Nature's Shift (13 page)

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.

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.”