Nature's Shift

by Brian Stableford

  “Sure,” he said, as my gaze moved slowly over the paintings, one at a time, “Rosalind would be delighted to think...or to believe…that I’ve inherited her taste in art. I keep the family pictures in the bedroom—including hers. This is where I pass most of my leisure time…it hasn’t seen as much use recently as it should have, I expect we’ll be spending more time here in future.”

  He waved a negligent arm at a pair of armchairs situated in the angle where the book-laden walls met. One of them looked brand new, or at least unused. Taking his negligent wave as an invitation, I sat down in the new one, while he went to a sideboard and poured us two drinks from a decanter—iced water again, although he took care to put a slice of lemon in this time.

  “Local lemons?” I asked.

  “Home-grown,” he assured me. “Everything fresh is home-grown, in a perfectly literal sense. We have a small kitchen-garden at the back of the house, and half a dozen plantations of various kinds on the shore—but they’re all grafted on to the house’s extending roots, all extensions of it. In time, the house will begin to displace the rain forest with its own substance. The grafted fruit and vegetable stocks all do very well, in spite of the rain and the heat. They’re Roderick’s finest, guaranteed pest-immune, and their specialist pollinators love it here. It’s a new kind of Eden, from the fruit-trees’ viewpoint, and using the house’s roots rather than their own adds a new order of magnitude to their strength and resilience. I envy them, sometimes…but it’s the natural destiny of animals, especially humans, to be essentially rootless, parasites in our homes rather than parts of them. So—for the present, at least—all of our meat’s tissue-cultured. The only animal husbandry going on inside the house is concerned with insects. I don’t eat insects, even though some of them are perfectly edible. It would be too vulgar.”

  I was glad to hear that speech, because it was the Rowland I knew, quintessentially. That kind of imaginative extravagance, spiced with eccentric wit, was what I had loved most about him, in the old days. I was glad to see that it had not only survived, but had proved irrepressible by circumstance. Perhaps, I thought, it was my presence here that had brought it out—in which case, perhaps I would be able to do him good, to stop whatever rot seemed to have set in somewhere deep in the metaphorical roots of his soul.

  Rowland sat down, and made himself comfortable. He looked at me, a trifle quizzically, while those thoughts ran through my mind. Then, very abruptly, he said: “How did Magdalen die, exactly?”

  I had to pause to collect myself. “Poison, apparently,” I said. “I can’t say, exactly, because Rosalind wouldn’t be any more specific than that, but she said that it’s highly unlikely to have been an accident, and certainly wasn’t murder.”

  “No,” Rowland murmured. “Definitely not murder.”

  “You can’t blame Rosalind,” I told him. I felt a slight twinge of incongruity about the fact that I was defending her, even though the conversation we’d had in her car while circling Heathrow had probably had no other purpose than to persuade me to come to her defense, if necessary—but I really did mean it.

  “I’m not,” was Rowland’s reply. I didn’t believe him.

  “She tried to help Magdalen,” I told him. “She was genuinely distressed that she hadn’t been able to. There’s no way in the world that Rosalind could be held responsible for her death.”

  “Nobody’s accusing her,” Rowland said, his voice taking on a edge of resentment.

  “Actually,” I continued, perhaps recklessly, “she hinted that you might know more about the causes of Magadelen’s death than she did. I assume you’ve been in communication with Magdalen, at least occasionally.”

  His pallor seemed to be intensifying further as I spoke, and the effort he was making to contain his emotion became visible. It was almost as if he, not I, had been the one traveling for more than a day, disorientated by a shift in time-zones. I still felt quite well. It had obviously been a bad idea to raise the subject of Magdalen’s death so soon, and I felt guilty about making things worse with my own insensitivity. There was no way of deflecting him now, though.

  “Very occasionally,” he said, in response to my unwise prompt. “Poisoned? Was that the word Rosalind actually used?”

  I nodded, not trusting myself to say anything.

  “A trifle vague,” he said, pensively. “Not like Rosalind, at all.” He made a very visible effort, then, to collect himself, and altered his tone decisively to say: “I’m really not sure what she’s trying to communicate, if anything. Lack of information sometimes speaks volumes, but…it really doesn’t matter, does it? Dead is dead. Poor Mag. I suppose Rosalind blames me?”

  “I honestly don’t think so,” I hastened to say. “When I spoke to her, she seemed to me to be blaming herself. I don’t think it was an act.”

  Rowland raised his eyebrows slightly. “You don’t know her” he said. “It’s not her style to blame herself—but I might be wrong. I suppose we all come face to face with mirrors occasionally. She’d been feeding Mag drugs, of course—trying to ‘cure’ her misery and confusion?”

  “She admitted that. Nothing chemically brutal, she insisted, and nothing experimental. Although she’s reported to be heavily into olfactory psychotropics at present—the new aromatherapy, some of the newsfeeds call it—she says that she didn’t try anything experimental on Magdalen. She told me that some of the stuff she gave her was just sugar pills—placebos—intended to have a purely psychosomatic attempt….but nothing worked.”

  Rowland’s eyes weren’t as blue as Rosalind’s, but they were capable of appearing to flare up in a similar fashion. I had always been able to tolerate Rowland’s gaze better than anyone else’s, except Magdalen’s, but not when he looked at me like that. I must have been blushing in confusion.

  “That’s what she told you?” he said, sharply.

  It was all I could do to prevent myself stammering when I replied: “I believed her Rowland. I really do think it’s true. I know that you and Rosalind have never seen eye to eye, but you can’t doubt that she loved Magadalen. I can’t believe that any treatment she attempted made matters any worse. She just wasn’t able to make them any better. The reasons why she was blaming herself go much deeper—all the way back to your conception, I suspect.”

  “I doubt that,” Rowland said, flatly. After a pause, though, he went on: “But you’re right about her not being able to make things better.” He paused again, still trying to collect himself, to recover the upbeat mood he had briefly attained while telling me about the fruit-trees and vegetables grafted on to the roots of his home. Finally, he deliberately adopted a lighter tone to say: “It wasn’t anyone’s fault. Poor Mag was unhappy because her circumstances were unhappy, not because of any chemical imbalance in the old tumor.”

  “Tumor?” I queried. It was so long that I’d heard the phrase used that it took me a moment or two to remember that, in Rowland’s private parlance, the “old tumor” was the human brain. His notion of evolutionary theory wasn’t entirely orthodox. He had always presented it as a joke, but I think he had been seriously committed to it, even while we were doing old Fliegmann’s course together, attempting to plumb the still-mostly-hidden depths of practical neurology.

  He smiled, albeit a little thinly, at my memory lapse. “We have let things slide haven’t we?” he said. “I don’t suppose you’ve got any more excuse than I have, because there isn’t one—but we both know that it goes with the intellectual territory. And you’re here now, aren’t you? I’ve given you a bedroom just across the hallway from mine, near the sitting-room…just the way it used to be when we were sharing that house in Chiswick we rented when we were students.”

  I remembered that house very well. He, Magdalen and I had lived in it for five years, through most of our undergraduate and all of our postgraduate years. It had been extremely convenient, at the time, to have friends who had received their own independent legacies from Roderick the Great, even if I had perforce become so
mething of a parasite on their generosity. The happiest times of my life had been spent in that house.

  “I couldn’t give you the lab next door to mine, though,” Rowland added. “You’re on a different floor, I’m afraid. I’ll show you how to get there in a little while. It’s very simple—the blue button in the elevator array.”

  “Which button gives access to your lab,” I asked, automatically rather than curiously.

  “Mine’s a little out of the way,” he said, not answering the question. “It requires all kinds of special facilities. I’ll show you round the rest of the labyrinth, though, in the course of the next day or two. I think you’ll be very interested in some of my experimental stocks. Roderick would have been proud of me—and, I hope, suitably amazed.”

  “I think Leon Gantz might have been amazed too,” I said, “had he lived long enough to see this place. He’d be delighted with the way you’ve used the local silt as a matrix, and tickled pink by your adventures in plantation-grafting.”

  The nostalgic memories and feelings kept flooding back. When Rowland and I had taken our course in civil engineering we’d been partners in practical classes, and had prided ourselves on becoming rather adept—as we arrogantly thought—in the deployment of the standard bacteria used in modern cementation processes. The engineered bacteria, which could be adapted to almost any kind of raw materials, had already wrought their first revolution by then, and were helping to transform whole vast areas of land where it had been impossible to build in the past: deserts, steppes and bare mountains alike. While the ecological engineers were transforming the world’s environments, Gantz-inspired structural engineers were building entire new cities for people whose ancestors had never known adequate shelter; thanks to Leon Gantz, there need be no more shanty-towns in the world that was rising phoenix-fashion from the ashes of the Crash, even if great palaces on the scale favored by Rosalind were still the prerogative of the rich.

  Rowland and I had been fired with a similar sense of mission in those days, both determined to use the tools that our education provided to their very best purpose, and to play our part in the Utopian remaking of the world. We had shared a sense of imaginative vision and an ambition that many of our fellows lacked, or so it seemed to us, which had helped to bring us together in spite of our intrinsic social awkwardness. We had both became increasingly and deliriously interested in the techniques of genetic engineering we were being taught, including those involved in the manufacture of gantzian bacteria as well as the manipulation of plants and invertebrates, and our friendship had been firmly founded in the dream of imparting new powers to these living instruments, which would equip them to perform ever-more-astounding miracles.

  My progress, inevitably had been far more modest than our shared daydreams allowed, and I had virtually given up on gantzing techniques in order to concentrate on plants and, ultimately, on algae. Evidently, Rowland had contrived to maintain a broader front in his endeavors and ambitions. Leon Gantz would, indeed, have been proud of him—and so was I.

  “I can’t take sole credit for the idea of the house,” Rowland told me. “If it hadn’t been for the discussions I had with you…well, let’s just say, for now, that the contribution you made, if only by way of inspiration, wasn’t trivial.” He was being generous—and the generous impulse seemed to be doing him good. A little color had returned to his cheeks.

  “You’ve obviously made significant headway with the great integration,” I said, attempting to be generous in my turn, but having no need to exaggerate to do so. The inevitable horizon of our dream had be the ultimate union of gantzing with other kinds of genetic engineering: the production of buildings that would be living organisms in themselves. Pioneers in our fields had been experimenting even then with the incorporation of living systems into the inert walls of gantzed structures, but their utilitarian assumptions had stopped them once they produced mechanisms that could fulfill narrowly-specified aims. They had produced houses that could put down tap roots into the ground on which they stood, to secure their own water-supplies, and living systems for the disposal of human wastes had been in use for some time, but the present generation of architects hadn’t taken the process of integration much further than that in the ten years since I’d obtained my doctorate, being as-yet-unready to follow the dream for the dream’s own sake.

  “Absolutely,” Rowland confirmed. “I’ll give you the whole story later, when we have a little more time.”

  I nodded my head, having become momentarily incapable of speech. Enclosed within Rowland Usher’s self-designed, self-constructed and self-maintained house, all those old dreams of our student days had suddenly come flooding back into my mind—all the projects that had gripped our collaborative imaginations before we had even started our careers, but which I had left behind in the interim. Obviously, he had been truer to his imagination than I had been to mine. I felt ashamed—and momentarily, I felt a twinge of envy. How had I slipped so far back, I wondered, while Rowland had continued to go forward? We had, after all, both been in love with Magdalen. How could it be, I wondered, that I had been existentially crippled by my unrequited love, as Magdalen seemed to have been by hers, while Rowland…?

  The shame suppressed the envy, though, and I shunted the train of thought into a dead-end siding—as I seemed to have been doing with so many trains of thought since going through the gates of Eden once again, to re-entangle myself with temptation.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Because it was still not long after midday, in terms of local time, Rowland insisted on giving me a guided tour of the house once we had rested briefly in the study and I had assured him that I was not significantly jet-lagged. As I began to explore the remarkable house that Rowland had built for himself, conducted by the architect in person, I couldn’t help falling ever further into submission to our old flights of fancy, and the more I saw, the more cause I had to wonder about how much progress his genius had made while mine had been plodding.

  The castles in the air that I had built my college days had been, without exception, edifices of considerable beauty and profound charm, perhaps not so very unlike Rosalind’s Crystal Palaces, although designed for human occupation rather than the accommodation of flowers. Rowland’s imagination had always had a greater originality and wildness about it, which some might have called surreal and others Gothic, although I always thought of it as simply Romantic, in spite of Rowland’s distaste for that appellation.

  No one could say that the strange masterpiece that Rowland had elevated from the silt of the great swamp bore any resemblance to a Crystal Palace, but it had an elegance of its own as well as an awesome complexity. Rowland had referred to its internal layout as a labyrinth, and so it seemed to be, but it was far more than any mere exercise in enigmatic convolution.

  The internal walls seemed slightly less than solid, but not because they resembled a supercooled liquid. They had a superficial texture not unlike soft flesh, and gave the impression that they might be capable of a certain sluggish protoplasmic flow. I have to admit that this suggestion gave me an uneasy feeling when Rowland took me down into the regions beneath the “residential floor”—the “bowels,” as I immediately began to think of them—and recalled to my mind the legend of Jonah who had been swallowed by a “great fish,” or, as the writer presumably meant to imply, a whale.

  Commencing the tour seemed to fill Rowland with a new enthusiasm, and I was thankful that the awkward conversation about Magdalen’s death was now out of the way. He was obviously eager to show me the house, and to have someone whose opinion he valued to witness his triumphs. He guided me through the spiraling smooth-walled corridor that curved eccentrically around the internal “organs” of the house, its several branches giving it the appearance that it might extend for miles, and he showed me the principal lateral corridors that connected the spirals, like the chemical bonds in some crazy parody of the DNA double helix. All the corridors were softly lighted by artificial bioluminescence, which
was slightly too ruddy and subdued for my taste, but not unsuited to their apparent fleshiness. They were not exactly cool, and the air was surprisingly humid, but the temperature was not too high to be uncomfortable, and I was only sweating moderately.

  Perhaps it was only because of his enthusiasm, and a lack of practice in sustained conversation, that Rowland’s voice began to stumble as he pointed out the features of his dwelling, occasionally stuttering over simple sentences. He gave the impression, however, of being slightly intoxicated—although I was certain that he had only drunk water down on the quay and up in the study. I felt obliged to suggest that he might be too tired to give me the extensive tour he had planned and promised, and reminded him that we had all the time in the world to complete it on another occasion.

  “You really don’t need to worry,” he assured me. “As I told you, I might have been overdoing things slightly. You’re right about the tour, of course—there’s far too much to see in one excursion—but we do need to go a little further, so that you’re familiar with the basic layout. It will do me good to walk and talk for a while—although I can’t leave my work for very long, I fear, and I’ll have to leave you to your own devices soon enough. It’s as well that you know where things are as soon as possible, so that you can find your own way around.”

  A sudden suspicion occurred to me, and I couldn’t help voicing it. “You’ve been taking something while you put in long stints of work, haven’t you? Not your mother’s products, I assume, but chemical stimulants of some kind? Aether, perhaps?”