Nature's Shift (16 page)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“Do you see your father at all, nowadays?” Rowland asked me, even though he'd observed only a few minutes before that we ought to be talking about rational and constructive matters, about what made the world tick and how its clockwork could be adjusted to bring about a better time.

“No,” I said. “He and I don't move in the same social circles any more. People think geneticists are mad, because all our discoveries seem unnatural at first, but it's the physicists who cling most obsessively to their own asylum and speak entirely in tongues. He took it hard when I deliberately went my own way. I'm a clone, after all. He'd hated his own father, but at least he'd fought him on his own ground. He could have understood it if I'd hated him in the same way—but to walk away entirely, to wash my hands of him, to take up genetics…there's only so much a clone-parent can stand. And only so much a clone-child can take.”

“If there were a Peter Bell the Fourth,” Rowland observed, “you could direct the development of the embryo much more cleverly than he did. You wouldn't have to do any genetic transformation—just give the control genes a little nudge, aiming for a better balance in the initial set-up of the cerebrum.”

“Why?” I said. “Don't you think I'm perfect as I am?”

He didn't laugh. “None of us is perfect,” he said. “Mercifully.”

“Mercifully because we'd have nothing to strive for if we were?” I queried.

“No,” he said. “Quite the opposite. If perfection were possible, we'd know what we were striving for, and we'd probably find a way to achieve it. Far better for perfection to be impossible, flaws inescapable…or, at the very least, for everyone to disagree as to what would count as perfection.”

“According to theoretical physicists,” I said, quoting something I'd read, which my father certainly hadn't written, “the universe itself is imperfect. Their continued failure to find a unifying theory isn't the fault of their observational and experimental technique or mathematical ingenuity—it's the fault of the universe, and its dogged refusal to make sense. I'm not sure how they can claim to know that, but they're physicists, after all.”

“We all do it,” Rowland said.

“Do what?”

“Project our own perceived faults on to others—including the universe. Why haven't you ever amounted to anything, Peter?”

“What?” I said, outraged by the insult even though I could see why he might think that I hadn't.

“When we were young,” he said, forgetting that we still were, “we seemed to be on the same wavelength, equally intelligent, equally imaginative—but now you're a teacher, collecting marine alga, looking for trivial chimerical anomalies. You've never
attempted
anything. You're still a physicist at heart, looking at the world and trying to understand it, but not involving yourself in it.”

He was allowed to say such things because he was a friend, but I wasn't going to take it lying down. “Unlike you,” I said, “living in the middle of a reconstituted wilderness, making yourself a new mother because you can't get along with the one who didn't want to give birth to you because it didn't give her enough control of your destiny, and shaping her as a vast glorified womb. You've really made something of yourself. I'm not quite sure what it is, mind, but it's certainly
something
.”

“Touché,” he said. “If only you'd ever managed to lash out at your father like that, or I'd ever got that kind of grip on Rosalind…do you think we'd feel a little better about ourselves?”

I shook my head, tiredly. “I doubt it,” I said. “They wouldn't take it in the same hilarious spirit as we do, of course, but they'd still laugh it off. We're their children, after all.”

“And neither of us would ever have dreamed of saying anything similar to Mag, would we?—even though she's the one who really didn't make anything of herself at all.”

He just couldn't let it alone. How could he? I was only here because Magdalen was dead; how could we keep the thought of her out of our minds for long, no matter how determined we were to throw ourselves into our work, into our safely scientific obsessions? Whatever we had come to, we had come to it because of our love for Magdalen: the love that we couldn't have, but couldn't bring ourselves to live without…except that we
had
lived, after a fashion, without it. Magdalen was the one who hadn't. Magadelen was the one who had actually summoned up the guts to kill herself.

“She shouldn't have done it, though,” I said, in a low voice.

“Made something of herself?” Rowland queried, not having been privy to the train of my thoughts.

“Killed herself,” I said. “She should have carried on. She should have done
something
, made
something
of herself—built her own crazy house, rather than going back to living in the bosom of Rosalind's. However imperfect our lives are, they
are
lives.” I hesitated, momentarily, but then plunged on: “It wasn't our fault, Rowland, was it? It wasn't because of the way we handled things…both running away…that left her with so little that, in the end….”

“Don't flatter yourself,” he said, brutally. “No, it wasn't your fault. No, it wouldn't have mattered a damn if you'd tried to so something different, found some way to be or behave that would have changed her mind. I'm the one who killed her, not you.”

I felt suddenly guilty about putting the idea into his head. “You mustn't think like that, Rowland,” I told him. “She killed herself. If it's self-indulgent for me to try to blame myself, it's just as self-indulgent for you. I shouldn't have put it as a question. It
wasn't
our fault, Rowland. She was the one who ran away, from you as well as me. She killed herself.”

“No, Peter,” Rowland said, in a voice that was pure desolation. “Rosalind lied to you…or let you believe the false conclusion to which you jumped. Magdalen didn't kill herself. Rosalind let everyone believe that because it was preferable to letting the truth be known—or what she thought was the truth. I don't know whether she figured out the whole of it—Mag certainly didn't—but either way, she had grounds for sending you here to torment me. In a way, if not quite in the way that Rosalind thinks, I
did
kill her.”

I was completely out of my depth. I had no idea what he was talking about. “But you've been here all the time, haven't you?” I said, hesitantly. “Magdalen died in England—in Eden. You couldn't possibly have killed her. Rosalind said that she was poisoned….in circumstances, if I remember her words correctly, that made it highly implausible that it had been a accident, and that it certainly wasn't murder.”

“Very scrupulous of her,” Rowland said. “Avoiding the word suicide in order to direct attention to it. Kind of her too, in a way, though not entirely. Accident and murder highly implausible, were they? But she
was
poisoned, in a way. Rosalind chose her words as carefully she chose her messenger…but nobody could accuse her of being a pedant. I know how Magdalen died, Peter—and I know why Rosalind sent you here. I know why you came, too, so there's no need to protest against the last remark. You came because you wanted to, because I'm your friend. I know that. But she still sent you, and I know why. She's wrong, but also right. I'm sorry, Peter—I won't say that I'm sorry that you got dragged into it, because you were always in it, and you're entitled to know the truth.”

That was when enlightenment finally hit me—belatedly, it seemed, and I cursed myself for a fool because I hadn't caught on earlier, although, in retrospect, I had been handed the essential piece in the jigsaw very recently, and out of context. At any rate, I realized, all of a sudden, what he was talking about.

I didn't blurt it out, though. My lips actually felt numb; I couldn't speak. The revelation came in a single surge, not in dribs and drabs. I understood how and why Rowland had killed his sister. I understood why Rosalind had sent me. And I understood why Rowland was sorry.

“You and I first met when we were eighteen,” Rowland said, his voice weakening almost to a whisper, as if the process of distant recall required him to lapse into trance-like reverie. “Magdalen was eighteen too, of course—we met you at the same time, although I don't know which of us saw you first, or which of us you saw first. It doesn't matter. You didn't know anything about us, except for the fact that we were Rosalind's children, and we liked that—we liked it about all the people we met, of course, but we saw something of a kindred spirit in you that we didn't see in others. Superficially, at least, your upbringing had been similar to ours: like us, you'd never been to school, but had been educated at home, according to a strict regime that had a particular end in mind…ends against which, not surprisingly, we had all rebelled.

“In the beginning, Peter, I admired you, because I thought that you had taken your rebellion further than ours. Eventually, I realized that the appearance in question was superficial…but I still admired you for succeeding in it, and saw myself in you, as you must have seen yourself in me, perhaps with a little admiration thrown in. I'd always had Magdalen, and Magdalen had always had me, but you didn't seem to have had anyone. I think we befriended you thinking that you might need us—the sort of support that we'd always been able to provide for one another—and we really did want to be kind, but in reality, we needed you more than you needed us.

“You were already self-sufficient, but the fact that we were brother and sister made our mutual endorsement of our own eccentricity seem suspect, a potential
folie à deux
. We needed someone outside ourselves to pass favorable judgment on us, and you did that. You never withdrew that favor, either—never, even when you realized that falling in love with Magdalen had been futile, because she was too intimately bound up with me ever to return your love. You never turned against us, even when it became obvious that we hadn't done you any kindness at all—quite the reverse.”

“That's not true,” I murmured. He ignored me.

“You weren't the only one to fall in love with Magdalen, of course,” he continued. “How could you be? She was beautiful. She won the admiration of everyone, merely by her appearance, and there was nothing in her character to alienate that affection. She was charming, and she was good. There was no malevolence in her at all. Nobody who loved her could turn that love to any kind of distaste, even though she couldn't and didn't return it.

“Perhaps we simply didn't rebel sufficiently against the grand plan that Rosalind had mapped out for our lives. I don't mean that we should have abandoned genetics for solid-state physics—that would only have been a small sidestep, and it would only have been a reaction against the part of the plan of which we were consciously aware. We didn't realize, you see, the extent to which our own relationship had been planned. My mother had produced non-identical twins with different fathers deliberately, not in pursuit of some puerile symmetry but because she wanted to provide each of us with what she considered to be an ideal companionship. She wanted us to become a self-sufficient atom of community, as tightly bound as the proton and electron of a hydrogen atom.

“Rosalind actually set out, in supervising our upbringing, to build such a bond of affection and intimacy between us as to make us the lights of one another's lives. I'm not saying that she actually intended that the bond in question would be literally incestuous—in fact, I suspect, implausible as it might seem from an objective viewpoint, that she never actually thought about the possibility of a sexual element, because she sincerely believed that, as brother and sister, we'd have no need of any such complication, and that no feelings of that sort would every materialize. If she had anticipated the possibility, she would have dismissed it as a minor irrelevancy—something not worth worrying about. I suspect that she'd never had any strong feelings of that kind herself—that she'd successfully repressed any that had threatened to arise in the course of her own unorthodox upbringing—and that she simply took it for granted that we wouldn't either.

“I suspect that, looking back on her own childhood and adolescence, Rosalind was only conscious of one defect, one lack. She had been an only child. She had felt an absence of a companion like herself. It must have seemed to her that the kind of uniquely close companionship that she tried to develop in her own first-born children was the greatest treasure that any human life was capable of discovering. She never said that to us, though; we thought of it as ours, as an aspect of our rebellion against the more obvious ways in which she tried to direct us. We tried to isolate ourselves from her, in the interests of psychological survival, but we didn't try to isolate ourselves from one another—indeed, our collaboration became the heart and soul of our reaction against her, enabling us to present a unified front in every act of defiance, petty or otherwise.

“Rosalind must have realized very swiftly that her experiment was going awry. Mag and I were eight before she decided to have another child, but even at that early stage she must have been dissatisfied with her experiment, because she didn't plump for another pair of twins, and never had another son thereafter. When we were at university—as I undoubtedly told you—I thought that was because she thought the downside of masculine genius too dangerous, to closely akin to madness. She might even have told me that herself one day, when she was trying to teach me and I was trying not to learn. There's probably even some truth in it…but I'm not sure that it was the real reason, even if the events that brought us to this could be interpreted as a vindication of that excuse.”