Nature's Shift

by Brian Stableford

  “I can’t claim that I achieved the philosophical calm of mind that was my ultimate objective….but that doesn’t mean that I consider the experiment a failure. Perhaps calm of mind is underrated, even by philosophers. Perhaps great science…and all great achievements of any kind…really do emerge from mental ferment and suffering, as Romantic artists claim. I have, at least, made every effort to channel all my own feelings into my work….and you’ll be the judge, when you’re ready, of the extent of my achievements.

  “I can say, I think, in all honesty, that I’m proud of what I’ve achieved, and justifiably so. I don’t regret having stayed here after Magdalen left, at the expense of becoming a recluse, accepting separation from the society of science and family alike. My memories of Magdalen have always seemed far more precious to me than any other relationship with a woman or a man could ever have been. In fact, her death ought not to make much difference now, for I’ve long grown accustomed to her absence…in a material sense, that is. There’s another sense, as you’ve observed, in which she’s still here, in spirit and ambition….”

  The monologue finally faded away—not, I think, because he had no more to say, but because the weariness had overwhelmed him again

  I was trying hard to come to terms with the implications of what he had been saying, even though it was difficult, if not impossible, for me to put myself imaginatively in his shoes. At the level of feeling, however, I couldn’t help a certain resentment, partly at the fact that neither he nor Magdalen had ever told me what they had planned to do, but mostly because they had not invited me to take a part in the plan.

  That wasn’t because they believed me to be already possessed of an adequate calm of mind, obviously. Why was it, then? Had we not been close enough, as friends, to entitle me to their confidence? I wouldn’t have agreed, of course—but perhaps I would have been able to talk them out of it. Perhaps, in fact, it was for that very reason that they hadn’t told me. Perhaps their silence had been a compliment of sorts. Or perhaps not.

  I remembered the apparition of the previous night, which I had already mentioned to Rowland, obliquely, but of which I still feared to speak. I couldn’t help but touch upon the subject again, but felt compelled to do so as elliptically as before, without revealing exactly what I had seen, imagined or felt.

  “She is still here,” I said. “I can sense her nearness, more acutely here than I could in Eden, when Rosalind delivered her eulogy.”

  Rowland got up then, and went to the sideboard where he kept his alcoholic beverages. The wine-bottle from which we had been drinking was empty. He didn’t pick up another bottle, though. Instead he rummaged in a drawer for a bottle of pills, shook two out into the palm of his hand and swallowed them.

  He turned to took at me, and said: “Just Aether. Crude, in spite of all the efforts chemical engineers have put into the engineering of better psychotropics—but effective. Not as subtle as Rosalind’s perfumes, of which she’d be only too happy to send me samples if I asked, but…well, tonight, I need to stay awake. I have work to do.”

  “You can’t possibly…,” I began, but broke off. Who was I to tell him what he could and couldn’t do, in is own house?

  “I’ll see you in the morning,” he said. “I’m sorry for being boring. When I get tired, my mind wanders. Tomorrow, we’ll get back to real subjects—in the evening, if you’re going to spend the day collecting algae downriver. We’ll get down to some serious genetics, at last.”

  Without waiting for a reply, he strode out of the room. I remained sitting in the study for a further ten minutes or so, but it seemed very empty without him. Eventually, I returned to my own room.

  This time, I was careful not to read before I went to bed, but I did look out of the window for a while. The rain had stopped, and the sky was clearing. It was going to be a fine night, and if the weather held, the next day might indeed be ideal for collecting specimens.

  I went to bed early, and tried not to think too much about the conversation we had just had, in the interests of peaceful and dreamless sleep.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  There was no sign of Rowland at breakfast the next morning. I asked Eve whether she had seen him, and she shook her head—but she seemed totally unconcerned by his absence, and was obviously well used to his keeping highly irregular hours.

  I thought, given that the good weather had held and that the sky was blue from horizon to horizon, that I might as well do what Rowland had suggested and go out in a boat with Adam, taking advantage of the favorable circumstances to explore the surroundings and collect some of the local algae.

  I loaded a considerable number of bottles and jars into the smallest of Rowland’s three boats—the only one powered by an old-fashioned internal combustion engine rather than a bioelectric motor, but much speedier in consequence—and eventually filled them all, but without paying overmuch attention to what it was that I was picking up. In the main, the excursion was a petty voyage of exploration, allowing me to figure how the local land and water lay.

  From a distance, the environs of the house had looked like jungle, the predominance of the greenery giving the impression of a vast forest, but at closer range, the true extent of the water became clear. Very few of the mangroves visible from the upper windows of the house were actually rooted in solid ground; the majority were growing in shallow water. At ground level, the strips of land seemed narrow and the squarer patches small; the impression given by the landscape as a whole, save for the channel through which the ferry had brought me on the first day, was of swampland.

  There were, however, channels of deeper water, which Adam seemed to know very well, and he was able to guide the boat through a labyrinth at least as complex, and far more extensive, that the one within the house, in order to point out what he considered to be the salient features of the delta country. He showed me trees and he showed me flowers; he even pointed out birds and insects, on occasion. He tried to show me algae, having been apprised of the fact that my interests lay in that direction, but he had obviously paid very little attention in the past to the weeds cluttering up the navigable channels, regarding them purely as a nuisance to be avoided or cursed, and he was unable to direct my attention to anything of significance.

  It was difficult to see the fish in the brackish waters, but there obviously were fish there, because we did see a small Orinoco crocodile at one point. Crocodiles and their near relatives were one of the few groups of larger vertebrates to have come though the Crash without drastic species loss—as was perhaps to be expected, given that they had come through so many extinction events already in their long evolutionary past.

  The aftermath of the storm had left the air a little fresher than it might have been, but my sojourn inside the house had allowed my body to begin the process of physiological adaptation to the tropical climate. I sweated far too profusely, and the sun’s fierce rays burned my skin even though I was wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a long-sleeved shirt. I couldn’t stay outside for very long without further practice. It didn’t seem to matter; I had all the time in the world.

  We returned to the house at about noon, and I transported my desultory collection of specimens to the lab, where I spent the afternoon making an initial inspection and classification. I found nothing unusual to suggest that the kinds of evolutionary processes that I’d briefly mentioned to Rowland might be going on hereabouts—but I knew that I’d have to look a great deal harder, and exercise considerable patience, before I could hope to turn up evidence of exotic responses to the crisis.

  When I went up to dinner, however, Rowland was absent again—and this time, when Eve replied in the negative to my enquiry as to whether I had seen him, she seemed a trifle anxious.

  “Perhaps you should go look for him,” I suggested, “to make sure that he’s all right.”

  “You come,” she said—so I did.

  I steeled myself for a long trek, but in the event, we didn’t have to look far. It transpired that Rowland was
in his room, in bed—and this time, his condition had clearly gone beyond mere fatigue.

  “I’m all right,” he assured me, when I rushed to his side—but he clearly wasn’t.

  “How long did you work last night?” I demanded.

  “I had things to do,” he retorted. “The necessities of the task set the timetable—you know that. I’m tired, but I can’t sleep. It’s the Aether—you know how it is. The pills do the job, but the ingenious chemists haven’t quite got over the problem of the let-down effect when the drug wears off. The after-effects are sometimes inconvenient. I’ll be fine—and I’m not addicted, even psychologically. It’s just a busy period, nothing more. Get me a glass of water, will you.”

  I fetched a glass of water from the bathroom, and then went to ask Adam and Eve to prepare some food for him that he could eat from a tray without getting up. I ate with him, from a second tray balanced on a small side-table. The food seemed to revive him somewhat, but he seemed slightly feverish.

  “You’re not well,” I told him. “I think you ought to put yourself through a full medical examination and send the results to a Med-Center for analysis.”

  “I will,” he promised, meekly. “First thing tomorrow.”

  I settled for that, and moved my chair back to the bedside in order to sit with him.

  “I need to bring you up to date,” he said, after an interval of silence. “Not that anything’s going to happen but…just in case.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Bring me the portable screen from the desk, with the hard keyboard from the top drawer. I can’t use a virtual on this coverlet.”

  I did as I was told.

  Bringing me up to date, at least for the first couple of hours, consisted of explaining how his files were organized and how to access them. “It’s all here,” he told me, “and all in order. All the data, that is. As for the explanations…well, I was hoping to take you through the whole chain of inspiration, step-by-step, but maybe it would be as well to give you a summary first. You need to know, after all…if anything were to happen, all this would be yours.”

  “What?”

  “You didn’t think I was going to leave it to Rosalind and the Hive, did you? My will’s on file in Caracas and London—there won’t be any problem.”

  “Your will’s on file? Even though you’re perfectly all right and expect to live to be two hundred? And you’ve left your bloody house to me? Your house made of silt in the middle of the Orinoco bloody delta?”

  “Don’t be childish, Peter. Who else could I leave my scientific legacy to? That’s the important thing, of course—although the millions might come in handy, especially if Rosalind were to try to challenge the will. Not that I expect her to do anything of the sort—she wouldn’t stoop that low.”

  “You’re frightening me, Rowland.”

  “I frighten myself, sometimes,” he admitted. “Now sit down, and listen. This is the heart of the matter.”

  I sat down, and listened—pointlessly, for at least three minutes. He had closed his eyes, but not because he was about to go to sleep. He was gathering his thoughts. In spite of the fact that he had resolved to tell me his secrets, starting with the heart of the matter, I think he was still hesitant. Indeed, I don’t believe that he would have told me any more at that point in time had he been in full possession of his faculties—but whatever he said about not being addicted to the Aether he was using, coming down from its effects was obviously having a drastic effect on him. He had planned a more gradual process of revelation, but he hadn’t made elaborate plans for any synoptic summary of his endeavors of the last ten years. He was more than slightly confused—but in the end, he began.

  “The first thing I need to make clear,” he said, “is that I never had any plan to duplicate Magdalen, or build any kind of simulacrum. That wasn’t the point. I began the work before she left, not knowing that she was going to leave—believing, in fact, that we would see the whole plan through together. Eve was with us even then, but it never occurred to us to carry out a full genomic and proteonomic analysis of her make-up, let alone start culturing her tissues. How could Eve have given informed consent, in any case? Magdalen was always the model we were going to use. We, not me. I don’t want you reading anything untoward into the plan, the way Rosalind probably would…probably has, if Magdalen told her about it.”

  “I’m not following,” I told him. “You’ll need to make yourself a little clearer.”

  “I’m getting there!” he retorted. “Listen, will you. Even after she had gone, no matter how much I missed her, I never planned on re-creating her, or creating some kind of substitute. That wasn’t why we started working with the larvae, and it wasn’t why I continued. You remember, obviously, how fascinated I always was by the phenomenon of metamorphosis, by the genetic mechanisms that permit insects to live two sequential lives, as very different organisms. You remember the work we did, even as postgraduates, on the biology of pupation. Mother Nature’s finest conjuring trick: the creation of tombs that are also wombs.”

  “I remember,” I told him, and quoted: “Give me a larva large enough, and a pupa with real leverage, and I’ll shift the gears of creation.”

  “Did I say that? It certainly sounds like me. Structural engineers were already inducing giantism in various kinds of boring larvae, of course—prototypes of the ones we were looking at yesterday—so I had a head start in that aspect of the work; it was easy enough to transfer the techniques to other kinds of larvae. It had always struck me as a terrible waste that structural engineers should be designing and breeding hundreds of new kinds of larvae to work for them, without sparing a thought for the fact that their eventual pupation would be effective death—that nothing could ever emerge from their tomb-wombs but unviable monsters, if anything emerged at all. The journeyman gantzers didn’t care, of course—they just ground down the stillborn-corpses for their chitin and processed the slush into culture-feed. No one was putting in the work that would allow giant larvae to produce viable imagoes…imagoes that would, of necessity, have to resemble vertebrates more than the simple exoskeletal forms that insects usually adopt.”

  “And you figured that if you were going to use any kind of vertebrate model, you might as well shoot for the jackpot,” I said, putting two and two together with the usual consummate ease. “Why bother with crocodile-beetles or bird-moths, when you might as well go all the way, and produce insect humanoids?”

  “I knew you’d understand,” he replied, although the slight sigh of relief he emitted suggested that he hadn’t been entirely sure. “At any rate 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. You’ll probably have taken note that the largest of the larvae I showed you yesterday—the ones with networks of blood vessels—had approximately the same biomass as an adult human being. They lose much of that in pupation, but they can still produce something the size of a child, or even a young adolescent.

  “The imagoes are mindless creatures, of course, and I can’t honestly say that they could pass for human in daylight, let alone for any specific human—but they are beautiful, in their way. I might be biased, but I think they’re even more beautiful, in their own way, than human beings. Just because Rosalind’s my mother, as you keep reminding me, it doesn’t mean that she’s always wrong, and she’s not wrong about the fact that insects and flowers alike really were selected to be beautiful, in accordance with some sort of universal aesthetics. If ever the mimics were to compete with authentic human women…but that was never the point.”

  “Mimics?” I queried.

  “Insects are good at mimicry,” he reminded me. “They already have that kind of potential built into their control genes. It was easier than I thought, once I got the trick of it. If only Mag had stayed a little longer, to see the early successes…we’d accelerated the generations, of course, but insects are good at that too. They’re not all prisone
rs of the calendar. The downside of that acceleration is that the imagoes don’t live long, at present—only a few days, for the most part—but the project is still in its early stages. I’ve laid the foundations for work that has limitless scope. In time, the engineers of the future might produce another human race—a hundred more human races. The imagoes won’t be mindless forever, you see. I’m generating tumors wholescale, but you can imagine how difficult it is to produce even the rudiments of a brain by means of that kind of trial and error.

  “If I’d started with fish, or even snakes, my chances of generating a shark-brain or an anaconda-brain would probably have been much better, but I didn’t…and anyway, there are other organs to develop too. Eyes weren’t so difficult, oddly enough, once I’d done the transformations to lay on the proteinaceous raw materials—almost as easy as skin and hair. Liver-substitutes, pancreas-substitutes and the like are much, much, harder, but once the outward appearance and internal bone-structure—or, for the moment, chitin-structure—are in place, the guts will follow, step by step…and the brain too. Enough tumors, enough generations, and the guts and brains will form. It’s just a matter of engineering and selection. All it needs is time. And we have all the time in the world, don’t we, Peter? I have the word of your inner cliché-factory on that, don’t I?”

  “Yes,” I told him, with utter insincerity. “You have all the time in the world. And I understand your reasons for making Magdalen a model—but why the only model, Rowland? If I’m taking the right inference from what I’m hearing, all your mimics are female.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “Sterile of course….not equipped, as yet, with any kind of reproductive apparatus. All workers, no queens…and no drones. In time, though…God got it backwards, of course, in Genesis. First you make your females, equipping them, in the first instance, for parthenogenetic reproduction…you only need males if and when you decide to add sex into the equation, to shuffle the genetic deck, and you only need to do that if and when you want your new human race to be capable of natural evolution, of finding its own future destiny.