauty and her sense of wonder, to give her the fullest measure of delight in the world where her mayfly existence was to be lived. He controlled all that she saw, and heard, and felt. When I became old enough to understand what was happening, he made me his collaborator instead of his instrument, and toward the end I conspired with him in planning her last few months. We were determined that there should be no joyful aspect of human experience denied to her and we discussed carefully the question of whether it should be he or I that would introduce her to sexual love. Despite the value of his experience in such matters, the responsibility was given to me—old taboos against father/daughter incest still have some power, while brother/sister intercourse is widely accepted, and we were scrupulously respectful of prevailing social attitudes even though we had established for Magdalen a private society in which the world at large could not interfere.

  “There is a sense, I think, in which the climax of my life had already passed when you first met me. You found in me a man who felt that he had already finished one life, attempting the impossible in trying to make another. All I can say is that I have done my best, and that I am proud of what I have achieved. I do not regret having become a recluse, separating myself as far as it has been practicable from the society of other men. My memories of Magdalen are far more precious to me than any other relationship with a woman or a man could ever have been.

  “I realize that you are bound to think this unusual, but if you are to be the interpreter of my achievement, who must explain to the world the measure of my genius and its productions, then you must try to understand.”

  Indeed, I did try to understand. He was correct in saying that in our enlightened times we are no longer so fearful of the taboos which preyed upon the consciences of our ancestors. We are no longer horrified by the idea of incest, so I was not particularly shocked to find out that Rowland had been his sister’s lover. Nevertheless, the tale he told was so singular that I did have to struggle imaginatively to accommodate it. How odd and unparalleled the life of Magdalen Usher must have been!

  * * *

  Frankly, I doubted Rowland’s assurances about the perfection of his sister’s existence. I could not believe that this experiment in eupsychian engineering could possibly have been as successful as he claimed. No human being can be kept so utterly insulated from the darker side of life—from the ominous aspects of her own inner nature—as to be held inviolate from all dread, all sorrow, all splenetic impulse. Nevertheless, I did not doubt that he believed it, and that in his mind his sister’s image must have a significance of purity greater than that of any saint or other idol.

  I remembered the apparition of the previous night, of which I still feared to speak. I could not help but touch upon the subject, but felt compelled to do so elliptically, without directly saying what I had seen.

  “She must be very much in your thoughts now,” I said. “You must feel her nearness very acutely.”

  “I do,” he said, dreamily. He seemed now to have been overcome by a tremendous tiredness, which carried him off into a kind of euphoric altered consciousness. Despite the fact that he had resolved to tell me his secrets, I do not believe that he would have told me any more at that time had he been in full possession of his faculties. He had surely planned a more gradual process of revelation. He was in the grip of his disease, though, and in a state of mind
that few humans can ever have attained.

  “At first,” he said, “I dreamed of re-creating her. So many of her cells, including oöcytes from her womb, were taken from her even before death, to make the tissue-cultures that would be used for the study of our freakish disease. I wanted to clone her, to bring her back from the dead, to make her anew. I soon realized, though, that it would be a dreadful thing to do. All the best efforts of my father and myself had gone into giving her a perfect existence within its prescribed limits. To create another of her would be to spoil our design, as if we were to take a great painting and daub over it an inferior copy. She could never be re-created, and to make another individual out of her genes would be an appalling travesty of all that my father and I had done.

  “When I went to college, therefore, I deliberately elected to stay away from medicine, from human engineering. I went into the kind of work that would help me to transform the human environment rather than the human body. I wanted to build houses, not people—places for people to live, where they could live well, in privacy. I soon realized that it would not be enough to build the kind of houses that are now being built—I wanted to create something much more ambitious. But I could not entirely forget Magdalen, and there remained a sense in which my house … my private world … must in some way contain her. That was when I conceived the notion of working with larvae.

  “We are so proud these days of our own biotechnic miracles that we tend to forget nature’s, and we tend to forget what a colossal bounty was made available to our early genetic engineers, in terms of the raw materials with which they began to work. I have always been fascinated by metamorphosis, by the fact that a maggot or a caterpillar can carry within it genes which code for an entirely different creature, so that when the time comes it builds itself a temporary tomb from which it will one day emerge anew.

  “It struck me as a terrible waste that structural engineers should breed hundreds or thousands of new kinds of larvae to work for us, without sparing a thought for the fact that their eventual pupation would now be the end of their story. No one cared, it seemed, about the fact that these modified larvae could no longer advance to a final stage in their development, because the imagos programmed into their altered genes were hopelessly inviable.

  “Thus, when I began engineering larvae for work within my house, I also began engineering them so that they would be able to pupate and metamorphose successfully. I knew that they could not produce giant insects, with wings and exoskeletons, so I set about reprogramming them to produce creatures that are viable at that size. The creatures which I showed you today, which resemble blowfly maggots, have approximately the same biomass as a human being; they lose much of that in pupation, but can still produce something the size of a young adolescent. Mindless creatures, of course, but beautiful, in their way. They do not live long, at present, but I have laid the foundations for work which has limitless scope. In time, the engineers of the future might produce another human race.

  “I have tried hard to gain sufficiently refined control over the features of these individuals, and I regret to say that I have not succeeded in producing one which bears more than a passing resemblance to my beloved Magdalen, despite using her own genetic material, but my quest has always been a hopeful one and I have derived much comfort from it. I needed something of her, you understand, to sustain me in my solitude … and they have given me that. Something, albeit so little…”

  Rowland began suddenly to cough, and the cough developed into a kind of seizure.

  Anxiously, I went to his side, and tried to calm him, but blood spattered my hand, and I suddenly realized that his condition was critical. His face had a ghastly pallor, and he struggled to whisper.

  “So soon … Magdalen!”

  It was as though the words themselves choked him. I tried to clear the blockage from his throat, to administer artificial respiration, but I could not start his heart beating again.

  Within minutes, he was dead.

  * * *

  I checked Rowland’s body for signs of life, and finding none I called Harvard, and asked to be put in touch with someone familiar with the details of his case. Then I went to another screen, and began to interrogate the data stores within the integral system. Within minutes I had a series of printed schematics which would serve as a map of the house. I located a wheeled stretcher in a nearby storeroom, and took him down to the room which housed his diagnostic computer and its ancillary apparatus. There I took the return call from Harvard. When I had manoeuvred the body into the cradle of the apparatus, the surgeon took over the remote controls, and began to check again for signs of life before continuing with the post-mortem.

  This I could not bear to watch, and so I made my way back to the study where Rowland had told me his remarkable story. There, obsessed with the necessity of being reasonable, I set about the task which he had set for me. I began to inspect the discs on which he had carefully kept the records of all his experiments and all his projects.

  In time, I could carry all the information away to more congenial surroundings, but I knew that if I were to do the job properly, then I would have to work in the house for at least a fortnight, in order to know exactly what ought to be taken away or transmitted electronically to my own home.

  I took three further calls from Harvard, but I was not required to do anything further—the doctors there, working in association with the house’s automatic systems, completed their examination, took their samples, issued a death certificate and wrapped the body in preparation for interment. By this time I had located Rowland’s actual last will and testament, and I set in motion the legal machinery needed to put it through probate. The will provided for the burial of the body beneath the house, and I knew that this was a task that I would have to carry out myself, but it was one that could safely be left for another day.

  It was late when I finally dimmed the lights and returned to my own room. Midnight had long gone, but insulated as I was from any knowledge of the setting and rising of the sun my sense of time was confused, and I did not feel tired until I actually took the decision to stop and rest. Then, fatigue suddenly swept over me like a wave.

  With darkness and fatigue, though, came an inevitable relaxation of reason, and when I slept, my self-control—so carefully maintained by the iron grip of consciousness—was banished. I dreamt more nightmarishly than I had done the previous night, and my dreams were pure Poe.

  I dreamt that I buried Rowland not in his own house but in that other—that haunted purgatory of fantasy. Our journey to the grave was through rotting passages weeping with cold slime, lit only by smoky torches whose flames were angry red. I dragged the coffin behind me, supporting only one end, and I think that Rowland somehow spoke to me from dead lips as we went, mocking my slowness.

  This was bad enough, but after I had immured him in a vault behind a great metal door I remained anchored to the spot, listening for an eternity, waiting for the sound that I knew would come—the sound of the body risen from its rest, its fingers tapping and scratching at the door.

  Inevitably (probably there was no real lapse of time, but simply an aching false consciousness of time passed) the sound began, and taunted my soul with echoes of dread and anguish which reverberated in my being until I felt myself literally driven insane, and howled at myself in the fury of my hallucination: “Madman! Madman! Madman!”

  Then I woke in a cold sweat, thirsting.

  And I heard, outside the door of my chamber, a faint tapping and scratching.

  For a moment, I convinced myself that I was still asleep, and struggled manfully to wake. Then I could deny my senses no longer, and knew that the sound was real.

  I dragged myself from my bed, feeling very heavy, my body requiring an agony of effort to move at all. I stumbled to the door, and opened it, at first by the merest crack and then—in consequence of what I saw—much wider.

  There in the faintly-lit corridor, prostrate at my feet, one hand still groping for the d
oor, was what seemed to be a teenage girl.

  I knew, of course, that it was not. How many human genes were in it—Magdalen Usher’s genes—I could not guess, but I knew that it was but a sham, a phantasm, no more human than the maggots which would soon consume Rowland Usher’s body—and one day, no doubt, my own. But still, it was a pitiful creature, and in such a form it could not help but attract my sympathies. I remembered what Rowland had said about their not living long.

  Some insect “adults” are born without digestive systems, unable to feed; they exist only to exchange genes in the physiological ritual of sexual intercourse. These creatures of Rowland’s had not even reproductive organs inside them. They existed neither to eat nor to breed, being equipped only with the very minimum of a behavioural repertoire in order to serve their maker’s purpose.

  They existed to cling and caress, to soothe and be soothed, and that was the entirety of their existence. Like mayflies they were born and they died, innocent and ignorant of time, space and the world at large. Their universe was the House of Usher, and one can only hope that they passed their brief existence in a kind of bliss.

  I was awake again now, and though startled and a little appalled, I found no alternative but to pick up the poor creature and carry her to my bed, where I stroked her gently and calmed her (I could no longer think in terms of “it” once I had touched her).

  She died before morning.

  * * *

  Later, I visited the caverns deep underground (but still within the living walls of the growing manse) where the free-living maggots pupated, and saw rank upon rank of grey pupae, shaped like the sarcophagi in which the Egyptians entombed their mummified dead. I watched the hatching of the humanoid ephemerae, and studied them through their brief life-cycle—a mere handful of days. They did not, left to themselves, find their way into the upper parts of the house, though when I led one of them—as Rowland Usher often must have done—to my own bedroom, she knew both the way back to the deepest cellars and the way to return to the room, unescorted.