Nature's Shift

by Brian Stableford

  When I left the room I intended to make my way to the lab, but I was in no particular hurry, and felt that I ought to look around a little, in order to become more familiar with the tunnels and lacunae formed by the natural honeycombing of the upper part of the house. Now that Rowland had explained a little more about the anatomy of the house and the way its construction had been undertaken, I realized that there was a fundamental natural pattern to the layout of the corridors and chambers, but the precise design of the rooms—not to mention the various connecting conduits that carried water, electricity and optical fibers—had obviously required supplementary work.

  Supplementary work, in the ordinary gantzed structures with which I had long been familiar in England, is routinely carried out by drills and other steel tools, in association with de-cementing bacteria whose activity is precisely the opposite of the cementers, but that was not the case here. Rowland appeared to be using worms do to do his drilling and shaping, akin to the engineered organisms used to pulverize rocks like granite and basalt but more refined. Most such organisms, of course aren’t really worms in the usually biological meaning; they’re modified insect larvae, analogous to the beetle larvae popularly know as “woodworm.” The common industrial types were equipped with jaws and rasps powerful enough to cope with stone and metal, but rarely had any sculptural ability beyond the facility to bore holes; Rowland’s seemed to be more artistic—or, at least, a good deal cleverer.

  With that sort of observation to be made, I spent far more time on the day of the storm studying the finer points of the house than setting up my own lab in readiness to receive specimens. I got lost several times, but only had to call on Adam’s help once in returning to known spaces; on the other occasions, simple trial and error eventually sufficed. I didn’t use the elevators at all, preferring to build a mental picture of the organization of the staircases. By mid-afternoon, I thought I had a good grasp of the upper floors—but I hadn’t even found any stairways leading down to the “cellars” that presumably lay beneath the ground-floor warehouses and store-rooms, where Roland’s laboratories were presumably located. I assumed that there had to be other means of access than the two central elevators, but I couldn’t locate them, either because they were deliberately hidden or because my mental picture of the upper part of labyrinth was incomplete, blind to some crucial lacuna.

  I did spend a little time in my lab, eventually, but I couldn’t settle to any kind of productive work there and went back up to the living-quarters to consult Adam about the likelihood that we would be able to go out the following day.

  The indigene shook his head sorrowfully. “Storm dying, but not dead,” he told me. “Wind and rain—not good for boat. Best wait one more day.”

  That didn’t seem unduly inconvenient; I wasn’t experiencing any impatience. I was looking forward to resuming my evening discussions with Rowland, but I didn’t feel any particular urgency about that, either. When he and I retired to the study after dinner, though, I asked him about the refinements he had made to the boring larvae.

  “Insect larvae may look like simple creatures,” he told me, “no more complicated in their anatomy and habits than mere nematodes or the simplest of annelids, but genetically, it’s a very different story. “They need to retain so much potential, for the eventual shaping of the imago—which is, of course, much more complex anatomically. Bringing out some of that potential while the larva is still a larva isn’t difficult, in engineering terms, if you have the necessary switching skills. Even Mother Nature sometimes retains the option of doing that, in connection with phenomena such as paedogenesis, where larvae develop reproductive organs normally seen in the imago. Building better woodworm to add the final touches to gantzed structures is so straightforward that it’s become standard architectural practice, and the early refinements I made were simply the next logical step in that direction—as you’ve obviously deduced from a superficial study of the body of the house.”

  His tone suggested that I hadn’t gone beyond the obvious, and I felt a trifle insulted by that. “That’s the context in which England’s insect engineers have explored giantism,” I observed, “but the giant larvae that are conventionally used to tunnel through gantzed compounds and native rock aren’t capable of reproduction or metamorphosis. They’re produced to order, to work and then die.”

  “That’s because the imagoes that would emerge if the larvae pupated would be unviable,” he remarked. “They’d be incapable of breathing or of locomotion, because the necessary kinds of modification hadn’t been made to their potential.”

  “But you’ve done better?” I queried, rhetorically. “Your borers can reproduce, either paedogenetically or by producing viably imagoes?”

  “That’s right,” he said. “I can show you that process in various stages of progress—maybe tomorrow, if I can make time. There’s a sense in which it’s not strictly necessary for my borers to be able to reproduce, of course—the familiar industrial models do the job—but the project fell so neatly into the scope of my general research that I slotted it in.”

  “So the relative sophistication…the artistry…of your borers was as much a side-effect as an actual target of your research?”

  “You could put it that way,” he replied, in a slightly evasive fashion that was becoming slightly irritating. “The humble servants that helped to hollow out my rooms were faithful companions for some years, and I have a certain affection for them, but yes, the development of their artistry—and I approve wholeheartedly of your use of that expression—was a sideline to less orthodox experiments unconnected with their vulgar purpose.”

  “Artistry is never superfluous,” I told him, “except in the Voltairean sense that the superfluous is a very necessary thing.”

  “You’re quoting again, Peter,” he pointed out.

  “Unrepentantly,” I assured him.

  He passed his hand over his face. He seemed tired again and somewhat strained. I knew that he’d been working all day, and was therefore entitled to a certain weariness, but I suspected that there was something else involved in his sudden brief fits of apparent near-exhaustion.

  In view of what we had said before, the first hypothesis that sprang to mind now was that his condition must be due to the lingering after-effects of some psychotropic compound.

  “How much Aether are you taking, Rowland?” I asked him. “And why are you continuing to take it, given that its side-effects seem to be causing you some distress?”

  He seemed surprised that I had noticed; he had obviously been trying to hide the symptoms, and had imagined that he was succeeding. His first ploy was to say: “It’s nothing.”

  “It’s not nothing, Rowland,” I told him. “Something’s going on. Why can’t you just tell me about it? We’re friends, after all.”

  He hesitated, but must have decided, in the end, that I was right. “I’ve used unorthodox methods of brain-stimulation in the past,” he confessed, eventually. “There do seem to be some belated side-effects—but they’re treatable. Aether’s not the cause, but it does seem to be an adequate solution—until something better comes along.”

  “By unorthodox methods of brain-stimulation, do you mean intelligence-enhancers?” I asked slight surprised. So-called intelligence enhancers had been around in pill form for more than a century, and had been one of the most fashionable products of experimental engineering labs for a brief period long before Rowland and I had been born, but the vogue was long past…unless current research on olfactory psychotropics was abut to revive it.

  “Not exactly,” he said, reluctantly.

  “Then what, exactly?” I persisted.

  “”I’ve experimented with a number of methods,” he said, still being determinedly and unhelpfully unspecific. “I never gave up on the experiments we began as students. I started work on olfactory psychotropics at the same time as Rosalind, but didn’t find olfactory delivery as satisfactory as she seems to have done. The stuff reaches the bloodstream rapidly
enough, and the dosage is easy to control and even out, but some of the compounds that Rosalind and others have tried to develop in that context need better targeting.”

  “Better targeting?” I repeated. “By vectors of some kind, you mean? Please don’t tell me that you’re dabbling in cerebral somatic engineering, Rowland. The reason it’s illegal is that it’s highly dangerous. You might persist in referring to your brain as the old tumor, but it’s….”

  I stopped dead. Maybe the expression on his face had tipped me off, or merely it was a pure stroke of inspiration, born of a more general context, but I guessed what he had done, even though it had never been done before.

  “Oh no,” I said, reluctant even to voice the idea that he had used his own cerebrum as a target for some kind of somatic transformation, which had inevitably misfired. Had he learned nothing from Professor Fliegmann’s cautionary tales regarding the limits of practical neurology?

  Eventually, I bit the bullet. “You really are ill, aren’t you?—and not in any familiar way. Is that why you didn’t come to Magdalen’s funeral? Is that why you’re no longer communicating with your mother or your sisters? I thought you were just distancing yourself, they way I’ve distanced myself from my father….”

  “I’m just busy,” he told me, insistently. “I have work to do. Nothing’s wrong with me. I invited you to stay, didn’t I? Whatever you’re imagining, it’s not true. I’m just a little tired. I’ve been using stimulants like Aether for a long time, partly to keep me going and partly, I admit, in the attempt to enhance my creativity…but it’s nothing that people haven’t been doing for centuries by drinking coffee, damn it!”

  “But you’ve been targeting the doses,” I said, reminding him of what he’d already conceded. “You couldn’t be content to entrust the stimulants to your bloodstream—you’ve actually introduced new genetic material into your brain to increase its sensitivity. You used some kind of transformation vector, didn’t you? You’ve deliberately given yourself some kind of artificial brain tumor!”

  “Mention of brain tumors isn’t helpful,” he said—hypocritically, given that he was probably the only person in the world who made a fetish out of referring to his entire brain as a tumor. “I haven’t infected myself with something that’s growing, let alone out of control, threatening to disrupt the working of the brain. The augmentation isn’t producing pain, or delusions, or causing amnesia. It’s just a supplementation of the neuronal network, at a key point in the cerebral labyrinth. It was experimental, obviously…but I’m not a idiot, Peter. If necessary, I can kill off the supplementary cells at any time, in a matter of minutes, with a single magic bullet—but that’s not necessary and it’s not desirable.

  “It really has helped me…and if it occasionally makes me a little wearier than I would be without it, and a little more haggard in my facial expression, then so be it. That’s no price at all to pay for the kinds of benefits I’ve reaping these last ten years. It has nothing to do with my not being able to attend Magdalen’s funeral, or my lack of communication with my mother, and I’m astonished that you, of all people, might think that it had. Of all the people in the world, Peter, I thought you’d be able to understand.”

  Fair trade, I remembered from my reverie of the previous evening, is an illusion. Although it’s commonplace, psychologically, for both parties to a deal to think that they’re coming out ahead, when you look at the deal from an objective standpoint, one of them is always being screwed. Exploitation is the norm. Rowland obviously believed that he was exploiting whatever “augmentation” he’d introduced into his brain—but the situation might look different, from an objective point of view.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about it, if you were so sure I’d understand?” I demanded, trying to keep all bitterness out of my tone.

  “I just have,” he said—again, hypocritically.

  “Have you set up any kind of independent monitoring?” I demanded. “Or are you allowing your neotumor-infested brain to be the sole judge of what the neotumor-infestation is doing to it?”

  “That’s a gross distortion of the facts,” he told me, coldly. “You’re talking like a second-rate horror story. I have an expertise in these technologies more advanced than anyone—more advanced that Rosalind, even. What I did hasn’t been done before, but I’ve been careful all along, and it hasn’t given me a moment’s anxiety in all these years. I don’t need anyone to look over my shoulder—that’s not why I brought you here.”

  “Brought me here?” I echoed, sharply.

  “Invited you here,” he corrected himself. “Oh, I know you think that you inveigled me into inviting you, just as I’m perfectly well aware that you wouldn’t have take the trouble if Rosalind hadn’t given you a shove, but the simple truth is that you’re here because I wanted you here—but not to lecture me on the dangers of self-experimentation and practical neurology. I wanted you here—I brought you here—because I thought you might be able to understand, eventually, what I’m doing. I knew that it would take time—maybe months—before you’d be able to get your head around it properly, but you’re my friend, and you’re Peter Bell the Third, and I thought that you, unlike Rosalind or any of my little sisters, might eventually be able to understand.”

  Oddly enough, I didn’t put that little rant down to the fact that he’d been screwing with his old tumor. I’d seen and heard its like many times before, although I’d needed to see and hear its like again to be reminded of how delicate Rowland’s temper could be. Again, I felt that I had been transported back in time, and my reaction came from then as much as now.

  “You’re right, Rowland,” I told him. “I do need time, sometimes, to get my head around things properly, to understand some kinds of things fully—and I ought to have known that you weren’t fooled for a moment by the apparent spontaneity of my call, and my angling for an invitation. Rosalind did give me a shove—but I’m not here on her behalf, and I really do want to understand what it is you’re doing here. And I am your friend.”

  I had always had to emphasize that fact, back in the day—as if neither of us could quite believe it. He was my friend too, just as implausibly, from an objective viewpoint. And no matter how implausible it might have been, from a supposedly objective viewpoint, it was a mutually beneficial and dedicated symbiosis, in which neither of us was getting screwed.

  Rowland sat back in his armchair, almost as if he were relieved to be able to let his weariness show now that the reason for his strange condition was out in the open—or, at least, no longer completely obscured.

  “Where were we, before we got sidetracked?” he said. He meant, where had we been in the discussion of abstruse scientific matters—but I wasn’t prepared to go back quite that far, as yet.

  “Wouldn’t it be a good idea,” I asked, “if you were at least to let someone else look at your scans? Not me—it’s not my specialty—but an expert neurologist?”

  “No,” he told me, “it wouldn’t be a good idea. An expert neurologist might detect something he hadn’t seen before, and he’d jump to the conclusion that, because it didn’t fit his preconceptions, it must be bad. He’d have his magic-bullet gun drawn before you could say ‘snipe.’ The scans don’t matter, I’m living in here, Peter—if there were anything wrong, I’d know it.”

  That, of course, was exactly the point. Because he was living inside his old tumor, with its relatively new modification, he might be in the worst position of all to judge the risks he was running, or even the effects to which he was subject. He was taking Aether to counteract the lingering side-effects, after all, and although Aether was supposed to be entirely safe in the context of normal brain tissue, the reason he felt that he needed it was precisely that his brain-tissue was no longer Mother Nature’s unadulterated product.

  There was no point in persisting, though; I knew how stubborn he could be. If he was prepared to take months preparing my unaugmented brain to accommodate whatever secrets he was hoarding in his bizarre dwelling, th
e least I could do was invest some time in preparing his augmented brain to accommodate the need to obtain a second opinion as to its efficacy and security from harm.

  “I’m just worried about you,” I said, all too conscious of how feeble I sounded.

  “I’m not ill,” he insisted. “In fact, I’m better than I ever was. I’ve barely scratched the surface of my ambition, but I’ve already achieved enough to ensure myself of the kind of immortality that Roderick achieved. I fully expect to live for another two hundred years, and maybe more, but no matter when I die, this house, or her descendants will outlive me. If I can bring about a successful metamorphosis, she might live for millennia—but long before then, she’ll be producing paedogenetic offspring that will revolutionize generic engineering. Rosalind’s branch of the Usher family will doubtless thrive, thanks to her own ectogenetic children and grandchildren, unto the umpteenth generation, but the House of Usher and her kin will be still be one of the wonders of this world when our descendants have built new worlds around distant stars. How’s that for Romantic imagination?”

  I had told him once, many years before, that it had been his “Romantic imagination” that had initially drawn me to him. He had refused to take it as a compliment.

  “I may be the clone of solid-state physicists,” I told him, “but I’ve done everything I can to cultivate and care for my own Romanic imagination. I can compete with the best when it comes to waxing rhapsodic about the futures nascent in the genetic technologies of today, vaulting across future centuries with talk of the miracles that the godlike genetic engineers of the far future will work—but I still have my feet on the ground.”