Nature's Shift

by Brian Stableford

  “Rosalind’s done some good work along those lines,” I put in. “Have you seen pictures of the marquee she designed for the funeral?”

  “Yes I have,” he said, curtly, “but as I say, that’s not really relevant to what I’ve done. I started off trying to work with woody structures, perhaps under Professor Crowthorne’s influence, but I soon figured out that I needed to retreat further down the evolutionary tree.”

  “To fungi?” I asked, knowing already that he didn’t mean algae.

  “Fundamentally, yes—but that entire subphylum suffers some crucial and awkward limitations. I figured that fungal chitin might be a useful basic matrix, but I knew that photosynthetic systems would have to be integrated into it at some stage, and figured that it would also be profitable to import some animal systems too.”

  “Hybridization of plant and animal tissue is hellishly difficult,” I observed. “Many have tried, but few have succeeded.”

  “I didn’t even try,” Rowland admitted. “Hybridization didn’t seem to be the way to go. Not surprisingly, I figured that there might be a lot more scope in symbiosis. Rather than trying to design an edifice that was akin to a gigantic organism, it seemed to me that it might be better to devise one that was akin to a colony: a colony combining fungal and cnidarian flesh with molluskan and insect flesh, to combine the benefits of animal and fungal chitin with those of shell and coral.”

  I was genuinely impressed. “Chimerization rather than hybridization,” I said. “There’s a lot of interesting work going on in that line back home—but nothing as ambitious as the kind of hectic mix you’re talking about. Have you really brought that off?” I looked around at the walls of the room with new respect, not having suspected them of so much internal complexity, at the protoplasmic level.

  “This part of the house is relatively simple,” he told me, following the direction of my gaze. It isn’t until you get down into the guts that the full extent of the…well, I suppose chimerization is as good a word as any…becomes obvious. What you’re looking at now is mostly just gantz-enhanced chitin.”

  I suddenly formed a mental picture of the buttons in the elevator, and realized the significance of the four black buttons at the base of the isosceles triangle.

  “You mean that the edifice extends downwards as well as upwards?” I said. “It has an elaborate network of cellars?”

  “I suppose that cellars,” he said, rather disdainfully, “is as good a word as any.” He was deliberately repeating the formula he’d used only a few moments before, but his tone implied that the descriptive capability of the word was distinctly lacking this time. He didn’t suggest any alternative, though. He’d already used “labyrinth” with respect to the parts of the house I’d seen, and presumably didn’t fee that “bowels” was any more appropriate than “cellars.” He’d already shown me the waterworks and sewerage, so the depths he was talking about now were deeper than that.

  “As we discussed back in the old days,” Rowland went on, “houses will one day be living hybrids of all kinds of flesh, harvesting the energy of the sun as plants do, moving as animals do, and providing every internal facility that biology can offer—but that’s a long way in the future. My house simulates a more primitive kind of organism: a lowly saprophyte and scavenger, which draws its energy from the organic detritus of the silt out of which its walls are constructed.

  “She’s no more sophisticated, in terms of her nutrition, than many sedentary creatures which live in shallow seas, filtering food from the murky waters which overflow them. Her closest analogues, if you wish to think in such terms, are polyps, barnacles and tubeworms. She’s alive and growing, though, with a great deal to scope for further development. Her saprophytic activity provides energy for numerous internal processes relying on what you call chimerization, although it really is more akin to symbiosis, in that many—though not all—of her subsidiary elements are disconnected from the basic biomass, resembling free-living organisms rather than the kind of grafts represented by the plantations.

  “The Orinoco feeds the house’s appetites very well, with all manner of decayed vegetable matter washed out of Venezuela’s heartland. It serves as a veritable cornucopia to the network of filters that extend from her foundations.”

  “It’s an impressive scheme,” I readily conceded. “I look forward to seeing more of the detail in action.”

  A slight shadow passed over his expression—but whatever thought was behind it wasn’t one he wanted to voice at present.

  “You’ll doubtless remember another of my fascinations,” he continued, “which is similarly embodied in the architecture of the house. Ordinary gantzing processes use inert moulds—the cementing organisms simply bind the material brought to them, and the architect controls the shape of what they produce by crude mechanical means. Roderick’s glass-workers are more creative than that, in terms of producing geometrical forms, but you’ll remember my saying, back in our student days, that the real models for emulation were the nests of wasps and termites, or bower-birds and ovenbirds, the supporting structures of corals, and the astonishing forms of flowering plants and trees….in brief, the most sophisticated produce of control genes. Adapting control genes to function in any kind of hybrid is difficult, let alone a chimera or a colony—but it’s not impossible. Again, my work in that respect is in its infancy, but I’m making progress. The structural elements of the house that are analogous to the xylem of a tree, the shell of a mollusk, the exoskeleton of an insect or the skeleton of a vertebrate, are all alive and active, subject to modification by the action of control genes. As you saw from the boat as you approached, she’s hardly an architectural masterpiece—but she has potential. The mission is hardly started, let alone complete, but one day….”

  He left that sentence incomplete.

  “One day,” I decided to finish for him, “the house will undergo a sort metamorphosis. At present, it’s not unlike a sort of pupa…but it has the potential to shed its husk and reveal something much more spectacular.”

  He nodded, in apparent satisfaction. “I can’t expect too much of this particular individual,” he hastened to add, “but even if she can’t live forever, or can’t develop beyond a certain point, what we can learn from her will make an enormous difference to her offspring.”

  “You really do mean her, don’t you?” I finally queried. I’d let the pronoun pass the first few times he’s used it, assuming that it was a mere figure of speech, but now I wondered whether he really was attributing a sex to the house.

  “The edifice incorporates individuals of many species and both sexes,” he replied, “but we don’t have a pronoun for a multiplex androgyne. Given that the house is intended to be the found an entire evolutionary sequence, though, I can’t help but think of her as a mother as well as a rough draft.”

  “But you don’t actually call her Rosalind the Second?” I remarked—too flippantly by half.

  This time, he scowled. “Don’t,” he said, briefly. “Sore point.”

  I apologized.

  “So,” I said, hastily recapitulating, “the whole chimera—or colony—although it contains various aspects, and perhaps entire organisms, from the fungal, plant and animal realms, is modeled on a giant insect? A giant much vaster and infinitely stranger than the ones you showed me yesterday, but not dissimilar in kind. It has a metamorphic capacity built into it…albeit one that isn’t likely to become manifest for a long time.”

  “It’s too simple-minded to compare her pupal status to that of an insect,” he said, reflectively rather than correctively. “Her primary builders are micro-organisms of various sorts, which associate and collaborate, more like the individual cells in a slime-mold or a Portuguese Man o’War than the various castes of a beehive. There’s a sense in which the more complex organisms in the colony—the symbiotes of the elementary cells—are a supplementary presence, but I’m trying to make them more integral in terms of their reproductive cycles. They can’t reproduce independently;
they have to be born from the fundamental structure—but there are flaws in that process that I haven’t worked out yet. Until I do, the possibility of reproducing the whole colony—mothering another House of Usher—remains out of reach.”

  “So you are prepared to call it the House of Usher, in spite of the Poesque precedent?” I suggested, trying not to sound flippant.

  “You’re prepared to answer to Peter Bell the Third, in spite of an even less prepossessing precedent,” he reminded me. “You’re prepared to struggle against the coincidental precedent rather than avoiding it. So am I. In time, my House of Usher will probably decay, and dissolve in the waters of the river….but not while I can sustain her, and not before she’s at least helped to provide a plan for her successor, if not actually to spawn a living heir. I’m doing everything humanly possible to differentiate my House of Usher from Poe’s. How are you doing?” He tried to sound sympathetically concerned, but couldn’t quite manage it.

  “In my work with algae?” I queried, deliberately misunderstanding him. He had, of course, been challenging me to demonstrate the extent of my own differentiation from Shelley’s unfortunate Peter Bell the Third.

  He smiled, and nodded his head, accepting the implicit rebuke. “With your algae, of course. Have you found anything that might be useful to my endeavors with the house?”

  “Actually,” I said, “there might be. You’d have to explain the genetics of your house in a great deal more detail before I can make practical suggestions, but if you were to look at what you’re doing in terms of chimerization rather than symbiotic colony-formation…well, it turns out that algae can perform some weird tricks when the going gets tough, as it did during the Crash. You might think that the marine algae had a fairly easy ride, by comparison with land-based plants, but they had to cope with changes in salinity and temperature as well as radically disrupted ecosystems. They had a hard time.”

  “Go on,” he prompted, seeming interested now—although it was optimistic of me to assume that the challenge he’d offered a few moments earlier had been abandoned. Knowing Rowland as I did, I should have known that he wouldn’t let it go.

  “Algae are no strangers to chimerization,” I said. “Lichens are a chimerical compound of fungi and single-celled algae, and there were numerous algal species that had taken up habitual residence in or on various plant and animal species in the pre-Crash ecosphere. It was only to be expected that more instances would show up, as evolution in the shifting littoral zones was forced into ultra-rapid mode, but the natural expectation would be that most of the algal species finding new niches of that sort would be single-celled green algae or simple strands of similar cells. I have found instances of that sort, but I’ve also found more complex associations, which require a certain amount of genetic collaboration: not quite chromosomal fusion—not yet, at least—but certainly chromosomal cross-functionality, control genes from both sets collaborating in the formation of compound individuals.

  “The ones that are easiest to spot are, of course, the monsters—but they’re mostly evolutionary rejects, scheduled for elimination by natural selection. The successes are less obtrusive—but examples are multiplying, and they include some surprising associations. I don’t know what I’ll be able to dredge up hereabouts, but what you’ve told me about your house suggests that it might be serving as a vital stimulus, spreading side-effects in all directions. I’m looking forward to finding out. None of that will surprise you, of course, given your theories about the contribution made by past genetic predation to the broad pattern of Earthly evolution. I presume that you haven’t had second thoughts about that, as you’re still referring to the human brain as the old tumor.”

  He raised his wine-glass to acknowledge the point.

  Even orthodox evolutionists concede that viruses might have made a significant positive contribution to the evolution of more complex organisms, by incorporating extra genetic material into chromosomal complements, which offered raw material for natural selection, but Rowland had always wanted to broaden that notion out. Just as the harm that viruses did to individuals had to be balanced out against potential benefits in speciation—thus ensuring that natural selection would never eliminate them from the scheme of things—he thought that the deleterious effects of cancers and other growths within the body had to be balanced out, in the accountancy of natural selection, against the occasional potential benefit that the additional tissue-growth might provide.

  In Rowland’s view, the human brain was the product of tumorous growths, only one in a thousand of which might have proved harmless, and only one in a million immediately useful, but those rare instances being enough for natural selection to work with spectacular effect. Indeed, according to Rowland, every aspect of complex multicellular bodies had probably begun existence as a tumor. In his view, cancer deserved at least as much credit for evolutionary progress as point mutations in the genome whose effects did not include producing cancers.

  “In that case,” I said, taking his gesture as assent, “you’ll doubtless be unsurprised to find Mother Nature attempting to duplicate, in her own slow and makeshift fashions, the same sort of innovations that you’re trying to hasten along in your house-building.”

  He nodded his head. “You’re right,” he said. “If I’d thought about it in those terms, I would have expected it, and might even have gone looking for it—but as you say, Nature tends to be slow and unsteady. I’m trying to sprint, faster than even Roderick contrived to go. It might not come off, but….”

  “Man’s reach must exceed his grasp,” I quoted, “or what’s a Heaven for?”

  “You really ought to ease up on the poetry, Peter,” he advised me, probably meaning well. “Too much quotation channels thought and inhibits innovation.”

  I resisted the temptation to recite “The Haunted Palace” in full, although our situation surely warranted it.

  “Trains of thought need tracks to run on,” I told him.

  “Only if their destination is fixed,” he retorted. “We’re supposed to be explorers, not commuters. We’re supposed to be pioneers of trackless wilderness—trackless in every sense of the word. Your fondness for quotation is holding you back, Peter, weighing you down.” The challenge was back again, sooner than I had anticipated.

  “I’m a quotation myself,” I murmured. “I can’t help being a copy of a copy, blurred but still a victim of predestination. No matter how hard I try to be an innovation—and there’s quite a distance between solid-state physics and the genetics of chimerization—I’ll never entirely escape the railway system of my nature.”

  “You mustn’t believe that, Peter,” he told me earnestly. “Even if it were true, you shouldn’t believe it—but it isn’t true. You and I are geneticists, and we know the limits of genetic determinism. There’s always scope for viruses and tumors, and lesser afflictions of a similar kind, as well as the power of the imagination—and I’m talking about the biological imagination, the practical imagination, not Romantic whimsy. You’re not really Peter Bell the Third—you’re Peter Bell the New. You need to move on. I have.”

  “Really?” I said, I trifle resentfully. “Have you moved on in every respect?”

  When he’d told me that I needed to move on, he’d had Magdalen in mind, so he understood my response. We were friends; we understood one another—even after the long lapse of time during which we hadn’t seen one another. So I believed, at any rate.

  “Some things are easier to get past than others,” he said, soberly and wisely, “but we have to try—one way or another.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The following day, Rowland left me to my own devices again while he retreated to his mysterious underground laboratories to see to the progress of his mysterious experiments. I had plenty of work that I could be doing in my own lab, even in the absence of any research material, but to begin with, I watched the storm for a while through the windows of my room. I’d seen plenty of storms in England, of course, but this was
my first opportunity to observe a tropical storm—not quite a hurricane, but certainly violent enough to be impressive. The pouring rain limited visibility, but I was able to study the ingenious ways in which the trees on the nearby shore yielded to the wind, preserving their foliage and branches as best they could against the assaults of the air.

  As Rowland had promised, the house resisted the wind too, assisted by its curvature, which seemed able to deflect the airflow smoothly in spite of all its protuberances. It did not shake at all, nor did it produce the kinds of noises that English houses invariably did in English storms. It did not creak or groan, and the shutters on its windows did not rattle or bang. It was, in fact, eerily silent within the house, whose insulating walls and windows muffled the sounds generated outside: the splashing of the water, the whistling of the wind and the intermittent rumbling of thunder. The distant spikes of lightning seemed oddly perfunctory, though. I wondered, idly, how much damage a direct strike on the house might do, but the prospect did not seem unduly scary. I had no doubt that Rowland would have taken precautions against such an eventuality, for the house’s sake as well as his own.

  In ancient fiction, I knew, weather had routinely been used to reflect the emotional states of characters and the dramatic pitch of plots, but Rowland’s House of Usher seemed to deny and defy that possibility. An observer within it, like me, was cocooned from all the effects of the storm’s external urgency and fury. I was perfectly calm, in spite of the fact that I was watching a tropical storm. I was warm and dry, and the air I was breathing was still and pure. Emotion seemed almost impossible, at least as a reflection of that kind of external effect—and there did not seem to be any kind of well-defined plot in my presence, whose drama might be subject to acceleration and climax. All in all, watching the storm from my room was more like watching TV than actually participating in the life of the tropics.